What exactly am I watching? (example: “Titanic”)

You will probably be a bit surprised to find out that I decided to write about this movie today, but it’s actually important for something else. Because, you see, next time you will get a more ‘Young Royals’ related post where we will need some of the stuff I’m discussing in the post below. So, you know…I have my reasons. Enjoy.

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So…Remember ‘Titanic’?

Huge ship, not enough lifeboats…and so much water everywhere you only dimly remember the second half of the movie because you had to pee so badly?

You know…that big, bold James Cameron blockbuster with the submarines and the blue heart-shaped diamond, with all those classist snobs and the splendour of the ritzy first-class dining saloons, with the soot-blackened faces of the coal trimmers and firemen keeping the ship’s furnaces burning and the drunk emigrants in steerage dancing to Irish folk music, the movie where Kate Winslet was seemingly unable to just scoot over a little bit on that floating door and make some room for a freezing Leonardo DiCaprio…

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that one.

The one about the unsinkable ship that just went and sank anyway. The one with the iceberg and the underwater shots and Celine Dion wailing insufferably all over the closing credits until your ears bled.

The one about that pretty, oh-so-prrrrretty ship…you already knew was unfortunately going to founder as you were watching the first minutes of the movie.

(Uhm…spoiler alert, I guess, for a historical event that happened 113 years ago: Psssst, the RMS Titanic sank on her maiden voyage…Yeah, I know, shock-gasp.)

Grand staircases and luxurious private promenades. Corsets and top hats. Champagne and lobster galore. And the caviar Jack never liked that much. All of that contrasted with the abject poverty in third class. With the steerage passengers undergoing lice inspections and the rats knowing which way to run once the water came rushing in…

The movie showing the vastness of the dark ocean in one of the most frightening shots in film history. The movie with that terrible jump-scare that had me scream in terror in my seat at the cinema (well, okay, touché, my jump-scare moments might not necessarily be your jump-scare moments, but to me that was far, far worse than seeing Jack croak it at the end).

The movie that had the purple sun setting spectacularly over the ship one last time. The movie that had Jack whooping, “I’m the king of the world!” standing at the bow together with Rose, and then later passionately kissing his best buddy Fabrizio at the exact same spot…oh, no, wait! I think I’ve got that slightly muddled up, haven’t I?

Anyway, you know which movie I’m talking about now, right?

And now you’re probably wondering why the hell I’m bringing it up today, aren’t you? Is there even anything interesting to discuss there?

Well, a while ago, a few lovely readers talked about this movie in the comments section of this here blog, and I think someone said the movie wasn’t really their cup of tea (I’m liberally paraphrasing the comment in question, obviously), and then they said something along the lines of, ‘Unless you, tvmicroscope, prove us wrong, of course.’

Aha!

Obviously that’s when I thought to myself, ‘Challenge accepted,’ and set out to change your hearts and minds…

Yeah, okay, oookay. Hold on to your lifejackets, my pals. I’m joking, alright? I had actually planned, quite a while ago, to include a short paragraph or two about this movie in another post (the next one you’ll get on this little blog) because there’s something in ‘Titanic’ we will need for our further discussions here. Then it quickly turned out that the paragraphs in question would turn into too much of a detour, so I made them into a separate post (which I intended to be short, but alas…no such luck).

So, the actual reason I’m writing about this movie today isn’t some sort of attempt at shock-and-awe persuasion. We simply need this post today for something else; it’ll contain something hopefully useful, something about screenwriting that we will discuss the next time around. And that’s the actual reason why we’re diving in and getting into the whole topic of ‘Titanic’. (The verb ‘diving in’ being very apropos, actually.)

But I get it, I really do: Movies that are these massive commercial successes can create an aversion in the more discerning viewer. They can feel too mainstream, too trite, too banal. We tend to have this instinctive reaction whenever we hear that millions of people watched something and were simply in awe of it. Can this really be worth our time, we wonder, scrunching up our nose as if presented with some foul-smelling seaweed.

I really understand this reaction, but I also think it’s wrong.

I deeply believe in engaging with each and every movie on its own terms. And what I usually fall back on when defending a mainstream blockbuster with a broad appeal like this is my favourite food analogy:

There is a time and a place for enjoying a meal that came from, say, some tiny and obscure hole-in-the-wall hot tip restaurant in Mexico City, run by a Lebanese immigrant trying his hand at some experimental fusion cuisine and combining the ingredients used by the indigenous Nahua people with the traditional recipes of his Maronite grandmother.

But sometimes…sometimes you just want to munch some fast food, and that’s okay, too.

There’s good fast food and bad fast food, as I’m sure you all know. But you would never approach a fast food restaurant and then get angry when you didn’t get the Nahua-Maronite fusion delicacy you were expecting – because you wouldn’t expect it there in the first place.

‘Titanic’ isn’t exactly fast food (I’d call sitcoms fast food, for example, but your mileage on this may vary); ‘Titanic’ is probably the equivalent of one of those big steakhouse chains. You will most likely get a pretty decent steak there, but it won’t be your niche restaurant risotto or anything.

In short, saying, “Sorry, I simply don’t like steak/don’t eat meat in general,” is perfectly fine. But saying, “I don’t eat steak, which is why this particular steak is so bad,” is a logical fallacy. It’s great if you’re more into arthouse cinema in general, but that doesn’t make that mainstream blockbuster bad for its own genre and for what it can achieve on its own turf.

I mean, we all love ourselves a niche film from time to time (and there are a few true gems to be found there, no really! There are. And I intend to write about one such teensy, tiny wonderful film pretty soon). But let’s be honest: There’s a lot of pretentious crap out there, too. The same is obviously true of every genre there is.

I’m totally fine with you adoring the Luxembourgish-Icelandic co-production with Finnish subtitles, in which the main protagonist is a Mongolian throat singer who arrives in Reykjavík and falls in love with a deafblind woman who can only communicate through Dalcroze eurhythmics. We’ve all been there.

But the moment you were to claim that this film is a masterpiece precisely because it was only ever seen by 17 people and one asthmatic cat in an arthouse theatre the size of a shoebox, I would probably suck some air in through my teeth and shake my head like a duck ruffling its feathers. (No offence to any Mongolian throat singers out there, obviously. We do appreciate your work, guys, with or without the Finnish subtitles…And no, no Icelanders, deafblind dancers or asthmatic household pets were harmed in the making of this joke, and I know better than to pick any fights with Luxembourgers.)

What I’m trying to say is: I try to engage with each and every movie on its own terms.

I don’t watch a musical film like the wonderful (1952) ‘Singing in the Rain’ and then complain about the fact that the characters keep bursting into song in the middle of scenes.

Of course, we don’t usually start to sing in the middle of a conversation nor tap dance our way through life out here in the real world, but when watching a movie, we have to consider the genre, the time it was made in, compare it to other, potentially similar movies, etc. (And well, Gene Kelly is just that brilliant, okay? Doodle-doo-do, doodle, doodle-doo-doo-dee-doodle.)

You wouldn’t watch a silent film and complain about it having no sound and everyone making these exaggerated hand gestures and sporting those absolutely over-the-top facial expressions, would you? You would engage with a film like that on its own terms, understanding that the genre dictates a certain kind of look and feel – even when the silent film in question isn’t really from the silent era anymore.

I’m guessing you wouldn’t complain about films being black-and-white either. In real life, nothing is just black and white in your immediate environment (I hope), and yet you can accept this as part of the experience when watching a movie like that.

And this actually applies to many, many more experiences with art if you think about it: I’m guessing that, when you go to see one of these rather minimalist theatre productions, you don’t complain about that one chair up on stage representing an actual chair in one scene, a church altar in the next and then a seat in a horse carriage in the one after that. You just accept that as part of the experience.

(I am reminded of a rather fatuous acquaintance of mine who once complained to me that opera wasn’t really her thing. You see, she had recently been to an opera house for the very first time in her life, and it had been at that point that she had discovered that, as she put it, “Every line they sang took forever because every vowel was stretched out over so many notes. ‘I a-a-a-am dy-y-y-y-y-ing,’ and so on and so forth.” The poor woman had never heard of melismatic singing before and had no idea that this is a feature not a bug in opera music. I remember that it struck me as akin to complaining about a glass of Bordeaux causing lightheadedness and then discovering, to one’s astonishment, that wine typically contains alcohol.)

In any case, watching a big blockbuster type movie is a bit like that. You shouldn’t compare it to your favourite Mongolian trying to impress a deafblind girl with whatever it is that’s going on in his throat. Compare it to other blockbusters instead.

Look at ‘Titanic’ and ask yourself, “What were disaster movies like in the 1990s?” and you’ll quickly see that this is actually a pretty good film.

And when it comes to the question of, “Does it manage to achieve what it set out to achieve? In other words, is it an effective movie?”...Well, did you see your best buddy wiping his eyes and claiming to have allergies afterwards? Did your average granny, who otherwise struggled with the settings on her TV, suddenly become intrigued with an old ocean liner at the bottom of the sea and start reading up on it? Did musical kids around the globe try to play ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’ on their violins to the chagrin of their long-suffering neighbours?

See!

There’s probably another reason why people instinctively recoil from a movie such as this, and I get that one, too. (Boy, I get this one even more, truth be told.)

Some of us instinctively dislike actors who are touted as this big celebrity-heartthrob that everyone and their mother are losing their minds over.

I find that absolutely understandable, and I have to admit that I have been afflicted with this particularly unfair bias as well from time to time.

And just to be clear: It is unfair. Acting is a job. And the vast majority of actors are lucky if they earn enough to pay their bills. Many of them can count themselves lucky if they manage to appear as that one-off character for one single episode in your favourite police procedural from time to time and literally just move from show to show.

Getting so lucky as to be cast in a big blockbuster and getting to ride the wave of success for a while, earning actual, real money, is akin to winning the lottery. Wouldn’t you, dear reader, let the press call you a heartthrob, too, in a situation like this? Would you even be able to control what reporters write about you?

None of these actors ever know when their lucky streak will end. Only a very small number of them manage to stay on top for years or even decades. So, yes, it’s unfair to judge an actor’s skill by examining their current heartthrob status, which might end as quickly as it came, anyway. If you got a good gig like that, wouldn’t you milk it for what it’s worth?

And yet we all do it. It’s only human. We see an actor making the centrefold of teenage magazines, and we instantly scoff at them and deny that they could be any good.

And I’ll freely admit that I’m not free of this prejudice either:

I never had that reaction to Leonardo DiCaprio in ‘Titanic’ (although I understand why some people might have) because it was already fairly obvious at that point that the guy is just insanely talented. Whatever you may think of him as a person, it’s pretty clear that this is one of the greatest actors of his generation, and he did already have a few absolutely jaw-dropping performances under his belt at that time, so it was actually becoming apparent already at this point that he was far, far more than just a heartthrob.

But I will freely admit that I’ve had similar reactions to other actors.

I had this aversion to Ryan Gosling for the longest time. I just couldn’t take him seriously because so many people were swooning over him. I’ll admit it: I’m prejudiced. I saw the big hype about his alleged looks (and he’s not at all my type, anyway) and I scoffed. Couldn’t watch any movies with him in it because I felt I’d just be shallow and dumb if I did. And so I avoided pretty much all of his films for no rational reason whatsoever.

Well, and then I found out what he had done for ‘La La Land’ (2016), and my jaw dropped as I went, “The fucker did WHAT?!”

And that’s when I was cured of my anti-Ryan-Gosling-prejudice once and for all; I hold him in the highest regard now. True story.

(And yeah, yeah, yeah, I can still see it in the slightly stiff way he has his hands on the keys when he’s playing that he didn’t grow up playing the piano, but still…That is an amazing feat for an absolutely layperson to accomplish; it’s very impressive. I can't help but doff my hat to him.)

So, yes, I know this feeling of aversion when you just instinctively recoil because you think somebody who attracts these huge crowds of screeching teenagers, who have to change their underwear after seeing him, cannot be a serious actor. I’ve never had this feeling of revulsion with Leonardo DiCaprio (who incidentally is also not my type at all), but I do know this kind of aversion, of course.

And yet, it’s really unfair; we shouldn’t judge an actor’s skills based on his or her popularity.

So, here we go: Our deep dive into…uh-oh…‘deep dive’ makes it sound like I’m literally about to dive almost 4 kilometres (12,500 feet) to the bottom of the North Atlantic where the wreck of the Titanic has come to rest, and I’m certainly not doing that, no way. You won’t get me anywhere near a ship in real life, sorry. You would have to literally knock me out and carry me aboard.

What I meant is: Let’s take a look at the movie ‘Titanic’, my friends.

So, fasten your lifebelts, take out your Irish tin whistles, get yourselves some ice (but only for your whiskey tumblers) and get ready to relive some of your 1990s nostalgia.

Let us discuss some of the movie’s subtext, which, as it turns out, runs surprisingly deep and about which most of the film’s fans remain as much in the dark as the shipwreck at the bottom of the deep, black sea.

We will talk about metaphors and mirror characters and symbolism. We will talk about who the man of the hour is in this film.

And we will discuss why there are so many gay people who hold this movie dear to their hearts. (Because surprise, surprise…there are! And I think I know why. And no, it’s not just the handsome sailors prancing about in uniform aboard this ship, or Kate Winslet’s charming fire-extinguisher-coloured curls and heaving bosom – depending on which way you’re wired. There’s another reason, too.)

First and foremost, though, we will examine the film’s screenplay, and you will be surprised to hear that it’s actually really, really good and much cleverer than you might think at first glance.

So, we won’t be looking at the whole production (as impressive, nay, epic, challenging and often nerve-racking for the poor actors as that might have been). We won’t look too deeply into the editing or the cinematography either (which both won an Oscar, much deservedly) or the costumes or the original score, etc.

What we will discuss now is something seemingly very basic. And that’s the following question:

When we’re watching ‘Titanic’, what is it actually that we’re watching?

That’s always an interesting question to ask when watching a movie, and yet most people don’t ever think of it at the cinema or on the sofa in front of their TV. It seems such a basic question that it doesn’t even occur to most viewers:

What am I watching?

If you were asked to summarize the basic premise of ‘Titanic’ in one quick sentence, would you say it’s ‘Romeo and Juliet on the high seas’?

Because this is what a lot of people think it is: Romeo and Juliet on the high seas.

But it’s not!

It’s really, really not.

For one, ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is a tragedy, and ‘Titanic’ isn’t a tragedy at all.

This is the point where I practically can hear the mental record-scratch sound in your brain, my friends.

“Did tvmicroscope just say that the sinking of the Titanic wasn’t a tragedy? Well, that’s unusually cruel and callous. Surely the agonizing death of about 1,500 poor terrified souls, screaming and thrashing about in seawater that’s below freezing, many, many women and children among them, surely that counts as a tragedy. If that doesn’t qualify as one, what else would, right?”

And yes, you’re absolutely right: The sinking of the RMS Titanic, the real ship in real life, was a terrible, heartbreaking tragedy, no question.

But I’m not talking about the real Titanic in real life; I’m talking about a movie that was made about that tragic event. And even more importantly, I’m not using the word ‘tragedy’ in its colloquial sense (a dreadful situation/a disaster). I’m using this word with its original Greek meaning in mind; what I mean by ‘tragedy’ is a genre of drama. When you look at the screenplay of ‘Titanic’ through this lens, you’ll quickly realize that it is most certainly not a tragedy at all.

I’m saying this despite the fact that James Cameron, the screenwriter and director of this monumental film (in other words: the father whose brainchild this movie is) described it as ‘Romeo and Juliet on the high seas’, as well. He did so when he was pitching it to the producers though, i.e. the deep pockets who were supposed to finance the most expensive movie of all time (which it was back in 1997). So, I think it’s perfectly understandable why he used this (actually rather ill-fitting) description: He was trying to convince them to throw millions at a project that looked pretty much insane to any outsider (think of the massive almost-life-size, historically accurate replica of the ship Cameron had built on set, for example). He just needed a descriptor, a buzzword that would capture their imagination. It’s a sales pitch, a catchphrase; it doesn’t describe the reality of what this movie is at all.

And I don’t believe for a second that Cameron doesn’t know that his movie isn’t a tragedy, that it isn’t at all like ‘Romeo and Juliet’. This guy wrote the screenplay himself, and you can see how deliberate his choices in the text are when you scrutinize it carefully.

