Titane and the Dissolution of Gender
By Annalise Pelous
A woman ravenously bites into her sister's severed finger. This is the scene that comes to mind when I think of French filmmaker Julia Ducournau's first film, the 2016 horror film Raw, which tells the story of a vegetarian veterinary school student who develops cannibalistic urges after tasting meat for the first time. Against this nightmare-inducing backdrop, Ducournau paints a tender portrait of sisterhood and female kinship. This feature sets the tone for her sophomore project Titane, released in 2021 and awarded that year's prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Letterboxd user matt lynch called the film “A tremendous work about what it means to be meat,” evoking a continuation of Ducournau's interest in the body's tenuous humanity. In Titane, a female serial killer named Alexia who has sex with cars, poses as a fireman's long-since disappeared son in order to evade capture. Later characterized by intense gore that transforms bodies from conventional humans to abstract meat, the film opens with a montage of close-ups on the inside of a car. Engine sounds seamlessly blend into a child's imitation of this mechanical hum, designating a link between machine and human from the action's very onset. This curious relationship goes beyond the provocative, posing questions about gendered identification in a deceptively subtle manner. In Titane, Ducournau destabilizes the utility of gendered categorization by engaging in a transhumanist artistic practice that demonstrates a continuity between body and machine that transcends gender, thus opening space for deeper thought on the harm of recent “progressive” legislation that works to reinforce static gender categories rather than fluidifying them.
The legislative project that intends to foster trans* inclusion by reifying a third gender alongside the traditional male/female binary is certainly well-intentioned, but promotes a limited understanding of how gender as a classification system oppresses all individuals. Laws such as 2017’s California Senate Bill 179 which allows citizens to signify their non-normative gender identity with the X gender marker on official documents like state IDs demonstrate a governmental interest in gender inclusivity. However, in proposing an additional gendered category, lawmakers fail to embrace the explosive potential queerness offers up. But even then, queerness only serves as an entry point towards a broader dissolution of gender. Male and female bodies are incredibly unruly themselves, from tomboys to cis men performing drag. Therefore, looking beyond gender is not contingent on the existence of trans* positionalities, but rather these unconventional gender formations render the limitations of gender visible. Undoubtedly, the stakes of this operation are much higher for those whose bodies do not lend themselves to gendered taxonomization but the disavowal of gender as a helpful identifying category serves to recognize the ineffectiveness of these inaccurate categories.
Titane earnestly takes up the task of delegitimizing gender as a means of identification in its depiction of a woman impersonating a man. This literal engagement with trans* materiality exposes the flexibility of the human body and its propensity for evading alignment with a given gender. Alexia finds out early on in the film that her vehicular sexcapades have resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. Her decision to take on a man’s identity hence requires her to heavily disguise her body which undeniably reads as female. By binding her chest, shaving her eyebrows, and breaking her nose, Alexia metamorphoses into a man, passing as such for everyone she encounters. And yet, the audience knows she is a woman. In holding two supposedly contrary genders at once, Alexia’s character independently makes a case that gendered categorization, be it binary or tri-polar, is ineffective at conveying identity. Ducournau’s depiction of an unstable body invites the viewer to reconsider the merits of gendered classification as its utility crumbles when confronted with such a versatile form.
Some might question whether Titane merits consideration as a relevant work in regards to transness. After all, Alexia reclaims her cisgender femininity when she gives birth alongside her father figure, Vincent, and reveals her real name to him when he calls her by his son's, Adrien. Furthermore, popular discourse on representation has veered in the direction of invalidating, in the case of this film, a cisgender director’s perspective on a potentially trans* narrative. Though I am tempted to opt for the easier route and dismissively reassert Letterboxd reviewer reanna’s claim that “this is a movie about being trans if u get it u get it and if u don’t u don’t!!!!!!!!!!”, I believe this movie actually eschews transness altogether. Ducournau’s project functions beneath, above, through and beyond gender. She recognizes that trans* individuals aren’t the only people with something to gain from the evasion of gender, complexifying potential concerns over her suitedness to tell a story that may read on the surface as simply “trans.” In the case of the aforementioned birth scene, Alexia may seem to embody a cis female positionality, but upon deeper reflection her unruly body defies gendered categorization and expands birth-giving beyond womanhood. The incorporation of the non-human, analyzed in a later section, is crucial here. Thus, Titane expands discourse on generating new gender categories beyond the realm of trans rights and probes the ways in which gender evades this classic taxonomy.
