Titane’s Body Horror: Love and Technology in the Post-biological

‘Strange Intimacies’ University of Tartu, Estonia, September 23-24

CUNY Graduate Center, Sandra Moyano-Ariza

Julia Ducornau’s horror film Titane (2021) tells the story of Alexia, the gender fluid protagonist

with a strange intimacy with automobiles. She develops this liking for cars as a child, when she

gets fitted titanium plates in her head after a car crash with his father. In what we could interpret

is a transference of the love object from her father to cars, Alexia experiences a sort of

motorphilia as an adult whereby her sexuality and identity are defined by her relationship to this

technology – we see her as a dancer for hire in motor shows or get pregnant from having sex

with a Cadillac. Since for her this aspect of her identity is not subjected to the transactional,

hypersexualized view of the motor world and its objectification of women, those who approach

or position her as such are faced with a gruesome and torturous death. Alexia goes on a killing

spree (including burning down her parents’ house with them inside) and soon gets wanted for

murder by the French police.

However, in a twist that challenges the audience’s expectations as well as the horror

genre, what is set out to be a serial killer movie becomes one about unconditional love and the

generative intimacy of humans with technology; or as I’ll argue, an exploration of the originary

relationship of the human and the technical, embodied in the protagonist and her offspring

mainly, but to some extent also the automobiles and the community around her. Here I’m

building on the concept of “originary technicity” by Mark Hansen (2015) or Patricia Clough

(2018) within a media studies framework. They originally take the concept from Jacques

Derrida, who uses the concept to refer to the differantial relationship between the human and

their supplements, bringing attention to the unresolvable tension between the human and the

technical as both originary and not derivative of the other. In a media studies context, this tension
usually translates into the inquiry into the human with every technological advancement: if

technology is defining bodies, politics, economies; we need a new understanding of the human

with every technological condition.

When attempting to escape from the police, Alexia adopts the identity of Adrien Legrand,

a now teenage boy who went missing 10 years prior. She straps her pregnant belly tight around

her (her belly grows at a much faster speed than a regular pregnant human), breaks her nose, and

cuts her hair. The father of the boy, Vincent, comes to identify his son, he recognizes Alexia as

his son Adrien and are allowed to leave together (therefore shifting from being Alexia to

becoming Adrien, and from now on I’ll be interchangebly using she/he for the rest of the paper).

With this new father figure and away from the cops, Alexia stops killing and slowly develops a

compassionate connection to the community of firefighters her father leads and eventually her

hybrid offspring.

Unlike mainstream movies of the body horror genre, which usually dwell on paranoia and

hypermasculinity to offer a critique of technology and economies of desire, Ducornau’s body

horror represents this human/technological hybridity as one that allows for love precisely

because of this the interimplication of both the human and the technical. In my short

presentation, I’ll be discussing the human/non-human bonds in the movie to analyze Ducornau’s

exercise in expanding the body horror genre to include other figures of hybridity that are not

necessarily subdued to the libidinal economy or participate from the neoliberal subjectivity that

this genre usually criticizes. Instead, we can envision a post-biological human that integrates the

mediation of technology as the necessary condition to be able to render its humanness within a

larger planetary environment, offering an alternative approach to themes of technology and eros

in both the genre and beyond.

 Typical artistic and cultural representations of eros and technology have leaned towards

(as I was saying) a hypermasculine, obsessive, paranoid reading of the machine, usually resulting

in a libidinal excess that ultimately leads to the disintegration of the body. If we take David

Cronenberg’s Videodrome as the paragon of the representations of eros and technology in

science fiction and body horror, we see that flesh and the corporeal are essential to the encounter

with the technological – the body does not disappear into the virtual (like other kind of science

fiction or horror representation of technology/human), but rather technology enhances the body’s

visceral, excessive, gruesome features. In a way, body horror materializes this encounter.

However, the excess created by the technological flesh is often symptomatic of the masculine

obsession with power. In this sense, Cronenberg’s movie can be analyzed through

psychoanalytic and poststructural theories about the body and desire, where bodies are enclosed

organisms that accumulate excess and irremediably dematerialize when altered by technology.

His body horror’s message is psychologically, socially, and politically clear: technology and

corporations force control over privatized humans, who become enormously powerful by losing

their individuality within the machine. In other words, the technological flesh is shown as

powerful only in a narrative of perversion, paranoia, and sexual pathology. Despite Cronenberg’s

interest in the technological body, the ending of Videodrome condemns the technological human

and, as Steven Shaviro argues, “offers no alternative to a ubiquitous, simulated video reality. He

suggests that any promise of utopian transcendence is yet another avatar of manipulative power”

(141).