So, what is it then? What are we actually seeing when we’re watching ‘Titanic’?

It’s a coming-of-age story.

Too wild?

No, really. It is!

Coming-of-age stories needn’t be set at a high school or summer camp or anything like that.

‘Titanic’ is literally a coming-of-age story set on the high seas.

And James Cameron knows exactly that this is what it is; this choice of genre didn’t happen by accident.

It’s actually more than just a coming-of-age story, too. It’s a very specific kind of coming-of-age story: a feminist one.

If this makes you scratch your head in disbelief because you immediately thought of that scene with naked Kate Winslet lounging about on the sofa, all laid out for the hungry eye of the (male) character in the room and the presumed (male) gaze of the audience, if this is what you think of when you hear the word ‘Titanic’, then I can just shrug and say, “Snafus happen, okay?” Nobody is perfect, and James Cameron messed up there, no question. But that still doesn’t change the basic truth of this coming-of-age story having an underlying feminist message (we will come back to this in a bit).

To understand why this movie is indeed not a tragedy but a coming-of-age story, we have to ask a few tough questions about the characters in it.

We have to understand why Rose simply couldn’t just scoot over on that floating door at the end of the movie and why Jack absolutely had to die!

(And no, none of this has got anything to do with the material of the door in question nor the buoyancy of it. And the temperature of the water has no bearing on the outcome of this story either. Jack Dawson had to die at the end of ‘Titanic’ because he simply had to! The question of whether Rose and Jack could have both survived if she had just made some room for him on that door doesn’t make any sense once you examine the subtext of this story.)

Well, and perhaps we will even touch upon the question of why so many people who identify as gay love this movie so deeply. Isn’t it just some boring old straight love story? (Quick spoiler alert: No, it isn’t.)

And just in case you’re scratching your head again now: I do know a very-much niche director (don’t worry; it’s nobody you’d know – think Mongolian throat singer with Finnish subtitles) who simply adores ‘Titanic’. That might sound surprising. After all, ‘Titanic’ is anything but arthouse; it’s such a big blockbuster. But this friend of mine is in awe of ‘Titanic’ and keeps telling me that it’s one of his favourite movies of all time. So, there must be something to it, right? Something that we can all understand once we dissect its screenplay carefully under the microscope.

So, we’ve got a lot to talk about. Let’s get to it:

To understand ‘Titanic’ and its subtext, including the whole question of its genre, we have to first and foremost ask ourselves who the main protagonists of ‘Titanic’ are.

A lot of people will tell you, at this point, that the main protagonists are one Rose DeWitt Bukater and one Jack Dawson, as played by Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. And that, my dear fellow sailors, would be dead wrong.

‘Titanic’ doesn’t have two main protagonists – just one.

If you use the term ‘main protagonist’ in a more colloquial sense to mean ‘the characters who show up on screen fairly often’, then, well, yes, there are probably two of them: Jack and Rose.

But if we take the term seriously…

‘Titanic’ has one main protagonist, and that’s Rose. No one but Rose!

Jack isn’t the main protagonist of ‘Titanic’.

To understand who the main protagonist of a story (any story) is, you have to ask yourself who the character is that experiences character growth and change throughout the story. Who undergoes the big transformation over the course of the narrative? Where do we get the character development we, as viewers, all crave and find so fascinating? Who develops and changes throughout the story?

Rose.

Jack doesn’t really change all that much, does he?

He shows up as this proverbial free spirit; he literally calls himself a ‘tumbleweed blowing in the wind’. He’s a drifter, freely floating about, travelling the world, living as a Parisian clochard (or rather the American cliché of one), drawing and painting, meeting all sorts (artistic types, prostitutes and working-class people…) He even says so when he claims that, as long as he’s got air in his lungs and a few blank sheets of paper, he’s got everything he needs. He doesn’t care what other people think of him. He just is.

…and ultimately, he dies that exact same guy: the ultimate free spirit.

He doesn’t really change.

It’s Rose and her character development that are the focal point of this story.

The main protagonist of this film is a young woman.

I think I don’t need to tell you how unusual this is. It is rare even these days, but if you were around in the 1990s, then you know that it was even rarer back then.

These types of disaster movies usually feature a male main protagonist and his big struggle™ as he fights the elements or an asteroid falling out of the skies or some big, bad alien invasion or what have you.

A woman as the main protagonist of a story like this is very unusual (and whatever else you might say about ‘Titanic’ as a movie, that decision by James Cameron should get him at least a couple of pokémon points for originality, don’t you think?).

What’s more, Rose isn’t your stereotypical ‘strong female character’.

Do you know what that is?

I have to admit that I cannot think of the trope of the so-called ‘strong female character’™ without a full-body shudder.

Those are the types of cardboard-cutout characters that are introduced solely to fend off allegations of misogyny and sexism, but ultimately produce even more of what they purport to be fighting: Look, look, we’ve got this female ninja-type character, and we’re even going to show her in full leather combat gear (that ‘accidentally’ accentuates all of her secondary sexual characteristics). And now she’s going to kickbox and even knock out a guy twice her size with her high heels, all while smiling seductively into the camera. Her eyeliner is going to be so sharp that men will be scared to cross her. And of course, she will always have a sexy, sassy, snappy one-liner prepared whenever she’s doing her know-it-all routine and outsmarts every man in the room.

You all know female characters like that, right?

And you all know how ridiculous they are.

I don’t think anyone needs female characters to be like that. Female characters who are these badasses that weigh 100 pounds and can (unrealistically) knock out a giant gorilla of a guy, female characters who know everything and are absolutely flawlessly brilliant while looking like a fashion model in combat gear…female characters like that are just clichés.

So, what kind of female characters would actually be much better? What should viewers actually want in a female character?

Well, it’s actually not that complicated, is it?

The same thing we are used to getting in male characters: Characters who are complex and interesting. Characters that have dreams and fantasies and fears and hopes and goals. Characters that have depth and yes, characters that are flawed, that make mistakes and have regrets, characters who have to learn things, characters who are just interesting to watch. Characters that aren’t just black-and-white. Characters that are real and above all…well-written.

Basically, all the things we get from male characters all the time. (Why is that even so difficult?)

Well, and now look at what James Cameron did there: We can decry that ‘nude-drawing scene’ all we want (and we should actually; that scene is the dictionary definition of a ‘male gaze scene’), but even with this caveat in mind, we can still acknowledge that otherwise…Rose is actually a pretty interesting character.

She isn’t just some insufferable Mary Sue. She doesn’t knock out any of the officers on board, that’s for sure. She is quite complex.

This is an intelligent young woman, who is really, really struggling. At the beginning of the film, we are allowed to see how lost and depressed she is. And then we go with her, step by step, as she frees herself from this state of depression and paralysis, taking charge of her own life towards the end of the movie.

And she learns a ton of stuff on the way, too.

It’s not like she’s just magically good at everything. (Remember that scene with the axe? I love it. And not just because I have to laugh out loud every time I see her hit the, uhm, ‘same’ spot twice. It is legitimately a good idea to show the audience that a character has limitations. Rose…wouldn’t be the kind of sexy-combat-woman-in-a-leather-costume because she would just suck at this stuff. And I think that’s great! She’s a normal person. Also…she does get the job done in the end, doesn’t she? She cuts the chain on Jack’s handcuffs in half, so there’s that.)

Rose doesn’t know how to handle an axe. She can’t spit. She is shocked at the idea of riding a horse without a side saddle. She desperately clings to her old beliefs and the rules and norms of her upper-class upbringing at first (just look at her righteous indignation when Jack asks her point-blank if she loves her fiancé Cal), and yet it’s these precise constraints that make her so unhappy. She doubts; she hesitates, scared to take any chances and risk everything. But she has dreams, too. She wants things out of life. She longs for change.

In short: she is an interesting and complex character.

And at the end of her character arc, we get the massive pay-off: She gambles everything to win her own freedom by taking on a new name and identity after she’s been rescued by the RMS Carpathia. And thus she manages to slip away from her erstwhile fiancé and take control of her own life.

So, when we think of the movie ‘Titanic’, we have two items in the pro column already:

1. The film’s main protagonist is a woman (rare even now, and very, very unusual back then, especially in the disaster movie genre).

2. And Rose is a complex, flawed and interesting character with actual, real fears and dreams.

What else?

Well, who is Jack in this story? I did already tell you that he is not really the main protagonist of the movie ‘Titanic’, so…who is he?

Jack is a catalyst character.

Remember your chemistry lessons back in high school/grammar school?

Remember how sometimes, when a chemical reaction happens, the end product will show no trace of the substance you nonetheless know must have played a role in the process of the chemical reaction itself?

There is no trace of the catalyst left, but you can say – just by looking at the end result – that this catalyst must have facilitated the reaction or even made it possible in the first place.

Jack is a catalyst to Rose’s character development.

Jack isn’t part of Rose’s life until that point in her life in April of 1912. And he won’t be a part of her life after that fateful night in the water. He will, in fact, die.

And we are even told by a much-older Rose, in the frame narrative of this movie, that now Jack exists only in her memories: Since Jack won his ticket in a last-minute poker game, he presumably doesn’t show up on the ship’s passenger manifest. He hasn’t left any kind of paper trail, as a matter of fact. He vanished without a trace…as if he never existed in the first place. Oh, but Rose knows exactly that he did exist! She tells us as much. He exists in her memories. He brought about that big change in her. He was the catalyst in the chemical reaction that was her character development. In a sense, he is a part of her now.

Rose is the main character, and Jack is the catalyst to her character development.

And what do you know…catalysts are usually female.

James Cameron could have easily written a screenplay centred around a male main protagonist boarding the ship, a complex, interesting man who would have met a female free-spirited woman who’d have helped the struggling main protagonist overcome the obstacles in his life. Female catalyst characters like that are a dime a dozen. And often they die. They exist largely to further the male protagonist’s character development and bring about the transformation in him. James Cameron could have written a story like that and would have only done what thousands of screenwriters had done before him (and continue to do to this very day).

And yet, he didn’t.

His main protagonist is a woman.

And the catalyst (i.e. the character whose only function in the text it is to bring about the change in the main protagonist; the character who doesn’t really serve another purpose and who doesn’t really exist for their own sake) that catalyst…is male.

This character constellation is unusual enough to be noteworthy.

And it is no coincidence either. It’s not just something James Cameron did by accident, without even realizing it.

I mean, you can chide James Cameron for that ‘nude-drawing scene’ all you want, and he probably did push his actors to their limits in the cold water and everything, too, but credit where credit is due: The character constellation and basic premise of his story are unusual.

Look how deliberate this actually is:

When does Rose actually first meet Jack?

When she most needs him!

She is on the brink of committing suicide. She has climbed over the stern railing of the ship and is about to jump overboard because she can’t take it anymore: Everything in her life is being decided for her as though she were a little child (hold that thought!). It’s a gilded cage. She has no say over who her future husband is going to be and is expected to conform, trapped in a life she doesn’t want for herself but doesn’t know how to escape from.

Let me give you a quote from the script quickly. This is how Rose describes it herself:

“I saw my whole life as if I’d already lived it. An endless parade of parties and cotillions, yachts and polo matches. Always the same narrow people, the same mindless chatter. I felt like I was standing at a great precipice with no one to pull me back. No one who cared or even noticed.”

That’s why she decides to take her own life.

And that’s…when he appears: the catalyst to her character development.

Then she undergoes this huge transformation throughout the entire movie (and it’s specifically tied to the horrific, unimaginable, cathartic disaster she is not just witnessing but is forced to live through), and at the end of the story, Jack leaves her again: He dies.

When does he die?

Answer: When she doesn’t need him anymore!

It’s done very cleverly in the screenplay, too: We see her saying goodbye to Jack and then he disappears in the darkness of the deep, black ocean. And then suddenly, right that second, she decides to dive into the ice-cold water, swims over to a dead body nearby, grabs his whistle and starts to blow that whistle with all the power she can muster, hypothermia or no.

She wants to live! She wants to survive! She doesn’t want to give up anymore. She is choosing life, embracing it, as a matter of fact. And she really, really fights for it…now.

You can clearly see the very deliberate contrast between these two scenes: Jack’s first appearance in her life coincides with her not wanting to live anymore. And Jack’s disappearance from her life coincides with her choosing life and fighting for it with anything she’s got.

He’s the catalyst (and he even disappeared without a trace). Rose’s character development is the chemical reaction he has produced.

And what a character development that is! From deeply depressed and suicidal to fighting for her life in the ice-cold water, wanting to survive in order to live life to the fullest. That’s one hell of a change right there!

We get some foreshadowing of this moment, too: When Rose climbs over the railing and tries to jump overboard at the beginning of the movie, this happens specifically at the stern of the ship.

(Note the difference between her and Jack, by the way, who shouts, “I’m the king of the world!” at the ship’s bow, and who kisses Fabrizio…uh, I mean, Rose at that exact same spot, too. Jack is all about looking forward, about charging ahead. Rose’s depression means she’s constantly looking backwards; she cannot imagine the future to be any different than her past, her upbringing seems to dictate her whole life. Her suicide attempt is set specifically at the stern of the ship because she cannot see a future for herself; it’s exactly as she said, “I saw my whole life as if I’d already lived it.”

When they kiss at the bow, Rose gets a glimpse of what’s ahead; there’s finally a future to be seen on the horizon, and she is flying towards it. Location, location, location, remember? Where a scene is set is almost as important as what’s happening in it. Rose could have easily tried to kill herself at the bow of the ship or by trying to jump over the port or starboard railing, but that’s specifically not how Cameron wrote that ‘suicide attempt scene’.)

But be that as it may…So, Rose tries to jump overboard at the stern; that’s where she tries to end her own life. And you can see how she argues with Jack when he first appears, how he has to try everything in his power to keep her from jumping. She really doesn’t want to be on this ship anymore. She wants to jump off it and die.

At the end of the movie, Jack and Rose are clinging to the railing, as the ship is descending on its final plunge. It’s at this point that they realize where they are: the ship’s stern.

They even comment on it, stating that this is where they first met.

But this is more than just a neat bookending device. This foreshadows Rose’s ultimate transformation:

The stern is where Rose wanted to jump, where she wanted to let go off the railing and fall to her death. She warned Jack, who was trying to save her life, that if he came any closer she’d let go of the railing and jump.

At the end of the movie, the reverse is happening: Rose is clinging to that railing for dear life. She doesn’t want to let go anymore. She doesn’t want to fall to her death and die. She is clinging to that railing because she wants to live.

This moment with both of them, Jack and Rose, clinging to the railing together foreshadows her ultimate choice after Jack has died and disappeared in the black waters of the ocean. Rose will choose life.

This moment at the end of the movie, when Rose climbs over the stern railing again because she wants to live, is not at all like that first time when she climbed over the stern railing in order to jump and kill herself. It’s the exact opposite.

This scene isn’t just well-shot and insanely suspenseful. It is clever, too. Its purpose is to foreshadow her ultimate choice after Jack has died in the water: The choice to get that whistle and blow it as loudly as she can because she has finally learned that life is the most precious thing we are all given on this earth.

This obviously brings us to our next question:

Is ‘Titanic’ a heartbreaking story?

No, of course, not. It’s the opposite.

Were there viewers who were deeply upset about Jack’s death and the lack of a happily-ever-after for the two of them together? I’m sure there were (and still are).

But actually…being her one-and-only, happily-ever-after guy was never Jack’s function in the text.

I’m going to say something now that’ll sound nearly blasphemous to the ears of all dyed-in-the-wool Rose-and-Jack-forever fans: Jack is not Rose’s one true love. Not like that.

There, I said it.

That’s not at all what his function in the story is. Them being together forever and ever (or her mourning his death forever and ever, unable to forget him)…is decidedly not what this story is all about.

And viewers who get overly upset about Jack’s death and think that Rose will mourn his loss forever and won’t ever be truly happy with any other man, viewers who read ‘Titanic’ like that don’t really get what this story is about.

After all, it is very obvious where this story is going: The goal of the narrative is to make sure Rose can break free and leave the constraints of her horrible, upper-class life behind. The main question of this movie is: How can Rose find the strength to break free? How can she take control of her own life and be truly happy?

That’s Jack’s function in the text.

He isn’t the boyfriend she will mourn forever. He is the guy who makes her character transformation possible, so she can be really, truly happy with…whoever in the future.