The richness of Ducournau’s take on gender comes from her deconstruction of the body. As flagged earlier by matt lynch, she alienates the body from its human dimension, observing it as meat instead. This manifests primarily in the film's extreme gore content, from open brain surgery to a failed chopstick abortion. Durcournau renders the body abstract and defamiliarizes its connection to a given gender. After a horrific car accident, extreme close-ups depict the fusing of a metal plate to a young Alexia’s skull, melding shiny metal with spongy organic matter. Here, I turn to Eva Hayward’s piece from Queering the Non/Human titled “Lessons from a Starfish” to elaborate on the significance of this mutilation: “The cut cuts the meat (not primarily a visual operation for the embodied subject, but rather a proprioceptive one), and a space of psychical possibility is thereby created" (Hayward 255). Approaching embodiment through a trans lens, this enlightening passage interprets physical cuts to the body as enabling transformation. In Titane, Alexia’s childhood car accident and resulting surgical procedure force her body open, spilling its insides out, and prime it for reconstruction. Ducournau’s use of close-ups alluded to earlier draws attention to the injury as something deepening one’s understanding of corporeality. It’s worth noting that after the surgery, little Alexia sports an androgynous shaved head that confuses her gender. This detail connects the defamiliarization of the body achieved through cutting to the dissolution of gender. The cutting signifies an expansion of the body, a move which furthers Titane’s slick reformulation of human embodiment.
The transformation enabled by way of cuts in the brain surgery scene takes on a vital transhumanist angle when one considers it a representation of marriage between man and machine. This is Titane’s most brilliant contribution: a perspective on fleshy embodiment that considers it alongside non-human subjects. In aligning flesh and metal, Ducournau opens up new ways to think about human identity in ways that elide gender entirely. The assemblages of man and machine in Titane assist in revealing to those still enamored with gender’s categorical power how stunningly fluid human embodiment truly is. Alexia’s sexual encounters with cars provide the most obvious instances of these transhuman enmeshments. The male/female binary implies a heterosexual coupling, and conversely so. When Alexia has sex with a car, she disrupts heteronormative schemas and traverses into unfamiliar territory. In their reading of Laura Aguilar’s photo “Grounded #114” in their piece “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?,” Dana Luciano and Mel Y. Chen consider how Aguilar’s positionment of her amorphous nude form alongside a boulder carries a sexual charge: “If we think, more broadly, of the constitutive pleasure and potentiality of forms of corporeal communing, then we might well consider this image a sexual one, following, not without irony, on the queer theoretical insistence that we denaturalize the kind of ‘sex’ that lies at the center of deployments of sexuality” (Luciano, Chen 185). This insight makes sense of the initially confusing coupling Alexia initiates with the car. In representing a non-normative sexual arrangement that equalizes man and machine, Ducournau simultaneously humanizes the machine and automates the man, debasing traditional constructions of sexuality. An exchange of properties occurs that liberates each object from rigid conceptual boxes. Queerness, transness evaporate in a conversation that denaturalizes a preoccupation with such topics, making them seem superfluous and trivial. The representation of cars as a sexual agents in Titane, ultimately relagated to the sidelines of the plot, reframes normative sexual encounters as simply one form of sexual expression. Alexia has a fling with a female coworker after her vehicular lover early in the film; the utility of categorical identifiers turns moot for an individual so free in their attachments.
Man/machine linkages are literally embodied by Alexia’s eventual child, conceived from her intercourse with a car. If the act of sex troubles gender through sexuality, then the car-human hybrid child does so through the family unit, another framework which shapes gender. The child’s form is kept hidden save for brief flashes at the end of the film. The skin on Alexia’s stomach peels away at times to reveal what appears to be a hard metal shell. The withholding of information about the child plays into traditional narratives surrounding pregnancy, specifically the ritual of the “gender reveal.” In Titane, the question shifts from “what gender is the baby?” to simply “what is the baby?” Ducournau cleverly avoids any verbal reference to the child, which in the film’s French language would necessarily require attributing a sense of gender to it. Fusing human and non-human materiality probes past gender and engages with identity at a more essential level. When Alexia dies in childbirth, Vincent holds the child against his chest and Ducournau holds the camera on him in this position for the final shot. Ending the film on such a note orients the image of a single father and his adopted car-child towards futurity. What does it mean for Ducournau to associate the future with a familial arrangement so vastly removed from the nuclear family? Using man-machine hybridity to interrogate such social formations usually taken for granted, Titane imagines family beyond gender roles and offers a revolutionary vision for human relationships that immediately centers compassion and love before mediation through gender or sexuality.
