Welcome toAnatomy of a Queer Sex Scene, a series by Drew Burnett Gregory and Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya about queer sex scenes in film. This week, we discuss Julia Ducournau’s Titane.
Drew:I realized that I thought we were discussing the nipple biting but that maybe you’d think we were talking about when she fucks the car.
Kayla: Omg I definitely thought we were talking about car sex.
Drew: Lmaoooo
Kayla: We can talk about both! My opening question was going to be: So, have you ever had sex with a car?
Drew: I’ve had sex IN a car. I do like car sex. Funny for someone who left LA because I so didn’t want to drive.
Kayla: LOL. I haven’t had a tremendous amount of car sex, probably because I’ve never owned a car myself. But I do like it when it happens! But sex in a car definitely feels distinct from sex WITH a car. I took so many screenshots of car fucking this morning. You know, just a normal activity to do with my morning coffee. We have such interesting jobs.
Drew: We really do.I’m not sure I’ve had sex with ANY inanimate objects other than sex toys? I was never a pillow hump girl.
Kayla: Well, you see, I do have a different experience there lol. I didn’t use sex toys until much more recently in life. I was scared of them for some reason! But also had some shame about them that I sorta absorbed from an ex who had a TREMENDOUS amount of shame about them. But prior to that, I experimented with a lot of various objects — from pearl necklaces to mascara tubes. None of this is probably advisable from a health perspective lol but I was quite inventive in my youth.
Drew: Ooooo mascara tube and pearl necklace would both result in interesting but easier to birth babies I’d imagine.
Kayla: Maybelline is a beautiful name for a baby girl-mascara-tube.
Drew: Maybe I watched Crash (1996) at too young an age because I do sort of think sex in a car… the car feels more a part of it than sex other places.
Kayla: Crash is my favorite Cronenberg! Which I think primed me to be delighted by car sex in Titane.
Drew: I love Crash too. But I think what I love about Titane is even when it has some clear influences, it is in no way a pastiche. It really feels like a wholly original work.
Kayla: Completely and totally original in a way that Ducournau is so good at. On that note, let’s rewind a bit. So you just rewatched Titane for the first time since your initial viewing, and you texted me something I wanted to open with as you were rewatching yesterday, which is that you forgot how funny the film was. I agree! I’ve seen it twice, too, which is honestly a surprisingly low count given how much I like it. I watched it for the first time when we were working on the first iteration of our Scariest Queer Movie Moments list and was delighted and disturbed by it! My favorite combination.
Drew: It’s hilarious. I think it helps the film exist in its own reality. Even the sequence where she murders the sweet, hot lesbian and then all of her roommates could be overly brutal and make it tough to follow the character through the next chapter. But it’s turned into a farce so it’s easier to stomach. I do think the film gets funnier as it goes along. But from the start, child Alexia being a little shit in the back of the car is funny. A meet cute where your hair gets caught in a nipple ring is funny. Even just individual lines or looks throughout are funny.
Kayla: There’s an absurdism to it that actually makes it quite grounded. Like you said, the film exists in its own reality, and it’s really easy to just be immediately immersed in that.
Drew: And that does connect to the car sex. Because she doesn’t fuck the stick or rub her pussy against the seat or grind against the seatbelt (trying to think of other tangible ways to fuck a car…) she just fucks it. No questions. She’s fucking it and we don’t quite see how but we believe it.
Kayla: Yes! Exactly what I was about to say. Because of the really great world-building and tone-setting from the start, you get to something like car fucking, and it’s both funny but also you BELIEVE it as real sex. And I think what draws me to the car fucking is something you and I have both talked about a lot, which is that we share a very expansive idea of what “counts” as sex, especially queer sex. And this feels like following our expansive logic to its wildest ends.
Drew: Yeah and it IS the film’s sex scene. (The other being when she fucks another vehicle later in the film.) The encounters with Justine aren’t really sex as much as misguided attempts to start sex.
Kayla: Yeah, there’s a lot of sex in this movie, it’s pretty steeped in it. But that doesn’t look like how you think it might or look like any other film really.
