David McCandless - A Tale of Two Tituses - Julie Taymor's Vision On Stage and Screen

The Shakespeare Association of America, Inc.
George Washington University
A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor's Vision on Stage and Screen

Author(s): David McCandless
Source: Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 53, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), pp. 487-511
Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington
University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844238
Accessed: 18-09-2016 01:17 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3844238?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted
digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about
JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
The Shakespeare Association of America, Inc., The Johns Hopkins University Press,
George Washington University, Folger Shakespeare Library are collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Shakespeare Quarterly
This content downloaded from 178.250.250.21 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 01:17:19 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
A Tale of Two Tituses:
Julie Taymor's Vision on Stage and Screen
DAVID MCCANDLESS
TWO YEARS BEFORE THE SEPTEMBER 11 TRAGEDY, Julie Taymor attempted to

make a movie that would effect in the aesthetic realm what the terrorist attacks
enacted all too brutally in the material: the reassertion of the Real against the
Symbolic, the depiction of the devastating effects of a violence habitually abstract-
ed in American culture, the harrowing realization of the material body's vulnerabil-
ity to capricious destruction. Indeed, appearing as Bill Moyers's guest on the PBS
special "America Responds," Taymor located the principal trauma of 9/11 precisely
in its horrific actualizing of apocalyptic imagery from film, its wrenching conversion
of image to reality. Essentially Taymor said, as have so many others about the spec-
tacle of the exploding towers, that it looked just like a movie, except it was real.1
In attempting to give her treatment of Titus Andronicus the shock of the real,
Taymor aimed to reawaken spectators to the visceral horror of violence, to rescue
them from a benumbed dissociation from violence symptomatic of post-traumatic
stress. Having herself been genuinely"shocked" by the play's staging of both trauma
and post-traumatic debility, Taymor sought to re-expose her audience to the conta-
gion of trauma, in both her acclaimed but little-seen off-Broadway production
(1994) and the high-profile film it spawned (1999).2
1 Responding to Moyers's question,"Could you ... have foreseen what happened here eight days
ago?"Taymor replied"No" but then added,"Except that I think we have seen it in images in the movies.
Of course not as ... Probably as well done or as spectacular, but we have seen that kind of apocalyp-
tic imagery before. It's just the fact that it is truly happening that it's been conceived and it's not the
image but the actual result of the image that is so horrifying" ("PBS: America Responds: Coverage of
Events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001," http://www.pbs.org/americaresponds/moyers920.html
[accessed 20 September 2001]).
2 I did Titus because Jeffrey Horowitz asked me to read it and I was shocked. I'd never been shocked
by something I read before" (Taymor, quoted in Richard Schechner, "Julie Taymor: From Jacques
Lecoq to The Lion King," The Drama Review 43 [1999]: 36-55, esp. 46). Of course the kind of trauma
one experiences reading a shocking play or sitting in a theater witnessing virtual savageries is not the
same as one suffers witnessing actual ones, which in turn is not the same shock one suffers as a victim
of a savage attack. Nevertheless, the spectator's exposure to images of bodily vulnerability has, at least
488 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY
Trauma, in clinical terms, connotes an acute bodily injury that disables psychic
defenses against the terror of physical disintegration and death, exposing the struc-
tures of self and world as empty and fraudulent, leaving a void that available, cultur-
ally constructed meanings are inadequate to fill.3 Dissociation represents a kind of
defensive self-evacuation, a protracted recoil from the terrifying discovery of the
body's radical vulnerability.4 In today's post-traumatic culture, dissociation compels
psychic distance from graphic depictions of violence, even the real ones broadcast on
the evening news. Such distance can engender not only numb acceptance but also
excited consumption of violent imagery, empowering a sadistic gaze that takes plea-
sure in representations of pain and destruction. Taymor sought by contrast to acti-
vate a masochistic gaze, capable of identifying with loss and suffering and embracing
the abject fragility inimical to egoistic fantasies of integrity and sufficiency.
Taymor wanted not simply to pummel her audience, however, but, in the
Brechtian manner of the Verfremdungseffekt, to startle and goad them into querying
their own relation to violent spectacle: "This play is as much about how the audi-
ence experiences violence as entertainment as it is about the tragedy of the endless
cycle of violence itself"5 To accomplish this, Taymor mixed brutally realistic depic-
tions of violence (for example, Titus cutting the throats of Chiron and Demetrius)
with stylized presentations (Lavinia's rape) meant to stimulate interrogation. "I
wanted the audience to experience both reactions. I wanted them both inside and
outside the events," she explains, "reeling with the horror in their bellies and chal-
lenged with the dilemmas in their minds:'6 In effect, Taymor posits a Brechtian
potentially, unenviable bodily consequences. Gregory Doran reports many instances of vomiting
during his production of Titus Andronicus (see Antony Sher and Gregory Doran, Woza Shakespeare!:
Titus Andronicus in South Africa [London: Methuen Drama, 1996], 265). Deborah Warner's RSC
production provoked faintings and even, in a few cases, heart failure (see Dominique Goy-Blanquet,
"Titus resartus: Deborah Warner, Peter Stein, and Daniel Mesguich have cut at Titus Andronicus" in
Foreign Shakespeare, Dennis Kennedy, ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993], 36-55, esp. 41.)
3 For a thorough overview of trauma theory, see Deborah Willis,"'The gnawing vulture': Revenge,
Trauma Theory, and Titus Andronicus', Shakespeare Quarterly 53 (2002): 21-52, esp. 26-34. I have been
influenced most by works that portray trauma as shattering culturally shaped conceptions of self and
world. See Kirby Farrell, Post-traumatic Culture: Injury and Interpretation in the Nineties (Baltimore and
London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998); Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic
Books, 1992); Cathy Caruth, ed., Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1995); Richard B. Ulman and Doris Brothers, The Shattered Self: A Psychoanalytic Study
of Trauma (Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press, 1988); and RolfJ. Kleber, Charles R. Figley, and Berthold
P. R. Gersons, eds., Beyond Trauma: Cultural and Societal Dynamics (New York and London: Plenum
Press, 1995).
4 For helpful discussions of dissociation, see Farrell, 11-26; Herman, 33-61; Caruth, ed., 3-12;
and Ulman and Brothers, 24-25.
5 Eileen Blumenthal and Julie Taymor, Julie Taymor: Playing with Fire-Theater, Opera, and Film
(New York: H. N. Abrams, 1999), 194.
6 Blumenthal and Taymor, 184.
A TALE OF TWO TITUSES 489
audience, one viscerally engaged but also critically detached-more precisely

audience whose selective visceral distress may be channeled into examining
nature and meaning of violence. She aimed to make a violent movie that w
deconstruct movie violence.
In attempting to do so, she proposed to work against the grain of the Hollywo
revenge movie, in which audiences are routinely manipulated into applauding
talized victim's prodigies of vengeance; against a narrative pressure of the play it
which positions Titus as one such brutalized victim; and against revenge as a
mate mode of trauma-management. In fact, the script underwriting 'Ame
Response" to the trauma of September 11 is essentially that of a revenge pla
startlingly parallel to the plot of Titus Andronicus. In both instances the pr
trauma results from the infiltration of a vengeful, murderous barbarism int
lization, the insidious terrorism launched by seemingly assimilated foreig
("sleepers") whose deadly sneak attacks confirm the malevolent otherness written
their bodies. Aaron would have his soul black as his face; many Americans,
aftermath of 9/11, began to perceive Middle Eastern faces as markers of a d
cal enmity within. America's response to terrorist incursion is the same o
Titus's: emotionally charged, exterminatory vengeance.
Such righteous violence evokes precisely the kind of psychocultural prosth
and precisely the pro-revenge reading of Titus Andronicus-that Taymor exp
opposed. In Taymor's view, Titus is not a sympathetic avenger but a self-deg
nihilist, whose retributive berserking consummates his transmogrification
good man to Aaron-like "monster," from caring father to deranged genocidis
from positioning audiences to approve Titus's climactic mayhem, Titus Andr
depicts the tragedy of uncontrolled retaliatory violence:"once one form of violen
accepted and justified, the floodgates are opened and the reverberations flow
never-ending vicious cycle."8
In the pages that follow, I want to discuss how the audience experiences
lence differently in Taymor's two treatments of Shakespeare's play, arguing that
stage production succeeds to a far greater degree in staging trauma and d
structing violence, realizing Taymor's vision of the play as an excruciating
7 Schechner, 47.
8"Director's Notes" in Titus: Production Notes [press kit] (Fox Searchlight Pictures and Cle
Sky Productions), 6.
9 Titus Andronicus, dir. Julie Taymor, Theatre for a New Audience (New York, March 1994
not see this production but worked extensively with the archive video at the New York Public
for the Performing Arts. It is not my intention to bash the film either for failing to live up to a
or original or for deviating unforgivably from my pet interpretation. Rather, I am measuring T
film against her own stated goals. Although the film showcases Taymor's visual genius far more
than the stage production (making her preference for it quite understandable), the latter nev
delivers a more cogent expose of self-defeating violence. To an extent, the difference between
of the viciously cyclical nature of violence.9 The film, by contrast, uses violence as
much as it interrogates it and grants the audience a significantly greater degree of
imaginative control over contemporary anxieties stoked by this four-hundred-year-
old story. I will focus on four specific ways in which the film drains the stage pro-
duction's deconstructive potency: 1) by sanctioning rather than undercutting
Titus's deranged retaliations, 2) by turning the Brechtian sideshows Taymor
dubbed the "Penny Arcade Nightmares" into overdressed visions and flashbacks,
3) by evading and mystifying Lavinia's trauma, and 4) by crafting a surprisingly
happy ending from the stage production's more downcast finale, which requires
imprisoning Aaron in a scapegoated otherness that the stage production managed
to defamiliarize.10
II
One of the principal traumas staged by Titus Andronicus is the emasculation of