The child that results from man/machine coupling is not the only hybrid creature in the film. I'm referencing the fascinating subject produced by Ducournau’s filmmaking: the human digitally captured and rendered for aesthetic consumption. Jack Halberstam alludes to this potential as it pertains to animated features in his essay "Animating Revolt/Revolting Animation: Penguin Love, Doll Sex and the Spectacle of the Queer Nonhuman" from the aforementioned Queering the Non/Human. He writes, "The world of animation, ultimately, distorts, manipulates and messes with human form in a way that makes humanist ideals like heterosexual love and individualism seem creepy and that elevates post-human, stunt subjectivity from revolting animation to animating revolt" (Halberstam 280). I would argue that this phenomenon expands past animation into filmmaking and media creation as a whole, considering these live action mediums similarly mediate human forms by means of technological reproduction, albeit at a generally higher fidelity. I now turn to my favorite scene of the film, a slow-motion, pink-hued dance sequence in a bar occupied by Vincent and Alexia in her Adrien drag, among other firefighters. The visual distortions incorporated by Ducournau alienate the bodies from their humanness, tinting beige flesh fuschia and slowing movement into something foreign. But beyond these obvious transformations, cinematic media ontologically impresses a transhumanist quality upon the subjects it represents. Meat gives way to something far less tangible, its emissions of light preserved by digital means and manipulated with myriad techniques in post-production. Situating Titane’s evasion of gender as a categorizing force in this medium beautifully expands its significance. In a world increasingly mediated by digital processes, human bodies transcend their vessels into something even more malleable than flesh. It’s an appropriately timed addition to discourse on gender that Ducournau obliquely realizes here. Bodies melt into digital space and, as Halberstam signals, humanist ideals lose appeal. As a film, Titane liberates bodies from social codes and enables the viewer to interpret them beyond these confines.
The breadth of Titane’s insight into gender evades the scope of this study but nonetheless, Ducournau’s unparalleled existential claims immensely enrich discourse on the efficacy and utility of gendered boundaries. In the context of her work, creating new gender markers and bathroom stalls seems outright silly. She makes clear the ways in which human form evades these artificial boxes and articulates a strong case for doing away with this clutter altogether. By now it’s no secret I passionately adore Titane. On a crudely personal level, it gave me the language I needed to assert the terms of my identity as it relates to gender and changed the way I see myself. By no means does this imply I deny how challenging and demanding the film is. The first time I saw it in theaters, more people walked out than I could count. Perhaps Titane’s boldness limits its effectiveness as a vector for the breakdown of gendered categorization. But it is precisely the film’s abrasiveness and direct affront to audience sensibilities that enables its revolutionary potential. The breakdown of gender as a means of control and domination is hardly won. It cannot come from a place of familiarity or comfort. Ducournau forces us to reckon with shudder-inducing images of gore, to appreciate a perverse sexual relationship, to sympathize with a murderous fraud. Her attack on norms refuses to hold back in the slightest, making for a viscerally effective dissection of what it means to be human. And yet, despite its violence, the film is a comfort. Vincent’s closing words pulsate in my mind: “Je suis là” (I am here). Ducournau punches through all the ways in which we are taught to situate our humanity, as gender, as flesh, only to cradle us in the simple warmth of being here, being human. Free of gender and bodily vessels, this is enough. We are enough.
Works Cited
California State, Legislature. Senate Bill 179. California State Legislature, 16 Oct. 2017, https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180SB179.
@colonelmortimer (matt lynch). "A tremendous work about what it means to be meat, and how beautiful and terrible transformation must be. Cronenberg gets tossed around a lot in these parts, but this is truly the New Flesh." Letterboxd, 23 September 2021, https://letterboxd.com/colonelmortimer/film/titane/.
Ducournau, Julia, director. Titane. Neon, 2021.
Halberstam, Jack. "Animating Revolt/Revolting Animation: Penguin Love, Doll Sex and the Spectacle of the Queer Nonhuman." Queering the Non/Human. Routledge; 2008: 265-282.
Hayward, Eva. "Lessons From a Starfish." Queering the Non/Human. Routledge; 2008: 277-292.
Luciano, Dana and Mel Y. Chen. 2015. “Has the Queer Ever Been Human?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 21, no. 2-3: 183-207.
@reanna4l (reanna). "This is a movie about being trans if u get it u get it and if u don’t u don’t!!!!!!!!!!." Letterboxd, 29 September 2021,
https://letterboxd.com/reanna4l/film/titane/.