Rose’s one, true love never makes an appearance in the movie, as a matter of fact. Because that’s not the point of the movie.

There are tiny hints, of course, that she found happiness in life: She has a new name when she’s presented to us as old Rose. She is Rose Calvert now, so there must have been a Mr. Calvert. In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment we even see a blurry photograph of him, Rose and their two children on a beach somewhere. But the more important photographs that she has brought to the research ship Keldysh are the ones that show her life after her transformation: She rode a horse without a side saddle. She went ice-fishing, and most importantly, she became an actress – something she had always dreamed to become (a deleted scene showing us Rose at the age of 17 years old, walking around the boat deck with Jack, tells us about that dream). Rose managed to live her dream: She became an actress.

The point of these photographs is to show us that she is the centre of this fictional universe, and that her dreams came true.

And no, she didn’t just do all of these things in order to honour Jack and his sacrifice; she didn’t just do them while secretly crying into her latte for the rest of her life, still mourning him decades after the fact. She did them because she lived a full life! Because she was finally happy after she managed to break free. The fact that she definitely chose her own husband and didn’t allow anyone to push her into an arranged marriage again, is just one among the many, many things she accomplished in life because she took fate into her own hands!

She had children and even grandchildren (we meet her lovely grownup granddaughter Lizzie in the frame narrative of this story), and I’m sure Mr. Calvert was a wonderful man whom she loved very much.

But this story, this movie, isn’t about that man. It’s about the need to take charge of your own life, so you can eventually be happy in the future.

Jack doesn’t represent her future; he’s not part of the end product of the chemical reaction. But he’s the man who makes a future life like that possible for her.

That’s why this story is actually the opposite of a tragedy: It’s not heartbreaking; it’s life-affirming and empowering. Rose has to free herself over the course of this story in order to be happy.

That is exactly Jack’s purpose in the text. This isn’t a story à la ‘Nuovo Olimpo’, where the main protagonist remains sad, melancholy and unhappy forever, mourning the loss of love because he lost the one person who could have meant everything to him. (And even ‘Nuovo Olimpo’ is actually quite a bit more complicated than that.)

It’s a story about choosing life over death and embracing it…so you can eventually make your own choices and be happy.

Say what you want about that ‘nude-drawing scene’, but it gives us a very interesting line at the very end when old Rose comments dreamily, “It was the most erotic moment of my life…” and then suddenly adds dryly, “...up until then at least.”

This deadpan line of hers is very important: Rose had other lovers after Jack. (Also, I don’t know about your head canons, my friends, but can we all agree that Mr. Calvert must have been a hottie? We don’t see all that much of him in that one blurry photograph, so I challenge you to tell me what actor you’d choose to play him in the comments section.)

Anyway, my point is: Life was good to Rose. That’s the whole point of this frame narrative with old Rose, too.

I don’t always like frame narratives, and usually they don’t work. They’re often incredibly corny and cheesy…or even just plain dumb. (Case in point: Bradley Cooper’s recent Leonard Bernstein biopic ‘Maestro’.)

But ‘Titanic’ is one of those rare exceptions: It has a frame narrative that works. And it works because that’s precisely what the whole story is all about: Did Rose transform through her interaction with her catalyst, so she can spend the rest of her life making her own choices and being happy? Did Rose manage to live that full life she deserves?

Remember how Jack exhorts her, as he is literally dying, to embrace life?

He says, “Listen, Rose. You’re gonna get out of here. You’re gonna go on, and you’re gonna make lots of babies, and you’re gonna watch them grow. You’re gonna die an old lady warm in her bed. Not here. Not this night. Not like this. Do you understand me?”

And then she goes and does exactly that: She has a happy life and dies at the end of the movie an old lady in her own bed.

Jack dies on that night in the water because he has fulfilled his role. Rose turned from a woman who hated the idea of having to live another day…into a woman who wanted nothing more than to survive. Jack dies not because there is no room on that door Rose is lying on but because he has fulfilled his function in the text. And that function is precisely not ‘love interest forever and ever’. He’s a catalyst. He’s the guy who helps her see the value in her own existence, so she can take the reins and live life to the fullest.

The term ‘coming-of-age story’ describes a type of narrative in which the main protagonist has to grow up. The character in question will often be on the cusp of adulthood, but still pretty immature (that’s why James Cameron chose Rose to be 17 years old in the story, I think!), and the ‘growing-up part’ is usually about more than just turning from an adolescent into a proper adult; it’s about struggling and then managing to take fate into your own hands and learning to make your own choices.

These types of stories are always about young people finding the strength in themselves to live life authentically and be true to themselves.

At the end of the movie, Rose finds the strength to do that, and the person who has helped her along the way is Jack. That’s who he is. Not her ‘one true love’, not the one she will mourn forever and ever. He is the catalyst who prepares the way and makes it possible for her to commit to life and to love (even though that love will ultimately be with another man).

The fact that this movie is a surprise classic among gay people might sound strange to some. Some might even scoff at this idea, claiming that it has something to do with gay men liking opulent costumes and grand drama. But I think it’s more than just that (although there’s nothing to be said against opulent costumes and grand drama in my book). I, for one, know not just one, but several lesbian women whose favourite film this is. You might think this is just anecdotal evidence, but I don’t think that’s the case:

‘Titanic’ is a story about a main protagonist who struggles and eventually finds the strength to live life as her authentic true self. That is one hell of a message, and it appeals to many very different people specifically for that reason. It’s a story about a character who sheds the lie she had to hide her true self in and finds her real identity.

At the end of the movie, Rose takes on Jack’s name. Not, I believe, because she imagines that she is married to him forever now, but because he has become a part of her: The catalyst who can’t be observed nor seen anymore, who has disappeared without a trace is still always there with her because he has transformed her into something else: into her own true self.

And now imagine how hard this new beginning must have been for her at this point: She comes back to the US with nothing but the wet clothes on her back. No family connections anymore. No money. A teenager without a job or even a proper education. A woman. In 1912! (And while she has that priceless blue diamond in her pocket, it’s clearly implied in the movie that she never sold it in order to survive. More about that diamond in a bit.) So, imagine how hard that new beginning must have been. It would be difficult even today; it must have been insanely hard back then.

And yet she does it: She takes charge of her life. She transforms into somebody else, so she can live life freely and be happy.

Is there another aspect of this movie that shows us just how deliberately James Cameron wrote it as a coming-of-age story?

Yes, but this one will be a bit more tricky.

We have only talked about the film’s basic premise and its main character constellation so far. We have to properly dive into this film’s subtext now, and boy, that subtext is pretty much 4 kilometres deep, let me tell you…

So, let me show you a scene that you probably all know very well. As you watch it, try to focus on the interaction between Rose and her fiancé Cal, the man with the most insane guyliner since Tutankhamun. And yes, his eyebrow game is certainly on point, too. I mean, Captain Jack Sparrow has nothing on him.

The scene is unfortunately in two parts on youtube, so I’ll just link you to both of them.

Immediately after the first video, Rose will come up with that Freudian phallus joke, and then she will storm out of the room.

Here’s video No. 1, and here’s video No. 2.

(Please watch both of these videos now, they are both very short. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a video that would combine these two parts into one, sorry.)

So, what you see here is that Cal orders for Rose, without ever asking her what she wants to eat. (Also, bleurgh at the idea of eating rare lamb with mint sauce. I mean, I get violently seasick on ships as it is, but even if I didn’t…just the mere idea of having to eat this would certainly do the trick. Please excuse me while I go in search of my barf bag.)

So, Cal orders for Rose; he just decides for her, without ever consulting with her on the matter.

Now, you might argue that this wasn’t all that unusual back in those chauvinistic times, but then Molly Brown, who’s sitting across from them, quips, “You gonna cut her meat for her too there, Cal?” (And you know how I feel about jokes: Jokes often hide a deeper truth about the subtext of a scene.)

What Molly Brown is implying there is that Cal is treating Rose like a child. Cutting the meat for someone is not something you do for an adult, and you wouldn’t have done so even back in those more misogynistic times.

The screenwriter is telling us that Cal is behaving like a dad when it comes to his fiancé (and not a very good one, at that). You get another echo of this at the very end of the scene when Rose has already stormed out and Cal says, “Well, I may have to start minding what she reads from now on, won’t I?” That, too, is something parents say about their children’s choice in literature. It’s not something you say about your partner…at least not today, I hope.

But Cal doesn’t see Rose as a partner. He doesn’t take her seriously as an equal. He treats her as though he were her father and she were his daughter. (And clearly, James Cameron is making a general point here about the way this patriarchal society treated women: The husbands were behaving like fathers who could control their wives as though they were little children.)

Now, guess what the next scene after this is! (Oooh, this is so, so good, I promise.)

The next scene after this disastrous lunch scene is the one in which Jack spots Rose for the first time on deck. He sees her only from afar, of course, but a lot of viewers are so impressed by this love-at-first-sight moment that they completely miss the very beginning of this scene.

Let’s see if you notice it (I mean I’ve already told you, right?): I’m going to give you the scene now, and all I’m asking you to do is just to remember that the scene immediately preceding this one established that Cal behaves as though he were Rose’s father (!) and as though Rose were just a little child (!).

Here we go: Let’s see if you can see it. Here’s the scene.

Did you see that? No, really…did you see that?!

How does the scene start?

With a little girl and her father! Literally!

And the father is holding her, so, so tightly, so she doesn’t just tumble over the railing and fall overboard. (And Jack draws the two of them in that way, too: Daddy’s big, broad hands are on her arm and on that railing, and he’s making really sure his darling-daughter doesn’t plunge into the ocean.)

We have just seen a scene in which Cal acted like Rose’s father and treated her like a little child who couldn’t be trusted with her own choices at a restaurant. And now…we get exactly that: A little girl and her father.

Now, rewatch this scene and try to listen carefully to what this father is saying to his little daughter (it’s a bit difficult to make out):

“It’s a great big shaft, goes right through the middle of the boat. It’s known as a propeller. And it goes right along there, and it makes these waves. Makes them spin.”

Yes! That’s what the father in that scene says. And that happens right after we were told that whole Freudian phallus joke about the men (the patriarchs!) of this society being obsessed with size.

A great big shaft.

Oh, man!

These two, the girl and her father, aren’t just incidental background characters. They are incredibly important! They are mirror characters for Rose and Cal. (And no, that doesn’t mean that this particular unnamed father doesn’t love his daughter and that he is as deranged as Cal. It means these two characters have a mirroring function in the text. They are telling us things about Cal and Rose, metaphorically. On the surface of the text, i.e. literally, this is just a loving father and his daughter. But deep down in the subtext, they are reinforcing what we’ve just found out in the preceding scene: that Cal treats his fiancée Rose like a child.)

Note also that this father is really concerned his daughter might fall overboard. He is holding her so very tightly. Literally, on the textual surface, this is just love and concern, of course. But as a mirroring function, this tells us how trapped Rose actually is in Cal’s embrace, how he doesn’t trust her to make her own choices as an adult.

One thing strikes me as particularly fascinating about this: When Rose tries to commit suicide not too long after this, Jack rushes over to help her.

His rescue of Rose then happens in two stages!

At first he tells her, “Just give me your hand. I’ll pull you back over.”

But in the end, this first attempt fails. Rose slips on the railing and almost plunges into the ocean.

The second attempt starts with Jack yelling, “I’ve got you. I won’t let go. Now pull yourself up. Come on!”

This is the movie’s way of telling us what is and isn’t going to work for Rose. Rose has to grow up in this coming-of-age story. ‘Pulling someone over’ isn’t how growing up works. She has to pull herself up.

Growing up means you have to do the work yourself!

Jack, as her catalyst, can help her; he can reassure her that he won’t let go. But she’s got to do the ‘pulling up’ part herself. That’s what becoming an adult actually means.

Now, contrast this with the way this father holds his little girl so very, very tightly in the scene above. And also…contrast this with the way Cal makes choices for Rose without ever consulting with her, how he controls every aspect of her life…Cal doesn’t let Rose grow up. Jack, on the other hand, is the catalyst who will finally propel Rose forward by allowing her to make her own choices.

And while we’re on the subject of Rose’s transformation from little girl to grown woman, let me quickly throw you another scene:

Somewhat later in the movie, Jack steals, uh, borrows another guy’s coat and bowler hat and manages to slink past all the barriers that demarcate the third-class and the first-class areas of the ship. He pulls Rose aside and into the ship’s gymnasium to implore her to break free. He literally tells her, “They’ve got you trapped, Rose. And you’re gonna die if you don’t break free. Maybe not right away because you’re strong, but sooner or later, that fire that I love about you, Rose, that fire is gonna burn out.”

Here’s the whole scene. It’s just under two minutes long. Please pay attention to every minute detail in it and see if you can find out yourself what it is that I want to show you.

Did you watch it?

So, what did you pick up on? And no, I don’t just mean the very prominent butterfly hair clip in Rose’s hair that is front and centre in the frame. (You know…butterflies…transformation and all that…the symbolism is almost too in-your-face.)

What I mean is the following sentence that Jack says, “You’re the most amazingly astounding, wonderful girl…woman that I’ve ever known.”

Now, that’s sly, isn’t it? James Cameron is being really clever with us here. You think this is just Jack misspeaking, but it’s not. That’s the whole point of the movie: Rose is going from child…to adulthood, from being a girl to being a woman. And while Cal treats her like a little girl and plays ‘daddy’ around her (‘evil daddy’, one might add), Jack doesn’t. Jack treats her as an equal.

See how clever this screenplay is? ‘Most amazingly astounding, wonderful girl…woman’.

It’s a tiny, tiny thing, and yet it’s all so well-thought-out. There’s not a word out of place in this screenplay.

So, what we have established now is that we have to pay attention to the children aboard this ship because all the children could potentially function as mirror characters for Rose. And lo and behold, that’s exactly what they do! Especially one little girl, the one we’ve already seen standing on the lower rungs of the railing with her father holding her so very tightly as Jack draws the two of them.

This little girl’s name is Cora, and tracking her story line through the entire movie will be somewhat difficult for one specific reason:

Remember how I once said on this blog that you can usually see it in the subtext when major changes were made to a screenplay at a later point in the production, how you can often still see it when stuff was cut out?

When writers decide to cut down the plot, i.e. the part that you textually see on screen, what often remains behind is the subtext. It is often too deeply embedded in the text and cannot be removed without damaging other scenes and plot lines. So, this subtextual debris can remain behind (and let’s be honest, most people won’t know the difference because they don’t pick up on subtext at all), this subtextual debris can remain very deeply embedded in the text, often scattered all across the screenplay, but ultimately pointing at nothing in the plot anymore because the relevant scenes and/or plot lines were removed.

Well, something similar (but not quite) happened in the screenplay of ‘Titanic’, and it’s actually so fascinating that I really have to show you:

When I first watched ‘Titanic’ at the cinema, there was a tiny moment in it that gave me pause.

Remember that fun scene in which Rose attends a third-class party below deck with Jack, dancing to Irish folk music instead of getting bored (literally) to death with her stuck-up fiancé and her permanently constipated-looking mother upstairs in first class?

Yeah, that scene. The scene that inspired many a copycat scene (like, even the scene on ‘Victoria’ where Alfred and Edward fall in love with each other is clearly a knockoff, right?)

Well, there is a tiny moment at the beginning of this ‘Titanic’ dance scene where Jack can be seen dancing with a little girl. It’s a cute moment, and it’s actually surprisingly long. Sitting a bit further away, Rose is drinking beer, watching the two of them dance. (And please excuse me while my face turns all green; just the thought of chugging stout on board a constantly rocking ship below deck…did very much not-good things to my stomach.)

Then Jack decides that he wants to dance with Rose, who obviously hasn’t got the faintest idea how to dance to music like this. Jack encourages her to try anyway. Then Jack tells the little girl, “You’re still my best girl, Cora,” which has everyone in the audience at the cinema reflexively go, “Awww!” I suppose. And it is legitimately a cute little moment, isn’t it?

Well, okay, but now think about what Jack actually does in that ‘Irish folk dance scene’: He replaces Cora with Rose.

Rose literally takes little Cora’s place!

And the screenplay specifically draws attention to this by having Jack console a slightly disappointed-looking Cora and tell her that she’s still his best girl in that cute moment.