the patriarch, the failure of a traditional figure of power and authority to stem the
tides of chaos. In both of Taymor's renderings of the play, the armored heroic war-
rior, the rigid phallic father, becomes first a helplessly weeping supplicant and then
a shambling grandpa in baggy cardigan given to wild swings from paralysis to exhi-
bitionism, a man of action turned maniacal actor. He suffers a heightened version
of the Vietnam vet's traumatic dislocation, finding himself demeaned by the society
whose integrity he has fought to preserve, finding the values that once sustained him
suddenly nullified.1l
In a sense, Titus reverses the normative process of trauma, suffering an annihila-
tion of meaning and identity before suffering an acute bodily injury. It is Lavinia
whose mutilated body textualizes Titus's mutilated self. Even before encountering
the graphically lacking Lavinia, Titus acts out the trauma of his newly discovered
lack, anticipating his ravaged daughter in making a spectacle of himself, publicly
works may simply reflect the impossibility of reproducing stage-bound effects on film. This seems par-
ticularly true in the case of the penny-arcade nightmares. On the other hand, in the case of the invin-
cibly beautiful Lavinia and the surprise happy ending, Taymor may have capitulated, whether con-
sciously or not, to mainstream film's insistence on female beauty and upbeat endings.
10 Although Richard Burt reads Taymor's film quite differently-as a critique of fascism and an
evocation of the Holocaust-some of his conclusions overlap with mine, especially his assertion that
Taymor's critique of violence is undermined by the horror-movie panache of Anthony Hopkins's
Titus and by the hokiness of Young Lucius's rescue of Aaron's child; see Richard Burt, "Shakespeare
and the Holocaust: Julie Taymor's Titus is Beautiful, or Shakesploi Meets (the) Camp," Colby
Quarterly 37 (2001): 78-106.
11 According to Farrell, "Post-traumatic Stress Disorder first became widely familiar after the
Vietnam War, when journalists reported on its use as a legal defense for veterans in trouble with the
law, and veterans demanded that it be included in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" (11).
exposing his woundedness in weepy, overwrought, and ultimately ineffectual

entreaties to save his unjustly condemned sons. In so doing, he demonstrates two key
symptoms of trauma: "helplessness" and"lack of control"12
When meeting the disfigured Lavinia, Titus proposes to disfigure himself,
realize the image of himself he perceives in her cracked mirror: "Give me a swo
I'll chop off my hands too" (3.1.72), he exclaims-an ambition he is soon given t
opportunity to realize, at least in part, by severing one of his hands in an effort to
ransom Quintus and Martius.13 He materializes the wound to his masculine hon
by cutting off the appendage that previously purchased it, sacrificing the instrume
of his masculine potency, which he retroactively stigmatizes as "effectless" (1. 7
Afflicted with a bleeding wound, shedding tears he professes never before to h
shed (1. 25), Titus fulfills his wish to become more Lavinia-like and suffers the fem-
inizing trauma of uncontrolled leakiness, figuring himself as cataclysmically liqu
a sea "wax [ing] mad" with Lavinia's tumultuous sighs, an earth "with her contin
tears / Become a deluge, overflow'd and drown'd" (11. 222, 228-29).
After the heads-and-hand spectacle, Titus descends from helplessness and lac
of control to dissociation, heralded by his wildly mirthless laughter and eviden
by episodes of both numb withdrawal (distractedly presiding over family dinn
[3.2], scribbling pretended decrees with his own blood [5.2]) and unhinged displ
of maladaption (murderously assaulting a fly [3.2], exhorting confederates to sh
petitions demanding justice to the pitiless gods [4.3]).14
Titus's dissociation ultimately gives way to a final symptom of trauma that
often described as berserking, a term borrowed from military lingo which denotes
kind of decisive psychic snapping, an eruption into exterminatory violence thro
which a victim of trauma attempts to fill an evacuated self.15 Titus's berserking tak
the form of converting Chiron and Demetrius into meat pies and feeding them
Tamora. The emasculated patriarch thus takes extravagant revenge on his symbo
emasculator, Tamora, concretizing her image as rampaging oral mother, as all-co
12 See Herman, 41; and Nancy A. Andreasen, "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" in T

Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, H. I. Kaplan and B. J. Sadock, eds. (Baltimore: Wilkins a
Wilkins, 1985), 919.
13 Quotations of Shakespeare follow The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston
Houghton Mifflin, 1997).
14 As Herman puts it,"The conflict between the will to deny horrible events and the will to p
claim them aloud is the central dialectic of psychological trauma" (1).
15 As John Shay explains, berserk is derived from"the Norse word for the frenzied warriors w
went into battle naked or at least without armor, in a godlike or god-possessed-but also bea
like-fury" (Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character [New York: Maxw
Macmillan International, 1994], 77). Traumatizing contact with the horror of death can impa
self-transcending, even messianic fervor to the victim, allowing him to fill a psychic void with
impression of special powers. See also Farrell, 290-92.
suming pit, by turning her body into a tomb to receive the "coffin" of her sons-
"Like to the earth swallow her own increase" (5.2.188, 191).16 He crafts a tableau of
body parts that vindictively trumps the earlier display of his own son's severed
heads-exploiting an antecedent act of violence in order to do violence to Tamora.
As the meal she consumes incarnates Titus's author-ity, Titus effectively invades and
defiles her body, avenging Lavinia's rape by enacting a rape of Tamora. In so doing,
he manifests the berserker's reach for a godlike power that decisively ends his crisis
of powerlessness. The berserker is often described as wishing to "devour" death,
defying the unyielding destructive power that he simultaneously means to appro-
priate.17 To the extent that Tamora herself is a devouring death-figure, Titus could
be said to aim at devouring death by inducing her to devour her own offspring.
When Lucius commands that Tamora's unburied corpse become prey for birds
(5.3.195-200), he ensures that Tamora is literally devoured.
Against Taymor's will-or at least against her explicit intentions-Titus's retribu-
tive frenzy proves cathartic and potentially crowd-pleasing, resembling the rousing
derelictions of such antiheroic vigilantes as John Rambo and Travis Bickle (both of
them traumatized Vietnam vets), manifesting a comparable urge to cleanse the world
of a vividly displayed corruption. Moreover, in this age of irony and antiheroism, the
Titus of Taymor's film does not seem degraded by his vindictive bingeing; indeed, he
finds in revenge a means of transcending his antecedent degradation, essentially rein-
venting himself. His recourse to hyperbolical violence, while it does not rehabilitate
his old discredited image as noble warrior, nevertheless valorizes his new persona of
derelict exhibitionist: the emasculated patriarch is reborn as homicidal merry
prankster, exploiting his abject status to destroy his enemies and restore some coher-
ence to his world. Even if Titus's trauma severs him forever from the image of valor-
ous soldier, he can at least recover and reconstitute the self that once inhabited it.18
That the self he recovers strongly resembles another charismatic antihero from
the world of film also generates audience support for Titus. When a steely but wild-
eyed Anthony Hopkins condemns Tamora's sons to become cannibal fodder, Titus's
16 For insightful psychoanalytic readings of the pit's symbolic import, see David Willbern,"Rape and
Revenge in Titus Andronicus," English Literary Renaissance 8 (1978): 159-82, esp. 170-73; and Coppelia
Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Warriors, Wounds, and Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1997),
53-54 and 68-70. It should be stressed that Tamora's role as vengeful emasculator is strictly symbolic.
Despite Taymor's tendency to credit Tamora with making good on her promise to slaughter the whole
Andronicus clan (Titus DVD 1, Director's Commentary), it is Aaron who authors the atrocities that
derange Titus. Tamora does not actually initiate any acts of vengeance. Critics also assign Tamora more
agency in the play than she in fact possesses. See, for example, Kahn, 49-56; and Willis, 36-41.
17 See Farrell, 290.
18 The self he recovers he soon extinguishes. Taymor's Titus essentially kills himself after killing
his enemies, acquiescing, with a smile, to Saturninus's fatal attack, welcoming death as the ultimate
release from trauma.
retributive mania both evokes and subsumes the seductive monstrosity of Hannibal
Lecter, Hopkins's most famous film incarnation. This scene also underlines film's
capacity-through close-ups and recurrent focus-to create empathy for a
mortified protagonist. On stage, Taymor's mise-en-scene put focus on the vulnera-
ble bodies and horrific deaths of the two boys; in the film, focus falls overwhelm-
ingly on Hopkins's Titus, who displays a depth of pain in recounting their crimes
that largely mitigates the savagery of the ensuing throat-cuttings. Throughout the
film, the fixation of Taymor's camera on the wounded, eruptive Titus, combined
with Hopkins's intrinsic gravitas and eloquent pathos, create precisely the sort of
"star turn" conducive to heroizing a potentially repellent lunatic.
Taymor also implicitly vindicates Titus by explicitly demonizing his enemies.
Whether she meant to or not, she employs a strategy familiar to revenge movies:
make revenge palatable by making its victims detestable. Taymor's commentary on
Tamora bespeaks complicity with the scapegoating logic of the play, which trans-
forms Tamora from sympathetic, supplicating victim to pitiless, lascivious monster,
from good mother to bad.19 Indeed, Taymor implies that Jessica Lange's Tamora
was based, to an extent, on the voracious baroness from Luchino Visconti's The
Damned, who talks rapturously of power during sex and dominates and eventually
copulates with her crossdressing son.20
The vilification of Titus's adversaries is even more evident in the case of Chiron
and Demetrius, who are played as so spectacularly vile-easily exceeding the nasti-
ness of their stage predecessors-that most spectators will heartily applaud their
comeuppance. Indeed, Tamora's slinkily wicked sons embody a distinctly contem-
porary threat of generational difference: with their glamorous, leather-clad, rock-
star androgyny, attention-deficit disorders, penchant for video games, drugs, booze,
and kinky sex, in their frightfully careening hooliganism, they embody a nightmar-
ish vision of unruly youth as murderous enemy. In killing them, Titus negates the
traumatizing prospect of their unchecked rampaging.
In addition, despite Taymor's avowed attempts to humanize and "dimensional-
ize" him, her Aaron also proves assimilable to the status of scapegoated bogey to
which the play itself ultimately consigns him.21 Taymor professes to find in Aaron's
nihilism"an extraordinary contemporary image" of the disaffected young black man
whom one can find"in any ghetto', who"doesn't give a damn about the consequences
19 Titus DVD 1, Director's Commentary.

21 Taymor actually calls Aaron "a much richer character than Othello" (Titus DVD 1, Director's
Commentary).
22 Taymor, quoted in Paul Russell, "Titus: A Classic Reborn," DVD Angle <http://www.dvdangle
.com/fun_stuff/interviews/titus/index.html> [accessed 16 August 2000], 1-4, esp. 3; and Titus
DVD 2, Columbia Interview.
of his violence, doesn't give a damn about the future."22 But to the extent that
Taymor's Aaron manifests such a distinctly contemporary disaffection, he simply
incites racial prejudice in a more contemporary manner. If, for Shakespeare's audi-
ence the robustly atheistic Aaron activated fears of black devilry, for Taymor's white
audience he potentially stirs fears of genocidal rage. A contemporary spectator may
be untroubled by the recurrent references to Aaron as demonic but still be provoked
by his cooly remorseless malevolence (encompassing the gleeful stabbing of the
elderly nurse and the depraved boast that he laughed heartily when Titus lost his
hand [5.1.11-17]). Taymor's Aaron attracts the superimposition of contemporary
stereotypes in the white cultural imaginary: the supercool hipster (using Titus's sev-
ered hand as decoration in his sleek black Maserati), the sexual athlete (the pre-
ferred sexual partner of the hypersexual queen), and the nihilistic gangster. In fact,
what makes Aaron most menacing is his dissimilarity from a disaffected ghetto-
dweller; he presents the image of the seemingly assimilable (if marginalized), highly
intelligent black man whose secret ambition is to sleep with white women and
destroy white men.
III
The stage production undercut both exciting (anti)heroics and histrionic vil-
lainy, not only because a theatrical gaze can never emulate a camera's preemptive
focus on character but also because Taymor employed a striking metatheatrical
device that de-centered protagonists and antagonists alike and also undercut the
play's climactic spectacle of revenge: the so-called"Penny Arcade Nightmares.
At key moments in Taymor's stage production, a shadowy, curtained discovery
space was flown in upstage of the main action, bounded by a gold frame and red vel-
vet curtain. This presentational frame replicated exactly the proscenium and curtain
Taymor had grafted onto the stage itself in an effort to stir associations with vaude-
ville, melodrama, and other low-brow spectacles.23 To the accompaniment of dis-
cordant carnival music, Taymor then unveiled strange, abstract tableaux that depict-
ed violated and transmogrified bodies. These peep shows offered a powerful
Verfremdungseffekt, defamiliarizing the use of violence as entertainment by showcas-
ing bodily degradation as sleazy diversion, inviting, only to confound, a sadistic,
voyeuristic gaze primed for titillating spectacle.
The first of the film's penny-arcade nightmares, unfolding not long after Tamora
confesses her intention to massacre the Andronici at the end of 1.1, discloses a
human torso framed by severed limbs. In the second, Lavinia stands atop a pedestal,
clad only in a white petticoat, with a deer's mask on her head and prosthetic deer
23 See Blumenthal and Taymor, 192-94.
legs on her arms, while Chiron and Demetrius, manipulating life-sized tiger
outs, execute stylized predatory lunges at her. In the third, as Titus pleads fever
but futilely for the release of Martius and Quintus, the curtain unfurls to revea
grotesque figure of a lamb-man, a creature with the head and arms of a man and
body of a lamb, upside down and seemingly floating within the frame.
The second penny-arcade nightmare clearly, if abstractly, stages the unstaged
of Lavinia. The first and third represent the transformed bodies of the play's fi
casualties, Tamora's son Alarbus and Titus's son Mutius. The torso can also be
as an ideograph for the play as a whole, figuring the body as an assemblage
memberable parts, and the lamb-man as an ideograph of human sacrifice, represe
ing the body as perilously vulnerable to ideological violence (presenting Muti
victim of Titus's maniacal devotion to "duty"). These tableaux force the audie
contemplate the vulnerable creatureliness predicated but not explicitly dram
by the play's violent events and to remember two victims whose murders m
too easily forgotten or too readily written off as unremarkable sacrifices to reve
play convention. Moreover, because these sequences are both distressing an
plexing, aggressively denying the viewer both visual pleasure and evident m
they contradict their own presentation as entertaining spectacles.
Taymor's nightmare theater collapses the penny arcade with what, in actu
was one of its main attractions: the freak show. The freak show frequently o
spectacles of physical deformity, creatures who purported to be monstrous h
of human and animal24 Taymor's lamb-man, doe-girl, and tiger-boys call to
such celebrated oddities as the Camel Girl, the Seal Man and, most infamousl
"What is It?"-supposedly the missing link between man and ape (actually a m
cephalic African American man named William Henry Johnson).25 Like spec
of violence, freak shows posit a sadistic, mastering gaze, fixing the displayed
as lacking, reifying the spectator's image of bodily integrity in the cracked mir
freakish disunion. But within the context of Taymor's mise-en-scene, the im
elicit-at least potentially-the kind of gaze Taymor covets: a masochisti
that identifies with the freak by virtue of apprehending one's own freakishness
capacity to become"other" through form-altering physical trauma.
The fourth and fifth nightmares provocatively collapse the theatrical an
actual, bringing the side shows into the main show. In the fourth, a derelict
24 See Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chic
of Chicago P, 1988), 16. Elizabeth Grosz discusses the human/animal border as one of man
ries that freaks uncomfortably transgress in her essay"Intolerable Ambiguity: Freaks as/at th
in Freakery: Cultural Spectacle of the Extraordinary Body, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed. (New
New York UP, 1996), 55-66, esp. 57.
25 See Bogdan, 134-44; and James W. Cook Jr.,"Of Men, Missing Links, and Nondescrip
Strange Career of P. T. Barnum's'What is It?' Exhibition" in Thomson, ed., 139-57.
Figures 1-4: Robert Stattel (Titus Andronicus), Miriam Healy-Louie (Lavinia), Sebastian Roch6 (Demetrius),
and Jean Loup Wolfman (Chiron) in Theatre for a New Audience's March 1994 production of Titus Andronicus
directed by Julie Taymor. Photos by Gerry Goodstein, reproduced courtesy of TFANA.
.. ..........
.. ..... ........~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ?~;?

