Midway through Julia Ducournau’s Titane, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) locks herself in a bus-station bathroom to transform herself into a teenage boy named Adrien. She blackens and buzzes her hair, blocks out her eyebrows, binds her swollen belly with medical tape, and breaks her nose so that it bends at the bridge like Adrien’s. Like is the key word. When she locks eyes with the reflection contained within the mirror, it is neither her nor him. For a second, Alexia is totally obscure. And she smiles as a monster pretending to be a boy.
Throughout the first half of Titane, Ducournau teaches us to view Alexia as a monster. It seems to be her basic state. We see her first as a “monstrous child,” kicking her father’s seat as he speeds along a highway. After a car crash disables her, surgeons staple her head back together with a titanium plate, leaving her with an indelible scar. She has sex with a vintage Cadillac and is impregnated by it, and murders people with gusto, motivated by nothing. The effect is a relentless fall into the spiral of Alexia’s strangeness before we are ever able to understand her as a “normal” person.
From a film historical perspective, this spectacle of monstrosity is nothing new. Writing about the development of the horror film in 1983, critic Philip Brophy observes a shift from suspense organized around the threat of death toward “a pleasure in witnessing [death].” Movies like those of The Amityville Horror franchise and William Friedkin’s The Exorcist promised spectral blood-baths as their selling points. The excitement of the screen came not from whether x character would bite the bullet but from how the bullet would rip through their abdomen and shatter their skull. Alien, Halloween, and the Giallo films of Dario Argento were engineered to rile the senses.
It is this carnival of sensations through which we come to know the emotionally inscrutable Alexia. We watch in awe as she grinds against the glittering hood of her Cadillac at her nighttime job as a car show dancer. We laugh as she slams a chair into a man’s head to the rhythm of Caterina Caselli’s “Nessuno mi può giudicare (Nobody can judge me)”. In kinship with her, we lose count of the number of bodies she kills one night during a failed orgy. In place of empathy, Ducournau encourages the same kind of interest in Alexia that we experience when we watch Michael Myers’s knife plunge into young, powdery skin.
In an interview for Film Comment, Ducournau described Alexia to Isabel Sandoval as “pure death drive,” a reference to Sigmund Freud’s concept of the unconscious impulse to recreate the scene of a traumatic event. It’s a concept that reminds me of a different touchstone in the body horror genre: David Cronenberg’s The Fly, in which geneticist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) morphs into a giant insectoid after he splices his DNA with a housefly’s. Rather than treating Brundle like a thematic pawn, Cronenberg orients his film around how Brundle feels about the loss of his humanity. As he becomes a monster, Brundle loses his girlfriend, his reputation, and his future, but our empathy is dependent on us having seen him as human. Never in Titane do we see Alexia before her trauma, or, before she becomes a monster. Alexia is always the “Brundlefly.”
If we return to the scene in which Alexia becomes Adrien, we see a dedication to spectacle. We wince at the viciousness with which Alexia binds up her body and strips off her hair. Ducournau sustains the tension of Alexia’s nose-breaking with sadistic confidence. Clearly, Ducournau understands that we come to body horror to experience these visceral pleasures. But spectacle toward the satisfaction of prurient desires is not the sole end of this scene. This scene of mutation, which manifests in so many other films as the moment in which a character has reached a point of irreversible inhumanity, ends in Alexia becoming more human. But she is more human, like Adrien; ergo, she is still not human. This disjunction prompts us to ask ourselves: what is the difference between being and pretending to be a human?
It is here that Titane takes an unexpected turn: the chronicle of a merciless serial killer with a thing for dead matter transforms into a found family story with a body horror twist. Although she clearly resembles a mangled young woman, Alexia dupes fire chief Vincent Legrand, who takes her in as his son. The performance of Adrien is a garb Alexia initially hopes to quickly disregard. Yet her attempts to kill Vincent never come to fruition. Even when she finds Vincent collapsed on his bathroom’s floor, his heart succumbing to years of steroid abuse, she chooses instead to sit with him as he returns to consciousness. A scene halfway through this second “act” stands out as a possible lodestar. In a bathroom mirroring the one in which Alexia becomes Adrien, Alexia strips the medical tape around her belly and breasts, and tries on a floral dress. She does not necessarily become “herself” again, but trades in the “Adrien” mask for another, more feminine one. Vincent walks in on her before she can become Adrien again, and for a second we think the film will return to the thriller genre. Instead, he hugs her, and tells her, “You’re my son, no matter who you are.”
