The Fractured Rape/Revenge Fantasies of Julie Taymor’s ‘Titus’

This guest post by Rebecca Willoughby appears as part of our theme week on Rape Revenge Fantasies.

It might seem a bit archaic to look to a Shakespearean text for an answer to any question about rape/revenge fantasies—that is, unless you’re a student of Shakespeare.  As Leigh Kolb has already usefully pointed out, it seems the Bard knew a thing or two about the deeply affecting rage felt by survivors of sexual abuse, and how patriarchy perpetuates that rage by blocking their ability to feel that justice is served in their honor.  He knew about it so well, in fact, that even during the time of performances of Titus Andronicus, a play penned relatively early in Will’s career that revolves around rape and revenge, stage productions included a strange conglomeration of historical periods, all of which were oppressive to women in varying degrees.  Witness the Peacham drawing, an early-modern representation of the costuming and staging of Titus Andronicus, and you’ll see a combination of classical Roman and Elizabethan garb, where Titus Andronicus, the play’s titular general, appears in traditional Roman costume, and his soldiers appear in armor worn in Shakespeare’s day.  Both the classical Roman and Elizabethan periods were two moments in time when women (with the possible exception of the Queen) were literally the property of their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and had little recourse of their own if they were misused in any way, except through these societally approved male allies.

So it’s not truly surprising that the raped woman in this play, Titus’s daughter Lavinia, has to rely on her male relatives to enact revenge for her violation.  After all, this isn’t I Spit on Your Grave.  It’s more like The Last House on the Left, which—like Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring—is after all based on a 13^th century ballad about a girl raped by ruffians who then arrive for a respite at her family’s home.  When her parents find out about her rape, they torture and kill her rapists in retaliation.  If this origin story tells us anything (at least initially) about rape revenge narratives, it’s the unfortunate fact that sexual violence has been around for a long, long time.

Julie Taymor’s contemporary approach to creating a film of Titus Andronicus, then, has to address a variety of factors: 1) she has set up for herself the challenge of filming a Shakespeare play that has been called both an “early masterpiece” and an “Elizabethan pot-boiler”; 2) she’s a female director approaching a play that has, at its center, a ritual killing, a rape, and revenge cannibalism; and 3) she’s creating this piece of art during a historical moment during which entertainment media is rife with violence and there much alleged desensitization, as well as within a culture full of complex and problematic attitudes about rape.

Taymor’s answer to these challenges is to mimic the pastiche represented in the Peacham drawing, with a bit of updating: her film, Titus (1999), is a lush visual mash-up of classical Roman architecture, iconography that vaguely recalls both Stalinist Russia and Hitler’s Germany, avant-garde symbolism, Fellini-esque mise-en-scene, and even Degas ballerinas.  The influence of the Peacham sketch draws attention to the fact that the classical setting of Titus Andronicus reflects the violence of the Elizabethan period of the play’s production, as well as bringing to mind the violence of classical Rome, the coliseum as a theatre of violence, and the excessive, often despotic rulers of the classical period.  The overall look of Taymor’s film, with its naturalistic color palette, its blending and layering of historical periods and iconic imagery, and its direction and photography lends itself to a mode in which the grotesque is presented with utmost beauty, unsettling the viewer and increasing the tension between what the audience knows to be real and fiction.  Each of these symbols, referents, and cultural touchstones emphasize the powerlessness of women in those cultures (and, by extension, our own), and the fragility and repression that can characterize the feminine experience.  But perhaps most importantly, this approach destabilizes any complicity the audience might bring to these representations of violence.  Taymor wants her viewers to FEEL these wrongs, and feel them deeply.