Ducornau’s Titane, on the other hand, uses body horror to explore the materiality of the

post-biological human without necessarily leading to its hyperparanoid, masculine destruction. In

fact, those who encounter a torturous, excessive death are often the ones who have behaved
unfortunately very humanly: they’ve abused their power by sexually harrassing the protagonist,

clearly embodying the masculine figure that possesses the kind of excess and power that leads to

them deserving their killing without the enhancement of the technological. The first killing, for

instance, is a fan/stalker who forces himself upon her at the end of a car show.

Yet this fact does not make the movie just a feminist revenge kind of film. It is more

complicated than that. For instance, not all deaths fall into a feminist revenge narrative.

Ducornau is more interested in the love that can be harbored in the hybrid relationships and, thus,

it is not always clear about who deserves to be killed by the serial killer. When Alexia burns her

house down with her parents inside, we aren’t really told why or if they were neglecting or

abusive parents. Neither do we know why she kills her female coworker with whom she’s

developing a romantic bond, or subsequently all the lover’s roommates. What the audience

perceives, however, is a clear change in tone depending on who she is killing, making us

understand different types of violence within the movie. While the killings of those who harrass

her or express mysoginistic beliefs are treated seriously and therefore their death is experienced

by the audience as deserved, the more random killings (the ones that have no explanation) are

treated way more lightly. Therefore, the film doesn’t shy away from showing Alexia as a serial

killer and even punish her at the end of the film, but it does cover some killings more

humorously than others (a personal trait of Ducornau’s style/filmmaking). Whatever her

relationship with technology is, there doesn’t seem to be a direct explanation that would justify

or mark a relation of causation for her psycopathic behavior. Therefore, although I am aware that

we can do a psychoanalytic reading of the film and body genre, even from a feminist revenge

perspective, for me the movie is not fully explained through that lens.
 To me, the movie is more interested in showing the development of those who have

altered their bodies or recognized an inherently technical aspect in their subjectivity, as they are

also the ones who are able to encounter, although strangely, a more genuine connection with

humans and their environment by the end of the movie. Rather than using gruesomeness to

portray the power and paranoia of surveillance through ubiquitous technology, Ducornau’s body

horror is more interested in asking questions like what constitutes a body beyond the flesh? What

does desire in a body look like in this kind of hybrid body? How does acceptance of the regime

of the post-biological affect love among the characters? If Cronenberg used his movies to realize

the intrinsic connection of technology to the state, Ducornau advocates for a new

cinematography of eros and technology rooted in gender and identity fluidity (which

unfortunately I won’t be able to address properly in the presentation) as well as references to the

originary technicity that is inherent to every human subject formation.

As such, the characters who are most important to the film are those who have

established their body and identity as embedded in some sort of technical condition: Alexia alters

her body by having sex with a cadillac and carrying a metal/human offspring –who kicks hard,

who opens wounds in her belly and oozes oil through them;-- and Vincent, her adopting father,

uses steroids to alter his body and fight the impending aging process that will separate him from

his identity as a firefighter. Every protagonist body in the movie is an altered body, intersecting

with something artificial element, metal or otherwise. Both their bodies become increasingly

grotesque as the movie moves forward: Vincent is covered in bruises from injecting steroids;

Alexia’s itchy belly skin breaks up and oozes oil. The body horror of the movie “relentlessly

displays the anatomical agonies its characters endure” (Brody), and shows that they inhabit both

joy and terror in the encounter with love. But in this process, the more grotesque they become,
the more authentic their human relationships are. Even though one could say that characters’

relationship to the artificial represent an escape from their bodies, the excess they experience is

only taking them closer to accepting their bodies and their technical, hybrid beings. Interestingly

enough, Vincent’s steroid use is not rooted in a masculinity complex, but rather in the will to

help his community. Despite his very masculine profession and imposed masculine behavior by

society, he embodies a personality and attitude that is stereotypically found in characters that are

more motherly: he fervently defends not needing biology (DNA testing) to recognize his son, he

performs domestic tasks for his son like doing laundry and cooking for him, cuts his hair, heals

his wounds… often declaring the unconditional love that he feels for Alexia/Adrien as her/his

father.

In this love letter to the post-biological body, language is not as important as the affect

that circulates among the characters and vehicles. Breaking from psychoanalytic and post-

structural understandings of body, language, and subject structures, words are substituted by

slow and careful observations of the environment. Both music and dance hold an important role

in communicating and building relationships. As one review notes, “Titane wordlessly shows

shapes of love and hate transmuting as the characters’ states become evident not through

dialogue but through crises of sensation” (Russo np). Affect is more impactful and generative

than words in these hybrid relations. Alexia will start to integrate as Adrien with the rest of

firefighters after a dance scene with his father. Trying very hard to make Adrien talk, Vincent

decides that playing music and dancing might bring father and son closer, and after leading to

some sort of physical fight, it does. She is faced with the possibility of killing him when they get

closer, but she is unable to do it or leave. Vincent asks her: “Why do you always want to leave?
You’re already home.” Later, she helps him overcome an overdose of steroids, and from then on,

she participates as a firefighter in the community.