So, here you get even more evidence that Cora is indeed Rose’s mirror. (I mean, literally taking somebody’s place? It doesn’t get much better where mirroring is concerned. But we already knew Cora was mirroring Rose from that scene we watched earlier in which Jack was sitting on deck, drawing Cora with her father by the railing. Oh, didn’t I tell you? Yesss…Cora, the girl Jack was dancing with here, is that little girl from that earlier scene on deck.)

So, that dance with Cora is cute, right? And yet, when I first watched ‘Titanic’, I was stumped.

How exactly did Jack know Cora? I mean, he drew her once while she was standing by the railing with her father. But she seemed to be a random stranger back then. So, how come Jack even knows her now? And why is he dancing with her? He seems to have some prior connection with her, right?

Well, what can I say? The moment was tiny. It was over in a split second, and then there was more important stuff to worry about like, you know, Jack and Rose having steamy sex inside a classic Renault (by the way, did you know they still haven’t been able to identify the car in the wreck of the Titanic with a 100 % certainty on those many, many dives to the wreck site?), the iceberg, all the shooting and screaming and running about, and then all that water that made me think of the loo with more and more pressing urgency. In short, I forgot about that little girl and the question of how Jack knew her.

And I forgot about her for a long, long time. Until one day…I stumbled across the deleted scenes from ‘Titanic’, and there it was: the explanation for how Jack knew little girl Cora.

This ‘Irish folk dance scene’ during that third-class party below deck is, of course, not the first time we see Cora in ‘Titanic’. As I said, there was that scene on deck with her standing on the lower rung of the railing with her father holding her so very tightly and Jack looking at them from afar, drawing them. (And there’s actually an even earlier scene with Cora at the very beginning of the movie.)

But is there a scene where Jack actually gets to know Cora?

You see, that’s where the deleted scenes, that I only discovered so much later, come in. Two scenes containing Cora were cut, so we couldn’t really see what was going on and where James Cameron was eventually going with this mirror character.

There is actually one deleted scene that establishes Jack’s prior connection with little girl Cora.

It’s a scene in which Rose unexpectedly pays Jack a visit in third class the day after she tried to commit suicide and he saved her life. She comes to visit Jack below deck, and there are all sorts of fun and games going on there: somebody trying to tickle the ivories of one of the five Steinway pianos on board, a rat doing whatever it is that rats do in their spare time, I suppose, lovely Fabrizio being lovely (I say with a deep sigh), and then there’s, of course, Jack and Cora.

Jack is actually letting the little girl draw something on his sketchpad. He lets her draw, and she’s happy. And then her parents appear and take her off Jack’s hands.

Please keep in mind that Jack and Rose will strongly connect precisely because of his drawings, because of their shared love of art, a few moments later in the movie.

And here, in this scene, we have Jack forming a connection with a little girl because of that, too. Drawing is what connects him to little Cora in this deleted scene!

So, this once again confirms that Cora, the little girl we saw with her father by the railing earlier on, the girl Jack will dance around with during the ‘Irish folk dance scene’, serves as a mirror character for Rose. (And now we also know how Jack and little Cora got to know each other: It was literally a sketchpad that brought them together.)

Now, there are actually a few more scenes with Cora in this movie, but since we’re already on the subject of deleted scenes, let me tell you about her last scene in this story. Unfortunately, that one didn’t make the cut either, but I can really, really understand why it had to go: It’s the moment Cora dies.

Children dying is not something you see on screen all that often, and I think it’s a taboo that we do well to uphold.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t acknowledge the fact that it happened and how terrible that was: 53 children perished on that night when the Titanic went down. 53!

So, James Cameron probably wanted to remind us all of this sad truth, and thus he wrote and then filmed the scene in which Cora dies, and it’s excruciating to watch.

We have seen this lovely girl dance around with Jack and laugh. In a deleted scene, we saw her draw a picture on his sketchpad with the kind of serious and deeply focused expression on her face only little children can muster; we saw her stand on the lower rung of the railing, her father tightly hugging her (and there are actually a few more scenes with Cora scattered all across this movie), so we have formed an emotional connection with this little girl, too…and now we have to watch her die.

It’s a very short scene, really, and it obviously cuts away right before the worst part happens, but you still get a pretty good idea of what will happen a split second later. Cora and her parents are trapped behind one of those grilled doors. It’s locked, and they have no way to get out as the water rushes in. You watch the terrified little girl, and you really, really want to look away; it’s so awful.

The scene was filmed, but then cut, and so it only exists in this uncertain in-between space, this cinematic purgatory where scenes go that don’t make the final cut and thus get the moniker ‘deleted scene’, becoming an undefined something between canonical and non-canonical.

I think it’s very understandable why you would cut a scene where a little child is terrified of dying and you know she’ll have to die anyway. We definitely don’t need more of that on our screens. I understand why this heartbreaking scene was cut.

And yet this last scene with Cora really brings the whole Cora subtext full circle: Cora dies, trapped behind a locked door together with her family, screaming in agony.

This little girl mirrors Rose, right?

But she mirrors a particular aspect of Rose: the little child Rose.

This is the Rose who boards the ‘Titanic’, not the Rose who we will see at the very end of this movie. This is not the Rose who grew up.

This is the Rose who is still trapped inside the conventions of her class, the Rose who follows the rules and tries to play nice with the fiancé she doesn’t even like, the Rose who is playing along and trying to conform, who is being shown off by Cal like a prize and treated by him like a little child, kept in this docile state of permanent obedience.

Over the course of the story, she has to grow up. That’s what coming-of-age stories are all about, after all. She has to become an adult.

The Rose who boarded the ‘Titanic’ like a docile sheep, that inner ‘little child Rose’ with no agency, will eventually change and then swim away from the sinking ship and, at the very end, blow that whistle again and again in order to survive. Rose will leave this ship a grown woman.

And that’s why we get this excruciating scene of little Cora dying inside the ship.

Not just to remind us of how many children died an agonizing, horrific death on that night in 1912 but also to give us this very subtle and wonderful subtext: The ‘little child Rose’ has to die! This is the skin Rose has to shed. This aspect of Rose has to be drowned in order for Rose to grow up and stand on her own two feet in defiance of her family and the stratum of society she belongs to.

And this is the part where I actually think it’s a shame that these two deleted scenes with Cora didn’t make it into the film itself. (Just to make this crystal clear: I don’t regret the fact that I didn’t have to watch Cora die on screen. That scene is heart-rending and cruel. What I do regret is the fact that the whole subtextual story being told here became much more difficult to see because the ending is missing; the point this subtextual Cora story is trying to make is not there anymore.)

This is a bit different from the case I described above (and had described before on this blog, I believe); this isn’t somebody cutting out a lot of plot and leaving subtext deeply embedded in the script. This is somebody cutting out subtext and thus leaving the rest of this subtext disjointed and without its ultimate culmination. The Cora subtext thus turned into subtextual debris almost the size of that debris field that surrounds the actual Titanic wreck on the seafloor: There are Cora scenes everywhere in this movie, scattered all across the script, but unless you know about the way Cora dies in that deleted scene, it’s hard to reconstruct what it all means.

By the way, did you notice how well-thought-out, how detailed and finely constructed the whole Cora subtext actually is? When Jack and Cora just hang out in that first deleted scene and Cora draws on his sketchpad, we see Cora’s parents come over and collect her.

This is done in a friendly manner because textually this is a friendly and lighthearted moment, but in the subtext we get a clear constellation here: Cora (Rose’s mirror!) is being told by her family (!) to say bye-bye to Jack. It’s Cora’s family that demands she leave him behind.

It’s the same constellation we get with Rose: Her family, her mother and her fiancé Cal, will later on insist she forget about Jack and banish every thought of him from her mind.

Also, look how Cora dies: She dies trapped behind a locked door. And she dies there with her family.

Cora is that aspect of Rose, the part of her that’s trapped in her engagement to Cal, the part that’s locked behind the door of conventions. That aspect of her is literally trapped with her family, and we can see that clearly in that scene in which Cora dies.

If Rose stays who she is (the little girl without agency, the girl who follows the orders given to her by her family), she will suffocate; the message is pretty clear here.

See, ‘Titanic’ is potentially quite a bit cleverer than you’d think at first glance; you just have to know where to look.

And guess what: The Cora subtext is even interconnected with all the other subtext of the movie (we’ll get to that in a bit, I promise).

Anyway, once you know that the basic premise of this story is Rose-the-child boards the ship, but Rose-the-grownup leaves the sinking ship, you can see it in all sorts of other nooks and crannies, too.

There is, for example, a scene that instantly caused a bit of a visual hiccough in me when I first saw it at the cinema:

Right before Rose and Jack kiss at the bow of the ship, there is a scene which immediately and directly triggers Rose’s reaction of defiance: Rose watches a little girl fold a napkin in her lap in the ritzy first-class lounge while she’s having her afternoon tea with her mother and two of her mother’s snobby girlfriends.

Remember that scene?

The little girl sits at a nearby table. (It is, of course, a different girl, not Cora. This is a girl from first class.) The little girl’s mother corrects her posture at first and then we see the little girl fold the napkin in her lap.

Rose watches all of this like she is in some sort of trance, all while her mother talks about Rose’s upcoming nuptials and her two girlfriends gossip endlessly about the subject of weddings.

It is, of course, an important scene. Rose has just rejected Jack in that gymnasium scene and told him to mind his own business. Read: she is hesitant and afraid of change, afraid of taking risks. Then we get this tearoom scene, and afterwards…Rose returns to Jack: She has changed her mind and a moment later, she will kiss him passionately with the burning sunset behind them.

So, why did this afternoon tea scene cause a visual hiccough in me when I first watched it?

Well, because I instantly wondered why exactly we were getting the image of a little girl folding her napkin in this scene.

Yes, I know, I know: You could argue that Rose is remembering her own childhood, how she was raised to conform, how she was raised never to ask any questions and to keep her head down, fold her napkin and stretch out her pinkie as she picked up her teacup. None of that is wrong per se. You could also argue that Rose’s mother and her friends keep droning on and on and on about weddings and that it is clear from that conversation combined with the visuals here how rich people typically mould their children, generation after generation, so these children learn to conform and play along. Weddings are an important part of this gilded cage they keep their children in.

But still…The reason why the visuals in this scene gave me pause was the text that ran over it: Rose’s mother and her friends are talking about Rose’s future (!), not the past. They are talking about Rose’s wedding (to terrible-awful-no-good Cal).

So, why was it that the film’s creator decided to give us an image symbolizing the past: a little girl? Why not give us the image of a married woman, say? Why not let her literal future stare Rose in the face? Why not show us some woman and her husband who clearly hate each other, so we can see what’s on the cards for Rose in the foreseeable future? Why a little girl?

Well, because we have this ‘little child’ subtext in this movie!

Because that’s the horror here: Rose is still, in a sense, a little girl. The horror is that she will, in a sense, remain a child forever. A child with no agency who will always have her family decide her fate, so she will never own her own life and her own choices.

She has to grow up and emancipate herself from her own family. She has to become a real adult with full agency. Otherwise she will always remain this little girl who folds her napkin perfectly.

Rose gets the message, by the way. She returns to Jack. She has changed her mind. She is about to be transformed – sunset kisses, butterfly hair clips and all.

So, this tearoom scene is a prime example of the ‘little child’ subtext this movie has got going, and once you start paying attention to it, you will see it everywhere:

Rose is being mirrored by little girls (and sometimes boys, too) throughout the entire movie.

You might think that this is a big blockbuster with hundreds and hundreds of random extras working in the background (all those crowds, all those people everywhere), you might think that this is just so we get nice and poignant visuals, but that’s not actually true. James Cameron is absolutely meticulous about where he puts which extras and why. It’s absolutely insane once you pay attention to the subtext. None of these walk-on roles are incidental. (And keep in mind that he had to, you know, sink a whole ship replica and get all of that organized around his subtext too, okay?)

When disaster has already struck and the lifeboat situation is slowly but surely starting to get out of hand, there’s a moment in which a desperate father obviously lies to his little daughter who refuses to get into a lifeboat with her mother. He says, “It’s goodbye for a little while. Only for a little while. There’ll be another boat for the daddies; this boat’s for the mummies and the children. You hold mummy’s hand and be a good little girl.”

This heartbreaking scene is based on the accounts of Titanic survivor Eva Hart, I believe, who lost her father in this way. So this actually, really happened in real life, and if, as a viewer, you don’t feel a lump in your throat at that, you have no heart.

So, the scene depicts a real event. And yet…James Cameron is doing something with this, so the scene can serve a more specific (subtextual) purpose in his screenplay:

A split second after this scene with the desperate father lying to his little daughter has played out, we’re shown Rose, who is about to hesitantly climb into a lifeboat: Both Jack and Cal are lying to her. They’re lying through their teeth. They are telling her that there will be another boat that will take them both. And they’re lying to her for her own good, so she gets into a lifeboat and can survive.

The parallel between these two scenes that are literally shown one after the other (first the father with his daughter, then Jack and Cal with Rose) reinforces the message we have received earlier on: The men in this story behave like fathers in their relationships with women; they are literally acting in a paternalistic manner. They believe they know what’s best for their wives and girlfriends because ultimately they don’t see women as equals; they see them as little children who need to be told what to do.

I hope you see now why Rose absolutely had to jump off that lifeboat and back onboard the Titanic. Textually, this might be a dumb thing to do, but for her character development, this is the exact right thing to do: She has to make her own choices. She cannot let men treat her like this father is treating his little daughter. She is not Jack and Cal’s child!

Should you rewatch this scene, pay attention to how detailed and well-thought-out it is: You might think there is just random chaos and a panicking crowd to be seen. But Cameron has actually meticulously choreographed it: At the exact moment that Rose steps into the boat, there’s a voice in the background as that father tells his daughter, “Be daddy’s good girl now, alright?”

It’s insane how obvious the ‘little child’ subtext is once you see it.

Note, by the way, that this is the only scene in which Jack lies to Rose. He lies to her for her own good – i.e. he acts in that exact same patriarchal way in which all the men around Rose act all the time. And she has to rebel against this behaviour of his, too. That’s part of her character growth.

I love that Jack forgets his role as a catalyst for once here: Love is a very strong motivator, and it can even mean that you forget which role in the script you’re supposed to play.

But ultimately, this behaviour of Jack’s does actually cause exactly that which a catalyst character has to cause: Rose jumps out of the lifeboat and back on board. So, actually…Jack achieves even more character growth for Rose in this way.

She is in the process of emancipating herself – even from him.

As far as the ‘little child’ subtext is concerned: Do you remember the scene in which Cal slaps Rose? (As I said above, he is behaving like her father – and to add insult to injury, he is actually behaving like a horrible and abusive father, too. He verbally abuses her and then physically beats her.) At that precise moment, a steward walks in and tell them to put their lifebelts on. He is quite insistent but polite and does even give them advice on how to dress for the chilly night.

Cut. A steward unceremoniously throws open the door to a third-class cabin and yells, “Everybody up, lifebelts on!” and just carelessly chucks the lifebelts on the floor.

These two scenes show us the vivid contrast between the treatment of the first-class and third-class passengers, but James Cameron is being a tiny bit sly here again, too:

We’ve just seen Cal verbally and physically abuse Rose, acting out his worst ‘bad-daddy’ instincts. And now we see a third-class cabin…it’s little Cora’s cabin, and the camera lingers specifically on Cora and on her dad’s face. Her mother doesn’t really make an appearance. Cameron is literally giving us Cal and Rose…and the Cora and her father again. He is really hammering this point home.

You might remember another scene, later on, that gives us a few more subtle hints at this whole ‘bad-dad theme’ the movie has got going on:

When Jack and Rose are deep, deep down in the bowels of the ship and the situation has deteriorated significantly (there’s water pretty much everywhere now, with walls collapsing every other minute), they spot a crying boy standing in a corridor that is already filling with water (‘little child’ subtext, remember!). It’s a heartbreaking scene, and I find it very hard to watch, but the little boy is literally crying, “Dada! Dada! Dada!” again and again.

(This is a movie about a patriarchal society and men treating women like little children, themselves taking on the role as father – sometimes ‘good dad’, sometimes ‘bad dad’, but always, inevitably…dad, never partner and equal. And in this scene you can see how much that actually hurts everyone involved and how that ultimately brings about the catastrophe.)

