The Armoured Self, Un-becoming the Subject: Reading Julia Ducournau’s Titane (2021) Via Wyndham Lewis and Vorticism

In this paper, I explore what Lisa Tickner calls a ‘dissentient position’ in Modernism that assumes dehumanisation as a value of a new and brutal subjectivity and places the machine as a totemic deity. My understanding of this draws from the aesthetic language of Vorticism, particularly representations of women in the work of Wyndham Lewis. Moreover, I argue that this ‘machinic-modernism’ as Hal Foster describes it, which emerged in the early 20th century as a reaction to industrialised modernity, corporatisation, Taylorism, and Fordism, has a powerful and unacknowledged inheritor in the contemporary Palme d'Or winning film Titane (2021) written and directed by the auteur Julia Ducournau. I argue that the figure of Alexia in Titane, portrayed by actress and model Agathe Rousselle, is a celebration of dehumanisation that follows an anti-humanist path – sexually-combative femininity purged to become a hyper-masculine recruit, emerging as a biomechanical self – I claim that, while the modernism of Lewis and the creative intentions of Ducournau may have stemmed from different motivations, their utmost horizon for the subject and society is the same one, the swapping out of the tension of masculine and feminine for a machinic-self defined by ferocity, abjection, and trauma. I will also refer to the text Filibusters in Barbary from 1932 which is a reflective account of travels in North Africa including revealing attitudes of Lewis’s regarding machines which are, in common with the themes of Titane, anthropomorphised and presented as magical, violent, more frightening than monsters, and as having replaced gods. Ducournau and Lewis are reactive to the same social forces and rebarbative to so-called bourgeois conceptions of femininity in favour of a subjectivity that exists in a highly stratified social organisation.