. .........~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~'";ii::::i_iii-ii::
............~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~i iii i iiiiii:i -:::-,::::::1~j1I
.. .... .......~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~~~i)l:?ii)iii i

... ..............~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~iii
............... .I;lji ~ PL
..............' ~iiiiii
.... ..
::~~~~~~iilli:.~~~~~
Fig ~ ~ .
l'i~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ...
- ------- -------4
| . l,.:-
90 t,. G.> .l{,|'''
7: i 7 i57i N i24i g t-} | F it 1g4',- -' -i''i
ll - -
l =
Illl s
! !^!! !
bM' ? : f TSI; , Wlj' *' ' EN' F t

' '
:i:-i i: i ......... i iiii9jij
i- :iiiii-i: 1
::-:::,,
lii
::?i:g:?l
--iiib
j-i
".:I
'.i iiii-i-liil::i_:-_ -::?:?::::?
i iiiiiiici:i-,i-:-i -,i?i"88" BiiBgiL tHk:;li.--?':':::::--:i .;:

II :?::j
-":' --::iiiiii iiii
......."""'-i-:::,l__i:li,iii_i_ii-:_i_i-iiii i ::
"::- i--:iiliiiiiii'i:i:ii iiiiCj-I;S
':?jh:-:::::iXB iii i,i :-:i::i::
iiiiii :iii:ii'iil iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii
'''' i`:':': ::-:I:::-::::
':'-'- -'-':''' 'iii'iii'i:i:i:i-i:i:i:"Zjlij::ii '''''"
:iiili:il;i-i:ii:--::: :-liii:i_- iiiiiiiii--
:::-::':'
ii: i
i :i:i:iii:iiiiiil
., -il:iiiii:i- i
...-.-.- : ::
: : iiiiiil iiii i iiiiiiiiiiii;iiiii ;:'::---- --:---:ii::i:iiiiiii;iiiiiliiiri:i,'_:
:ii:_i:iiiii;i :,i:::i:_::_:::: :
:::-::::;::) :_::::::::::i:i:i
.... -i:i:iiii -::::::i ii-i_i-i:i:i:ii
:::::
iiii: .:.:. iiiili
i:j.:i-i-iii i :: ..:j .... --::::::-::
::-:
i-i-i lit
.. : ::: :i:::i::: :ii.iiiii.iii.ii.:;iiiii-ii:ii:i:_i i sli?-iiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiii:i ....

: _ _.._ . :i- _ -iiiiiiiiiii ; : :iiiii_iiiii::i:::,:ii:::-i:ijiii
::
iliil-iiiiiiiLi
::::::? i:ii
":' -;??????"?,;i iiii..iii:i-i:ii'iii
i::- .,: i-:::::ii--i i - iii
:iii-i-i:i:i:iii:i:- I !.f ..-
:--:::i:-:-:i:::::- iiiiiiii
.:X::;- ........ ii-i ........._
:i::::::?- a ...--..:.:. ----- ----
i:i C
i-'ii-:--i I-i:l Z;iii:i-iiijii
-:-:-i iiiii
)FiWiiiiiiii?
iiiii: I
:- ::::
" ::::: - aIt

i " ... ':-
:i;ijiiiiiiiii:i
11888Bta&8&6B161IdlBi *:-ii??..i_-i ?
I I I ai99j?I
iiiiiiiii
lili"i:i-i-iiiiiiiii ?-jii:i?iiiiiiiiiiii iii!ii" i
I-ii il:iiiii i-i i i:.i i:
:-* r II1 ;:-:-:----- -:::-- :i:ii:?ie. ---i
:?:- ::::::
::_::::-:::_:::: :::::::: :: iiiiiiiii
iii ----___i 'iii ii-i ........ : : .. : .. ::::::j:

:::::-:_-
iiii::---: liiii i ii ii: iii i iiii Lb I
i:i:i:::iiiliiiiii ::_::: . i ....._ ......

---:::-:-i:::::: i :-.- : i-::: -. :::: :-::-:-:::::-::::::::
.-.... ,,
i6Yst L?IIL- u . i ,cr
ii
iii i iiiiiiiiiiii iiii''iiii -:i:-:i:i-i_i-i:i

:::::::'
-. _ :-:
:-: ::?::_: : g! :::::::: 4
- -i::-l:l::::::::::::: :::: -::::::::: :-:::::-: :: : 9"
p: :: :-il-;l:-ii':i: i:i-i:i:i-::-:::::::i:: ::i:i:i:i i:i: ! iiiiiii;
:?-
: ::::i:i:i:-:: : ii
i6deEbF; :-:--i-i--i-_i-i-i -
t5 u
:-iii:i i : -_-i - i-: - -:-:-il_-i - iii,iiiiiii i I
I ... :i:i:r::: :: :::-: :::: il/ : I/r
--:-i'ii- --:
s1 r?d : :
I L _ i - - _:;lj__li - - :i I - :-
:: --
: :
::
---
I:- : ---:-----:
1":-- ::: :::-::: : : : : : : --.-. : -iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii - : i _ii
r:: x::: :::::::::::::::: ....
8,
'T iiiiiiiiiii
fi
"
gj.j
II j la i i i :s r
fillir iii
II i; Ii 19 lii$
soi
ICo: i I is4 Yli i)i9
1E4 s
LItil il a.
S
ii;iii:ii :::: :::::: ::""::'-::
igaaasbw. -,--, i
clown pulls on a wagon functioning as a mobile arcade, framed by the ubiquitous

