Stacey Anh Baran
LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL: so reads the title of a 1977 poetry collection by Charles Bukowski. In it, the introverted writer reflects on bedroom encounters, the inscrutability of women, and the incalculable science of love and lust. Although born in Germany, Bukowski left with family at the age of two and moved to Los Angeles, the sprawling city that would later become a fixture in much of his writing. Some argue that Bukowski “apotheosized” LA in his work, signaling his fidelity to and exaltation of American culture writ large (Dougherty).
LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL: so too does the phrase appear in Julia Ducournau’s French body horror film Titane (2021) on the torso of its main character, Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), in the form of a tattoo centered square between her breasts. The tattoo might be the first thing the viewer notices, given the centered placement, if it were not for the more notable focus of the scene: an explicit sexual encounter between Alexia and, rather than another person who might simply be out of frame, a souped-up 1980s Cadillac completely adorned in flames.
Considering the film’s reputation for being “that one where the woman has sex with a car,” it’s as good a place to start as any. Titane follows the story of Alexia, a showgirl with an erotic attraction towards vehicles that seemingly manifests after a car accident she was in as a child. She and her father (Bertrand Bonello) both survive the crash, but Alexia suffers a head injury and has a permanent titanium plate fitted into her head. As an adult, she lives at home with her parents, doing little by day and working as a dancer at car shows by night. Her first on-screen sexual encounter with a vehicle, pictured above, happens just after she is assaulted by an obsessed fan in a parking lot outside of the building after the show. In response to the forced kiss, Alexia appears to feign engagement only to then jam her hairpin into his ear, killing him.
Alexia, seen through the open sunroof of the Cadillac. (Neon, 2021)
She returns to the building and hastily showers when she hears loud sounds coming from the main showroom. Fully nude, she investigates to find that the Cadillac she had performed on earlier has started by itself. When she gets in, the car begins to shake aggressively, and the camera cuts between the interior and exterior of the vehicle as they have sex. After the encounter, Alexia shows signs of pregnancy that are marked by the presence of the nonhuman. She secretes motor oil the next morning, and later she attends a house party where she sees that her lower stomach is already beginning to swell. She unsuccessfully attempts to give herself an abortion in the bathroom, after which she returns to the party and kills nearly everyone there, finally going home and setting her house on fire, killing her parents as well.
Alexia then goes into hiding by posing as Adrian, the missing son of a fire captain named Vincent (Vincent London). While Vincent doesn’t seem to truly believe Alexia is Adrian, he accepts her as his son nonetheless. Vincent attempts to connect with “Adrian” while also managing his dependency on steroids, and Alexia increasingly struggles to keep her identity and pregnancy hidden by taping her growing belly down. Her true circumstances eventually prove impossible to hide when she goes into a painful and difficult labor, during which her belly and head begin to rupture while she bleeds and vomits motor oil. Before she dies, Vincent helps Alexia deliver an apparently healthy baby—with an exposed titanium spine.
As a work of body horror, Titane grapples with not only the visual terrors of bodily violation but also with the bounds of “humano-normative” desire: Heiko Motschenbacher’s term for “the belief that sexual relationships with human beings are preferable or more natural than those involving inanimate objects” (57). Alexia’s queered sexual proclivities, as well as the slow transfiguration of her own body that marks the intrusion of the automobile, illustrate these anxieties over the machinic nonhuman at their most radical. Such anthropological fears are well articulated by Brian Ladd’s notion of “autophobia,” which he defines as the conflation of the fear of the car and the fear of the self. In the 2008 titular book, Ladd further argues that autophobia emerges from the love/hate relationship between humans and their growing infrastructural (and ideological) dependency on cars in the automobile age.
Titane similarly plays with the embodiment of transgressive desire and fear, inverting our anxieties about the dangers of being inside cars by envisioning the car, instead, inside of us. For the automobile is the penetrative machine that moves us violently and rapidly through space, but does it not also seem to move through us just as well? Phenomena like highway hypnosis—where we find ourselves able to drive and react normally behind the wheel for extended periods of time, but without any conscious memory—force us to confront the question of how much control we really have over our own bodies while in the automotive body of a vehicle. And to conceive of the car as a kind of prosthesis or cyborgian extension of the organic human—“many of us have chosen to become virtual centaurs attached to our four-wheeled prosthetic bodies,” Ladd comments cheekily (12)—leads us to wonder exactly when and where the boundaries between a human driver and their vehicle are drawn.