Rose says, “We can’t leave him!” meaning the little boy, and they pick him up, trying to carry him out of the corridor that is rapidly filling with water, walls about to burst.

Suddenly, the boy’s father appears as if out of nowhere. He rips the boy out of Jack’s arms and swears loudly at Jack (in Slovakian).

Then the crucial mistake happens: The man (with the boy in his arms) runs in the wrong direction, towards the wall that is about to burst. Rose and Jack are frantically screaming at him that he is going the wrong way, but it’s no use.

The wall collapses and the father and his son are swept away by the water. (Rose and Jack barely make it out of this situation alive.)

What you see here is that same theme the movie keeps giving us over and over and over again: The father made a decision. He made it for his child. It’s the wrong decision. They will both perish.

Fathers not making the right choices is a thing in this movie. And the subtext makes it clear why that is the case.

Knowing this makes it easier to understand a scene happening only a few minutes of screen time later: This is the scene in which Rose’s fiancé Cal tries to get into a lifeboat even though the order is to only allow women and children in. (The order was actually interpreted differently on the port and starboard sides of the ship: Officer Murdoch interpreted it as ‘women and children first’ and then, in case there are still empty seats in the boats, men are allowed in, too. Officer Lightoller interpreted it as ‘women and children only’, no matter what. But I digress.)

So, Cal manages to persuade the officer in charge, Officer Wilde, to let him into a lifeboat. He does so by grabbing a random child, who he has just spotted crying in a corner, and pushing through the crowd, “I have a child,” he yells. “Please. I am all she has in this world,” he pleads with Wilde. Wilde relents. And that’s how Cal gets one of the much-coveted seats in the lifeboat: He pretends to be a father.

Knowing the subtext of this film helps us decipher this scene, too. On the surface of the text, this is just Cal being Cal and using a child to get what he wants. It’s one of his usual schemes.

But then…we remember our whole ‘little child’ subtext, and…Bingo!

The sentence, “Please. I am all she has in this world,” implies that Cal is pretending to be this girl’s father.

I.e. what Cal does there summarizes his relationship with his fiancée Rose: It’s akin to a kidnapping. He just grabbed Rose despite the fact that she didn’t even want him. (Like that child that has literally no connection to Cal and that he just grabs in order to use her for his own purposes). That’s what we’re being told here. Cal took advantage of Rose; he nabbed her at a point where she was vulnerable and depressed, where Rose’s real father was already dead and she and her mother were about to go bankrupt. (The little girl in that scene is crying, after all.) And ultimately Cal has no use for Rose. If they ever got married, he would just mistreat Rose in the same way we see Cal throw the little girl into the lifeboat and then push her on somebody else, some a middle-aged woman, interestingly. (If Cal and Rose ever got married, she’d probably end up living with her mother very quickly or at least being with her mother all the time because ultimately Cal has no use for Rose. He might be obsessed with her now. He might love her in some twisted, awful way. But ultimately, he just needs her for his own sinister purposes.)

Rose has to stop being a child who’s constantly being dragged around by people like Cal. She has to make her own choices. She cannot allow him to take her hostage like this.

There is a fascinating and really, really clever detail in the writing here, by the way: Earlier Cal had tried to bribe Officer Murdoch to let him into one of the lifeboats. But ultimately, Murdoch just threw that money in his face and told him that money wouldn’t save him. Then Murdoch first shot Tommy and committed suicide afterwards by shooting himself.

And look what Murdoch yells exactly as he throws Cal’s money back in his face, “Your money can’t save you any more than it could me!”

Murdoch literally compares himself to Cal here. They are both doomed, he says. Money will save neither of them. And then Murdoch shoots himself.

So, money won’t save Cal. What saves him, in the end, is the little girl he takes hostage right?

Do you remember what we are told about Cal’s future at the very end of this movie? Old Rose (Gloria Stuart) tells us that Cal inherited his millions, but that ultimately his money didn’t save him. The Wall Street crash of 1929 caused him to commit suicide…He shot himself!

How is that for some brilliant foreshadowing?

Officer Murdoch literally told us that he…was like Cal. That money wouldn’t save either of them. And then Murdoch shot himself.

Brilliant, brilliant idea to foreshadow the end of Cal’s story line like this.

And note that the thing that could have potentially saved Cal…would have been a happy marriage. Had he got married to Rose and benefited from her warmth and love (hopefully while undergoing some character change of his own), then he might not have killed himself in 1929 because…

…money didn’t save Cal; it didn’t get him a spot in a lifeboat; the little girl did!

But alas, then we immediately saw Cal push that girl away and onto some woman. Cal isn’t capable of change. And thus Murdoch was exactly right: Money couldn’t save either of them. And both did end up shooting themselves (one in 1912 aboard the ship and one in 1929 at the beginning of the Great Depression).

That’s some very clever writing right there. And it’s really subtle, too.

The suicide scene James Cameron wrote for Officer Murdoch was quite controversial back in 1997 because historically it’s not really clear what actually happened: Most likely Murdoch did fire a few warning shots, but it’s not clear if he shot anybody, much less killed them. The suicide probably didn’t happen either (although that is a much-debated question). In any case, Murdoch’s family, i.e. his descendants, were not exactly happy with Cameron’s depiction of Murdoch in the movie, and Cameron did have to apologize to them.

After all, the real Officer Murdoch did most likely lead the evacuation of the ship until the very last minute, never leaving his post and perishing himself in the process. Just so you get the picture of who this guy was in real life: Since he interpreted the ‘women and children’ rule to mean ‘women and children first, then fill all the empty seats with whoever’, he managed to save a lot of people without any regard for sex, age, class, status, etc. He took them all: women, children, men, first class, third class…

You probably know that the chances to survive this disaster were very slim for somebody from third class. Well, almost every single third-class survivor on that night owes their life to Officer Murdoch.

The man himself died in the disaster and probably never intended to save himself. His body was never found.

So, that (fictional) scene is actually pretty unfair, all things considered.

But you can probably see now why Cameron did include this controversial scene, right? It might not be historically accurate, but it has a foreshadowing function in the subtext.

Fiction is not reality. And screenplays follow their own rules. Often they have to balance out historical accuracy and important subtextual functions. Sometimes this will go so far as to throw historical accuracy overboard altogether.

Cameron wanted to foreshadow Cal’s suicide in 1929, so he made a choice a screenwriter can make, but a historian never should.

Since we’re already talking about interesting mirror characters in this film, let me introduce you to one pet theory of mine that I am particularly fond of, and this one concerns Jack’s drawings!

There’s a point in the movie where Jack (reluctantly) shows Rose his drawings (well, actually she just yanks his sketchpad out of his hand because she’s nosy), and we are to understand that one of these drawings is a depiction of a half-naked, one-legged prostitute.

It’s filmed in a slightly mischievous way because Jack and Rose are sitting in their deck chairs talking about the one-legged prostitute, but we, i.e. the audience, never actually get to see the drawing. (And if you want to know how naughty James Cameron actually was when he made this movie, you can try to freeze frame your way through the scene, frame by frame, and you’ll find that if you press ‘pause’ at the exact right moment, you can actually see the drawing for a split second.)

Now, what’s so interesting about this sex worker whom Jack was apparently close to in Paris and whose portrait he drew several times?

It’s this fascinating little dialogue that happens much, much later in the movie between Rose and her fiancé Cal:

Rose refuses to board the lifeboat together with her mother and a gaggle of other first-class women as long as Jack is handcuffed to a pipe somewhere below deck. Cal shouts, “Where are you going?...What, to him?...What? To be a whore to a gutter rat?”

And she replies, “I’d rather be his whore than your wife,” and then spits in Cal’s face, which is a nice callback to the scene in which Jack taught her how to spit earlier on in the movie. (Note also that Cal is physically violent here, too: He grabs her, brutally yanking her by the arms and struggling with her in a way no man should ever do with a woman. Spitting at him is the only way she can break free of his hold. As I mentioned above: He’s not just pretending to be her father; he is a bad and abusive father, on top of that.)

So, there you have it: Rose literally says she’d rather be Jack’s whore than Cal’s wife. (By the way, I apologize for using the term ‘whore’ throughout the next couple of paragraphs, but you understand that we’re not literally talking about prostitution here, and we’re not denigrating anyone. This word is used as an insult in the script, and it’s quite important to keep using it in this exact context in order to understand what is going on with this insult.)

To Cal (and Rose’s mother and everyone else of her upper-class background), it is unimaginable and shocking that Rose would follow a man such as Jack. It’s shameful and brings dishonour to her family name. To them, it is tantamount to being a whore. Marrying somebody like Cal, on the other hand, is the normal and honourable thing to do because he is her social equal.

Rose spits in Cal’s face and tells him she’d rather be seen as a whore than his wife, which is deeply shocking to anybody who has been raised to believe in this class-stratified society.

The irony here is, of course, that it’s actually the other way around!

And anybody watching this movie in our modern times can clearly see this: By choosing Jack or any man she truly loves just as a person (Calvert!), Rose is doing a wonderful and empowering thing. This is the kind of foundation a marriage should be built on. This is actually the ‘wife part’ of the equation, not the ‘whore part’!

Being with Cal, on the other hand…well, we are literally told in the text that Rose’s mother only insisted on her getting engaged to Cal because they have no money left (because Rose’s father left them nothing but debts). I.e. the whole engagement is forced upon Rose because Cal is rich and would rid Rose’s family of their financial problems. That’s it. That’s the reason she is supposed to marry him, and that’s also the reason Cal has zero qualms about pressuring her to have sex with him.

What do we call it when you have to share somebody’s bed for his money?

Rose’s mother is essentially pimping out her daughter to the highest bidder. Because when you are forced into an arranged marriage like that because of the guy’s money, well, then you are basically forced into prostitution. They don’t call it that, of course, because they’re upper-class people and arranged marriages feel natural to them, but essentially that’s what it is.

Prostitution is therefore a major theme in this movie that keeps subtly coming up again and again.

Because far from being either Cal’s wife or Jack’s whore, Rose is actually forced to be Cal’s whore and discouraged from being Jack’s wife.

Like it or dislike it, the subtextual ‘whore’ in this story…is Rose.

This is not a very nice word to use, and you do, of course, understand that she is being forced into this awful situation. She doesn’t even like Cal. She doesn’t want to marry this idiot and abuser. And ultimately she will reject him. But at the beginning of the story, this is essentially what’s happening: These people are forcing her to be ‘Cal’s whore’.

And now, let us quickly return to that earlier scene in which Jack and Rose are looking at the drawing of a prostitute whom Jack knew in Paris.

Do we think that’s a coincidence? Jack will draw Rose later on in the story, too. And she will be nude, as well.

This is a clear indication that the surprisingly long discussion of the one-legged prostitute whom Jack had drawn isn’t just a fun little detail James Cameron put in the screenplay. This one-legged prostitute (whom we never meet in the story) has her own function in the text: She mirrors Rose – the young woman who is being forced to prostitute herself to a millionaire’s son: Cal.

So, why only one leg?

You know what one-legged people can’t do?

They can’t run away.

If the one-legged prostitute is indeed a mirror character for Rose, then this tells us something about Rose at the beginning of this story: She is trapped. She dreams of running away, of escaping the suffocating constraints of her upbringing and social status, but she can’t run off. She is trapped in this position as ‘Cal’s whore’. She is essentially a one-legged (!) prostitute.

In the scene where Rose admires Jack’s drawings as they sit in their deck chairs, Rose actually notices something about this one-legged prostitute in the picture:

She says, “You liked this woman. You used her several times,” (meaning that Jack drew her more than once).

Rose then doubles down on this by telling Jack point blank, “I think you must have had a love affair with her.”

Jack denies this, but the idea is immediately planted in our head. (Jack will have a love affair with Rose later on in the movie.)

The fact that he denies it is actually really interesting:

Jack won’t have a love affair with the aspect of Rose that’s essentially ‘Cal’s whore’ and ‘one-legged’ (i.e. unable to run off, break free and escape those conventions she grew up with). Jack won’t have a love affair with that aspect of Rose. He will have a love affair with the aspect of Rose that will manage to free herself, with grownup Rose, with free Rose, with Rose who has agency and makes own choices.

And that’s where the dialogue gets really interesting, actually.

After Rose has said, “I think you must have had a love affair with her,” (meaning the one-legged prostitute).

Jack replies, “No, no, no. Just with her hands.” (The emphasis here is mine.)

So, Jack won’t have a love affair with the aspect of Rose that’s still playing along (i.e. ‘Cal’s whore’, the ‘one-legged’ woman). But he will have a love affair with Rose’s hands.

“She had beautiful hands, you see?” Jack says about the one-legged prostitute, subtextually meaning Rose whom the one-legged prostitute is mirroring here.

Once you know about this subtle case of mirroring, you will suddenly see the whole subtext pretty much explode in front of your eyes, the whole movie overflowing with scenes that are filled with…close-ups of Rose’s hands. Her hands are everywhere! (And by the way, may I once again point out that I’m very sceptical of the claim that the appreciation of hands is allegedly a female-gazey thing. I know I’ve said so before. But here you get some excellent proof: Jack is a man. And even more importantly, so is James Cameron. And boy, are there a lot of hand scenes in this movie. What I’m trying to say is: Men like hands, too. And they don’t even have to be pianists for that. Sometimes being artistic, a painter or a filmmaker, for example, is quite enough.)

In any case…once you’ve seen it, you cannot unsee it:

When Rose and Jack first meet (when she is about to commit suicide and he saves her life), we get a very, very in-your-face close-up of Jack holding out his hand to her and her taking it. We get to see how important her hand is to him. It’s literally part and parcel of the whole saving-her-life deal, and a moment later she slips and he literally holds her life in his hand, screaming. “I’ve got you. I won’t let go!” He is holding her by the hand. That same hand we just saw in the close-up. Rose’s hand is very important here.

Or think of that ‘nude drawing scene’: Rose is lying on that sofa stark naked, but Mr. Big Artiste is mostly concerned with the position of her hand. (He asks her to put her hand next to her face.) I.e. he’s giving her hand his full and undivided attention. And I mean, come on, I might not be the expert here, but shouldn’t a straight guy be kinda more focused on the whole nakedness going on on that sofa instead of obsessing over her hand? (And Jack is definitely straight, or else he would definitely be looking at his buddy Fabrizio in a very different way, just saying.)

(Note, by the way, that in that infamous ‘nude-drawing scene’, Rose tells Jack, “The last thing I need is another picture of me looking like a porcelain doll.” Porcelain dolls are very, very childlike. This is Rose rejecting her old ‘little girl’ persona; she is growing as a character.)

Or what about that infamous scene in which Jack and Rose make the quintessential experience of all American teenagers by having sex in a car: Remember what we see in that steamed up back window of the Renault? Rose’s hand sliding down the glass.

And what does Jack kiss when he turns up for that first-class dinner party wearing his borrowed white tie and tails? Her hand! The dialogue even draws attention to it by having him comment on it, “I saw that in a nickelodeon once, and I always wanted to do it.”

When she uses that axe to cut the chain on his handcuffs, he specifically corrects her hold on the axe’s handle by saying, “Open your hands a little more.”

Rose’s hands are all over this story again and again. And yes, Jack really has a love affair with her hands, that much is clear. The mirroring of the one-legged prostitute is exactly right. He said he didn’t have a love affair with that woman because Jack doesn’t love the aspect of Rose that’s basically ‘Cal’s whore’ and is still too afraid to escape her upbringing (‘one-legged’), but he has a love affair with her hands, which he thinks are beautiful (and we will see in a second why Rose’s hands are actually so important in this story).

It’s more than just Rose’s hands, though. This story is all about Jack’s hands, too.

After all, the close-up during the ‘suicide attempt scene’ is of both their hands. Their joined hands!

When they’re about to have sex in the car, Rose tells him, “Put your hands on me, Jack.” She even kisses his fingertips for emphasis in that scene.

Hands again. His hands.

When he is drawing her nude, we get all of these close-ups of his hands holding the pencil and drawing. (It’s a little cheeky, self-referential moment, as a matter of fact. The drawing itself was produced by none other than James Cameron himself. And it’s his hands, his fingers we see in those close-ups. It’s as if the author were inserting himself into the narrative, telling us to watch out for his hands, the author’s hands, too. I love this little metatextual moment.)

