Titane and the Modern Virgin Mary
By Zara Symes
As we close in on yet another Yuletide season, one that sadly seems to reflect the return of technology-enabled Zoom festive drinks and Amazon-clicked gift delivery, the inevitable questions start swirling about what the perfect Christmas movie is. The romantics will say Love Actually, the film bros will claim Die Hard, and the nostalgic millenials will opt for Home Alone (with the additional holiday Schitts Creek spice of the inimitable Catherine O’Hara), but what will the genre faithful choose? Black Christmas, Gremlins, Better Watch Out (aka Christmas Evil), The Lodge, The Nightmare Before Christmas?? Or could a new contender enter the mix with Julia Ducournau’s insane mechano-sex slasher Titane? A big swing, and the lack of the usual Judeo-Christian festive paraphernalia is against me, but I’m not pitching a traditional Christmas movie. Titane has nods to something more…biblical. As in, Old Testament biblical. Fire and scourging; purgative transformation; and a thoroughly modern immaculate conception culminating with a birth of a kind of saviour. One made wholly for the technological age we find ourselves in.
Agathe Rousselle’s unyielding Alexia is no Virgin Mary. Her character imbues violence and a vehemence against any kind of virtuous behaviour into every fuming, fury-laden glare but over the course of the film she does come to inhabit aspects of martyrdom and even saviourhood as her character journeys towards her own bloody salvation and release. Her divine selection could be seen from the opening sequence, with young Alexia being fitted with a metallic apparatus, strikingly similar to a crown of thorns, after miraculously surviving a terrible car accident. Her transformative process continues as an adult. Now an erotic dancer, sexually active and strongly subversive of what may be understood as traditional Christian values, Alexia’s sexual relationship with the car that she dances on at her work reaches what may be considered a state of modern immaculate conception. She is made pregnant without any interference from a human male, excreting motor oil from her vagina as the first sign of her new state of being. No angel of the Lord descends, proclaiming her “conceived […] from the Holy Spirit”, explaining how such an incredible state could be reached. Whereas Mary wanted a child Alexia is an unwilling vessel, fruitlessly attempting to abort the pregnancy with her murder weapon of choice. She is the forced bearer of a miracle, her body no longer her own.
Within the visual and thematic lexicon of Titane the element of fire is recurrent, suggesting moments of transformative purging. In a biblical sense, fire is spoken of as a baptismal force of the Holy Spirit, a metamorphic purging from one state to another, or as a signifier of divine significance like the star that burned above the stable where Mary gave birth to Jesus. As Alexia and later Adrien, Rousselle gives a performance that seems to transform a smouldering internal anger into moments of fiery transgressive action. Adult Alexia writhes atop a flame-decaled car in throes of ecstatic transgression, thrusting and licking the metaphorical burning bush that later becomes the mode of her transformation to seemingly divine-appointed Mother. Fire appears again when Alexia, on the run from a massacre, Alexia locks her parents into her childhood home and burns it to the ground. She then takes the opportunity to break her face and become someone entirely new - Adrien, the missing son of a steroid-abusing fire captain Vincent (Vincent Lindon). Alexia, now as Adrien, is inducted into the firefighting brotherhood, joining them as they train through blazes, literally walking through fire. In one of the most memorable scenes of the film ‘Adrien’ moves mesmerizingly among the smoking firemen in a moment of ecstatic dance that should have solidified her status as one of them but instead makes obvious the fracturing of her stolen identity. Her purgation is not stagnant in this fiery haven, it cannot hold her safe as her next transformation, and the impending birth, approaches.
Alexia’s relationship with Vincent, enabled from its first moment by his desperate faith that his prodigal son has returned, is the true heart of the film. Vincent’s loneliness is the chink in the armour of a man who does not want to appear weak, injecting his failing body with steroids and pushing away close connection with the flock of younger men under his care at the fire station. Alexia as Adrien, a person as utterly broken as Vincent himself, is the fetish surrogate Vincent needs to seek forgiveness for the sins that have plagued him since his son went missing. The Pietà-like submission scene, with Vincent laying his head on Alexia’s lap seeking solace and absolution affects her as much as him, two broken souls coming together to find mutual salvation. This is further cemented when Adrien’s mother does not reveal Alexia’s subterfuge – she recognises that having ‘Adrien’ back, is what Vincent needs. She entreats Alexia to take care of Vincent and that he too needs someone to care for. Seemingly, she means Alexia, but as Alexia’s ill-adapted body gives way under the pressure of giving birth to a half-human, half-machine child, it becomes apparent that Alexia was merely the vessel of Vincent’s salvation. She dies, covered in motor oil and viscera, and he holds aloft a child with a spine made inhumanly strong by titanium, whispering to the baby reverently: “I am here”.
And thus, a saviour was born.
The singularity of Titane as a potential Christmas film is in its subtextual repurposing of the Bible's immaculate conception for a modern audience. We worship new gods, gods of interconnectivity, constantly upgrading technology disseminated through 5G networks. Centennials, the first generation never to have lived without the internet, are a new breed of children whose lives are irrevocably tech-based. They are, like the child borne by Alexia in Titane, children of hybridisation, metaphorically (at least for now) part machine. As human civilisation changes, so too does the mode of religious worship and Ducournau layers in a connotative anxiety about a world where children are born different to previous generations, upgraded from their more fragile, purely flesh parents. But where in classic horror films this kind of aberration would be perceived as monstrous, here it is venerated as a saviour. A new Jesus for the techno-human hybrid age.
Titane is not your classic Christmas movie. There are no festive halls decked with boughs of holly, no eggnog, sleigh bells ringing or even yippee ki-yay motherfucker-ing. But there is a persistent theme of family, of connecting to other people, and the fiery, transformative conflict that is unique to family coming together over the holiday season. And beyond all that, there is a virginal birth, a saviour born, and a new era of humanity ushered in. I know what I’ll be watching this Christmas.
Zara Symes is an Australian-Scottish filmmaker whose writing focuses on gender identity and sexuality through horror and folkloric elements. Her feminist horror anthology television series HER HORROR has been greenlit for production in early 2022 for Shudder with Ruby Rock Pictures and Envision Entertainment and Zara has original and adaptive television series in development with Tall Story Pictures and The Imaginarium. Zara has written and produced several award-winning short films, ON AIR starring Dr Who’s Mandip Gill and PUFF with Downton Abbey’s Victoria Emslie premiered at Frightfest 2021, the UK’s premiere genre film festival. PUFF is also Zara’s short film directing debut. She has previously worked extensively with NBCUniversal as a script editor and development coordinator across new and returning series, and as script consultant on the studio’s first foray into VR/AR with Venice Berlinale nominated multi-narrative VR/AR series ELEVEN ELEVEN. Zara’s two episodes of Big Finish radio drama DARK SHADOWS: THE TONY AND CASSANDRA MYSTERIES are currently available on Audible.
We've been going independently for years now, and so far have self-financed every single project. In order to do more work, and continue supporting amazing filmmakers in the genre space, we've launched a Patreon.
If you are able to support us and the work we do on Patreon, we'd truly and deeply appreciate it.