Ducornau describes Titane as an attempt to “talk about love without words,” using the

“lexicon of horror (serial killings, bodily eruptions, transposed identities)” together with music

and dance “to get under the skin of unconditional love” (The Guardian). If at first Alexia was

scared of the oil oozing from her pregnant body, or tried to perform an abortion on herself with

the hair pin she’s used to kill people throughout the film, after coming closer to the community

she becomes more kindred with her body and her offspring, recognizing the ability of her own

metallic body to bring her to this new understanding of family (structure), which includes not

only the firefighters and her half-cadillac offspring but also the fire trucks. Not only that, it is this

realization of this originary technicity that allows the moment of acceptance. Alexia can no

longer hide her pregnant belly or her identity, but at that point, the truth to her own post-

biological identity and the love she’s built are more important than pretending to be who she is

not, especially before her father, to which Vincent responds “whoever you are, you’ll always be

my son.”

My argument is that for the human relationships in the movie to become harmonious and

realize a form of unconditional love, the acknowledgement and acceptance of

human/technological hybridity, or their grotesque body, needs to occur. Otherwise, we stay with

the same analysis of Vidreodome, whereby technology is destructive of what’s human and in

aligment with power. I argue that if postmodern and post-structural discourses are fitting to

Cronenberg’s body horror, Titane can be analyzed through posthumanist theories that demystify

and de-naturalize essentialist conceptions of the human, technology, and what is considered the

‘natural’ environment, usually built around binaries like nature/culture, man/world,

natural/artificial. For instance, while biology is highlighted in the body horror genre, or science

fiction, as a condition of truth or paradigm that technology destroys, therefore destroying

humanity, in Titane the importance of biology gets dismissed or neglected, often through

suspension of disbelief: when the father and Adrien are allowed to live almost immediately, or

when all the firefighters don’t really trust that Alexia is Adrien but they dismiss it for most of the

film as something they believe because the leader has said so, when it’s clear that Alexia doesn’t

resemble Adrien and is definitely in a body that doesn’t belong to a teenager. When finally one

of the firefighters recognizes her on the news, the conflict doesn’t really get resolved but rather

danced out in the next scene (where a lot of gender things are materialized as well) The ultimate

reveal happens in the last dance scene, which is quite crucial to the movie but I didn’t have

enough time to include that bit, but we can discuss it in the Q&A). The posthumanist angle of the

movie decenters human paradigms of knowledge (I mean here mostly biology) to foreground the

human hybrid relations where the binary of artificial vs. natural no longer holds, challenging

conceptualizations of family, gender, love, technology as evil, etc.

A theory of the posthuman, then, should liberate the human from an always constraining

relationship to technology: either as one of prosthesis, which assumes the control of the human

over the tool, or as one of subversion, where technology controls consciousness and rids the

human of will-power. As such, the body cannot be constrained to the human organism limited by

the skin, but rather it should be open to different connections and alterations with the

environment, attending to the entanglement that is produced. I understand the different

embodiment forms of Titane as indeterminate, or as Michelle Murphy puts it, “open to

alteration” (10). In the movie, the alteration responds to the need to understand love from this

condition of hybridity, rather than destroying this relationship or negating its inter-implication
(leading to destruction/dystopia). From this lens, Ducornau’s embodiment, in Murphy’s words, is

“‘the body itself in need of dismantling” (5), bringing attention to the potential of matter to

become “life materialized in other ways and life exceeding our normative materializations” (11).

The love narrative in the movie culminates with an impossible birth, a hybrid life

materialized in this creature of titanium and flesh, which embodies Murphy’s life exceeding

normative materializations. However, it seems important to point out that for the movie, this

birth couldn’t come without a sacrifice, which is the death of the protagonist. Or rather, it can’t

come without a punishment: a serial killer should die, we guess. Although this is as you can

imagine not my favorite part of the movie because it can be interpreted as a death that is caused

by technology and therefore another example of destruction, I don’t think the ending diminishes

the posthumanist reading I’ve offered in this presentation. Indeed, the movie produces a

different ecology of eros, the human, and technology, one that envisions an environment that

deconstructs the essentialist opposition between so-called natural and technological elements. In

other words, the transgression of Ducornau’s body horror is not showing human/cadillac sex,

but rather its stance on love, which tackles and affirms the originary technical condition of the

post-biological human.