Andrew Sarris identifies three facets of the auteur: technical aptitude, personal style, and interior meaning, which is “extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material” (663). Julie Taymor’s Titus certainly shows technical aptitude – her theatre experience adapts wonderfully to the cinema – and her personal flair is evident in the world she creates visually through her choice of costumes, movement, and sets. However, it is the interior meaning in the film that makes it truly great. Taymor, unlike some other Shakespearian directors, has no concerns about her authority in manipulating the text – she is true to the text in many ways, but makes no pretences about using Shakespeare’s work to convey her own message. Her preoccupations are evident in both her theatrical and cinematic versions of Titus, but with the techniques available in film she is able to further express her ideas and draw the audience into her world. And this is essential to her meaning, because what Taymor gives to Shakespeare’s work is her desire to make the work meaningful to viewers, in a way that it historically has been unable to do. This play has traditionally been dismissed as too violent, and has often alienated its viewers with its brutality. Taymor, however, refuses to let her audience draw away – she keeps viewers involved by implicating them in the violence, in a way that could only be achieved in film. Taymor uses filmic representation to involve the viewer in a self-critical examination of the act of viewing violence, by exploring Shakespeare’s theme of violence as entertainment, and adding her own twist in exploring the way that violence affects the child.
One of Taymor’s most obvious – and I will argue, most significant – additions to Shakespeare’s text is the framing or “book-ending” of the play. The film is framed by two aspects: the gaze of the child, and the coliseum setting. In the original text Young Lucius does not play a big role, but Taymor seizes upon the child as a way to humanise the impact of the play – the child’s reactions to all the horrific acts forces the viewer to feel that horror, keeping us from shutting down and becoming numb to the violence. We also share the child’s perspective at times: we too are helpless onlookers to the acts in the film, knowing the horror that is about to take place but voiceless and powerless to stop it. This identification with the boy, moreover, strengthens the pity and outrage that we feel as he is exposed to all this violence, forced to watch and learn the revenge code as it is carried out, taught by his elders that this is the way the world works – violence in the right forms is condoned, even required. This condoning of violence is figured in the coliseum, the original theatre of violence-as-entertainment, the theatre in which this story takes place. In the opening scenes the coliseum is used to transform the boy’s toy soldiers into a real army, to bring his make-believe violence to life. In the ending, as the camera pans out from the banquet scene to reveal that it is being played out in the coliseum, this theatre of violence transforms the impassioned characters into actors on a stage, returning the aggression to the realm of make-believe, of entertainment.
Taymor’s film opens with a close-up of the boy. His face is lit by a flickering blue-ish light, making it look like he might be watching TV. This impression is reinforced by the cartoon sounds accompanying the scene. However as the camera pans out we see that he has a more active role – he is creating the play-violence himself, with toy soldiers. As the boy’s violence escalates, so does the violence of the soundtrack; eventually we hear actual sirens and explosions, and then there is an explosion onscreen. Taymor says “it begins with an innocent play, that escalates very quickly into actual violence; so it starts with innocent TV violence, the kind of sounds […] that we heard in our childhood, […] but then it becomes true violence around him… So in a way he very innocently has created his violence” (Director’s commentary). The boy’s make-believe has become reality, metaphorically pointing to the way that TV violence and violence as entertainment can produce actual violence. The film thus opens with the child’s experience of violence, and the way that modern society has initiated the child into that violence (through the cartoon sounds and the toy soldiers); this is later mirrored by the way that Young Lucius is taught the codes of violence and revenge by his elders. Taymor emphasises this element of Shakespeare’s story by providing a parallel into contemporary culture, thus manipulating the story to express her own preoccupations.
We next see Young Lucius being taken into the coliseum, the embodiment of violence as entertainment – which is linked to the cartoon violence-entertainment earlier. He sees the burning remains of his house, and then finds one of his toy soldiers on the ground. As he holds it aloft the camera shifts away to show an actual soldier, and then an entire army. This scene exemplifies the way that Taymor uses camerawork to direct our gaze and to visually associate elements in a way that would be difficult in the theatre. Through film she is able to give us her own vision of child’s play becoming reality. The significance of the coliseum as a venue is not yet communicated, but this scene at the beginning is important in the way that it parallels the end scene. By framing the story and serving as a stage for the events it gives the film a self-reflective awareness that it itself is a form of violence designed to entertain; thus exposing us, the audience, as spectators, watching the violence unfold, and being entertained by it.
