By: Erin
Posted: November 21, 2023
Originally Written: October 23, 2023
If one wishes to live their life, one must be prepared to die.
My first ever experience with transness was a Tumblr blog called “whycantibehim”. The owner of that blog posted short yearning missives that fit the URL and would reblog pictures of traditionally masculine bodies, of masculine romantic and sexual attraction, erotic and artistic, passionate and plaintive. I didn’t understand what I was seeing at the time – it was 2010 and I had just graduated high school – and my own journey with queerness was still over a decade away, but the sentiment broke something deep in my heart. A URL, some pictures, a wish. That’s all.
That single experience was tied to my other main experience with transness at the time, the secret a friend online confided in me after showing me that blog, the deep desire that she wanted to be a boy. She had even picked out a name – Evan. To try it out, I called her that a few times, and then every time we spoke. We grew close – we had already been close in the past, but our relationship was fraught and complicated. And then, one day, Evan didn’t want to be Evan anymore. As far as I know, she never went back. And the blog she showed me stopped posting in 2012.
I’m queer. I know that now. It will always be the label I most closely identify with, but it took me a long time to get anywhere close to comfortable. I was, like many queer kids in my generation, an overly-invested ally in high school, caught in that state where we wanted to be good people but knew we were a long way away from any kind of acceptance by society. Insecure enough to push someone out of their chair for daring to insinuate there was a problem with being gay, but questioning enough to not be able to answer when they asked me if I was. I wanted to start a queer support group if it killed me and I didn’t even know why. I went to Rainbow Alliance meetings in college just to feel something, and yet my friend – who I nicknamed Wallace because we both loved Scott Pilgrim – was my Token Gay Friend, and I the seemingly-straight man who was there for a good time.
There’s a lot of talk online about coming out to oneself as a joyful process. Of course it is, it can be one of endless beauty, but I resonate harder with ones that understand it is also a story of great and terrible pain. The first time I felt queer yearning and love was in the Summer of 2012. I was sitting on my brother’s couch and working with a writing partner over the internet, putting together a piece of work that looking back was dripping with pure unadulterated queer passion – God in Heaven, how could I not fall in love? And I cried myself to sleep wondering why I so desperately wanted to be held in those arms. Near the end of that same visit, I was terrified that my plane home would crash and I listened to the albums said writing partner recommended to me the entire way through just to save me from my anxieties. I still can’t listen to True North by The Devin Townsend Project without thinking of the queer temporality of visiting my brother that Summer, how a week overseas felt like an endless expanse that changed everything, a burning passionate ember seared into time and space for eternity.
Titane understands those moments of yearning and those moments of soft pain. It understands those times we spend where we feel the euphoria of the in-group and the dysphoria of being perceived. It understands it through operatic camp and shocking, erotic violence, it understands it through body horror and mutilation and agony just as it understands it through the slow and erotic destruction of the body and the pure filth and sexuality that queerness has to embody. The erotics of torture, the desire to be so close to what we want to be, yet the pain and need to destroy everything we do not want. The horror – oh, the horror – of being at war with our bodies! We shouldn’t be here. The world doesn’t want us here. Yet here we are, suffering, living, a distraction and discomfort to all! God, we will always be a failure to this world, and it is in our failure to be what it wants us to be that we find our queer selves.
Through soaking blood and blinding light, through pounding bass and tragic dance, through testosterone injections and erotic lovemaking to cars, through horrific physical trauma, we are born, reborn, cracking and opening up to the world until we are undeniably ourselves and unstoppably so. Titane captures the aesthetics of queerness in murder, blood, gashes and oil. What is it about queer people, especially trans people, and our relationship with the inhuman? I say I’m a robot, and how I wish I was, a modular mechanical being that can change at will. We are not afforded humanity by the world, so we reject it. We are monsters. We are robots. Perhaps we are cars. We are transhuman and we are transcendent.
And there is love, oh there is love. Some compare Titane to Eraserhead, another favorite of mine. Where Eraserhead found anxiety expressed through symbolism and art, Titane finds joy in the vicious and erotic, love in the paradox that is existing in our world. Catcalls, confusion, disgust and self-loathing, kink and death, lies and truth. Peace and love.
Movies like this are rare and when one comes out you have to hold tight, as tightly as you can. It crackles with energy and is packed as densely as it comes, full of life throughout. It is an intersection of art and of music and of death and murder, a body horror extravaganza, an anxious nightmare, a beautiful nude dance, an erotic fascination with the machine and how it creates us and becomes part of us. It is violent art that makes one scream. It portrays the masculine, the feminine, and the expected stages of life – and how to pervert them as only we can.
“I don’t care who you are. You are my son. You’ll always be my son.”