Titane

  

Warning: This blog post contains spoilers about the 2021 horror film Titane. If you would like to avoid the spoilers or don’t like horror, I recommend an older post, “In Defense of Sleeping Beauty and All the Others”, which was spiritually an International Women’s Day post like this one, even though it was posted at a different month.

 

There are two movie genres that tend to get the most resistance or the least love from the people I interact with: horror and musicals.

Drama and comedy are the vanilla genres accepted by everyone. Action and western are pastimes. Science fiction and documentaries make people feel their time is spent productively. …

On the other hand, many people deem horror disturbing and musicals annoying.

 

I love all movie genres. But I am specifically a sucker for horror and musicals. Both are like emotion-fireworks. Unlike my sentiments about real fireworks, which I think should be banned, any art that depicts emotion-fireworks is helpful to deal with emotions that we aren’t allowed or welcomed to deal with publicly. Such art can be a life-vest while swimming through those emotions preventing you from being drowned in them.

 

I watched Titane (on IMDB, categorized as drama, horror, and sci-fi) together with Sister in Movies the week it hit the theaters in Copenhagen in Fall 2021 at Gloria Biograf. I was going through a difficult period at work and had a lot of anger, frustration, and sadness. I was supported very well by family and friends at the time, but some emotions were hard to express outwardly. Titane threw me a life-vest.

Regardless of my specific situation at that time, Titane also serves as a life-vest for the anxiety and anger I have internalized as a woman who goes through life in this world. Today, I count Titane as one of my favorite movies.

 

In Titane, Alexia is our main protagonist. In the remainder of this post, I will go over some events she endures each having a horror element of different intensity. The interpretation of these events is based on what they triggered in my mind during my viewing of the film. The intention of the filmmaker Julia Ducournau might be very different.

 

Hair being a source of pain.

Alexia’s hair gets stuck in another character’s piercing causing pain for both Alexia and the other character.

Let’s first take this one literally. I don’t know how many times my own hair got stuck in things causing me physical pain, yet I always prefer to keep it long and untied increasing the changes of it getting stuck at places.

Moving onto less literal avenues … How we present our hair to the world, whether we choose or are forced to cover (or uncover) it or put it and other body hair through various beauty regimes, can also be a source of pain.

 

Blood coming out of your body.

Alexia finds motor oil, not blood, because this film is also sci-fi, coming out of her vagina.

Vaginal bleeding is a normal part of a woman’s life during menstruation. However, even under those normal and expected circumstances, many things associated with menstruation can be sources of anxiety: pain, irregularity, PMS, drowsiness, a heavy flow causing you having to clean blood off things you wore or slept on ...

 

Unwanted or unplanned pregnancy.

Alexia finds out she is pregnant. This wasn’t her intention. Her first reaction is to take it in her hands to terminate the pregnancy. It doesn’t work. She has to keep the baby.

I have never planned to have a baby, but I had to do a pregnancy test once. The days surrounding it were among the loneliest of my life. I was too young to be a mother (“too young” can change person to person). Luckily, the test result was negative, and I got my period a few days later (three weeks late). There was one thing that kept me calm for the case where the result wasn’t negative: I lived in a country (Turkey at the time) where abortion was (and still is) legal.

We live in the year 2024. Women’s autonomy on their own body is still a luxury and not a human right and is still heavily exploited by (mostly male) politicians.

 

Being followed by a stranger, or unwanted attention in general.

One day, as she is leaving work, Alexia is followed by a man. He doesn’t leave her even if she rejects his advances. Another day, Alexia listens to a girl being verbally harassed on a bus by a group of boys.

Unlike the single pregnancy test example, I unfortunately have several examples for this one. The guy who didn’t leave my dorm-room door even though I repeatedly told him to leave, an uncomfortable interaction with a colleague back when I was a PhD student, the stranger who started hitting on me on San Jose light rail and followed me even after I rejected his advances and got off the light rail … Too many people feeling entitled over your body.

 

Hiding your identity to be accepted.

A large chunk of the movie, we watch Alexia hide the fact that she is a woman, to feel safe and be accepted among a group of men. As the movie progresses, the toll this lie takes on her body increases. 

When I started my PhD, I was in a lab where I was the only female. Terms like diversity & inclusion or psychological safety weren’t a thing back then. I thought to be part of the lab I had to be “one of the boys”. The reason was a combination of the environment and my lack of self-confidence. I assume most woman who has career ambitions, not just in computer science, can relate to this at some point.

I wasn’t one of the boys, and I was never going to be. As a solution, I hid myself behind layers of armor and revealed very little. It didn’t work. I was let go of that lab. I eventually ended up in a lab where I could reveal more of myself. But at work events such as conferences I still thought I needed some armor and put the layers back on just in case to keep myself safer. It was a false sense of safety. Instead, I got unhappy for having to hide myself. I spent years after my PhD getting rid of the armor.

Today, I am the coordinator of a lab that has 5 female faculty members. Things have improved in our field even though the pace of progress is way slower than I wish it to be. I rarely feel the need for armor now even at work events, but I am unsure whether this is a result of progress or me being in a position of relative power as an associate professor instead of a PhD student. Likely both.

 

Death by childbirth.

Alexia dies while giving birth to her baby.

A mother dying during childbirth could be a metaphor for other things such as being reborn or letting go of the life you had before the baby. On the other hand, according to WHO, in 2020, 800 women died on average each day due to causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. In the older centuries, these rates were way higher, and if you wanted a long life as a woman, you were better off becoming a nun.

 

Happy International Women’s Day everyone!