Jack’s leather-bound sketchpad contains lots of drawings of hands, too, by the way.

I mean, there are a couple nudes. Obviously. The script had to introduce that topic. But his other drawings feature a lot of hands…and a lot of children with their parents. Ding, ding, ding.

In general a lot of the story is centred around Rose and Jack holding hands. He tells her he won’t let go when she slips after her suicide attempt and almost falls off the ship. At the end of the movie, when they’re both clinging to the stern that’s about to sink into the dark water, he tells her to hold her breath and not to let go of his hand, “The ship is gonna suck us down. Take a deep breath when I say. Kick for the surface and keep kicking. Do not let go of my hand.” The moment where we see that their hands are nonetheless separated underwater is among the most terrifying in this entire movie.

So much of their story is centred around the idea that they just have to hold hands.

In the scene in which Rose wields that axe so very clumsily, she is actually trying to free him. He is handcuffed to a pipe. Handcuffed! He cannot hold her hand. She is making sure that order is restored by cutting the chain on those handcuffs, so he can hold her hand again. (And yes, this was actually foreshadowed in that ‘suicide attempt scene’ when Jack was accused of trying to rape her and got handcuffed, as well…From holding her by the hand and saving her life because he never let go off that hand while she was dangling over the railing…to being handcuffed in under a minute.)

So, yes, the story is just as much about his hands as it is about hers.

There’s a real, proper hand motif in this movie. And I love it dearly.

The last thing we see of Jack after he has died and Rose has to say goodbye to him as he disappears in the blackness of the ocean…is one of his hands! His hand is literally the last part of him that she sees (and that we, the audience, get to see of him, too).

And remember the first scene we ever get of Jack? That poker game in which he wins the ticket for the Titanic? There are many close-up shots of his hands in that poker game, too. Jack’s story in this movie literally starts with his hands and ends with his hands. How beautifully bookended.

And that’s not even mentioning the fact that he wins that ticket due to a…lucky hand at poker. He will later tell the first-class passengers all about it during that first-class dinner he attends, saying, “I won my ticket on Titanic here at a lucky hand at poker. A very lucky hand.”

Hand.

It’s literally in the text. And he says that about a minute after he has kissed Rose’s hand, at that.

So, what’s going on with this hand motif? Why all this fuss about hands? Just because James Cameron is similarly inclined as yours truly?

No. That’s not what this is.

The recurring hand motif in this film is actually very important for understanding what this film is all about.

It would be easy to just read this obsession with hands as a way the movie found to depict memory. I’m sure it’s not entirely wrong either, but it’s just a surface level reading of the text.

Yes, memory is a tactile thing for many people, and we see old Rose touch all those items the researchers/treasure hunters have brought up from the bottom of the ocean at the beginning of the movie. We see her touch her butterfly hair clip and mirror with her hands. (By the way, note the context here: Rose picks up her old hand mirror and says, “This was mine. How extraordinary! And it looks the same as it did the last time I saw it.” Then she turns it around to look into the mirror properly and sighs, “The reflection has changed a bit,” referring to her old age. And then she picks up the butterfly hair clip! The butterfly hair clip is all about change. She has literally just told us that she has changed. This movie is all about character growth and change. See how clever this is?!)

So, yes, hands and touch can communicate memories. It’s the way we often deal with the past: We touch things and suddenly the memories come flooding back…

But that’s just a really shallow, superficial reading of the text; ‘tactile memory’ is not all there is to this hand motif, I’m sure.

Some might also argue that Jack and Rose repeatedly holding hands throughout the movie, saving each other by holding hands and despairing whenever their hands are separated is a motif that shows us their closeness, loyalty to each other and their love. And sure, their clasped hands show us their connection, their love and the way they need each other for their survival.

But still…that, too, is just a direct, literal reading of what the surface of the text says.

I think there’s something much deeper going on with all the hands in this movie (and feel free to rewatch it any time and confirm this; I’m sure you will find many, many more examples of the hand motif in it).

I think the hands are all about the basic premise of this movie: Rose has to turn into her own true self, grow up and start to make her own choices; she has to live a life that is authentically hers.

Because, well, hands are the tools we use to…do stuff, right?

Hands are about action. About being active. About actively doing something. About having agency. Hands are the opposite of being passive and just letting things happen to you, right? There’s a reason we use expressions such as ‘take fate into your own hands’, etc.

When you don’t do anything, when you remain inactive and passive and let other people tell you what to do, when you just let life pass you by without ever taking the reins, that’s when you just ‘sit on your hands’, right?

Doing things with your hands means…stopping the inertia, stopping the passivity, doing something with your life.

When Rose tries to explain to Jack why she tried to kill herself she says, “It was everything. It was my whole world and all the people in it. And the inertia of my life, plunging ahead, and me, powerless to stop it.”

This is Jack’s role as a catalyst: He is showing her how to use her hands to seize life by the proverbials and stop being a passive child who just lets other people decide everything for her.

In that ‘suicide attempt scene’, he saves her; he offers her his hand. He doesn’t thrust it at her, he doesn’t force her to take it…he offers it.

The catalyst character is offering the main protagonist his hand.

It’s like fate offering Rose to take a course in how to become her own true self.

Rose can take this hand or just jump overboard and die.

Rose takes his hand.

And after that, we see it again and again: Her taking his hand, him calling her hands beautiful (albeit through a mirror character)...it’s all about him encouraging her to do something with her hands, i.e. to grasp at life and seize it…and never let go.

Jack didn’t have a love affair with the one-legged prostitute because Jack doesn’t like this aspect of Rose (the aspect that’s just ‘Cal’s whore’ and too paralyzed to escape). But Jack really, really loved the hands of that one-legged prostitute. I.e. Jack loves Rose’s hands and calls them beautiful because these hands are all about her taking fate into her own hands. And symbolically she is doing that each and every time they hold each other’s hands.

At the end of their story together, when Jack is already in the water and Rose is lying on that door (that is not actually a door, by the way, but a piece of wooden door panelling…but whatever; you do understand the symbolism, of course: this is Rose going through a door – a door towards a different life; it’s very, very difficult to go through it, painful and horrible, but it’s worth it for what’s waiting on the other side of this cathartic experience)...

So, when Rose is lying on that door, Jack implores her, shivering in the cold water, “You’re gonna get out of here. You’re gonna go on and you’re gonna make lots of babies and you’re gonna watch them grow. You’re gonna die an old lady warm in her bed. Not here. Not this night. Not like this. Do you understand me?”

And then he adds, “You must promise me that you’ll survive. That you won’t give up, no matter what happens. No matter how hopeless. Promise me, now, Rose. And never let go of that promise.”

She replies, “I promise. I will never let go, Jack. I’ll never let go.”

The word choice here is very deliberate. Usually you’d say ‘I will never break this promise’. But Jack and Rose specifically talk about ‘never letting go’. Usually, you ‘let go’ of hands.

Just a few minutes of screen time earlier, Jack had told her not to let go of his hand when the stern of the ship plunged into the icy waters. This choice of words is a callback to that moment.

And they are, of course, holding hands in that scene on the door in which she makes that promise.

Holding hands means taking your life into your own hands, fighting in order to be able to live a life of freedom and have agency. Holding hands means fighting to survive, embracing life and being happy. That’s obvious in that scene.

Some rather childish viewers like to snigger about the fact that, a few moments later, when Jack has already passed away, and Rose realizes that he is dead and sends him off to the depths of the dark, dark sea, she actually repeats, “I’ll never let go. I promise,” and then promptly lets go of his hands, so he can sink to the bottom of the ocean.

These viewers laugh and roll their eyes at the seemingly vapid woman saying she won’t let go and then letting go of his hands.

But that’s the whole point here!

She doesn’t literally have to hold his hand anymore. He was her catalyst. He has brought about the change in her. She can now figuratively say she won’t let go (of his hand and of her promise, which are functionally the same thing anyway) and she doesn’t need to literally hold his hand for that anymore.

She wants to survive. She wants to embrace life. She has chosen life. He (her catalyst) has become a part of her. She is always going to hold his hand and never let go, throughout her whole life, because figuratively that means embracing life and taking fate into your own hands.

And therefore she can let go of his hand in this scene (she has to literally break free because their hands are literally frozen together in it!).

There is a huge difference between young Rose at the beginning of this story and old Rose, did you notice?

Old Rose learned this lesson many, many years ago with Jack and she did exactly that: She lived life to the fullest. She never let go of her catalyst. She internalized him and his message. Young Rose at the beginning of this movie hadn’t learned any of this yet.

The scene in which her young hand morphs into her old hand with the help of some clever computer graphics was unfortunately cut and is now one of those deleted scenes, but we get that there’s a contrast between her young hands and her old hands even without this scene.

Remember how Rose arrives at the very beginning of the movie? How she gets out of her fancy automobile? What’s the first thing we see of her? It’s her hand! She gets out of that car, and we get an overhead shot of her. We see her hand first! And that hand…is gloved, sheathed in the constraints of her time and the conventions of her class.

And what is pretty much the first thing we ever see of old Rose in this movie? (Played brilliantly by Gloria Stuart, by the way.) Her old hands. She is making a pot out on the veranda. We get a close-up shot of her old, wrinkled, dirty hand covered in clay, and yet these old hands instantly seem much more beautiful to us than the young, slender gloved ones of young Rose climbing out of her car.

These old hands are making pottery. They are creating something. They are creative, active…they’re not passive like that gloved hand that needs a chauffeur’s help, so young Rose can climb out of the car. These old hands have seized life and lived it to the fullest. And they are still making things, pots and cups and vases. These hands create. Just like Rose has literally created a life for herself out of nothing once she disembarked the Carpathia after being rescued. She has made a life for herself. She has never let go of her promise, i.e. internally she is holding Jack’s hand, the hand of her catalyst who helped her free herself.

And that’s why she can say, “I’ll never let go, Jack,” and then let go of his hand in that scene on the door in the water. She has internalized him at that precise point. And a second later, she will show us how much: She swims over to the dead guy with the whistle and then starts loudly blowing that whistle. She wants to live!

By the way, I promised to tell you who the man of the hour is in this movie, so now that time has finally come:

You might remember the dulcet Welsh tones of his voice.

No?

You can hear him yelling, “Is anyone alive out there?” again and again throughout this cold, dark scene in the water.

This man, the man of the hour is…Harrow.

Yes, yes, remember Harrow? The main protagonist of that Australian show we discussed a while back?

Well, not literally Harrow, of course, but the actor who plays him: Ioan Gruffudd. A much, much younger and still baby-faced Ioan Gruffudd. Did you recognize him?

As Rose blows that whistle to signal to us that she’s embracing life now and to signal to that one lifeboat that she wishes to be picked up, we see him steering that boat.

That man really was the man of the hour, a true hero. His name was Harold Lowe. Many, many people owed their life to this man on that night, but especially the handful of people that got picked up later on when he returned to the site of the disaster in his boat to save more people.

He had had the ingenious idea of gathering five lifeboats together and redistributing the passengers in them (you might remember that many of the lifeboats weren’t even filled to capacity). This way he created one boat filled with experienced sailors only; it is with this boat that he returned to the site of the disaster to look for survivors amongst the hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies.

In the movie, he rescues Rose in this way.

But unlike Rose, Harold Lowe was actually a real person. And his was the only boat that returned to look for survivors on that night. Later on, he was also the only one who managed to unfurl the sail on his lifeboat and sail towards the Carpathia. And reading his biography is actually a real treat: He must have had a knack for saving people; he had saved people from drowning in his youth, too. An absolutely remarkable man, and a bit of a unique character, too. Played here by Ioan Gruffudd (a.k.a. baby-faced Harrow) and immortalized by James Cameron in his movie.

Anyway, so…this happens after Rose promises Jack to ‘never let go’, kisses his hand (!) and lets him slip into the ocean.

And that’s the hand motif for you, my friends.

I’m sure a lot of people watch all of these hands and think they’re just a neat way to represent the idea that memory is tactile. I’m sure a lot of people think Jack and Rose holding hands all the time just means they love each other very much and want to stay connected. But this hand motif is so much more than just that. It’s about agency, and that’s why you get a surprising amount of other hands in this story, too (Mr. Bodine, one of the treasure hunters at the beginning of the movie, asks for his robot hands, for example, while snooping around the wreck of the Titanic. And there are many, many other hands coming up again and again in this story.)

This hand subtext runs so very, very deep…

Why deep?

Well, we have to look at the blue diamond for that, of course, the so-called ‘Heart of the Ocean’.

But in order to get to that giant rock, we have to sail along a very specific route, so to speak.

First stop: The scene in which Rose is inspecting Jack’s drawings and he tells her about the one-legged prostitute.

So, we have established that Jack wasn’t in love with the one-legged prostitute, i.e. Jack doesn’t like the aspect of Rose that’s ‘Cal’s whore’ and cannot find the strength to escape convention. But he really, really loved the one-legged prostitute’s hands, i.e. Jack likes Rose’s hands because those hands represent agency, the potential to take fate into your own hands and make your own choices.

Jack does, however, describe another one of his drawings in that scene, too!

It’s a drawing of an old woman.

This is important, people, so please pay attention now! This movie pretty much starts with an old woman: old Rose (Gloria Stuart). She is a central figure in the story, so we can be reasonably sure that old women don’t just show up in Jack’s drawings for no subtextual reason whatsoever. This is highly significant. Screenwriters don’t throw parallels like this around for nothing.

We have already talked about how young Rose has to grow and transform as a character, so the end result of that has to be old Rose, right?

So, let’s take a closer look at the second drawing (the first one was the one-legged prostitute) that Jack and Rose discuss in that scene: the drawing of the old woman.

Jack says, “She used to sit at this bar every night, wearing every piece of jewelry she owned, just waiting for her long, lost love. We called her Madame Bijoux.”

If the one-legged prostitute is a mirror character for Rose (one that Jack notably did not have a love affair with), then what do you want to bet that this old woman, Madame Bijoux, is a mirror character for Rose, too? (And Jack obviously didn’t have a love affair with her either, i.e. doesn’t like this mirror of Rose’s either.)

Now, there are probably a few viewers who would argue that Madame Bijoux is the sad old lady Rose will eventually turn into, i.e. the old woman who cannot forget her first love and is still mourning him (Jack).

But here’s what I think:

The one-legged prostitute is who Jack doesn’t want Rose to be anymore.

And Madame Bijoux is who Jack doesn’t want Rose to turn into.

Look, are we to assume that Jack had a love affair with Madame Bijoux, the old woman he saw sitting in a bar in Paris every night? No, of course, not.

Jack never had a love affair with the one-legged prostitute, and Jack never had a love affair with Madame Bijoux, because these two mirror characters represent things Jack doesn’t want for Rose.

Jack doesn’t know yet how this story will end, of course, but in his function as a catalyst, we are told here by the screenwriter what it is that Jack will and won’t want for Rose.

Rose isn’t supposed to become this old woman who sits in a bar every night, wearing the blue heart-shaped diamond around her neck and mourning Jack, her one true love, forever and ever. She’s not supposed to be this permanently sad and depressed person who cannot get over his death even decades after the fact.

She is supposed to embrace life and be happy. And yes, that includes being happy with the man she will marry at some point (marry for love, one might add!) and have children with and eventually grandchildren.

Rose isn’t supposed to be the one-legged prostitute anymore (‘Cal’s whore’ who’s much too scared and paralyzed to free herself). But she’s not supposed to turn into Madame Bijoux (an old woman who throws herself into grief and can never love anybody else ever again) either.

Both mirrors are negatives. They are the outcomes Jack doesn’t want for Rose (and by extension, we shouldn’t want for Rose either).

It’s as if James Cameron were telling us: Here’s one thing that belongs to the past. Rose shouldn’t be that anymore. (That’s the one-legged prostitute.) But Rose shouldn’t pick the other extreme either (Madame Bijoux); she shouldn’t be mourning Jack forever either. After all, the purpose of this whole movie is to make sure she can be happy.

That’s what I see when I see Jack talk about those drawings because it just connects to the rest of the subtext of this movie so very, very nicely, right?

