The kid in Taymor's "Titus Andronicus"
Gary Kosinsky
day, and found that I enjoyed it more than I have on previous
viewings.
However, I'm still confused about the prominent role the young
boy plays in the movie. Later on in the movie, it's made clear that
he is supposed to be Lucius' son (or Titus' grandson). Is that his
role right from the start? That is, at the opening of the movie, when
we see the young boy playing with his toy soldiers at the dinner
table, are we, the viewers, to understand that we are watching Titus'
grandson playing with his toys?
- Gary Kosinsky
Symposium1
writes:
As in some previous productions of Titus (I'm thinking of the BBC Shakespeare
by Jane Howell, but I believe it has a longer tradition than that), Young
Lucius is given the responsibility of representing some hope for the future.
Thus you see him prominently featured in the last filmed scene.
To balance this, Taymor also creates glimpses of Lucius just being a regular
kid, and yes, he has the most trappings of modern realism (clothes, toys, the
setting of the first scene). Thus, I am pretty sure her attempt was to make the
child the personification of us, the audience. Howell set the boy apart by
having modern (actually very Harry Potter-ish, if memory serves) spectacles on
him.
At first, the invasion of the Roman world on this Young Lucius, sitting in a
50's kitchen, is so jarring it seems like the beginning of "Time Bandits", but
as the film went on I could just accept it as a way of setting up the mingling
of periods in all the visuals.
I have no idea how hard it would be for a stranger to the play to accept the
boy as Titus' grandson, though.
--Ann
John Dean
I wasn't a stranger to the play when I saw the film, but I didn't realise
until later in the film that the kid was indeed young Lucius. I don't
recollect any clues or indicators until he made his specified appearance in
Act III.
--
John Dean
Oxford
De-frag to reply
KQKnave
sympo...@aol.computer (Symposium1) writes:
>At first, the invasion of the Roman world on this Young Lucius, sitting in a
>50's kitchen, is so jarring it seems like the beginning of "Time Bandits",
>but
>as the film went on I could just accept it as a way of setting up the
>mingling
>of periods in all the visuals.
I thought, with the boy playing with toy soldiers and other toy weapons, that
it was an attempt to show the universality of the themes of war and revenge.
I thought this version of Titus was great, but the opening is the only weak
part of the film in my opinion. It's not really neccessary.
See my demolition of Monsarrat's RES paper!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/monsarr1.html
The Droeshout portrait is not unusual at all!
http://hometown.aol.com/kqknave/shakenbake.html
Agent Jim
Gary Kosinsky
wrote:
>In article <3f831296...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>, gk...@vcn.bc.ca (Gary Kosinsky)
>writes:
>
>> I watched Julie Taymor's "Titus Andronicus" again the other
>>day, and found that I enjoyed it more than I have on previous
>>viewings.
>>
>> However, I'm still confused about the prominent role the young
>>boy plays in the movie. Later on in the movie, it's made clear that
>>he is supposed to be Lucius' son (or Titus' grandson). Is that his
>>role right from the start? That is, at the opening of the movie, when
>>we see the young boy playing with his toy soldiers at the dinner
>>table, are we, the viewers, to understand that we are watching Titus'
>>grandson playing with his toys?
>
>As in some previous productions of Titus (I'm thinking of the BBC Shakespeare
>by Jane Howell, but I believe it has a longer tradition than that), Young
>Lucius is given the responsibility of representing some hope for the future.
>Thus you see him prominently featured in the last filmed scene.
Right, carrying Aaron's child into the sunrise.
>To balance this, Taymor also creates glimpses of Lucius just being a regular
>kid, and yes, he has the most trappings of modern realism (clothes, toys, the
>setting of the first scene). Thus, I am pretty sure her attempt was to make the
>child the personification of us, the audience. Howell set the boy apart by
>having modern (actually very Harry Potter-ish, if memory serves) spectacles on
>him.
