Conlcusion: Aaron’s Role

In conclusion, I would like to dwell for a moment on the mysterious character of Aaron the Moor as a way of drawing attention to some of Taymor’s aims in setting her piece in the arena, with her actors as arena fighter-slash-performers. As I have shown, Tamora becomes assimilated as Roman through marriage to the emperor. Taking advantage of her new situation, she transfers her former status as victim onto Lavinia; of the original prisoners, only Aaron remains purely Other, and thus untainted. Initially lumped together with the Goths as a foreign prisoner, Aaron demonstrates that because of his skin color, he not as easily assimilated. On the contrary, he uses the stigma of his blackness and the animosity it inspires to remain aloof and carry out his own agenda.

Taymor distills the relationship between Tamora and Aaron to the epithets "revenge" and "weapon", respectively, which are inscribed beside their images in the DVD’s menu frame, as we see here (2sl).^x As Tamora retires to the emperor’s box to watch the carnage, Aaron enacts her revenge against Titus’ family. But he is not acting selflessly; in fact, as we learn near the play’s end, he has manipulated events such that his (and Tamora’s) child will survive him. At the end of the play the weapon (Aaron) has outlasted its wielder (Tamora); Tamora and Titus lie dead on the arena floor, while Aaron lives long enough to witness the survival of his son, who, at least in the film, is carried by Young Lucius out of the arena and away from the cyclical violence that has consumed the rest of the play’s fighters.

It was typical for early adaptations of Titus Andronicus to foreground the character of Aaron the Moor; the first known restoration was actually re-named "Aaron and Titus".^xi And in fact, Aaron’s presence in the play and movie forces a triangulation between Tamora and Titus; while they are locked in a duet of reciprocal revenge killings, Aaron is unencumbered by their explicit polarities of gender, ethnicity and status. Aaron’s consequent isolation is reinforced by the fact that he often appears on the screen alone and is the only character to address the camera, and through this, the film’s audience, directly, as we see in the three stills of this slide (sl). Aaron’s direct addresses to the camera allow him to implicate the film’s audience as viewers of an arena show, whose most nefarious character is fully cognizant of his role as a performer. Although this distinguishes him from the other characters, he is in fact acting a role familiar to cinematic gladiators by forcing the audience to identify themselves as consumers of arena violence as a form of entertainment. Think here of Maximus’s now-canonical declarative question from the arena floor, "Are you not entertained?" (sl), in Ridley Scott’s Gladiator.

But this taunt from the arena floor has precedent in an iconic scene from Kubrick’s Spartacus, in which an African slave is forced to fight Spartacus for the delectation of their wealthy and distracted viewers (sl). In this scene the African fighter, a novelty among his white cohort, much like the gladiatrix among gladitaors, hurls his weapon directly at the camera, which is situated at the back of the viewing box (sl). This deviant action forces a direct confrontation between viewers — both the arena’s and the film’s — and viewed subject, by reminding the viewer of their uncomfortable closeness, particularly in the enclosed setting of the arena or the darkened movie house.

Much critical debate has swirled around whether Taymor’s film deconstructs violence or glorifies the notion of violence as entertainment by fixating upon its visual appeal. In critiquing arena films, is Taymor guilty, as her male forebears were, of glorifying the violence of the arena? I have not intended to answer that question today, but I do hope to have made it clear that by using the meta-theatrical setting of the arena-slash-stage for her gladiator-slash-actors, Julie Taymor foregrounds the modern viewer’s appetite for watching violence stylized and staged for visual consumption, whetted by the films of her predecessors.

^x Waith (1957: 46) calls Aaron "the projection of [Tamora’s] revenge."

^xi This was a Dutch production. By the end of the film, Aaron has become a foil for Titus; while Titus revels in his sadistic murder of Tamora’s sons to avenge the rape of his daughter, Aaron, although unrepentant, is ready to sacrifice his own life so that his son may live.