In the climactic banquet scene, the importance of the child’s gaze is epitomized – before we were often given the child’s point of view, as a fellow helpless onlooker; but here we are instead viewing the child. At the end of the scene, when Lucius kills Saturnine, the screen freezes, halting the violent frenzy in order to call attention to specific points. The boy steps into center screen, looks at his father in horror, and his gaze follows the gun as his father shoots Saturnine. The camera then cuts out to reveal the coliseum again, this time full of spectators, inviting a comparison with an Elizabethan audience watching the original Shakespeare play. The spectators are motionless, unaffected, waiting for the next thing to happen. They, like us, have been watching the whole thing play out for their/our entertainment. Julie Taymor’s goal is to shake the audience out of the complacency which has become common in watching violence: she “‘wanted to the audience to experience the danger and unease of not knowing what form the acts would take. Complacency as a result of familiarity is an enemy’” (Starks 126). She uses two methods for representing violence in order to unsettle the viewer: the first is stylised violence, in which “you can distance yourself in order to look at the action” (Taymor, “Columbia”), and the second is realistic violence, which makes the viewer “feel the actions viscerally” (Starks 126). The audience is first horrified (but at the same time entertained) by the realistic, unromanticised violence in the banquet killing spree, and then we are challenged on an intellectual level by the more stylised, slow-motion image of Lucius shooting Saturnine. Our attention is focused on Young Lucius’s face and his reaction to his father’s brutality – we experience the horror in the child’s expression and see this act on an ethical level. We are horrified at the tragedy of this young boy watching his father kill a man, up close and without mercy – but then we are quickly moved from the boy’s face to the emotionless faces of the spectators, and we realize that this represents us, the viewers. We are the ones watching this horror unfold for our entertainment, and we are really as unaffected and unmoved as the audience in the coliseum.
The film’s self-awareness gives it a rather paradoxical quality. Elsie Walker identifies this as “a tension in the film: ‘it is enlivened by the very practices it means to invalidate’” (198). There is a conflict within the film between condemning violence yet portraying it artistically within the film, between exposing the dangers of violence-as-entertainment and simultaneously being a form of that same tradition (and recognising itself as being so), makes the film almost self-critical. These tensions are displaced onto the viewer as we simultaneously watch the violence in the film as a form of entertainment, and empathise with the film’s exploration of the act of viewing violence. Thus Taymor manipulates viewers into criticising their own actions – we are invited to condemn the violence and the spectatorship of violence, but simultaneously forced to identify with it. Starks explores this conflict in psychoanalytic terms, identifying it as a confrontation with the abject. In this analysis, Taymor’s film is about breaking down boundaries, which creates the experience of the abject. Taymor will not let the viewer distinguish (him)Self from the Other in the film (that which the viewer is condemning) – “by involving its audience in an investigation of the act of viewing images of violence, [the film reveals] the abjection underpinning the horror” (Starks 126). The key achievement of Taymor’s film is the breaking down of boundaries between subject and object, forcing the viewer to identify with the object of his disgust.
Taymor accomplishes this manipulation through perspective and camerawork, using filmic techniques to achieve what could not be done in the theatre. The camera visually pulls the viewer into the act of spectatorship – we experience the play from the child’s point of view, and then in the banquet scene we watch the child’s reaction to what he has seen. We are involved in the horror, we feel what the boy feels; but then Taymor’s camera reveals us as spectators ourselves, cheapening our empathy into mere observation. As the camera pans back to the banquet setting, we see the characters drop their weapons and simply step away from the table, as actors stepping off the stage, and the bodies are covered up with tarp “as if they’re pieces of dead furniture” (Taymor, “Commentary”). As soon as we experience the moment of true horror, Taymor pulls back to reveal the danger in viewing violence – she successfully breaks through our numbness to make us experience the violence, and then immediately contrasts it to the numbness of the spectators in the coliseum (which correspond to us as the viewers of the film). Thus Taymor artfully manipulates the viewer in order to force the realization that in our contemporary viewing of violence, we both condone it as entertainment and numb ourselves to it; in showing how this affects the child she tells us that the cycle of violence will never end until we address not just the issue of violence, but the issue of how we literally view violence.
Taymor’s adaptation of Titus Andronicus shifts the focus from a critical examination of the revenge code to an examination of the way that violence is perpetuated through the way that we view violence. Shakespeare’s message was that violence begets violence; Taymor’s message is that our society condones and continues violence through spectatorship. As an auteur, Taymor deftly and confidently manipulates Shakespeare’s text to fit her own needs; she both brings out new meanings in Shakespeare’s work and instills her own. She is able to use her technical skills with cinematography to create “inner meaning” in the play – the meanings that she brings to the film, which shine through the Shakespearian text. Thus she revives a long-forgotten play by making it relevant today, overcoming the play’s limitations by using film to involve the viewer in the story, and to stimulate a self-critical awareness in viewers through which she achieves the transmission of her own message.
Works Cited
Sarris, Andrew. “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Eds. G. Mast and M. Cohen. London: Oxford UP, 1974. 650-65.
Starks, Lisa S. “Cinema of Cruelty: Powers of Horror in Julie Taymor’s Titus.” The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory. Eds. Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann. Madison: Fairleigh Dickenson UP, 2002.
Taymor, Julie. “Director’s Commentary.” Extra feature in Titus (DVD). Twentieth
Century Fox Home Entertainment, Inc., 2000.
Taymor, Julie. “Julie Taymor at Columbia U.” 25 February 2000. Extra feature in Titus (DVD). Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, Inc., 2000.
Titus (DVD). Dir. Julie Taymor. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, Inc., 2000.
Walker, Elsie. “‘Now is a time to storm’: Julie Taymor’s Titus.” Literature/Film Quarterly 30.3 (2002): 194-207.