Exploring the role of the female warrior in film
III: Deploying the tigers
Newly empowered — however precariously — Tamora, enabled by Aaron’s plotting, deploys her sons to rape and maim Titus’ daughter Lavinia. The play’s central characters have gathered in the woods for a hunt. In a circular clearing scattered with pale dead leaves that clash with the lush greenery of the forest and evoke the sands of the arena, Tamora stages a sadistic damnatio ad bestias worthy of the arena, by unleashing her feral sons upon the virginal couple, Lavinia and her fiancé Bassianus. We might say that the gladiatrix has become the lanista.vii In an inversion of the showdown between the virginal Christian maiden and a threatening beast, from which she is rescued by a manly savior, familiar from such films as the 1951 Quo Vadis?, the savage Chiron and Demetrius, stab Bassianus and ensnare Lavinia. Once they have her in their clutches, the boys paw and lick at Lavinia as though actual beasts, as seen here (sl). Notice, too, that Demetrius is wearing a tiger-pelt jacket to emphasize his bestial ferocity. In her commentary in this scene, Taymor reveals that she deliberately created a "swirling, confusing" effect with the Steadicam so that the viewer would feel like Lavinia and Bassianus, not knowing where the next assault would come from.viii Thus she encourages our participation on the arena floor; in that sense, Tamora’s games incorporate us with uncomfortable proximity.
The visual spectacle of Lavinia’s rape is later amplified when she re-lives the horrible violation in her mind while scratching the names of Tamora’s sons in the sand to implicate them. In one of Taymor’s "penny arcade nightmares" (sl), a term coined by the director to allude to the carnivalesque luridness and peep-show quality of these scenes, Lavinia re-imagines her rape by casting herself as an ersatz Marilyn Monroe, trying to keep her dress from fluttering up while she is set upon by two wild tigers who pounce upon her from both sides. The ad bestias has become a venatio as images of a doe’s head and hooves are superimposed on Lavinia as she is attacked (sl). Again we think of the cinematic precedent of the innocent Christian girl bound to the stake. Tamora’s role as gladiatrix has shifted; from the safety of her dominant position comes the ability to force her opposite — the feminine, delicate, Lavinia, daughter of Rome — to play the arena victim.ix
vii The theme of the hunt is echoed in repeated references to the story of Actaeon set upon by his dogs under the command of Diana. Bassianus to Tamora (II.3.57); Tamora’s retort (II.3.60-65); Lavinia’s taunt (II.3.66-71). Tamora pits her sons against Lavinia and Bassianus as Diana sets the dogs upon Actaeon.
viii Director’s Commentary, Titus DVD. Later in the play, when Titus has learned of what has happened to Lavinia, he exclaims, "Why should nature build so foul a den unless the gods delight in tragedies?" (IV.1.64-65). Thus he imagines the woods as a kind of performance space with the gods as spectators.
ix Taymor’s own staging of the murder and abduction as an arena fight, and the rape of Lavinia as a theatrical sideshow creates contexts in which violence is acceptable, and therefore somehow more tolerable. This has a parallel in the way that Shakespeare repeatedly uses the metaphor of Tereus and Philomela to articulate the unspeakable horror of Lavinia’s rape and mutilation. I believe that this might evoke and hint at the reenactments of mythological encounters in the arena, such as that between Pasiphae and the bull, for example, which Martial describes in the Liber Spectaculorum. The violence was certainly acceptable when witnessed in such sanctioned circumstances, but it was all the more palatable when contextualized in terms of myth, and thus the actors/fighters/victims were depersonalized in the guise of mythic figures. Taymor says in Julie Taymor Playing with Fire (1995:187), "…I sought to theatricalize the rich imagery of Shakespeare’s language. Verbal motifs would become visual ones." She refers here to her staging of the play in 1994, but this statement applies to the film as well.
