Titus · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A boy sits at a kitchen table, a paper bag pulled over his head, smashing toy soldiers through a pool of ketchup. Then an explosion tears the room apart and carries him into the dust of the Roman Colosseum, where the same soldiers, now men, march in living ranks. With that single cut Julie Taymor states her whole argument: the violence we play with as children is the violence we inherit, and a culture transmits cruelty the way it transmits anything else — as spectacle. Titus takes Shakespeare's earliest, goriest, most-dismissed tragedy and treats its cartoonish butchery not as an embarrassment to be excused but as a subject to be examined. Deleuze gives us names for what Taymor is doing, and the names make the film legible rather than merely lurid.

Start underneath. Deleuze called naturalism the cinema in which a recognizable social world — here Rome, its togas and senate and martial honor — turns out to be the thin crust over an originary world of pure drives: appetite, possession, the body reduced to meat. You can read the whole film as a line of slope, an irreversible descent toward exhaustion and death. Titus sacrifices a son of Tamora in ritual; the ritual feeds revenge; revenge feeds rape and mutilation; and the slope bottoms out at the banquet where Tamora, with vaudevillian glee on Hopkins's face, eats her own children baked into a pie. Hands are severed, tongues cut, sons cooked. These are not plot points so much as symptoms — acts that read as eruptions of a compulsion older than any character. The arena itself is the originary world: a pit where the civilized milieu is stripped away and the drive shows its face.

But Taymor refuses to simply immerse us in the gore, and this is her specific invention. Atrocity in Titus is almost never dramatized in real time; it is figured. When Lavinia appears after her rape with bare branches grafted where her hands were, posed on a tree stump, Tovoli's camera holds her as a tableau — Daphne from Ovid, a Renaissance painting, a thing to be looked at. Deleuze would call this the reflection-image, action transposed into Figure and spectacle rather than acted out, and behind it Eisenstein's montage of attractions: staging that presents an idea instead of advancing a story. The frieze-like compositions, figures dwarfed on monumental fascist staircases, the gore arranged with a painter's deliberateness — all of it converts event into emblem. The film keeps asking, in this Brechtian register, why we crave the very image it is offering us.

Where the suffering goes interior, Taymor invents the Penny Arcade Nightmares — layered, superimposed, slow-motion hallucinations that visualize trauma. These are pure dream-images (Deleuze's onirosign): circuits of fantasy unanchored to any datable memory, where the world's logic dissolves and a private horror plays out in symbols. Bonnot, who cut Costa-Gavras's Z into its famous associative shards, brings exactly that fractured montage method here, so the film breathes between long passages of patiently spoken verse and these aggressive bursts of dream.

Then there is the most radical stroke, the one the old tags called simply 'anachronism.' Togas share the frame with leather military coats; chariots run beside motorcycles; a sword answers a microphone. This is not decoration. It is a chronosign — a direct image of time in which historical eras stop being a sequence and become a coexistence. Roman antiquity, Mussolini's EUR district with its 'Square Colosseum,' and contemporary detritus pile into one arena as sheets of past that all press on a single present. Taymor builds a place where every century of organized cruelty is happening at once, which is the truest thing the film says: the pageantry of power rhymes across time.

And someone watches. Young Lucius, silent throughout, is Deleuze's seer — the figure who can no longer act, only look and endure, registering atrocity in a pure optical situation. He is us, the appalled conscience strapped into the spectacle. The film's wager rides entirely on him. In the final image he carries the captured infant — Aaron and Tamora's child, marked for death by the cycle's logic — out of the arena toward a dawning light. It is the one gesture Shakespeare never wrote, and it asks whether the seer who has watched the whole machine can decline to feed it.

Place this in its discourse and the debts are precise. From Loncraine's Richard III Taymor takes fascist architecture and uniform as the engine of menace; from Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, the pop-collage clash of period registers; from Olivier's Henry V, the self-aware frame that opens on artifice; from Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, Shakespeare abstracted into mask and ritual rather than psychology — the lineage of Taymor's own theater. Tovoli imports the engulfing, saturated color he built for Argento's Suspiria, space itself turned threatening. What Taymor adds to film as an art is a way of staging brutality so that it thinks: a tragedy long read as juvenile excess becomes an essay on how spectacle manufactures, and might yet refuse, the next generation's appetite for blood.