Titane doubles down on these questions, positing whether there might arise a non-normative desire from the very tensions out of which autophobia is also produced: an autophilia of sorts, a kind of awe and terror that almost compulsively draws Alexia to the automobile. In some sense, the film treats her autophilic desires in the same way that body horror works through its own mutually constructed fascination and repulsion with the interiority of the body made visible, made abject.
Interestingly, Alexia’s autophilic tendencies are juxtaposed with her humano-normative relational experiences: that is, the human-to-human interactions that she participates in but appears to not fully comprehend. For one, her consenting encounters with a coworker named Justine (Garance Marillier) are marked by a feeling of abnormality and clumsiness through Alexia’s expressions and gestures on the screen. Alexia often looks somewhat unsure of her movements, and in one instance she accidentally hurts Justine after being too rough. Almost immediately after, Alexia vomits and realizes that she is pregnant by the car. The attempt at intimacy with another human is thus disrupted by the presence of the car in her body, an obvious corporeal intrusion on the one hand and, on the other, a clear manifestation of her anti-relational stance toward humano-normative desire.
But Alexia’s apparent antisociality towards other people doesn’t end at the point of awkwardness. At the house party, when Justine rests her head on Alexia’s stomach in a moment of vulnerability, Alexia suddenly reaches for her hairpin. She stabs Justine, once in the face and again in the ear, killing her in the same way she killed the man who had assaulted her in the parking lot. These doubled and queered interactions—both the consenting and (especially) non-consenting ones—correlate Alexia’s misdirected human-relational experiences with clear and causal redirections into violence.
Fig 2: Justine and Alexia regard one another. Alexia’s expression reads as searching but confused, almost vacuous. (Neon, 2021)
Far from being senseless, I’d argue that these instances of violence speak literally and forcefully to the queer antisocial projects described by prominent theorists such as Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, and Leo Bersani, who have called for and praised responses to the heteronormative agenda in the expressions of “rage,” “intensity,” “mania,” and “counterhegemonic violence” (824). And while these theorists were speaking in the context of heteronormativity, there’s room in their arguments to connect with the nascent conversations, like Motschenbacher’s, about objectophilia and humano-normativity as well. In Titane, the autophilic queering of Alexia’s sexuality, ambiguously constructed as it may be, can be read as a radical exploration of the ways in which all categories of normativity are both reified and shaken through representation and discourse.
The film’s final violent moments—the birth of the child and Alexia’s simultaneous death—leave me with at least two immediate questions, one of which is a question of futurity. That her baby is born crying and healthy (as far as one can tell) prompts me to wonder how Titane presents the subject of non-normative sexualities and queer negativity, particularly in the Edelmanian sense that queer subjects may lean into their socially-constructed negativity by embracing “antiproduction” as a form of resistance. If Alexia’s hybrid baby exists in spite of her queered, autophilic sexuality, could there be a commentary here that, as Tim Dean (827) puts it, “embraces [queer] negativity without foreclosing futurity”?
These ideas are important ones, but forgive me for bracketing the inquiry purely in the interest of space; examining the subjects of queer negativity/positivity and antiproduction in Titane would require more time (and knowledge) than I have remaining. The final question that emerges for me is one of embodiment, and here I make a return to the Question of the Car. In one light, Alexia’s pregnancy is a strange intrusion upon her body. Although she went willingly to the Cadillac that impregnated her, she constantly fights against the pregnancy from the moment she knows of it and attempts to abort. Once she assumes the identity of Adrian, the viewer sees her repeatedly binding her torso, hiding both her growing belly and her feminine physicality from Vincent. But the hybrid growing inside of Alexia persists as an intrusion, and when the “LOVE IS A DOG FROM HELL” tattoo on her chest is again made visible in the final sequence, I find myself drawn to thinking about the transnational. While the bold-faced lettering of Bukowski’s book is not part of the body makeup for Alexia—the American poet’s title is actually inked on Agathe Rousselle’s chest—its visibility seems deliberate in this curious moment of intertextuality.
“American” words on a French femme: a transcultural embodiment that, coupled with Alexia’s charged and complicated relationship with the car, seems to recall the history of automobiles specifically in the French post-war period of the 1950s-1970s. David Inglis’ compelling article, “Auto Couture,” pieces together the larger story that backdrops the French people’s responses to the automobile, beginning with the fact that France was one of the world leaders in car manufacturing at the turn of the twentieth century (199). But by the start of the post-war era, the car (and its ascension as a new consumer commodity) was perceived by the French as “something of an alien object” and an “avatar of Americanization” (201-2). It seems no small coincidence, then, that the car which impregnates Alexia is a Cadillac, an American brand that’s also the luxury division of General Motors (GM). Considering the initial mixed reception of the car in France, I see the Cadillac in Titane as a representational stand-in for the automobile’s “fantastic and alien intrusion into French quotidian existence” (215). If, as Inglis writes, the French understood the car as a “threat to French values and spaces” and, particularly, an “agent of reproduction of aggressive individualism” (213), Alexia’s pregnancy is suggestive of not just her interstitial hybrid corporeality, but of the invasive Americanization by which her autophilia—quite literally—gives birth.
