‘Titanic’ or — The Adventures of Rose and Jack: The Curse of the Heart of the Ocean?
I shouldn’t be writing about ‘Titanic’ (1997) because I consider ‘A Night to Remember’ (1958) to be one of the finest movies ever made so was obviously going to approach Cameron’s flick with a heavily biased eye. I also thought it would feel cheap to simply compare the two versions because of the subject matter but also knew I’d be unable to resist. Still, ‘Titanic’ is called, and set onboard, the Titanic and is about the Titanic and the sinking of the Titanic so it’s understandable to compare it to another movie about the Titanic, right?
Well it would be if ‘Titanic’ was actually about the Titanic in the slightest! So what the hell is it about, then?
‘Titanic’ is about a little old lady (who is totally up herself I might add!) who gaslights some annoying underwater-robot-operating assholes with a necklace they’re after. This little old lady is called Rose and, like Cameron himself, is a raging narcissist who loves doing nothing more than gazing into water and admiring naked drawings of herself as a young woman and telling everyone around how smoking hot she use to be before going on to bore us with a tale about how her boyfriend died one day because he got cold and she’s very sad even though they only they had only just met, hardly knew each other and what relationship they did have consisted of nothing of more substance than suffering the company of some highly annoying folk musicians, her showing him her tits (I had no idea tits were such a necessary and integral part of Titanic history but I guess Cameron’s done his rigorous research so knows best) and then fucking in the back of a car. Her other boyfriend then becomes angry and tries to shoot them both (who knew all this was going on whilst the ship was sinking!) and even steals the precious necklace for himself only for Rose and Jack to give him the slip with Rose finally making it safe and sound to America with the necklace all to herself allowing her to start a life of rampant hedonism and, I assume, more car-fucking.
Oh, and at some point during all this the Titanic sinks.
And that’s it!
Look, I know James Cameron is a technically accomplished filmmaker and his decision to put a love story front and center obviously worked wonders financially but whilst focusing on Jack and Rose might make sense for a Hollywood blockbuster it reduces the sinking of the Titanic itself to nothing more than a sideshow, and that’s a problem for a movie called ‘Titanic’. In ‘A Night to Remember’ it wasn’t just about the sinking of a ship but about the upheaval of an entire world and how humanity saw itself in that world. Here it’s simply a convenient way of wriggling out of an irritating marriage and getting to see a willy in an automobile.
‘Titanic’ isn’t really about the Titanic at all.
Shifting the emotional focus from the ship and what it represented onto Jack and Rose has profound consequences and none of them are good. An example? Take the scene where Jack is handcuffed to a pipe as the water slowly rises. “Oh no!” we cry, “Will Jack escape in time?!” But here’s the thing — do we really need all this extra danger? Cameron would respond that Jack’s situation increases the tension but my rejoinder to that would be “Is the sinking of the Titanic not fucking tension enough?!” It’s like watching Luke in ‘Star Wars’ trying to blow up the Death Star AND perform open-heart surgery at the same time; it’s utterly redundant and diminishes power from the actual core of the subject. Plus, as soon as it becomes about Rose saving Jack it radically alters the relationship we have the with the sinking itself and all historical and thematic resonances are automatically lost.
Not only that but by narrowing in on Jack’s predicament at being wrongfully incarcerated there were several sequences in ‘Titanic’ when I completely forgot that the Titanic was actually sinking… in a movie called ‘Titanic’!
I repeat — James Cameron’s ‘Titanic’ has got hardly anything to do with the Titanic at all.
Technically the filmmaking is deliberate, monumental, maximalist and, ultimately, banal meaning Cameron’s movie resembles less a love story and more the Nazi architecture of Albert Speer. Also Cameron’s film embraces, rather than sheds, cinematic clichés which could account as to why ‘A Night to Remember’ feels, by far, the more modern, fresher and dynamic film in comparison.
Still, ‘Titanic’ isn’t utterly god-awful which considering all its issues and bloated run-time is something of a blessed miracle. In fact, it’s almost borderline tolerable. Yet it is shockingly empty, thematically hollow and treats the sinking of the ocean liner less as a way of viewing Empire, class and hubris and more as an image of oceanic pornography to leer over with James Cameron as Jack, capturing the vision of the Titanic splayed out before him like one of his French girls.
