Abstract

Anderson argues that corporate or media allegory as a hermeneutic practice offers necessary context for understanding creative production and that, in the case of Julie Taymor’s film Titus, it alters how we might view the film’s representation of historical, cultural, and familial relationships. Anderson claims that the film extends Shakespeare’s ambivalence over a Roman cultural and religious inheritance to her own position as an inheritor of two legacies—one, the historical avant-garde and two, the wonderful world of Disney. In making Titus her first film after the considerable success of her Disney collaboration The Lion King, Taymor delegitimizes her corporate partnership by symbolically disowning her Disney past: like young Lucius at the end of the film who walks into pixilated sunrise and away from what has become a Roman mausoleum, the director rejects Disney’s powerful corporate legacy that promises to shape the reception of her avant-garde work.

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