FLESH AND FIRE — THE ABJECT CYBORG OF TITANE (JULIA DUCOURNAU, 2021)

Like the robust chambers built to contain the condensed, explosive energy of fossil carbon, the energy of the female body—with its risk of explosive discharge—has been seen to be in need of channelling into orderly (re)productive outlets.

Clark and Yusoff (2018, 19)

Formerly, I too sucked satiny coals. Once I burned my tongue. (That only happens if someone makes you lose faith.) Ever since I have no longer dared suck real fire; for a long time I lived on electricity

Cixous (1991, 24)

Julia Ducournau’s Palme d’Or winning body-horror Titane presents a dystopian vision of hyper-sexualized monstrosity – in which the feminine and the masculine, the body and the machine, are in  constant, abject, and spectacular battle. Almost 40 years ago Haraway (1991, 150; 180) argued “for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction,” whereby the cyborg manifested a “utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.” Ducournau transposes this utopian dream with an abject nightmare; presenting, through visceral steampunk cinematography, a fetishized, fleshy body entwined with fire, oil, and machinery.

Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), the protagonist, is a mechanophiliac serial killer from suburban Marseilles. She escapes the police by disguising herself as a missing teenage boy by the name of Adrien. Under the guardianship of Vincent (Vincent London), a 60-something fire captain and Adrien’s beleaguered father, Alexia further morphs into the ambiguous figure of Adrien whilst bonding with Vincent’s fire-fighter colleagues. As she does this, her gender becomes further disguised; as does her unwanted pregnancy, which swells in the diegetic atmosphere. This pregnancy, as an early scene makes ironically clear, was conceived through sexual intercourse with a car; a manifestation of Alexia’s obsession with vehicles which arose from the traumatic car crash of her childhood.

On first reading, Alexia might be interpreted as Haraway’s (1991, 149) cyborg par excellence:  “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism.” Cinematographically the machine is in constant struggle with the body throughout; entwining with Alexia’s biophysical rhythms. Nowhere is this more apparent than the mechanic colonisation of Alexia’s reproductive cycle. Alexia has literally merged her own DNA with that of a fire-painted Caddy. As her pregnancy progresses she begins secreting black, mechanic oil. But even before the conception and the torturous delivery of a steel-spined baby, Alexia is a cyborg-in-training — a titanium plate is affixed to her skull after a serious childhood car accident, one seemingly willed by her obsessive impersonation of an engine as a 10-year-old girl.

Throughout the film the feminine and masculine are never resolved into a coherent whole. Apprehensive of men and resentful of her status as an object of male desire, Alexa is ill at ease in her given femininity, emboldened only by her sexuality. As the film progresses the distinction between masculine and feminine is further unsettled, dissolving to the point of indistinction. Vincent and Alexa’s ambiguous relationship manifests this. Vincent, a fireman, is portrayed as a stereotype: a literal manifestation, of – often toxic ­– masculinity. Yet it soon becomes apparent that his masculinity sits at the confluence of a palpable sense of vulnerability. His recourse to steroids makes his ageing vulnerability palpable: “Are you sick?” Adrien asks when discovering his late-night syringe binge. “No, just old,” Vincent plaintively replies. Alexa’s embrace of gendered ambiguity, the embrace of the cyborg, further unsettles any distinction; her bedroom walls literally symbolise this, littered with cybermen posters and toys.

Yet for Haraway (1991, 150), one should take “pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction.” There is no pleasure to be found in Titane’s dissolution of Humanist schema and subjectivity. Rousselle carries Alexia with a presence that is constantly under siege by flesh itself. The fleshyness of the body is a constant, palpable presence. Alexia picks at an unending itch, tugs at a pierced nipple, constricts her breasts with bandages, attempts a forced abortion, endures a swelling, tearing stomach. At points this verges on the disgusting. The softness of flesh, of blood-warmed bodies, is palpable and becomes more so as Alexa’s complexion transitions to a metallic grey from its initial, sexualized warmth. This representation makes Alexa’s corporeality palpable; her expelled bodily fluids are an example of abjection par excellence.