In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet Capulet, while contemplating her love for Romeo, declares “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet”. It is not that Juliet forgives Romeo for being a Montague, nor that she does not understand the real weight of such titles, but that she knows that his family name is not all that he is. Even if what she sees is but a fantastical construction onto which she projects her own private Romeo, she knows her understanding of Romeo is no more definitive than any of the ones his family prescribe. I believe a similar relation to be unfolding in this crucial scene between Alexia and Vincent, which proves to be a turning point in their relationship. One could look at Titane as a reversal of the linear trajectory of the body horror genre. It seems that unlike Seth Brundle, who loses the love of his life when he becomes a monster, Alexia gains love when she becomes a human. What this mirrored narrative structure would communicate is that one can always redeem oneself after becoming a monster, and return to the realm of the human. But, once more, Alexia does not become Adrien. Alexia is like Adrien. Vincent, in affirming Alexia’s ambiguity, seems to understand this. And ultimately, Alexia finds love not by becoming human, but as a monster.
Whereas Titane proved that there is still room in body horror for new voices to exercise the genre’s conventions in ingenious ways, this year David Cronenberg, the “Baron of Blood,” tore apart and reassembled it. In Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg presents us with a dystopian world in which infection and contamination are old-world problems, and the pain threshold is so high that sex is no longer pleasurable; thus “surgery is the new sex.” For some, surgery is also a necessity: a fraction of humanity has developed AES, a disease that triggers the spontaneous growth of new, seemingly functionless organs which disrupt the body’s natural order. In response, the federal government has created the National Organ Registry, a unit tasked with documenting each new organ and extracting them to keep bodies “human.” At the same time, a movement of artists led by Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen) and his assistant/lover Caprice (Léa Seydoux) organized around aestheticized surgical performances develops. So begins a fusion of body horror and black comedy concerned with what it means to be “human” in a world that seems aggressively alien yet so familiar.
Despite claims that his film would inspire more walkouts from its Cannes premiere than his disaffected, mechanophilic Crash, Crimes of the Future proved disappointing for viewers who sought from it the same thrills of Titane. Unlike Ducournau’s film, which engaged its audience with the instruments of body horror before turning inside out, Crimes of the Future forsakes the genre’s spectacle entirely. Whereas Titane sought a zone between the human and the inhuman for Alexia to find love inside, the idea of the “human,” in Cronenberg’s world, has disintegrated. Effectively, then, the aesthetic that Philip Brophy described as exploring “how one controls and relates to [one’s body]” no longer applies. Cronenberg is not dealing with the audience’s bodies, but bodies whose sensoriums have been so reshaped by environmental collapse that we cannot possibly relate to them on a visceral level. We do not see our bodies in Crimes of the Future, but instead, what our bodies could be. Rather than terrifying us, Cronenberg gives us the space to find new ways of feeling his world.
In the film’s first signature “body horror” scene, we see Caprice and Saul perform. Saul lies inside of a Sark module, a polymeliac, coffinesque bed used for autopsies. With a fleshy remote, Caprice directs the module’s arms to slice open Saul’s abdomen and fish for the precious organs inside. The camera hovers above the gaping abdomen, quiet and attentive. Blood does not pour from Saul’s body; instead, we see his excess organs in their casings, pink as coral and egg-shaped, glistening under the lights of the performance space. The probes remove Saul’s latest creation and hold it up for the audience to see, who admire and photograph the beautiful icon. What is surprising about this scene is its sound, or lack thereof. Cronenberg’s editors opt for a largely quiet soundscape; this distances the audience from the screen’s violence. The stillness of cinematographer Douglas Koch’s camera gives us time to patiently observe the mutilation of Saul’s body. I believe the point is to prompt the question: how am I supposed to feel?
It is notable that Caprice sees her invasive surgeries as a form of high art. The destruction of the body is not actually destruction here, but creative production. From the perspective of art, Saul is creating himself anew. Ultimately, like Ducournau, Cronenberg sets a course for a new “body” aesthetic: one in which the very grammar of body horror is used to help us grapple with our humanity in the face of personal and environmental trauma. I have already stated that Crimes of the Future and Titane teach us how to feel about people who exist beyond the boundaries of the human. But perhaps, in getting away from humanity, they might also reveal to us how far our notion of the human can go.