red velvet curtain, and, after grotesquely dancing about and manically promoting his
"show" like a demented carny barker, he unveils the severed heads of Titus's two sons
and the hand of Titus severed to ransom them. This spectacle of violation surpass-
es the perversity of the first three penny-arcade nightmares in seeming actual rather
than representational; because the audience shares Titus's spectator's perspective,
they potentially share his perception of the displayed body parts as real. This spec-
tacle does not simply frame violence-or its gruesome effects-as entertainment; it
uses an image of violence-as-entertainment to violate Titus. The freakish night-
mares, previously confined to an abstract commentary space, become reality. The
same is true in the fifth penny-arcade nightmare: the monstrous apparitions of
Revenge, Rape, and Murder, seemingly products of Titus's damaged mind, turn out
to be Tamora and sons in lavish disguise.
Just before the play's final scene, Taymor effectively reverses the infiltration of the
side show into the main show by linking the space of the production itself to the
prodigies of the penny-arcade space. For the first time in the play, the main red vel-
vet curtain closes, transforming the theater into an enlarged version of the peep-
show stage. The clown reprises his weird madcap dance that heralded the spectacle
of his mobile sideshow, linking the imminent parting of the theater's main curtain
to this earlier unveiling of decapitated heads and severed hand. Suddenly the whole
play is a penny-arcade nightmare. Or rather Taymor positions the spectator to dis-
cern that it has been so all along.
Taymor ingeniously reinforces this metatheatrical effect by converting some of
the dinner guests into conspicuously dispassionate witnesses of the grisly multiple
murders. After Titus kills Lavinia, the guest/witnesses slowly raise their drinking
glasses in an eerily synchronized, robotic toast, a gesture they repeat after Lucius's
shooting of Saturninus ends the hugger-mugger succession of killings. Explicitly
identified as consumers, these soulless figures exhibit an automatonic, culturally
conditioned, vacant aesthetic appreciation for violent spectacle. By disengaging her
own spectators from these frightfully disengaged surrogates, Taymor aims to re-
engage them with the spectacle as a provocation rather than as an aesthetic diver-
sion. By discrediting the dissociated gaze, Taymor evokes by contrast the look she
wants to empower: one viscerally responsive to the images yet sufficiently conscious
and potentially critical of its own culturally mediated operations to interrogate the
meaning and effect of its response.
In the film, Taymor could not recreate this theater-within-a-theater and so sub-
stituted a theater-within-a-film, replacing the penny arcade with the Roman
Colosseum, the original locus of violence as entertainment. If she could not recur-
rently unveil nightmarish visions from a metatheatrical commentary space, she
could at least frame the play's action as a piece of theatricalized violence. As in the
stage production, the film opens with a contemporary image of a young boy
paper-bag mask on his head playing an increasingly convulsive game of toy s
at a kitchen table. In the film, however, the boy is not simply transported back
world of Titus-assuming the identity of Young Lucius-but is first taken,
bizarre Biker-Clown, into the ancient Roman Colosseum, where the story of
soon begins and where, in the manner of Olivier's Henry V, it ultimately ends.26
arena seems empty, but we hear ghostly huzzahs when the Clown hoists t
above his head, presenting him to the spectral crowd in a manner slyly par
Rafiki's display of the young Simba in Taymor's Broadway mega-hit, The Lion Ki
The boy's act of clearing mud from a stowaway toy soldier somehow cues the arr
of hordes of warriors marching in mechanized lockstep.
The sequence marks the boy as a new combatant, a gladiator-in-the-makin
to take his place in the violent man's world. The implied presence of televisio
ing his childish play suggests that the imagery of warfare he employs in his
believe battle, which in turn shapes his consciousness and his image of hims
culturally implanted, supporting an ideology that sanctions and even valorize
lence. In effect, his toy soldiers become real because he introjects the cultura
bology authorizing them.
While Taymor's use of the Colosseum gives her film a more spectacu
metatheatrical beginning than her stage production (and sets up her surprise
ending), the loss of the arcade space limits her deconstructive gestures to the beg
ning and end of the film. It also deprives the arcade nightmares of their signify
context. They lose their status as interventionist freak shows and become, especia
in the case of the doe-girl and lamb-man images, subjective visions, surreal p
tions from the characters' battered minds, potential registers of trauma. Ho
the ornate, static staginess of these images renders them implausible as po
traumatic flashbacks, which tend to be frightfully vivid relivings of the or
trauma.27 Indeed, why should Lavinia, remembering her rape, imagine herse
pedestal-bound doe-girl beset by rapacious tiger-boys? This "recollection" l
26 In making the ancient Roman Colosseum the theatrical space within which the story of
unfolds, Taymor aligns her audience with the spectators of the ancient gladiatorial conte
strategy is directly contrary to that of Gladiator (dir. Ridley Scott, 2000), the Academy Awar
ning film released a half-year later, whose spectators are distanced from their decadent
counterparts, allowed to enjoy the violent spectacles that confirm the fictional audience's sa
27 See Caruth, ed., 5; Herman, 37-40; and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorde
ed. (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association Press, 1980), 236. Taymor re
Lavinia's vision of herself under stylized attack as a"flashback." She also speaks of the penny
nightmares as manifestations of the effect on memory of violent events (Titus DVD 1, Di
Commentary). Her sense of these visions as post-traumatic, however, seems at cross purpose
her view of them as "cinematic puppet-shows" (Blumenthal and Taymor, 228) and"haiku-like
resentations of"the metamorphic flux of the human, animal, and divine" ("Director's Notes,"
much more like what it was onstage-an authorial gesture, a visual riddle requiring
explication but in this case lacking an explicatory framework. Exceeding their func-
tion as post-traumatic visions, the penny-arcade nightmares become merely extrav-
agant exhibitions; cut loose from the exhibitionistic context in which they formerly
cohered as abstract commentary, they become incoherent. Even the fourth night-
mare-the biker-clown's traveling arcade-while retaining some of its original
shock value, loses much of its clarity and signifying power in losing its overt con-
nection to the arcade space. Without the sideshow framework, the film simply does
not collide violence and entertainment in as sustained, intelligible, and provocative
a fashion as the stage production.28
The absence of the arcade space also lessens the impact of Taymor's attempt to
deconstruct the play's climactic acts of violence. There is neither telltale red curtain
nor sideshow barker to underline the finale's theatricality, and no onstage audience
to frame the carnage as spectator sport. On the contrary, the black-comic tone that
pervades the scene of slaughter seems designed to elicit the sort of complacent
sadistic gaze that the stage production forcefully defamiliarized. From the shot of
the ghastly meat pies cooling in the breeze to Titus's giddy supervision of the
horrific meal to the dizzying, helter-skelter succession of increasingly over-the-top
killings (Titus stabbing Tamora in the neck, Saturninus emptying a candelabra with
his teeth in order to plunge it into Titus's chest, Lucius forcing a spoon down
Saturninus's throat before shooting him dead), the sequence imparts a near farcical
grotesquerie that produces neither a harrowingly realistic nor an enigmatically styl-
ized treatment of violence. In every screening I attended, this ghoulish extravaganza
drew gales of pained laughter.29
In the film, Taymor attempts a Verfremdungseffekt after rather than during the car-
nage, relocating the corpse-strewn tableau to the Colosseum, returning the action to
28 For a view of the filmic penny-arcade nightmares as compelling and thematically pertinent, see
Lisa S. Starks, "Cinema of Cruelty: Powers of Horror in Julie Taymor's Titus" in The Reel Shakespeare:
Alternative Cinema and Theory, Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann, eds. (Cranbury, NJ: Fairleigh
Dickinson UP, 2002, 153-89), 165-70. According to Starks, "the P.A.N.'s poetically refigure the
abject and further interrogate the act of viewing horror itself" (165-66). I contend that the interro-
gation Starks posits is pre-empted by the alienness of Taymor's visual"poetry": the fruity theatrical-
ity of the penny-arcade nightmares is "other" to the realistic medium of film. In a telling admission,
Taymor remarks: "I'm not sure the Penny Arcade Nightmares are essential" and "I don't expect the
audience to get [them]" (Titus DVD 1, Director's Commentary).
29 I do not mean to imply that laughter is an inconceivable or even inappropriate response to this
scene. Indeed, the meaning of laughter in this play has been well considered in such essays as Richard
J. Brucher,"'Tragedy, Laugh On': Comic Violence in Titus Andronicus," Renaissance Drama 10 (1979):
71-91; and James Hirsh, "Laughter at'Titus Andronicus,"' Essays in Theatre 7 (1988): 59-74. My
point is that such dissociated laughter is not what Taymor seems to have had in mind for the final
scene (or for any other save the episode in which Aaron kills the Nurse-the one time, Taymor
asserts, that she allowed violence to be funny [Titus DVD 1, Director's Commentary]).
the overtly theatrical space in which it began; this time the stands are full o
tators, seemingly stand-ins for us, as though our act of looking has materialized
disembodied spirits evoked at the outset. Certainly the spectator's rediscove
his/her status as spectator defamiliarizes the tableau of death and potentially
interrogation of his/her willingness to indulge violent spectacle. Still, this se
does not preempt the primal satisfactions of Titus's retaliatory bingeing an
not offer as strong an image of the complacent sadistic gaze. The "onstage" s
tors in the film are impassive surrogates rather that robotically appreciative dop
gangers, and their disruptive agency is, in relation to the stage production, too l
and too late.
IV
I would like now to compare the very different characterizations of Lavinia in