Fig 3: The flame-adorned Cadillac that Alexia dances on at the car show, and which later impregnates her. [Brightness adjusted for clarity.] (Neon, 2021)
Indeed, the shot that frames Alexia’s torso in the Cadillac, with the Bukowski reference placed squarely at the center, communicates tensions in the perceived stability of the French body politic as it has been modified (might I say “queered”?) by American cultural influence. Significantly, it’s a reference that reminds me of Bukowski’s allegiance to LA, and furthermore the city’s cultural status as an “autopia” (a portmanteau of “automobile” and “utopia,” taken from the Disneyland ride). The tattoo also signals to the knowing viewer the themes of transgressive love and sexual desire that appear in Bukowski’s poetry. Of the poems in the collection, one in particular is titled “the night I fucked my alarm clock” (127). In the poem, the narrator describes an evening when he had watched a couple kiss from the window of his apartment. He then recounts how he promptly took his alarm clock into bed with him and “fucked it until the hands dropped off.” However one interprets this in isolation, the intertextual play on objectophilia in both Bukowski’s poem and in Alexia is clear.
Thinking through the history of auto culture in France offers one starting point for a through-line of commentary on globalization and the perceived reign of American culture on the world stage (and screen). By spotlighting Alexia’s pregnancy—and the efforts she puts forth to suppress its existence—the viewer can begin to parse how Titane symbolically registers many of the public responses to Americanization in the Western sphere, ranging from a turning-up-of-the-nose condescension to outright animosity. And while they would seem to exist in separate spheres of discourse, car culture and queer relationality might actually share a great deal in common when it comes to the intrusion of American sociocultural influence. In some ways, this article plays directly into that: criticisms of contemporary American queer theories have been at least partially fueled by what Lawrence R. Schehr calls an “imperialist, US master-narrative” (qtd. in Rees-Roberts 5) that gets foisted onto media like French queer cinema, and onto non-American queer theories generally. But even these critiques can be productive for exploring the transnational politics of performativity and queered bodies.
Titane has given me much to think about regarding the twinned spectacles of body horror and queer embodiment as they relate to the spectacularized fears and pleasures of the automobile—and the autophilic propensities that we all share, at least culturally, with Alexia. Her line of work further conflates her performance as a car show dancer with her doubly queered performativity, “becoming” Adrian as much as she “becomes” cyborg throughout the film. All in all, Titane may ask a few more questions than it endeavors to answer, but its treatment of objectophilia, embodiment, and relationality play in fascinating rhythm with the deeper, nearly subconscious nuances of transnational auto culture.
On a recent rewatch, I noticed that when the viewer first sees Alexia dance at the auto show, the camera doesn’t seem to linger but assertively direct, focusing on the visual interplay between Alexia’s body and the car itself. As she spins and gyrates on the Cadillac, its flames reflecting in her matching metallic gold top and shorts, I’m reminded of another Bukowski poem, “wax job” (from a compilation aptly titled Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame). It recounts a conversation with a man who is about to wax the narrator’s car, and with Titane in mind, the words especially stick:
“you know, I’ve been sitting here looking at your car,
wondering just how I was gonna do it,
I wanna do it real good.”
Works Cited
Bukowski, Charles. Love is a Dog from Hell: Poems 1974-1977. HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 1977.
–. “wax job.” Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame: Selected Poems, 1955-1973. Poetry Foundation. [Black Sparrow Press, 1966.] Accessed 22 Sept. 2024.
Caserio, Robert L., Lee Edelman, Judith Halberstam, José Estaban Muñoz, and Tim Dean. “The
Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory.” PMLA, vol. 121, no. 3, May 2006, pp. 819-828.
Dougherty, Jay. “An Introduction to Charles Bukowski.” Jay Dougherty, 1995. Accessed 22 Sept. 2024.
Ladd, Brian. Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age. The University of Chicago Press, 2008.
Lemenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford University Press, 2014.
Motschenbacher, Heiko. “Focusing on Normativity in Language and Sexuality Studies: Insights from Conversations on Objectophilia.” Critical Discourse Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 2014, pp. 49-70.
Rees-Roberts, Nick. “Introduction.” Queer French Cinema. Edinburgh University Press, 2008, pp. 1-12.