The topic of Madame Bijoux (I mean, come on, Rose will end up with the ultimate bijou, the blue diamond, at the end of the story, this name is so apropos; this old woman is clearly a mirror character for Rose, but a negative one, one that shows us what Rose isn’t supposed to become!)...so, the topic of Madame Bijoux gets us one step closer to the blue diamond, but there’s one other thing I would like you to consider first:

When screenplays feature a love story between two people, the writers in question will often assign one of the two lovers the role of the Brain™ and the other one the part of the Heart™. One lover is the mind and the other one is the much-needed injection of feelings and emotions into the story.

That’s an age-old storytelling recipe. And you can see this in a great number of films, actually.

‘Titanic’ gives us Rose as…the Brain.

And it’s actually really obvious that this is the case: I mean, Rose is clever. Really, really clever, right?

This is a teenager who understands cubism. She collects paintings and loves art. She reads Freud…No, scratch that; she doesn’t just read him. She is actually so intelligent that she can make up phallic jokes on the fly, using what she has read in Freud’s works. Like…this girl is quick-witted as hell.

And no wonder that she and Cal aren’t a good match. They just don’t fit as people. Even if he weren’t the egotistical arsehole and predator who’s pressuring her into having sex with him and who physically abuses her several times in this film…they’d still be a bad match because he is clearly so much dimmer than she is.

Remember the infamous ‘something Picasso scene’? Yes, Cal cannot keep up with this girl. (Oh, and by the way, no, Picasso’s ‘Les Demoiselles d'Avignon’ weren’t on board the Titanic, which is why you can still admire this painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And James Cameron actually got into real trouble with Picasso’s estate for including it in his film. You needn’t fear for the other famous paintings by Degas and Monet in that scene either. They’re all safe and sound. There was actually a reasonably famous painting that went down with the Titanic and that we thus don’t have anymore: Merry-Joseph Blondel’s ‘La Circassienne au Bain’, but that’s perhaps a story for another time. For now, let us just mention that the Picasso Rose discusses in that scene with Cal…actually depicts five prostitutes (!). Prostitution as a theme around Cal…again! And the one who is being pimped out here by her own mother is sadly Rose.)

Anyway…so, Rose is the brain of this love story, right?

This, in and of itself, is already incredibly unusual.

Brain characters are usually men.

Jack is the heart of the story. He is the one aligned with the heart principle, so to speak. He brings something new, something fresh, something lively and warm to the table: He opens up Rose’s emotions.

Before Jack, Rose was intelligent already, yes. Clever and bright. But she was unhappy and depressed, living in that cold space somewhere between dread and indifference to the people around her.

Jack changes all of that!

Jack, the free spirit, the man who lives off of whatever chance throws his way, Jack the artist, Jack the tumbleweed blowing in the wind…Jack breathes life into Rose. He is clearly the heart character of this love story.

This whole character constellation is incredibly unusual (again! ding-ding-ding…James Cameron keeps doing unusual things in this movie you guys probably all thought was as streamlined and ordinary as can be!). Usually, you would expect the main protagonist to be a broody guy, a deep thinker perhaps, an introverted, intelligent man who cannot really connect to his own emotions, who is complicated and deep and complex and who keeps mulling over the point of his own existence, half-depressed, listless and desperate. And then…then he meets this wonderful, lovely, warmhearted woman, the free spirit. And she suddenly makes it possible for him to gain access to his own emotions. She opens up the world of feelings for him. She is the heart of the love story where he is the brain.

That’s how stories like that are usually written. Just look at the disaster movies of the 1990s. Whatever disaster it is all about, the man is a tough, broody guy who is working hard to prevent the catastrophe, mulling over his choices, facing incredible challenges, brooding over the dilemmas he is confronted with. The woman he loves is the beacon of light in his life, she is the heart, she brings emotions and feelings. She makes it possible for him to finally, finally be soft and open. She gives him access to his own emotions (and usually serves no other purpose as a character than just to be all about him).

And it’s not just disaster movies that are written in this way, and it’s not even just movies in the 1990s. Most movies are written exactly like this.

‘Titanic’ isn’t!

Rose is the brain of the story. And boy, is she struggling with that role. And then, when she is at her worst, when she is about to hit rock bottom…the heart appears: Jack.

And Jack opens up something completely new for her: He gives her access to her own heart. He gives her access to honest and authentic emotions, so she can really be herself.

I cannot stress enough how unusual a writing choice this is.

The eccentric, quirky character who opens up the world of emotions to the broody, brainy one is usually a woman. It’s usually the woman who shows this broody (male) character what it means to follow your dreams and discover what feelings actually mean.

Okay, so, now that we’ve got that out of the way…

…what kind of transformation is it actually that Rose has to undergo?

I think nobody who has ever watched ‘Titanic’ doesn’t understand what this ship actually stands for: You can see how it is a mirror for society pretty clearly. The ship is so ridiculously stratified according to class that you basically get beaten over the head with this metaphor:

The ship is Edwardian society. With the haves and the have-nots. With people who are on top and people who are literally at the very bottom, down in steerage.

But this ship, this type of society, will go under…has to go under, we are told here. It will end.

And how?

Well, that’s where the water comes in, doesn’t it? (And it literally comes in, mind.)

Note, by the way, that everyone keeps saying that this ship is unsinkable. Cal certainly does right at the beginning of the movie as he climbs out of his car and admires the vessel with what amounts to little hearts in his eyes.

Yes, these types of people, these men, really think their society is fundamentally right and perfect. They think it will never founder because it fundamentally cannot founder. Their class-segregated civilization will live on and on and on, is what they think. It is their deepest conviction that it is absolutely unsinkable.

But it’s not! That’s what the whole movie is all about.

This society has to go under, we are told by James Cameron.

And if you now go, “Well, true. World War I, which broke out two years after the events depicted in ‘Titanic’, did actually change societies throughout the West in rather fundamental ways, but still…It was followed by the horrors of World War II and even then, it took until the late 1960s for some real change, say, in the area of women’s rights. So, isn’t this whole ship-going-down-represents-society-going-under thing a bit of a premature statement at this point in 1912?” If you say that, then I’d ask you to consider the following thought:

This ship isn’t just a mirror for the actual, real Edwardian society that existed at this point in time in various forms all across the West…it is also a mirror for what Rose has internalized at the beginning of the story!

Rose has internalized certain rules and conventions; her entire upbringing makes it incredibly hard for her to question those, and since she cannot question and successfully defy them on her own at the beginning of the movie, the cognitive dissonance and unhappiness this causes make her consider suicide. Killing herself is the only option, the only way out of this type of ‘internalized society’ that she constantly carries within herself.

The task of this movie (and thus the screenwriter) is to make sure that that ‘internalized society’ inside of Rose sinks! These internalized rules, these conventions, these constraints, everything in her subconscious that is holding her back from actually leaving her fiancé, running off, becoming an actress, choosing a life partner for herself, i.e. everything that keeps her from taking charge of her own life and being happy, all of that…has to founder. It has to go down.

This ship is a metaphorical manifestation of this ‘internalized society’ that Rose has to fight within herself! (Rose is the main protagonist of this story. So it makes perfect sense for everything in this story to be about her.)

The ship is a gigantic mirror for the small and very personal misery of one single person: the story’s main protagonist Rose.

It magnifies her suffering and her inner turmoil and turns it into this giant vessel (the Titanic on her maiden (!) voyage, which is mirrored by Rose, this young maiden, being on her way to her engagement gala).

That’s what the story of ‘Titanic’ is all about.

Note how this class-stratified ship is described in the screenplay itself: Rose herself points out the Freudian aspect here, how the men who built it and maintain it are obsessed with its phallic size and power.

This whole ship is very masculine-coded because this is what this society is: It’s patriarchal at its core, and you can see this in the way Cal keeps behaving like he is Rose’s father, not her equal partner, throughout the movie, as we have discussed above. (If you want another example of this, just look at the scene where he tells her, “You will never behave like that again, Rose, do you understand?”)

Anyway…after the infamous first-class dinner party, Rose whispers to Jack in disgust that the men will now retreat to the first-class smoking room and ‘congratulate each other on being masters of the universe’ over cigars and brandy. (Please keep the first-class smoking room in mind for now; it’s a very important filming location.)

So, this is the type of society Rose is facing, a society whose rules she has internalized, that she struggles with, but has so far not found the strength to confront. It is masculine-coded, patriarchal and deeply segregated by class. In many ways, it is also calcified, ossified, in a sense, and doesn’t allow even for the slightest whiff of change (cf. Cal’s remarks about modern art or the indignation Rose’s mother expresses at Rose smoking).

Water on the other hand…well, water is the opposite, isn’t it?

I know that, if you’ve been following this little blog for a while, you will probably think first and foremost of the meaning of emotions and feelings when you hear the term ‘water metaphor’.

And that isn’t wrong per se, but water can represent many, many, many more things when it is shown on screen: femininity, the primordial chaos, baptismal rites and ritual cleansings, destruction, change, etc.

The cleverness of ‘Titanic’s’ screenplay consists in bringing all of these things together:

The ship is masculine-coded (cf. Rose’s Freudian phallic joke and her remark about men ‘playing masters of the universe’), so water is feminine-coded. It is the force that comes to sweep all of those old and decaying rules and conventions away.

This force is incredibly dangerous and scary. It is really threatening. Powerful and unimaginably destructive. But it might, just might also be one other thing: necessary!

It sweeps away old, ossified structures and societal institutions.

It is chaotic and dark and unpredictable. It is incredibly dangerous, often even fatal. But it might destroy that which must be destroyed, cleanse that which must be cleansed, sweep away that which must be swept away. It might destroy in order to bring about that necessary change.

And that change is happening within Rose as a character.

This incredibly chaotic and often terrifying disaster with its brutal force and horrific destruction is necessary for Rose. Her ‘internalized society’ has to be ripped apart and swept away, so she can finally stand there at the end of the movie and say her name is ‘Rose Dawson’, so she can transform and become her own true self, so she can turn away from Cal and her mother and the entire social class that she was brought up in.

And that’s why water, this huge, dangerous and frankly terrifying ocean, that tears apart an entire steamship in this movie, is all of these things: a primordial force, chaos, the power of free emotions and feelings over rational restraint and precision, the necessary destruction of a patriarchal concept, all of it…

This is not new, by the way. It’s not something James Cameron came up with on his own. In fictional stories, civilization is often described as masculine. It is ordered and civilized. It is precise because it’s run according to rules and functions without a hitch. It is constructive where water (femininity and chaos) is destructive. It builds and erects.

But it is also often unjust. It is ossified beyond belief and resists change. It builds structures and hierarchies that, while stable, make people almost suffocate, as they are trapped inside.

Water is often described as the opposite in fiction: It is feminine and destructive. It is dangerous, chaotic and can undermine and sweep away everything you have built. But this destruction can, at its core, be necessary in order to bring about change where masculine-coded society resists it.

These storytelling tropes aren’t new, and a lot of this reflects much older cultural ideas that are taken from philosophy. They are present in our collective cultural subconscious whether we read Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung or just follow the precepts of Chinese philosophy with its yin and yang concepts.

I don’t care if you agree with these ideas or not, and I don’t think this blog is the place to go into them too deeply. (This is a film blog, after all.)

The only thing that we should be interested in is the fact that James Cameron uses this basic premise in his movie, too:

Rose’s ‘internalized society’ has to go. It has to be destroyed…by water. And all of this destruction is necessary in order for her to grow as a character and be transformed.

This might be the point where you, dear reader, go, “Hang on a minute…didn’t you say that Jack was her catalyst and meeting Jack was that which brought about that change in her?”

To which I would reply, “Bingo! Now you’re getting it.”

Meeting Jack and that ship sinking…are functionally the same thing in the story.

One experience mirrors the other!

Meeting Jack, falling in love with him, being taken seriously as an adult, as an equal, as a person in her own right for the first time in her life…all of that is life-changing for Rose. All of this tears down the barriers in her mind, destroys the internalized norms and rules of her class. And that is why this experience of emotions and love, of finally discovering what agency means and starting to make her own choices, that’s why this experience is mirrored by the collision with an iceberg and the catastrophic sinking of an entire ship (i.e. her ‘internalized society’).

These are the same things!

Meeting Jack and the disaster in this movie are mirror images of each other.

That disaster only exists in this story to show how massively life-changing this event of meeting Jack, of falling in love with him is for Rose. This emotional experience ploughs through her inner psychological landscape with the force of a tsunami.

Her ‘Jack experience’ is akin to the collision with an iceberg. Her inner change as a character is like a 52,000-ton steel ship being brutally ripped apart.

Those are the forces exerted on her psyche in this movie.

And you can see how deliberate this mirroring effect between the big catastrophe™ and the small personal love experience with Jack actually is. The author’s intent is clearly visible here:

It’s no coincidence that their having sex and the collision with the iceberg happen so close in time to each other. Jack and Rose have sex in the car, and literally the next scene (!) is the collision with the iceberg that will bring about the sinking of the ship (read: will bring about the character change). It’s incredibly obvious.

In fact, the two sailors in the lookout specifically miss the iceberg because they’re preoccupied with the scene below as they peek down to where Jack and Rose are passionately kissing in their post-coital bliss.

In other words, the Titanic rams that iceberg because Jack and Rose just had sex. These two things are clearly linked in the text itself. (Because they are functionally the same thing in the subtext, anyway!)

This is also the only time in the screenplay where we get a tiny, little gay joke (at least as far as I recall):

Reginald Lee (that’s one of the two guys on lookout duty) says, “They’re a bit warmer than we are,” with a smile as he looks at Jack and Rose kissing.

And Frederick Fleet (the other sailor in the crow’s nest) quips, “Well, if that’s what it takes for us to get warm, I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you, all right?”

They both chuckle at that, distracted by the kiss below and that little joke.

And then, a split second later, Fleet spots the iceberg. (Both men survived the disaster in real life, by the way, which is just an unimaginable coincidence.)

Now, don’t be mad at James Cameron for including this little gay joke. Not everything merits accusations of homophobia and cancellations. Personally, I think it’s a hilarious little joke.

But if you want to go so far, you can even read it as another element of the rich and densely woven tapestry of subtext this screenplay gives us:

These men work in a highly homo-social context (a crow’s nest on a ship, which is usually exclusively manned by…men). The entire ship (read: this entire society) is built, maintained and steered by men working for and with other men, as a matter of fact.

And for these types of men occasional homophobic signalling is important. Where there are this many men working together in close proximity in a society like that, casual (and sometimes not so casual) homophobia is used to maintain order and keep things running.

These two men are just a manifestation of that. Granted it’s just a tiny little joke, but it shows us how this society works. And because heteronormative standards and homophobic signalling is so important to them…they miss the iceberg that’s about to hit them and their society, uh, ‘ship’.

This is a society hellbent on enforcing its norms and rules. And because it acts like that, it cannot see what’s coming for it, it cannot see the threat, the iceberg straight ahead, it cannot see that it is about to be swept away and go under.

As I said: It could just be a tiny little joke by James Cameron…or it could be intentional. With how densely woven the subtext of this screenplay is otherwise, I’d wager it is the latter not the former.

Anyway…you get the general idea, right?

Meeting Jack and falling in love with him…is functionally the same thing as the Titanic ramming an iceberg and sinking.

These things are the same.

And just to give you one other fascinating detail that confirms this reading:

Do you remember who dies first in this movie? No?

The stewards who were sent by Cal’s valet Mr. Lovejoy to find Rose. They are walking around the cargo hold, carrying their oldtimey flashlights, looking for Jack and Rose. They even find the steamed-up car, but Jack and Rose have already disappeared.

These guys are the first ones to die in this movie. They are the first ones to be swept away by a wall of water right as the iceberg scrapes along the hull of the ship and the steel plates burst just above the keel.

This is not at all what happened historically, and that’s how you know that James Cameron wrote this deliberately. (The guy knows everything there is to know about the sinking of the Titanic; I’m sure he knows who the first people were that died on that night.)

Historically, the first real victims of the iceberg were two engineers in one of the boiler rooms: Jonathan Shepard and Herbert Harvey. This is a well-documented historical fact.

In the commotion after the ship hit the iceberg, Jonathan Shepard slipped and broke his leg. His colleagues helped him and carried him into the pump room to keep him safe. Unfortunately, shortly after that, the boiler room began to flood, and everyone started to evacuate it. Herbert Harvey hurried back to the pump room in order to carry Shepard to safety, but it was too late. They were both swept away by the water. Their bodies were never recovered, as they were most likely carried down to the bottom of the Atlantic ocean by the sinking ship.