the film and stage production, arguing that the latter leaves largely unameliorated
the trauma that the former mostly manages. Onstage, the penny-arcade nightmare
of Lavinia's rape offers a complex Verfremdungseffekt, a presentation of sexual violence
as cheap entertainment in which Taymor effectively takes out the sex and under-
mines the entertainment. She depicts the rape as an act of raw animal aggression,
deploying imagery from the play that figures Lavinia as a doe and Chiron and
Demetrius as tigers. This highly stylized assault nevertheless potentially induces
phenomenological distress, as the audience perceives within the image of the imper-
iled doe an undressed, frightened, helpless girl. At the same time, the bald styliza-
tion-the framing of this distressing image as a titillating side show-encourages
critical scrutiny of the practice of packaging sexual violence as entertainment.
Moreover, the pedestal on which Lavinia stands introduces a cultural construct
into the image of animal aggression that further simulates critical reflection. Both
during and after the rape, Lavinia seems unable to leave the pedestal. For the entire-
ty of Marcus's grievously protracted speech, she stands atop it, bleeding, quivering,
wishing desperately to hide-which, anchored to the pedestal as she is, proves impos-
sible. Thus she cannot escape the look that registers her loss, a look the audience
inevitably shares in, constituting the public cultural gaze that shames her as lacking.
Lavinia's pedestal represents the material predicate of that objectifying, shaming
gaze to which Marcus's long-winded speech holds her captive. Indeed, this
aggrieved apostrophe, employing the Petrarchan tactic of rapturously anatomizing
a woman's physical features, evinces a delirious nostalgia for body parts now miss-
ing or hideously marred ("rosed lips" "honey breath,' "lily hands" "sweet tongue
[2.4.24, 25, 44, 49]) and thus extends the process of objectification that Lavinia's
rapists so viciously initiate, effecting a rhetorical dismemberment. Marcus tries to
neutralize the horror of Lavinia's trauma by textualizing it, importing not only
Petrarchan devices but mythical precedents, essentially erasing the obscene, incom-
prehensible specificity of Lavinia's ordeal by reading it as a cogent reiteration of

