You’re My Son: Found Families and Queer Monsters in Titane
By Sam Moore
One of the most striking things about Titane is it’s starkness of structure. Julia Ducournau’s follow-up to her coming-of-age cannibalism tale Raw is very deliberate put together as a film of two distinct narrative sections, bound together by the way the film grapples with flesh and blood, steel and chrome, queerness and family. The shocked responses to Titane that seemed to define its response coming out of Cannes - where it was called “the most fucked up film of the year” - are rooted in the violence and shocking imagery of the film’s opening section. These images include, but aren’t limited to: a car crash; a series of brutal killings; and a self-inflicted-nose-breaking. But once the violence has faded away, Titane becomes something else entirely; something stranger and sweeter, the story of two people who can’t seem to control their bodies finding agency, solace, and love, in one another. Ducournau takes one of the most common tropes in queer storytelling, the found family, and reinvents it, a masterstroke for a film like Titane, one that’s so obsessed with characters reinventing and defining themselves.
In its simplest terms, the found family is a group not related by blood, who find in one another the affection and intimacy that they don’t receive from the family they grew up with. Unsurprisingly, its particularly common in queer stories, where tension between queer people and their families can drive them apart. Over the past few years, its appeared in TV shows like Pose and It’s a Sin. But in Titane, this idea is turned on its head; here our protagonist is found by a father desperately searching for someone to love.
After committing a series of violent acts, car-show model Alexia (Agathe Rousselle) goes on the run and, in order to protect themselves from the police, goes to extreme lengths in order to gain a passing resemblance to Adrien, a missing young man whose face they see on a screen in a service station. But Adrien’s father, Vincent (Vincent Lindon), has been looking for him ever since his - unexplained - disappearance. When “Adrien” is brought to Vincent, he needs no confirmation, no DNA test; he simply accepts that the person in front of him is the son that he’s been searching for.
Vincent and Adrien/Alexia are mirrors of one another; as both are struggling to keep control of their bodies - Vincent self-administers steroids in order to keep up with the physical requirements of his job as a fire station captain, and Alexia is dealing with the fallout from an unexpected one-night-stand - they find the agency and affirmation that the outside world doesn’t give them through the relationship that develops between them. Their dynamic is messy, at once full of the angst of adolescence, and the messy contradictions of queer life. The perpetually silent, petulant Adrien feels like a moody teenager constantly trying to escape from their “father,” even as Vincent says “why do you always want to leave? You’re already home.” The beginning of their dynamic is all about Vincent reinforcing his belief that the Adrien he’s living with is the son that’s been missing all these years; even as everyone around him can see the truth - and even as he can see it himself but chooses to ignore it - he insists to Adrien “they can’t tell me you’re not my son.” The arc between Vincent and Adrien is one that resonates as almost classically queer: a father accepting who their child is, rather than who he might wish that they could be. This messy queer anger comes through in some of the most fascinating - and non-horrific - imagery that Titane offers up; in one scene, Alexia literally hides from Vincent in a closet, wearing one of their old dresses.
What’s most striking about the ways in which Titane handles the queer elements of its story is the fact that it all takes place within the confines of a body horror film. While body horror has often been fertile ground for exploring stories about sexuality and the relationship that we have with our bodies, family narratives - especially where queer and trans characters are concerned - have a tendency to be a little more thorny and uncomfortable. The power of Titane comes from the ways in which
plays its horror straight - even after the explosions of violence in the film’s first section, there’s no shortage of nightmarish imagery at play alongside the queerer narrative of the story’s back half - it takes tropes of family, queerness, and monstrosity that have been commonplace in horror for decades, and subverts them.
One of the most (in)famous twist endings in the history of horror films is in the 1983 slasher Sleepaway Camp. The final coup of this summer camp slasher is to reveal that its killer is a young man who was raised “as a girl,” complete with the unveiling of a penis. While it would take more than the space set aside here to unpack the “trans to serial killer pipeline” that the film seems to invite (something that’s echoed/satirised in the short film I Was a Teenage Serial Killer), there’s an interesting through line that connects Sleepaway Camp to Titane in a way that reveals the subversive power of the latter film. An argument could be made that Alexia is a trans serial killer, like Angela/Peter in Sleepaway Camp, and there are even moments when Vincent, wilfully oblivious to the truth in front of him, seems to care for Adrien “as a boy.” But what’s most striking about these scenes is the fact that, rather than stoking the flames of some monstrosity, the relationship between Vincent and Alexia/Adrien instead allows for both of them to fight against the darker sides of their own nature. There’s a scene in Titane where a classic father/son ritual is put on screen, when Vincent helps Adrien shave. It’s in this moment that they say “I love you” to their adoptive father. Late in the film, Vincent gets the affirmation that he’s been desperate for for so long, when Adrien calls him “dad” for the first time.
The relationship between Alexia and Vincent is fascinating for how sweet it is, how earnest it is willing to be in showing two broken people helping one another gather up the pieces of their past lives, and rebuild one another so that they can try to face the future. Family stories are a mainstay in horror, but they never explore relationships that are defined by this kind of affection. Instead, there are tribes of twisted cannibals in The Hills Have Eyes, or the (anti)climactic queer-coded humiliation in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2. In films like these - and in films that bring out the underlying violence of “normal” families, like The Last House on the Left - families express themselves through violence, and to be unable to inflict violence on behalf of the family means being exiled from it. This undercurrent of violence runs through the beginning of Alexia’s relationship with Vincent; as the two of them dance to ‘She’s Not There’ (dancing plays a fascinating role in the relationship that Titane has with bodies, agency, and liberation), the intimacy that’s beginning to develop between them is often interrupted by bursts of violence, a refusal to let these potentially life-saving feelings of love come through to the surface. But as their relationship develops - and again, as they dance together, this time to ‘Light House’ by Future Islands - the language that they use to communicate with one another changes, moving from one of standoffish violence, to understanding, and a - somewhat twisted - kind of unconditional love.
After all, Titane is a horror film, and to treat it exclusively as being a sweet, queer family story is as much of an oversimplification as treating it as nothing more than a bloodstained, car-fucking provocation. The subversive power of Titane’s second part couldn’t exist without the violence of its first, or the body horror that runs deep in the film’s petrol-black DNA. In a perfect coup for a film that’s so driven by the way its characters reinvent themselves, it finds liberation through challenging the tropes and binary definitions that have been so common throughout the history of horror. It takes these stock ideas - found and violent families, queer monsters - and articulates them in a new language, one that understands the nuances of queerness, ageing, and the ways in3 which we try to find love in one another’s arms.
Sam Moore is a writer, artist, and editor. Their work has been published by the LA Review of Books, i-D, the BFI, and other places. They are one of the founding editors of Powder, a queer zine of art and literature.
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