Little did I know, when I literally tried to pitch a film adaptation of Titus Andronicus to Quentin Tarantino several months ago, that critically acclaimed director Julie Taymor made her debut bringing Titus to the big screen back in 1999. I guess that explains why Tarantino’s agent never got back to me. Note to self: do more research before contacting Hollywood agents with your next big idea. In fairness to Julie Taymor, I’ll say that I was dreading my viewing of Titus well before I hit play. Shakespeare’s text is so gruesome and disturbing that I wasn’t sure I had the stomach to make it through the whole film. But with Taymor’s Tempest on the way, I knew that I had to acknowledge this bold new voice in Shakespearean cinema.
I had braced myself for horror, but nothing could have prepared me for Titus’s opening scene. Having expected the action to begin in ancient Rome, I was caught completely off guard when the first thing I saw was a young boy with a paper bag over his head, breaking his toys apart amid a large-scale ketchup explosion at a 1950s-era kitchen table. In fact, I was afraid I had inserted the wrong disc into my DVD player. Though this fear turned out to be unfounded, the strange scene made for anxiety-filled viewing all the same. Things did calm down for me moments later as a large man, dressed entirely in black, burst through the kitchen window to seemingly kidnap this child. Normally, this would be alarming, but once you see the kind of mess the kid was making, you’ll accept the fact that he had to be stopped somehow.
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