The next part of my dissertation is about affect and character, so naturally I am putting the focus on Alexia from Julia Ducournau’s Titane, a film about a mysterious, murderous woman who is impregnated by a car. In her bouts of violence and her truly bizarre attempt to avoid detection by police in the aftermath of her killing spree, Alexia is, to say the least, unrelatable. The film was critiqued upon release for its supposed misogyny, despite the fact that it was made by a woman (not that it isn’t possible for a person to espouse positions that work against their own social locations, but social media isn’t typically where one finds critique that works on that level). But I think that this film owes at least as much to other films about difficult protagonists, like Varda’s Sans toit ni loi, whose Mona Bergeron uses and abuses those around her, takes her own hits along the way, and refuses the character’s into whose lives she intrudes any insight into what motivates her. Through withholding, self-contradiction, or contrarianism, the viewer find themselves without any clue who Mona was or what she wanted from her vagabondage, and Alexia is not much different.

The victim of a car accident that also codes as an aestheticization of her relationship with her shitty father and absentee mother, young Alexia finds herself right away interlaced with metal and physically intimate with automobiles. Fast forward a decade or more and we find her making her bones by dancing provocatively at car shows. But while attendees think that she is there for their pleasure, it seems she’s actually found a way to turn her passion for hot rods into a vocation. After fucking a Cadillac (how will they imply this sex act? I wondered naively at the start of the film – they just show it…) and murdering a creepy fan/stalker, Alexia finds herself mysteriously pregnant. The shit hits the fan when her love interest finds out, and so Alexia murders her and everyone else at the home where they are staying, going into hiding by posing as an aging fire chief’s long lost son, Adrien. She binds her growing abdomen and breaks her own nose to create the illusion, and the illusion is precisely that which is at stake in this film as the dynamic between Alexia/Adrien and her surrogate father, the other firefighters, and so on. In the end she gives birth to a human/car hybrid and it isn’t certain if she survives. In this way, the film also pays homage to another gem from the past, Donald Cammel’s 1977 Demon Seed, in which a robotic AI becomes self-aware and impregnates a woman as a way to make its way out into the world.

A few things here are interesting, actually, I guess two things. I’ll start with this relationship with Demon Seed and make my way back to Sans toit ni loi. In the first place, the human/technology hybrid is literal, and it is mechanical. Contrast this with the more esoteric or ethereal human/technology hybrids: human/computer, or humanoid robot with a hidden tell, things like that. This isn’t Neuromancer or Videodrome, and it certainly isn’t The Matrix or even Raised by Wolves. This hybridization almost has more to do with Cronenberg’s Crash, except the relationship between man and machine in that film is mediated through sex between humans (see: Katarzyna Paszkiewicz’s interesting article “‘I’m in Love With My Car’”). In short, there is little like Alexia’s baby in film, and the trend since the cyberpunk revolution of forty years ago has been toward transcending the flesh through interfacing with some sort of network, pushing the boundaries between wetware and software, or in the humanization of machines, like Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and the Alien franchise. When humans do get mechanical, it is often seen as an augmentation, not simply a value neutral, if terrifying, extension of the self.

This brings us back to Mona, Alexia, and affect. In the absence of any motivation that can be discerned by the viewer, why should anyone get anything out of this film? That is, how is the narrative even intelligible, much less credible even on its own terms, if it isn’t clear what the protagonist’s terms even are? I solve the problem by smooshing two theories together, or rather, using one theoretical approach to break open a promising methodology. This methodology is Murray Smith’s notion of recognition, alignment, and allegiance, which he offers contra the traditional notion of “identification” of the viewer with the protagonist. I like Titane to argue this point because it would be a stretch to identify with this character, given her proclivities, the fact that most of her time onscreen she refuses to speak, and in light of her relationships with people and machines alike. By Smith’s logic, viewers recognize certain entities as specific characters as opposed to, say, background characters, undifferentiated members of a crowd, whatever, and the are then aligned with these characters through various narrative techniques: screen time, dialogue that serves to illuminate their past, feelings, etc., or other access to the character’s interiority through inner monologue, etc. These all contribute to our allegiance with a character, or whether we want to see them succeed or fail. In Alexia’s case, though, we don’t know what that is because Alexia just keeps transgressing boundaries that most of us so take for granted that we don’t even see them. And she does this via affective engagement with other people and machines. So the theoretical model I’m trying to use to break open Smith is the ol’ Spinoza/Marx approach, to demonstrate the relationship between Alexia and those around her simply works towards a different ethic of desire that cares less about the boundary between metal and flesh, and which finds itself continually in crisis throughout the film.

In the last instance, Alexia realizes that she loves her father figure, Vincent, which is what Vincent has wanted from his wayward son all along. Somewhere along the way, though, the signal gets scrambled, and a moment of filial intimacy becomes sexual. Even though Vincent has admitted that he knows that Alexia is not Adrien, it is not until she makes a move on him that the spell is broken, the illusion of their father/son relationship is dispelled, and they become Vincent the firefighter/EMT and Alexia the pregnant woman, who is about to deliver her hybrid child. It’s interesting that they love each other, but they aren’t sure how or why, and this “inadequate” knowledge of the origin of their appetites leads to a narrative breakdown, a dissipation of the story that had united them throughout the film, and even caused Vincent to murder his own favorite employee. In fact, I would argue that the viewer is drawn into a sort of affective puzzle, as we see Alexia trying to pursue various escape routes – from Vincent, from the police, from her pregnancy, from her identity – only to be drawn back and forth by mysterious forces, that is, her passions, those that she withholds from others, from us. Murray Smith’s framework isn’t broken down, but thrust into the foreground as our very allegiance with Alexia becomes the motivation behind the story, in a certain sense. This leads me to the conclusions that a) sometimes it’s worth building something just to try and break it down, since that makes the structures visible to begin with and b) Smith’s framework functions outside the anthropocentric and can be applied to all sorts of narratives that feature nonhuman (and non-human-like) agents, from Solaris to Arrival.