By pushing the cyborg, a concept which already unsettles, to the abject limits of bearablity, Ducournau is looking to bring “death and femininity, murder and procreation, cessation of life and vitality […] together” (Kristeva, 1982, 96). These, of course, are all motifs that Ducournau plays with in various ways. ‘Murder and procreation’ is seemingly the perfect dialectic which Titane embodies: life is created through a murderous, gory streak. One half of the film focuses on seemingly schizophrenic murders; the other half on the birth of the cyborg child. It is no coincidence, then, that Kristeva also argues that we first experience abjection at the point of separation from the mother.  When the Alexia finally gives into the swelling machine growing inside of her and gives birth, there is an almost euphoric moment – accompanied by choral music and pious light – whereby the machinic child is expelled whilst Alexia tragically dies. As Kristeva (1982, 138 my emphasis) argues in this oft-quoted passage: “Abjection oscillates then between the fading of all meaning and all humanity, burnt as in the flames of a fire, and the ecstasy of an ego which, having lost its Other and its objects, touches, at the precise moment of suicide, the height of harmony with the promised land.”

Following from the above quote, I think it is no coincidence that Ducournu mobilizes fire, both symbolically and affectively, to summon the abject cyborg into cinematic reality. Fire is used by Ducournau – in counterposition to metal and oil – to evoke death and loss. When training in the fire station, Vincent is confronted with the burnt corpse of his presumably dead son; when tackling a forest fire a fellow fire man is killed in a curated explosion. But fire is also associated with Ducournau’s problematization of sexuality and gender. The car with which Alexia has sex is painted with flames and surrounded by fire cannons. It exists in excess of what Yusoff and Clark (2018) term the pyrotechnical constrainment of fossil-capitalism and industrial combustion. This is where the mechanical engines, even the fire engines, which pervade the film become somewhat ironic (Harraway, 1991) – precisely because the fossil fuel, the oil, the flames exceed any containment within pyrotechnic systems; sex and fire become implicated as expressions of an exorbitant energy which we might associate with the works of Bataille (1986 [1957]).

Ducournau’s cyborg, then, is an expression of what Clark and Yusoff (2018) term pyrosexuality: Alexia exists in abject excess of “pyrotechnical transmutation” (16). Her abject representation exists at the confluence of the elemental – fire, metallics, oils – and the sexual; abjection is the means by which the material and the sexual are foregrounded in co-constitution, short-circuiting historical co-option of elemental energy by capitalist systems (Parisi and Terranova, 2000). Alexia’s pyrosexuality also exists “far from the heteronormativities and filial modes of inheritance” (Clark and Yusoff, 2018, 13). It is subversive, resonating with Luce Irigaray’s (1993, 80) sense of an elemental wonder that is in a vital interplay with sexual difference: evoking a feeling of “a primary passion and a perpetual crossroads between earth and sky, or hell, where it would be possible to rework the attraction between those who differ, especially sexually.”

Hereby lies the beauty and power of Titane. It is a timely unsettling of the figure of the cyborg which has by all intense of purpose become naturalised within capitalist systems and pastiche-like representations. Haraway’s radical figure of the cyborg is now present in the everyday. The systems of patriarchy and sexuality with which the figure of the cyborg was tasked to unsettle are now in fact reproduced within novel ecology of Humans and technology. We need look no further than the operation of code space to see how the cyborg now reproduces gendered and racialised outcomes. This somewhat explains Haraway’s (2016) own turn away from technofeminism towards the Lovecraftian entanglements of Staying with the Trouble. And this is where the genius of Ducournau’s cyborg lies: it reignites, quite literally, the radical cyborg; the cyborg which unsettles structures of power; the cyborg which bring into purview the possibility of futures otherwise.

Still from Titane (all images courtesy NEON Films, photos © Carole Bethuel)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bataille, G., 1986 [1957]. Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, Tr. M. Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Cixous, H., 1991. The Book of Promethea, Tr. B. Wing. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press

Clark, N., & Yusoff, K. 2018. queer fire: ecology, combustion and pyrosexual desire. Feminist Review, 118(1), 7–24

Haraway, D., 1991. Simians, cyborgs, and women: The reinvention of nature. Routledge.

Haraway, D.J., 2016. Staying with the Trouble. Duke University Press.

Irigaray, L., 1993. An Ethics of Sexual Difference, Trs. C. Burke and G.C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press

Kristeva, J., 1982. Powers of horror (Vol. 98). University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton.

Parisi, L. and Terranova, T., 2000. Heat-death: emergence and control in genetic engineering and artificial life. CTheory, 10 May. Available at: https://journals.uvic.ca/index.php/ctheory/article/view/14604/5455