Philomela's, costuming Lavinia in the received image of the violated woman, turn-
ing a material loss into a cultural lack, asserting the Symbolic against the Real.30
In the film, Taymor seems to collude somewhat in Marcus's neutralizing of
Lavinia's provocation, diminishing the traumatizing effects of her violation by lim-
iting exposure to her traumatized body. After the (unrepresented) rape, we first see
Lavinia from the rear and are subsequently denied any sustained image of her bru-
talized body, as the camera first focuses on her jeering assailants and then on the
shaken, stupefied Marcus. Indeed, Lavinia's trauma registers inferentially through
Marcus's uncomprehending, grief-stricken face-captured in long, agonized close-
up. Here, Lavinia stands not on a pedestal but on a stump in a swamp dotted with
lopped-off trees.31 This muddy, watery, desolate landscape-"the essence of the
raped and ravaged woman" according to Taymor32-displaces Lavinia herself as an
image of devastation; visual metaphor supplants traumatic display, effectively
removing Lavinia's body from view.
This scene exposes Taymor's tendency to limit exposure to Lavinia, to hide
the signifiers of her loss. Onstage, Lavinia's entire body is always available to the
spectator's look and thus always registers visible evidence of absence-always
bears material traces of a crime, rape, whose bodily incursions are often invisible.
The play's spectators can neither escape nor master this ghoulish spectacle of
loss; they either confront it or look away, figuratively (through dissociation) or
perhaps even literally, an averted gaze that simply confirms Lavinia's status as a
frightful Medusa.
30 The seminal essay on rhetorical dismemberment in the Petrarchan sonnet is Nancy J. Vickers,
"Diana Described: Scattered Women and Scattered Rhyme," Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265-79. I don't
mean to suggest that Marcus is monomaniacally indifferent to Lavinia's suffering. Her mutilation
shocks him, not into speechlessness but into excessive speech, into a kind of verbal speechlessness
that registers the inadequacy of words as a medium for expressing his horror or for reading or reliev-
ing her trauma. For particularly nuanced and sensitive accounts of this scene, see Heather James,
Shakespeare's Troy: Drama, politics, and the translation of empire (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997),
60-69; and Cynthia Marshall,"'I can interpret all her martyr'd signs': Titus Andronicus, Feminism, and
the Limits of Interpretation" in Sexuality and Politics in Renaissance Drama, Carole Levin and Karen
Robertson, eds. (Lewiston, NY; Queenston, Ontario; and Lampeter, UK: Edwin Mellen Press,
1991), 193-213, esp. 197-98. For a vivid description of Deborah Warner's quite different approach,
which had Marcus cradling and comforting his niece for much of the speech, see Alan C. Dessen,
"Titus Andronicus [At the RSC, Stratford-on-Avon, 1988]" in Titus Andronicus: Critical Essays,
Philip C. Kolin, ed. (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1995), 453-57, esp. 454-55.
31 The image of Lavinia on a pedestal shows up later in the movie as a vision/flashback. Taymor
even intensifies it by projecting as background a closeup of Lavinia's terror-stricken face and by giv-
ing her the additional affliction of a relentlessly billowing skirt that she must constantly beat down-
deliberately evoking the famous image of Marilyn Monroe's skirts flying up as she crosses a subway
grate in The Seven Year Itch (dir. Billy Wilder, 1955).
Indeed, on one hand, Lavinia discloses in a horrifically vivid way the lack th
patriarchal culture genders feminine, embodying the threat of castration th
Medusa is said to symbolize.33 Her visible wounds-particularly her bloo
mouth-signify the invisible vaginal wound she sustained as a result of the ra
which in turn conjures the "bleeding wound" foundational to female subjectiv
within a phallocentric system of meaning. In place of the culturally idealized, phan-
tom feminine form she once inhabited, Lavinia exhibits the culturally stigmati
obscene female body-obscene in its excessive fluidity, its foul materiality, its sham
ing capacity to leak and dissolve.34
On the other hand, her bloody wounds acquire a significance that exceeds th
"bleeding wound," figuring a lack to which both genders are subject. In J
Kristeva's terms, Lavinia becomes abject, her maimed body registering a mes
fleshliness-preceding and subverting "system and order"-that materializes th
estranging otherness of the malleable flesh in which all human beings are encased.3
She becomes a concrete image of self-absence, inhabiting a border between what the
phenomenologists call Leiblichkeit (the living body, the body we are) and Korper (th
thing-body, the body we have).36 She essentially becomes an animate K6rper
doomed occupant of a perishable husk, a corpse-in-the-making, an image, as bef
abjection, of "death infecting life."37
33 What Nancy Vickers says of Medusa is equally true of Lavinia: rape is "the price Medusa pa
for being'beauty's best'; monstrousness, the price for having been raped" ("'The blazon of sw
beauty's best': Shakespeare's Lucrece" in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, Patricia Parker
Geoffrey Hartman, eds. [New York and London: Methuen, 1985], 95-115, esp. 110).
34 For a historical account of the cultural stigma attached to the supposedly "undisciplin
female body, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in
Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993). Paster aptly characterizes Lavinia's bleeding
as"the tragic representation of the trope" of the helplessly leaking woman (105).
35 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New Y
Columbia UP, 1982), 1-18 and 54-55. My interest in revisiting this suggestive essay was piq
considerably by Starks's provocative use of it in her fascinating article. Kristeva's theoretical con
of abjection overlaps with Paster's historical account of the culturally stigmatized, leaking fem
body. Indeed, Paster essentially describes the process by which the female body was figur
"abject" in Shakespeare's time, focusing on some of the same bodily emissions that Kristeva ass
ates with the abject. Kristeva's concept also accords to a significant degree with Grosz's definiti
of freakery as boundary-blurring. Because Starks reads the displayed Lavinia as necessar
signifier of castration, she endorses Taymor's eschewal of display as a strike against the patriar
myth of the "monstrous-feminine" (164-67). I argue that, because the abject disrupts the ph
centric system of meaning that consigns woman to "lack,' the mutilated Lavinia is not reducibl
the castrated body; rather, she images a universal, corporeal vulnerability that sustains Taym
focus on the ruinous effects of violence.
36 For an excellent discussion of the meaning of these terms within phenomenological discou
see Stanton B. Garner Jr., Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology in Contemporary Performance (Ithaca,
Cornell UP, 1994), 28.
37 Kristeva, 4.
To the extent that Lavinia remains, to the end, freakishly deviant from idealized
form, she remains a freak and ensures that Titus Andronicus remains a freak show.
She is a walking trauma potentially afflicting spectators not only with the dread of
their own abjection but also with the guilt of passively occupying a culture that
breeds predators of women. Lavinia forces spectators to reconcile violence and
entertainment by exhibiting, in the space of entertainment, a body bearing perma-
nent marks of violence's irreparable harm.
Of course, no film director could replicate the unlimited accessibility of a char-
acter onstage. Still, in the film, Taymor tends to focus less on Lavinia's wrecked body
and more on her face, which, although pale and stricken, nevertheless offers no overt
physical evidence of traumatic alteration. Nor does the film Lavinia often emit
sounds that manifest loss-the guttural groans and moans that register speechless-
ness.38 Whether consciously or not, Taymor exploits the resources of film to keep
Lavinia from becoming a freak. Her camera does for Lavinia what the stage prevents
her from doing: hiding-escaping the gaze that comprehends and constitutes her
as lacking.
In addition, the film Lavinia is, in comparison with the stage Lavinia, far more pas-
sive and liminal, signally lacking in interiority and agency.39 Two examples will, I hope,
suffice to make this point. First, the stage Lavinia, during the family-dinner scene
(3.2), proves indomitably resourceful in finding a means to communicate with her
family, overcoming their initial bemusement at her vivid gesticulations and success-
fully identifying her attackers. At the very same moment (right after Titus has inter-
preted her refusal to drink), the film Lavinia likewise attempts to communicate some-
thing-but never succeeds in doing so. There is no way to determine what she might
have been trying to say, or whether it concerned the identity of her assailants; her
intentions are inscrutable, her meaning as unavailable to the audience as it is to Titus.
Second, the drastically different manner of the stage Lavinia's death underscores
the film Lavinia's lack of agency. Whereas the film Lavinia leans serenely against
Titus's chest and submits to having her neck snapped, the stage Lavinia essentially
kills herself, impaling herself on one of her own prosthetic talons that, at her behest,
Titus had removed and extended toward her. While it could of course be argued
that Lavinia's suicide confirms her fatal acceptance of her status as object, as text of
her father's (dis)honor, it nevertheless allows her to claim control of her body and
to express her will in a way the film Lavinia never manages.
38 Exceptions include her keening during Titus's "weeping welkin" speech (3.1.219-33) and her
throaty scream before identifying her attackers.
39 I refer here and elsewhere to "the stage Lavinia" and"the film Lavinia" and omit the actresses'
names in order to make clear that the differences I describe are attributable to directorial vision
rather than actorial choice (even though, in practice, the line between the two cannot be so rigidly
drawn).
The differences between the two death scenes point up the way in which the f
effectively shrouds Lavinia in mystification. We first see her in shadow, veil
dressed in black, descending the stairs to a crypt. The image positions her as
tent, a figure of death, crossing over a shadowy portal to bring closure to Titus's
ual of burying the dead. In the final scene, she makes virtually the same veil
shadowy entrance, this time setting the stage for the climactic orgy of death. On
second occasion she is dressed not in black but in white-like a bride, as Tay
observes-affirming her status as both bride of death and bride of her father
killing his daughter, Titus consummates both her deliverance to death and
unconditional submission to him. Our first look at Lavinia foreshadows, an
last finalizes, the death-in-life she suffers as a result of the rape.
The shadow of death on Lavinia arguably enhances her attractiveness, assim
ing her trauma to an image of iconic, doomed beauty. This effect could conce
have been intended, given Taymor's pronounced attraction to the idea of bea
degradation.41 Lavinia's iconicity is enhanced by her acquisition of prosthetic han
which Young Lucius procures for her from a woodcarver who crafts religious
of saints and madonnas. The display of body parts in the woodcarver's shop c
mind the severed limbs of the first penny-arcade nightmare, which foresh
Lavinia's dismemberment. Her acquisition of hands thus offers an image of
and reassembly, of rejoining part to whole, dead appendage to living body
wooden hands give Lavinia a fantastical, constructed quality, as though she
part statue. The association of the hands with madonnas and saints lends an
sanctity rather than freakishness to her transformation, extending her sta
mystified other, a monument of patience smiling at grief. The hands not only co
pensate for loss but assist in re-dressing it as martyrdom.
40 Titus DVD 1, Director's Commentary. For a discussion of the ways in which a father's s
of a daughter symbolizes an incestuous marriage, see Lorraine Helms,"'The High Roman F
Sacrifice, Suicide, and the Shakespearean Stage," PMLA 107 (1992): 554-65, esp. 558. In reading
formance reviews, one is struck by how frequently critics characterize the killing of Lavinia a
der, intimate act. See Alan C. Dessen, Titus Andronicus (Manchester, UK, and New York: Man
UP, 1989), 94-96; and Alan Hughes, ed., Titus Andronicus (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994
41 Western art, Taymor opines, is replete with beautiful images of horror, from the Rape
Sabine Women to the Crucifixion (Titus DVD 2, Documentary). She professes to find"exq
beauty in the ugliness and torture" in Titus (see Stephen Pizzello,"From Stage to Screen: The
Director Julie Taymor Reimagines Her Radical Stage Version of 'Titus Andronicus' f
Cinema," American Cinematographer [February 2000]: 64-66, 68, and 70-73, esp. 66), She cite
influence the artist Joel Peter Witkin, whose interest in aberrant bodies encompasses the pr
of desecrating images of masterpieces-which, Taymor declares, are "still beautiful in th
(Pizzello, 66). Thus she compares Titus to"a great sculpture from antiquity, with a broken ha
broken foot" (Pizzello, 66) and the mutilated Lavinia to a defiled Degas ballerina (Titus D
Director's Commentary). The resources of film allow Taymor to pursue this notion of bea
defilement to a degree that blunts the impact of Lavinia's trauma.
The iconic hands re-dress Lavinia's loss in another sense. Combined with the
focus on her unflawed face, they enable her to inhabit the phantom cultural body
and even, as a fragile, still-beautiful woman, to attract a desiring look. As that look
implicitly disavows her lack, the film Lavinia could be said to acquire a prosthetic
phallus as well as prosthetic hands. Whether Taymor consciously intended this
effect or not, the film Lavinia ascends the pedestal that the stage Lavinia leaves
behind. To the extent that this Lavinia helps to ameliorate trauma, she herself has
prosthetic value, lending spectators a compensatory tool with which to deny appre-
hension of their own lack.42
In these final pages, I would like to discuss the distinct endings of Taymor's two
treatments of Titus. First of all, the stage production leaves Aaron's menacing oth-
erness unassimilated, presenting his final mortification in a manner quite different
from the film and delivering his child to a quite different fate. Onstage, as Aaron
receives Lucius's sentence-to be buried breast-deep in the ground and starved to
death (5.3.179-85)-he delivers his final, defiant lines while standing within the
arcade space. Taymor's use of the parallel theater at this point is particularly potent
for being so unexpected. When, in the final scene, the theater itself was converted
to an arcade space, the upstage discovery frame seemingly forfeited its status as com-
mentary space, becoming merely a window in Titus's dining room.
By exhibiting Aaron in the freak-show space, whose prodigious spectacles
implicitly ask the spectator"what is it?," Taymor subjects her audience to the uncom-
fortable apprehension of Aaron as a freak-freakish by virtue of his stigmatized
racial difference, thus linking him with the historical"What is It?" and other people
of African descent (such as the Hottentot Venus) exhibited in freak shows. As with
Lavinia's pedestal, Taymor defamiliarizes a process of objectification by concretiz-
ing an objectifying mechanism. Her Verfremdungseffekt shames and obstructs the
sadistic look associated not only with the freak show but also with a cultural spec-
tacle reducing racial difference to demonized otherness.
Aaron's exhibition in a space reserved for constructed provocations points to the
character's status as a constructed provocation, potentially enabling the audience to
separate the actor-subject from the fabricated hobgoblin. As such, they may decon-
struct Aaron's villainy as a kind of minstrelsy, a blackface performance aesthetically
subsidizing a guilt-free exercise in racial stereotyping, an affectation of monstrosity
feeding fears of genocidal retribution that justify Aaron's execution. To the extent
that Taymor's Verfremdungseffekt allows the spectator to comprehend the construct-
42 I borrow this use of the word prosthetic-a psychocultural tool compensating for loss or limita-
tion-from Farrell, 175-79.
edness of Aaron's villainy, and its imbrication with racist scapegoating, Aaro
freed from the freak show, generating a different version of the question what is
The defamiliarization, that is, while releasing Aaron from objectification, never
less leaves his subjectivity unsearchable, indistinct, unassimilable-imparting
uncertainty that arguably exacerbates rather than mollifies trauma.
Moreover, onstage Aaron's baby does not survive but is represented in the f
scene by a tiny black coffin, on which Young Lucius obsessively fixes his gaze in th
play's final moments. He rests his hand on the coffin as the lights begin to dim an
the sounds of wailing babies and screeching birds of prey fill the space. The b
sympathy for the victim models a response to violent spectacle distinct from that
the jaded, robotic connoisseurs. His evident trauma reverses the enthusiasm for
lence he evinced at the play's beginning. The film, on the other hand, does n
deconstruct the image of the marauding racial other by rendering Aaron unass
lable to it but rather whitewashes it by re-birthing Aaron in the assimilable im
of the innocent baby. Because the child has elicited a surprising, semi-redemp
paternal tenderness in Aaron-captured far more compellingly in the film thro
the use of an actual infant-he serves as the purified repository of that tendern
an angelic renovation of the demonic Aaron, an image of blackness far more acc
able to a predominantly white audience potentially unnerved by Aaron's raci
troped, unrepentant nihilism.
In the film Young Lucius affirms his distance from the dissociated spectato
not only by sympathizing with Aaron's baby but by rescuing him. Unlike th
Young Lucius onstage, the boy in the film escapes the arena of violence-and p
sumably of violence as entertainment-taking with him the son of his father
mortal enemy, the tiny likeness of Aaron that, unlike the fly, he will not kill but
serve and potentially shield from the racial hatred that, Taymor contends, corrupt
ed Aaron.43 This climactic rejection of violence constitutes the film's final dec
instance of trauma management. In exiting the Colosseum, Young Lucius bre
the cycle of violence that the stage production portrayed as unbreakable. To
extent that the boy's violent play called the world of violence into being, his absen
from it signifies its collapse.
However, to the extent that the world of violence generates his violent play
the extent that the world of Titus represents not the boy's subjective dreams
but"reality," an imposing symbolic formation fortified by historical facts, he cann
so readily escape. Indeed, the opening sequence of Taymor's film suggests that, whe
the boy enters"the Arena" at the beginning, he enters the Symbolic Order, the ord
of representation and mediation, of "reality" as his culture constructs it. The impli
relay between televised violence, the boy's make-believe war, and the make-bel
war-of-Titus-made-real, dramatizes the cultural process of mediation and interpel-