Drew: I’m interested in the placement of the first car sex scene. It’s right after the first time we see her kill. (Is penetrating someone with a titanium hair pin ALSO sex?) She’s washing both the attempted assault and her most justified kill off in the shower and then she’s pulled toward the garage.
Kayla: It’s like the car is waiting for her. I’ve seen some people describe the scene as her seducing the car, but I think of it more as the car is seducing her in this moment.
Drew: Oh absolutely. I agree with you.
Kayla: And that’s the more interesting reading tbh! Because Ducournau throughout is really challenging the lines between flesh vs. machine. A car seducing a person is more of a mindfuck than a person seducing a car.
Drew: And in some ways it’s a call to a deeper self. Alexia is established as half machine herself with the metal plate in her head taking on a mythic quality beyond its real-world medical counterpart. She’s drawn to machine because part of her is machine. So fucking the car is both an embrace of the car and an embrace of that other part of herself. Which makes it VERY queer because is that not what first queer sex also does? The seduction isn’t just FROM a queer person, it’s also an invitation to embrace one’s own queerness through sex.
Kayla: Yeah, I love that so much, it really speaks to everything I love about this scene and this film! So then, in a way, Justine is also having sexual encounters with a machine, or a part-machine.
Drew: And, most significantly, one who hasn’t reckoned with that part of herself which ends up being very dangerous. I do appreciate how the first half hour of the film plays with audience expectations around an “edgy French horror movie.” The setup suggests a movie where a woman kills men who deserve it and is going to raise a car baby with a hot lesbian with nipple piercings. And then it’s like NOPE. She’s going to murder the girl (and also the genre) and instead it’s going to be about her pretending to be a boy and become the son of a roided up firefighter. As fun as the movie would’ve been had it stayed to that teased path, I appreciate the more interesting movie it becomes.
Kayla: I think the success of the film as specifically a horror one is in these plays on expectations.
Drew: I do think I just have an (as of yet unexplored) fixation with nipple piercings, so I was a bit bummed to not get the lesbian romance version lol
Kayla: Haha yes, on that note, what did you want to say about the nipple biting scene when you thought this was going to be a conversation about nipple biting and not about car fucking?
Drew: Maybe nothing interesting. Maybe just that I find nipple piercings so hot and I’m not sure how I’ve lived to 30 and not had sex with anyone with pierced nipples and someday I think I will get my own nipples pierced. The car sex is the more fruitful convo albeit the less horny one for me personally.
Kayla: Yeah, I know some people do legitimately get turned on by cars, but I’ve never really understood that. Perhaps the closest I’ve come is how I feel about vintage Broncos.
Drew: Well now I’m wondering if my nipple ring fixation is because it implies the person with pierced nipples is cool and edgy in some way OR if it actually is because of the combination of the flesh and the metal, the organic and the artificial?
Kayla: I’m married to someone with a tongue ring, and it is indeed something very hot! I’ve always been more interested in piercings than in tattoos (I like tattoos! nothing against them! just don’t do it for me the way piercings do).
Drew: With Vintage Broncos is it what is implied by someone owning it? Or is it the car itself?
Kayla: It’s just the car itself! I don’t really think about the people who own them. I wish I could BE one of them though. It all started when a lesbian couple came into a wine shop where Kristen and I were sitting having a glass of wine in New Orleans and were driving a custom cream colored vintage Bronco and idk something about the memory was just so COOL, it stayed with me. The car was like sexy but also covered in dirt. I do love a hot dirtbag vibe.
Drew: Yeah I feel that way a bit about pickup trucks. I wouldnt want one though. I’d only want to have sex with someone who has one. A dyke who has one.
Kayla: One of my first published short stories starts with lesbian sex in a pickup truck!
Drew: It’s such a vibe !! And I do think the hard metal adds to the experience? Having never done that specific thing but having had sex other places where the discomfort adds to the eroticism.
Even sex leaning against a car is great to me. Especially if my skin is exposed so it’s making contact with either the cool car or hot car depending on what weather it’s absorbed.
Maybe I do have a car thing.
I guess I was raised in SoCal.
Kayla: Wow, it’s so beautiful when cinema can help you discover things about yourself.
Drew: Knee deep in the passenger seat and I’m fucking my car is it casual now.