>
>At first, the invasion of the Roman world on this Young Lucius, sitting in a
>50's kitchen, is so jarring it seems like the beginning of "Time Bandits", but
>as the film went on I could just accept it as a way of setting up the mingling
>of periods in all the visuals.
That was sort of my idea the first time or two I saw this
movie. For some reason I thought perhaps the ensuing movie was
nothing more than something that was going on in the kid's mind as he
played with his toy soldiers. But I've changed my mind.
>I have no idea how hard it would be for a stranger to the play to accept the
>boy as Titus' grandson, though.
I've been doing some thinking about this movie since I made
the post, and I've decided that the young boy is indeed Young Lucius
from beginning to end. As you point out, the movie is a mish-mash of
styles (which I very much enjoyed), so there is nothing particularly
incongruous in the opening set.
But the reason he plays such a prominent role is, as you say,
that "Young Lucius is given the responsibility of representing some
hope for the future." It's as if there is no hope that the older
generations will ever be able to escape the killing/revenge/killing
mentality, and the only hope is that somehow the younger generation
shall.
And thinking about it in this way, I couldn't help thinking of
the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
It's a very interesting movie.
- Gary Kosinsky
Symposium1
<john...@frag.lineone.net> writes:
>I wasn't a stranger to the play when I saw the film, but I didn't realise
>until later in the film that the kid was indeed young Lucius. I don't
>recollect any clues or indicators until he made his specified appearance in
>Act III.
I believe that, on second watching, I noted that his father was the one
embracing him in an early scene. Truth is, I haven't seen it recently, so I'm
not sure I'm remembering clearly.
Incidentally, for those who saw Adrian Noble's fanciful soundstage-film version
of AMND (1996), young Osheen Jones also plays the boy in that, and like his
role in "Titus", it's a role that's enlarged to interject the role of the
observer. Strangely, he's the boy whose dream we are supposedly seeing, and why
a pre-teen boy would dream of such complicated sexual politics is quite beyond
me. So maybe I was more forgiving of what was done to him in "Titus," because
he was at least awake, shifting in a world torn apart by love and war.
--Ann
Art Neuendorffer
> >
> >> I watched Julie Taymor's "Titus Andronicus" again the other
> >>day, and found that I enjoyed it more than I have on previous
> >>viewings.
> >>
> >> However, I'm still confused about the prominent role the young
> >>boy plays in the movie. Later on in the movie, it's made clear that
> >>he is supposed to be Lucius' son (or Titus' grandson). Is that his
> >>role right from the start? That is, at the opening of the movie, when
> >>we see the young boy playing with his toy soldiers at the dinner
> >>table, are we, the viewers, to understand that we are watching
> >> Titus' grandson playing with his toys?
> sympo...@aol.computer (Symposium1) wrote:
>
> >As in some previous productions of Titus (I'm thinking of the BBC
Shakespeare
> >by Jane Howell, but I believe it has a longer tradition than that),
Young
> >Lucius is given the responsibility of representing some hope for the
future.
> >Thus you see him prominently featured in the last filmed scene.
"Gary Kosinsky" <gk...@vcn.bc.ca> wrote
> Right, carrying Aaron's child into the sunrise.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.shakespeare-bulletin.org/issues/winter00/review-crowl.html
<<As with Titus, so with Aaron and his version of the world he finds himself
trapped in. With a visual nod to Orson Welles' Othello, he is associated
with a variety of cages. The largest is in the bowels of Saturninus' palace
where Chiron, Demetrius, and Aaron have a version of the family game room;
the smallest is the tiny cage from which Aaron's child is released by Young
Lucius in the film's final sequence.