lation. The boy endows the cultural fiction with reality by using it as a substantiat-
ing mirror. He is constituted as a subject by virtue of his introjection and projection
of the cultural symbolic.
The stage production affirms the impenetrability of the Symbolic Order: the
boy remains inescapably within spectacle, without a means to combat violence or
manage trauma. It therefore denies the audience a release from traumatizing images
of violence. The only consolation or compensatory insight available is the Brechtian
one of"not, but": freshly apprehending things as they are in order to discover the
alternative of what they might be, setting an intuition of the Real against the
onslaught of the Symbolic.44
In the film, Young Lucius's triumphant exit from the Colosseum has the opposite
effect, fortifying the Symbolic against the Real by staging a wish-fulfillment fantasy,
a denouement uncomfortably comparable to a Hollywood Happy Ending. What
Taymor opposes to the Symbolic Order is a flagrantly symbolic landscape, complete
with computer-generated sunrise. What the boy heads toward is an illusion, a haven
provided by the fiats of aesthetic escapism.45 Rather than traumatize the audience,
Taymor seems rather to release them from trauma, playing the quasi-therapeutic
role of positioning her viewers to reexperience trauma in a safe environment, to
observe events evocative of contemporary terrors in order to achieve imaginative
control over them. In following Lucius out of the arena of representation/destruc-
tion, in leaving behind the pile of corpses that dominate it, the spectator might well
experience a kind of vicarious survivor's pleasure that ironically estranges her/him
from the boy's sympathetic alignment with a vulnerable other.46 As in Rene Girard's
formulation, human sacrifices-even virtual ones-facilitate a process of terror-
management that promotes the psychic health of the community.47
In attempting to extend her vision of Titus Andronicus to potential millions in
the American moviegoing public, Taymor, despite her explicit intentions, offers
Shakespeare's play as a cultural prosthetic, a tool with which to conquer contem-
44 See "Short Description of a New Technique of Acting Which Produces an Alienation Effect"
and"A Short Organum for the Theatre" in Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1957).
45 Starks suggests that the artificiality of the sunrise imparts an ambiguity to the final scene that
keeps it from being"a conventional Hollywood happy ending" (177). This ironic reading of the end-
ing is hard to reconcile with some of Taymor's more sentimental glosses of it, as for instance, "Titus
will premiere as the millennium comes to an end. May the child finally exit the Colosseum as the
new millennium rolls in" (Blumenthal and Taymor, 233). For Burt, the film's ending subverts
Taymor's critique of fascism with"a fascist romanticization of the child in a closing shot straight out
of Steven Spielberg's E.T" (82).
46 For a discussion of "survivor pleasure," see Farrell, 17.
47 Rend Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1977).
porary traumas, even including, two years later, the

happy ending onto a brutal revenge movie, Taymo
ways, sanctioning both retaliation against and red
case disavowing lack by imposing it on a mystified,
Titus, trauma is largely evaded through the agenc
production but relatively indispensable to movies:
goated villain, the fetishized woman, and the inc
into the new millennium.

David McCandless - A Tale of Two Tituses - Julie Taymor's Vision On Stage and Screen

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

David McCandless - A Tale of Two Tituses - Julie Taymor's Vision On Stage and Screen

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Shakespeare Association of America, Inc.

George Washington University

A Tale of Two Tituses: Julie Taymor's Vision on Stage and Screen

TWO YEARS BEFORE THE SEPTEMBER 11 TRAGEDY, Julie Taymor attempted to

audience, one viscerally engaged but also critically detached-more precisely

One of the principal traumas staged by Titus Andronicus is the emasculation of

exposing his woundedness in weepy, overwrought, and ultimately ineffectual

12 See Herman, 41; and Nancy A. Andreasen, "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" in T

19 Titus DVD 1, Director's Commentary.

23 See Blumenthal and Taymor, 192-94.

.. ..... ........~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ?~;?

.. .... .......~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~~ ~~~i)l:?ii)iii i

bM' ? : f TSI; , Wlj' *' ' EN' F t

i iiiiiiici:i-,i-:-i -,i?i"88" BiiBgiL tHk:;li.--?':':::::--:i .;:

.. : ::: :i:::i::: :ii.iiiii.iii.ii.:;iiiii-ii:ii:i:_i i sli?-iiiiiiiiiiiiii iiiiiii:i ....

" ::::: - aIt

::_::::-:::_:::: :::::::: :: iiiiiiiii

iii ----___i 'iii ii-i ........ : : .. : .. ::::::j:

i:i:i:::iiiliiiiii ::_::: . i ....._ ......

iii i iiiiiiiiiiii iiii''iiii -:i:-:i:i-i_i-i:i

clown pulls on a wagon functioning as a mobile arcade, framed by the ubiquitous

I would like now to compare the very different characterizations of Lavinia in

prehensible specificity of Lavinia's ordeal by reading it as a cogent reiteration of

43 Titus DVD 1, Director's Commentary.

war-of-Titus-made-real, dramatizes the cultural process of mediation and interpel-

porary traumas, even including, two years later, the

You might also like

.. .... .......~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~i)l:?ii)iii i