Julie Taymor's Critique of Violence in Titus

Abstract

This essay examines the ways in which Julie Taymor's Titus, her 1999 cinematic adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, juxtaposes violence and circularity. The focus is further limited to how she brings Yin-Yang and the Five Elements (water, fire, wood, metal, and earth), and the notion of family revenge to the critique of violence. For this focus, the essay is divided into three parts. The first part starts from the assumption that there are two principles which dominate in the production of the film: Yin-Yang and the Five Elements and family revenge, both of which lie on the common ground of the idea of circularity. This part also defines what constitutes Yin-Yang and the Five Elements and traces how Taymor employs them to emphasize the vicious cycle of violence. But for the most part, the discussion focuses on how she structures the film centering around Yin-Yang imageries such as circles, wheels, stairs, and binary opposites. The workings of the Five Elements as they relate to the act of violence are also addressed. The second part of the essay argues that Taymor develops Shakespearean theme of family revenge to the universal level of human atrocities by putting children at the center of the constitution and the meaning of family. One violently acts because of his or her children, to simply put. In other words, this essay tries to uncover how the film attributes the cause of repetitive violence to the modern concept of family that children's safety ought to be secured under any circumstances. The final part suggests that Taymor's visual message seems to be clear, given the production logic of the film: the natural law, whether it be Yin-Yang and the Five Elements in the natural world or family revenge in the human world, would entail the vicious cycle of violence, were it not for the transcendental redemption, as best shown in the final scene of the film. Whether or not Taymor's resolution is acceptable, however, predicts the essay, will depend on further discussion of violence in the years to come.