The film opens and closes with two scenes of Taymor's invention that signal
her intentions with the Shakespearean material. They both feature Osheen
Jones as Young Lucius, whom she elevates to the status of silent (with one
key exception) witness to the events of the film. In the opening scene,
Lucius is a contemporary child marshaling, with growing violent abandon and
plenty of ketchup, his toy soldiers on a kitchen table. Suddenly, the
external world begins to echo his imaginary violence as bombs begin crashing
into his home. He is swept up by an oddly dressed figure who slides with
him, Alice-like, down a great vortex into the world of Titus (interestingly,
Adrian Noble used this same narrative device and the same young actor in his
recent film of A Midsummer Night's Dream). At the film's end, Young Lucius
unlocks the small cage in which Aaron's baby son has been imprisoned,
cradles the infant in his arms, and walks slowly out of the Coliseum into
the dawn as Elliot Goldenthal's score swells on the soundtrack. Lucius is
the key device through which Taymor dramatizes her desire to see Titus
speaking directly to us about the violence of our own world as well as that
of ancient Rome. And Lucius is the figure by which she overlays an
optimistic, and controversial, ending on the bleak and bloody carnage that
litters the end of Shakespeare's brutal tale.
The opening scene of mock war played out on top of the kitchen table is
hauntingly echoed when Titus leads Aaron through his home and into the
kitchen seeking its butcher block and meat cleaver as the site and means of
chopping off his hand--a scene witnessed through a crack in the kitchen door
by Lucius. And that same kitchen is, of course, revisited for the slaying of
Chiron and Demetrius, who are suspended upsidedown above the cook's work
table. Taymor's camera captures Titus through the links of the iron chain
used to suspend his victims as he absentmindedly wipes his knife clean
against his white robe while their blood drips into Lavinia's pan. The
dining room, as the adjunct to the kitchen, is also linked to Young Lucius:
Taymor gives him Marcus' lines about the killing of the fly at the heart of
Shakespeare's sad, absurdist version of the family dinner table scene.
Shakespeare's fly-killing episode provides Taymor with the warrant for her
opening sequence of toy soldier destruction. Young Lucius becomes her
vehicle for moving beyond violence by moving through it as symbolic
participant and silent witness.
Her intentions are further underlined by costume and set design. Lucius
wears a T-shirt with an image of a female wolf on its back meant to remind
us, I gather, of the she-wolf who nursed Rome's founders: Romulus and Remus.
This image of a potentially nourishing Rome is placed in contrast to the
immense throne she builds for Saturninus over which looms the giant iron
head of a savage wolf. >>
---------------------------------------------------------------------
> sympo...@aol.computer (Symposium1) wrote:
>
> >To balance this, Taymor also creates glimpses of Lucius just being a
regular
> >kid, and yes, he has the most trappings of modern realism (clothes, toys,
the
> >setting of the first scene). Thus, I am pretty sure her attempt was to
make the
> >child the personification of us, the audience. Howell set the boy apart
by
> >having modern (actually very Harry Potter-ish, if memory serves)
> > spectacles on him.
> >
> >At first, the invasion of the Roman world on this Young Lucius, sitting
in a
> >50's kitchen, is so jarring it seems like the beginning of "Time
Bandits", but
> >as the film went on I could just accept it as a way of setting up the
mingling
> >of periods in all the visuals.
"Gary Kosinsky" <gk...@vcn.bc.ca> wrote
> That was sort of my idea the first time or two I saw this
> movie. For some reason I thought perhaps the ensuing movie was
> nothing more than something that was going on in the kid's mind as he
> played with his toy soldiers. But I've changed my mind.