Enter what Taymor calls the “Penny Arcade Nightmares.”  Although the film is brimming with gorgeously realized but horrifying images happening in the play proper—such as Marcus’s discovery of Lavinia that has been much discussed—these sequences are the most obviously symbolic, and are meant to illustrate the intense emotions surrounding the events that drive the revenge plot: the supposed honor-killing of Goth Queen Tamora’s eldest son; her younger sons’ subsequent rape of Lavinia in retaliation; Titus’s murder of Chiron and Demetrius in vengeance; and finally the epically terrifying final scenes, where Titus has ground the  boys’ bones “to dust” and baked them into pies, which he’s fed to their mother Tamora, whose enraged husband slaughters Titus (but not before Titus kills his own daughter to save her from “surviv[ing] her shame”)… yeah.  Pile of bodies on the stage at the end of the play: check.  Taymor takes these remarkable cruelties, mingles them with horror’s libidinal audience reactions, and controls those reactions through unexpectedly stunning imagery to produce an increase of empathy.   In Taymor’s adaptation, each act of violence is an image that is hauntingly beautiful and still highly disturbing.  The Penny Arcade Nightmares illustrate not only acts of torture, dismemberment and cannibalism, but also their internal consequences, their effects on those who execute them, and how victims and those close to them are changed by such extreme violence.

Lavinia’s rape, though it occurs “off-stage,” is represented in one of these stylized vignettes.  Bathed in icy hues of blue, white, and grey, Lavinia appears at once as a sort of Old-Hollywood female icon, a suitable eye-rest for the male gaze, but also as a wounded deer, with a deer head placed atop her head, and deer hooves replacing her dismembered hands.  Twisting and cowering on a pedestal as if she’s trapped within a snow globe, she dodges the sharpened claws of Chiron and Demetrius, represented as man-tigers bent on consuming their herbivore prey.  Chaotic rock music and fast-paced editing underscores the brief scene, highlighting the jagged edges of Lavinia’s memory of her trauma, evoking her anger and her frustrating helplessness.  It’s also significant that this moment appears in the film as her male allies encourage her to write the names of her rapists in the sand, revealing their heretofore elusive identities in order to facilitate vengeance—by performing an act that will lead to justice for the violated girl, she is violated again by her own memory of the event.

But what can this film teach us about rape culture?  The film and its source material are chock full of horrible acts of violence, including rape.  The problem is not that Lavinia doesn’t get justice—she does.  The problem is that this justice is achieved through additional violence, a fact that Taymor emphasizes by placing the final bloodbath in the setting of an arena, populated with viewers.  They signify us, those watching at home, and implicate this violent justice through their blank faces and silent stares.  They do not cheer.  Lavinia’s plight is finished, but the cycle of violence has claimed nearly everyone on “stage.” Taymor’s revision leaves the children to potentially clean up the massacre.  Taymor’s insistence on unmooring our expectations of representational violence through her painterly compositions, and her use of the audience suggest that she not only wants to change our ideas about rape culture and revenge, but about violence in general.  The very construction of the term “rape culture” includes that word, “culture”—a concept that is all-inclusive, encompassing all people, regardless of your place on the sexual spectrum.

Lavinia’s attack and subsequent mutilation is a horrifying, physical manifestation of how broken we are as a society in regards to rape and other forms of sexual violence, and Titus’s attempt at justice—however well intentioned—doesn’t really solve the problem.  The problem is not only rape culture. In Shakespeare’s text Lavinia is our center of empathy, the character through which we experience tragedy on a grand and grotesque scale.  But Titus himself is guilty of perpetuating the cycle of revenge that ends with that pile of (albeit mostly despicable) bodies on stage, and the layered representation of various historical moments in original performance and the contemporary film speaks to the agonizing continuation of these flawed approaches to healing. Extreme?  Sure.  But this text seems to ask audiences through the centuries: is more violence really how we want to handle terrible, soul-crushing, self-negating violence?  With everyone dead, does anyone really learn a lesson?  In her modern re-vision, Taymor’s use of the coliseum audience seems to refute the idea that rage unleashed in additional violence is any kind of cure for deeply felt pain.  Their silence, and perhaps ours, is a thoughtful one, one that might include some consideration of alternatives to perpetuating the cycle of violence that leads down a deep rabbit-hole to oblivion.

Rebecca Willoughby holds a Ph.D. in English and Film Studies from Lehigh University.  She writes most frequently on horror films and melodrama, and is currently a lecturer in Film/Media Studies at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.