ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that Taymor's integration of performing objects and performing bodies in her depiction of Lavinia's mutilat. In Titus, Julie Taymor's experimental film adaptation of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, the director explores the relationship between performing objects and performing bodies. Shakespeare's tragedy, which transforms human bodies into commodities, abstracts them into metaphors for the fragile Roman polity, and exposes the often-devastating cost on human bodies of literary and historical tradition, is especially suited to this type of interrogation. The film's Penny Arcade Nightmares (PANs) a series of surreal, non-narrative sequences that impressionistically represent various characters' mental pain and sufferingalso establish Taymor's investment in experimental techniques that interrogate the sovereign status of the human body. In representing the human body in its fragmented, prosthetic form, Taymor's film explicitly addresses the damaging consequences of making the corporeal body 'incorporate in Rome'. Lavinia's presence as the object of her rapists' derision, then, begins the cinematic blazon that Marcus' poetic description only extends.