---------------------------------------------------
http://www.geocities.com/tlverburg/titus.html
<<Taymor herself has said that her metaphorical use of Young Lucius stems
from her being "intrigued with this idea of the child's experience of
violence" (De Luca and Lindroth, 28).>>
---------------------------------------------------
http://www.movieclub.com/reviews/archives/00titus/titus.html
<<Having already directed a 1994 off-Broadway production of the play, Taymor
sees "Titus Andronicus" as the devilishly playful work of a then-new talent
and connects it to the preoccupation with violence that every young person
experiences -- whether via violent cartoons, video games or Arnold
Schwarzenegger movies. She then juxtaposes all of this stuff in this
gorgeous, moving mural of a movie. This approach is telegraphed in her
film's opening scene, set in a kitchen in the 1950s, where a little boy
(Osheen Jones) is playing with his toy soldiers and goes crazy bombarding
them with milk and mashed potatoes and whatever else is on the table. He
goes into such a frenzy that he is transported -- literally carried by a
circus performer from early Rome -- into Shakespeare's text, where he's cast
as Young Lucius, son of Lucius (Angus Macfadyen) who, in turn, is the eldest
son of Titus himself (Anthony Hopkins).
---------------------------------------------------
Time Bandits Questions
http://www.smart.co.uk/dreams/bandqs.htm
Why did Gilliam use dwarves in the movie?
<<"At the start of the film, the bandits appear to Kevin by stumbling out of
a wardrobe. "I had an old circus gag in the back of my head for that," said
Gilliam, "I always loved those little cars that would stop in a circus ring
and expel a limitless number of clowns. And I loved the idea of working with
a whole gang of little people throughout this particular picture. There were
a couple of reasons - one was practical, one was not. My silly side was just
tickled with the visual outrageousness of it all - with how I would be able
to contrast the bandits' height with other objects in the film. From the
very beginning, one of my ideas for Time Bandits had been to shoot the
entire film from the eye level of a child. However, I then had serious
reservations as to whether the kid could carry a whole movie. So I and my
cowriter - Michael Palin - came up with the idea of using a gang of really
short people who were the same size as the boy. Being able to get away with
my original idea was the primary reason we ended up using little people on
Time Bandits. A lot of the film is shot with the camera about three feet off
the ground or down in a hole.">>
Why did Gilliam kill off Kevin's parents?
<<"A basic theme of Time Bandits [was] the notion of this little boy
searching for his heroes and finding most of them coming up a little short.
Napoleon is a drunken runt obsessed with height and Robin Hood is an
upper-class twit who hasn't a clue about poor people. Even Agamemnon, who
treats the lad well, turns him down when the boy wants to learn swordplay.
Instead, Agamemnon teaches him magic tricks which he says at one point are
far more useful in life. Kevin's having learned to deal realistically with
hero worship is one of the reasons I left him alone at the end of the film
without his parents. I felt he was now capable of looking after himself in
life - not only because he had been through this adventure, but also because
he had discovered that heroes are not usually what they're cracked up to
be.">>
---------------------------------------------------
Art N.
Gary Kosinsky
<aneuendor...@comcast.net> wrote:
SNIP
>http://www.shakespeare-bulletin.org/issues/winter00/review-crowl.html
SNIP
>In the opening scene,
>Lucius is a contemporary child marshaling, with growing violent abandon and
>plenty of ketchup, his toy soldiers on a kitchen table. Suddenly, the
>external world begins to echo his imaginary violence as bombs begin crashing
>into his home. He is swept up by an oddly dressed figure who slides with
>him, Alice-like, down a great vortex into the world of Titus
SNIP
>http://www.movieclub.com/reviews/archives/00titus/titus.html
SNIP
> This approach is telegraphed in her
>film's opening scene, set in a kitchen in the 1950s, where a little boy
>(Osheen Jones) is playing with his toy soldiers and goes crazy bombarding
>them with milk and mashed potatoes and whatever else is on the table. He
>goes into such a frenzy that he is transported -- literally carried by a
>circus performer from early Rome -- into Shakespeare's text, where he's cast
>as Young Lucius, son of Lucius (Angus Macfadyen) who, in turn, is the eldest
>son of Titus himself (Anthony Hopkins).
SNIP
Interesting. So there is some critical opinion out there that
supports the idea that the kid is **not** necessarily Young Lucius
from the get-go. And just when I had made up my mind that he was.
Thanks for that, Art.
- Gary Kosinsky