It’s a very well-known story – and a heartbreaking one at that, seeing as it was all down to a dumb accident. It’s really poignant to find out how everyone in that boiler room acted just right, trying to help, and yet…these two men died, anyway.

And of course, James Cameron knows this story.

But, in his movie, he makes the first victims the stewards with their lamps who are looking for Jack and Rose in the infamous car down in the cargo hold.

James Cameron makes sure that the first people who die in this quasi-revolutionary disaster are the guys who were sent to enforce the norms and rules of this society, the men who were asked by Cal to drag Rose back to her family. The enforcers of the laws of this society are the first victims of the iceberg. How very fitting.

So, you see how the great disaster of this disaster movie is actually just a way to visualize character change: painful, arduous, unwanted…but ultimately necessary. Rose’s meeting of Jack is functionally the same thing as the collision with that iceberg and the sinking of the ship.

Now, what about that blue diamond, I hear you ask.

So, here is where things get really interesting.

If you’ve read the movie reviews in the press back at the time or read pretty much anything that has been written about this film since, you will find the following claim made surprisingly often:

The blue diamond, the so-called ‘Heart of the Ocean’, is a metaphor for naked greed and corruption, for wealth and privilege, for cold-blooded cruelty and oppression, for the exact kind of society Rose rejects and ultimately manages to escape from. The necklace with the diamond is metaphorically suffocating her; it’s a shackle, a ball and chain, if you will. And that is why old Rose throws the diamond necklace overboard and into the ocean at the very end of the movie. She rejects the thing and thus the society that oppressed her.

Personally, I think this reading is completely and utterly wrong. It just doesn’t get to the, uhm, heart of this metaphor at all.

If this blue diamond is supposed to have this awful, negative meaning…well, then why is Rose wearing it (willingly and very much enthusiastically!) as Jack draws her in the nude? This is as we’re literally told ‘the most erotic moment of her life’ (at least up until that point). So are we to assume she put on this sign of oppression and greed on that occasion? That doesn’t seem to make any sense.

What’s more, why does Rose keep the diamond for a whopping 84 years, before eventually throwing it away at the end of the movie? If this stone were just another way to visualize her oppression, then young Rose should have thrown the stone away the moment she declared her name to be Rose Dawson and discovered this thing in her pocket. She should have thrown it away the moment she freed herself, right?

But she didn’t!

She actually kept it for an unimaginably long time, for many, many decades; she kept it safely and never ever sold it. She only throws it into the water when she’s about to turn 101 years old, and specifically on the night she dies (as the movie so heavily implies).

So, what’s up with that?

Doesn’t seem to make much sense if you read the blue diamond necklace as a metaphorical representation of everything that Rose hated and rejected, does it?

The reason why this doesn’t make any sense is the complexity of this metaphor. Because what it does actually do is: It switches its meaning with its owner. Once you see what is being done there, you cannot miss it. And it’s actually pretty cool.

Let us at first establish what the story of the diamond is, so we’re all on the same page here, okay?

This diamond is a fictitious object, i.e. it doesn’t exist outside of the fictional universe of ‘Titanic’.

Now, in the movie, we are told that Louis XVI, the King of France, owned a huge, beautiful blue diamond. It was called the ‘Blue Diamond of the Crown’. In 1792, i.e. during the French Revolution, when, as the screenplay puts it, ‘old Louis lost everything from the neck up’, the diamond was stolen.

This crown diamond was then subsequently recut into a heart-like shape, and that’s when it became known as the ‘Heart of the Ocean’, i.e. not the ‘Diamond of the Crown’ anymore.

At some point, Cal’s family purchased the ‘Heart of the Ocean’, and Cal then gives it to Rose as a gift while they are aboard the Titanic. (Billy Zane actually does an okay-ish French accent when he calls that thing ‘le cœur de la mer’.)

He specifically tells us that he had intended to give it to her as an engagement gift during the engagement gala, but he has rethought that decision now and is giving it to her here, aboard the Titanic. The way he behaves in that scene is coded as extremely predatory. He is basically pressuring her to have sex with him, and you get the strong sense that he wants both from her: her body, but also her complete emotional devotion. He literally asks her to ‘open her heart’ to him as he puts that heart necklace on her, and she touches it with her hand like one would put a hand over one’s own heart.

Old Rose describes the blue diamond as a ‘dreadful, heavy thing’ in the frame narrative of the film which deals with the treasure hunters.

In a deleted scene (the one where her young hand morphs into old Rose’s hand), she says, “It was a cold stone, a heart of ice. After all these years I can still feel it closing around my throat like a dog collar.”

So, this is the way Rose herself describes the stone, but she does that in a very specific context (when she’s talking about that moment Cal gave the necklace to her).

What happens next to the blue diamond?

Rose wears the blue diamond as Jack draws her in the nude. For this, she specifically takes it out of the safe herself (!). She does so willingly and very enthusiastically. She wants this. It is actually her idea to wear the necklace for this ‘erotic moment’.

Later in the movie, Cal completely loses his proverbial as he discovers the drawing of naked Rose. He then formulates a plan: frame Jack for the theft of the diamond and get him locked up and later arrested and tried in court.

Cal makes sure his valet Mr. Lovejoy slips the diamond necklace into Jack’s coat pocket when nobody’s looking.

Jack is then accused of theft and taken away in handcuffs. (Note: Jack never stole that diamond. He didn’t do what they are accusing him of in those scenes. Jack is innocent! Cal’s machinations were responsible for the diamond ending up with Jack in that scene. Cal is to blame for everything.)

At a later point in the movie, Cal unintentionally gives the diamond to Rose. He doesn’t intend on that happening, but it ends up in her possession, anyway. (Cal puts it in his pocket as he tries to evacuate the ship, and then puts the coat on Rose.)

It is then implied that the diamond necklace stays with Rose throughout her incredible ordeal on that ship, even when she is sucked into the water by the sinking stern. She doesn’t lose it even as she thrashes about in the water and ultimately comes to rest on that door frame panel. (None of this seems terribly realistic, seeing how often that coat pocket must be full of water in those scenes, but it’s actually subtextually important that she doesn’t lose that stone throughout those moments where she fights for her life.)

Once Rose is rescued by a lifeboat and then ultimately by the RMS Carpathia that’s come to save the survivors, she realizes what has happened: She discovers the diamond in her pocket.

It is implied that she keeps it for her entire life, guarding it, protecting it, never giving it away, never selling it, never having it recut, nothing. The implication is: 84 years of safekeeping.

Until her very last day on Earth, when she throws it into the ocean on the research ship Keldysh in the middle of the night, when nobody is looking, defying the express wishes of the treasure hunter Brock Lovett who is trying to locate it. We then see an imaginary necklace float above her head as she is dreaming of returning to the ship, and it is heavily implied that she is dying.

The end.

That’s the whole story of this (fictitious) object in this screenplay.

Now, let’s dissect the metaphor here, okay?

So, Cal gives the necklace to Rose as an engagement gift. It is really important to him, but to her it feels awful, cold and heavy. She feels collared by it.

What Cal is giving Rose there is his heart. He loves her.

I can see you furrow your brow at this, dear reader. But rest assured that Cal really loves Rose. It’s a completely twisted and sick kind of love, of course. But he does really love her. He loves her like one loves a possession, and he treats her like a little child. But he is absolutely mad about her. He is obsessed with her. After the iceberg strikes, we get several occasions on which Cal could have saved himself but doesn’t because he goes back to get Rose. He hates Jack deeply for taking her from him, but he also really wants to possess Rose. It’s a mad obsession that goes so far that he forgets about his own safety and risks everything.

This is a very dark and very unhealthy passion. What he feels for her is not indifference and cold. What he feels for her is crazy but real. He wants her physically and emotionally in every which way, but he doesn’t even see her as a full grown adult with agency. He sees her as someone who has to obey him like a little girl would obey her father. (And a particularly creepy deleted scene underlines his obsession with taking her virginity. Kinda metaphorically important on a maiden voyage…)

So, Cal gives Rose his heart. As he gives her the heart-shaped diamond, he literally tells her, “This is a reminder of my feelings for you.” It’s literally in the text.

And she immediately feels how wrong this love is, how deeply twisted and perverted his affections are. She feels this blue diamond is cold as ice and incredibly heavy and restricting the movement of her neck, her breathing, her freedom. She hates that thing, but she hates it specifically in the context of Cal giving it to her.

But now the meaning of the necklace switches. It is hers now, isn’t it? Her property. So now we are actually looking at her heart! (That’s important.)

And what do we find out? She takes it out of the safe for Jack!

This is where my earlier observation comes in: Love stories like this often feature one protagonist who is the Brain™ and one who is the Heart™. One is all about the mind; the other one is about opening the first character up and giving them access to their own emotions.

Rose has no problem accessing her brain; we see that all the time in this movie. But she has no access to her heart at first. It is locked up. It’s difficult to get to. It’s in a safe. (No surprise. If you had been raised the way she was raised, you wouldn’t find it easy to access your own emotions either.) There is a scene in the movie where Jack, whom she has just met, asks her point-blank if she loves Cal. Her face is the definition of that ‘Internal Server Error 404’ meme.

She pretends to be incensed. This is not a suitable topic of conversation, she tells Jack. But actually, you can see how she struggles with the fact that this question hadn’t even occurred to her so far. It’s not something she is supposed to be asking herself. She is supposed to obey. And we can see that realization on her face that she is really intrigued by this free-spirit-artist-guy but cannot even answer this impertinent question because, well, deep down she probably knows she doesn’t love Cal, but it’s also something you’re not supposed to say, you’re not supposed to even think, so it’s like her brain is doing some ‘white noise’ thing, and she pretends to be full of righteous indignation.

This girl has no access to her own emotions yet. She is emotionally immature. She is still trying to lie herself into a relationship with Cal, trying to tell herself that she really loves him.

Over the course of the movie and thanks to her catalyst Jack, this changes. And eventually, she takes the blue diamond out of the safe. She does it herself. She does it for Jack. In a very erotic context. She opens the locked safe and takes out that heart!

(I mean, if the movie wanted us to understand that this blue diamond just represented greed, wealth and oppression, then why make it a heart in the first place, right?)

There is other jewellery in this story that has that negative meaning, by the way. The same scene in which Jack impertinently asks Rose if she loves Cal also features a moment in which she briefly holds out her hand to him and he catches sight of her engagement ring. He pretty much whistles and jokes she would have definitely gone down straight to the bottom of the Atlantic if she had truly jumped off the ship during her suicide attempt, implying that the rock on that ring is huge and heavy.

Note how cleverly the engagement ring and the suicide attempt are linked in this line: Jack jokes that the ring would have been the reason for Rose to drown. You cannot make it any more obvious: This engagement is toxic for Rose and her character development. Rose has to get away from Cal.

So, there is actually a piece of jewellery that fulfils that exact function in the text; it’s just not the blue diamond necklace. That one now becomes Rose’s heart. A heart she finally manages to take out of the safe…for Jack.

“A woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets,” old Rose tells us later on in the story, and this alone should make it clear to us that the literal ‘Heart of the Ocean’...is her heart now.

Then comes the fascinating part of this metaphor’s life story:

Cal has the stone put in Jack’s pocket and tells everyone Jack stole it. Cal is absolutely apoplectic because of this ‘theft’.

“Two things dear to me have disappeared this evening,” Cal states. He means Rose (or rather Rose’s heart which was figuratively stolen from Cal) and the blue diamond (which he claims was literally stolen at the same time). So, the author of this script is actually literally telling us that Rose’s heart and this diamond mirror each other.

And Cal accuses Jack of stealing Rose’s heart…from its rightful owner (which Cal supposes is he, Cal).

This is the point where I’m really happy we recently talked about ‘White Collar’ because that show played with the exact same idea, remember?

The music box has a rightful owner (Empress Catherine the Great), but then the music box was stolen. Empress Catherine mirrors Peter’s wife Elizabeth. The thief mirrors Neal Caffrey. Well, and the music box itself is a metaphor for Peter’s heart. Peter’s heart was stolen by Neal Caffrey, and the rightful owner (Peter’s wife) wants it back.

Same story here in ‘Titanic’.

Cal demands the heart back. He accuses Jack of stealing Rose’s heart.

This is the point where we should remember the origin story of this blue diamond in the fictional universe that is the screenplay of ‘Titanic’:

We were told that the blue diamond was stolen from King Louis XVI. And earlier on in the film, Cal specifically tells Rose, “We are royalty.” I.e. we, the audience, are clearly told here that King Louis XVI is a mirror for Cal!

The blue diamond was stolen from King Louis XVI, but (wait for it!) it wasn’t a heart back then; it was the Crown Diamond.

Ooh, this is brilliant. Louis XVI mirrors Cal, so we are told here that Cal originally saw this whole love he felt for Rose as something where he could have Rose like a possession, like that final, precious, sparkling centrepiece of his own royal crown.

But then the diamond was stolen from Louis XVI (read: Cal).

It was only then that this diamond was recut and turned into a heart-shaped jewel, after it was already stolen from Louis XVI. It was only then that it was turned from the Crown Diamond into the ‘Heart of the Ocean’.

You get it, right? It’s only after Cal isn’t in charge of Rose’s emotions anymore that she can turn that which was a relationship in which she would have ended up being the centrepiece of his crown (i.e. an arranged marriage/essentially prostitution) into a true love for somebody she really loved and respected.

Interestingly, the theft of Louis XVI prized stone happened during the French Revolution.

Yeah. The whole ‘Titanic’ story is a revolution of sorts.

And we are specifically reminded of the fact that King Louis’ head was chopped off in the process, as well.

To which I can only say, “So long, Cal. It was nice knowing ya. But here we get some excellent foreshadowing that you won’t make it long term.” (Well, and Edwardian society won’t either.)

Might I remind you of one other fact: Cal calls himself ‘royalty’. But his kind is actually on the way out. You know who else calls himself ‘royalty’?

Jack! Yes, really.

And that’s certainly no coincidence. After Jack has won those tickets in a poker game, he and Fabrizio run towards the ship and Jack yells, “We’re riding in high style now! We’re a couple of regular swells. We’re practically goddamn royalty, ragazzo mio.”

Yes, Cal might think he is royalty, but it’s chop-choppity-chop-chop time for him and his kind. Jack is coming. And he’s the one who will get Rose and Rose’s heart. He will transform the Crown Diamond into the ‘Heart of the Ocean’…in a sense.

And that’s why it’s Jack (not Cal!) who yells, “I’m the king of the world!” a few minutes later.

The King!

So, the Crown Diamond was turned into the ‘Heart of the Ocean’.

I.e. we are literally told in the stone’s French origin story that this metaphor changes its meaning.

Anyway…where were we?

Ah, yes. So, Cal accuses Jack of theft. Jack has stolen Rose’s heart, Cal tells us here in metaphorical terms.

But here comes the kicker: Jack hasn’t. Jack hasn’t stolen it. “You know I didn’t do this, Rose,” a desperate Jack yells at Rose. “You know it!”

So, what is this all about, you might wonder. Didn’t Jack steal Rose’s heart?

Well…no. He didn’t.

But Rose’s heart ended up with him anyway. (I mean, the diamond is right there in Jack’s pocket, right?)

Really clever, don’t you think?

Jack is innocent. He didn’t steal the diamond, i.e. Jack did not set out to seduce Rose. He didn’t nefariously ‘steal her heart’.

But her heart ended up in his pocket anyway. Even though he didn’t intentionally pursue her. It happened anyway. She fell for him anyway.

And who put the stone (read: Rose’s heart) in Jack’s pocket? Why, none other than Cal himself (or rather the valet acting on his behalf).

This doesn’t mean that Cal wanted Jack to have Rose’s heart. No, I’m sure that what this means is: It’s Cal’s fault, in a sense, that Rose fell in love with another man. If he hadn’t been the absolute, utter prick that he is. If he hadn’t yelled at her and threatened her and pressured her into having sex with him in a very predatory way (and later in the movie, we even see him physically abuse her several times), so if Cal hadn’t been this massive cock, who knows, perhaps Rose wouldn’t have fallen for another man.

But as things stand, Cal was horrible, and so he basically ‘gave’ her heart away to another man. (No wonder, actually, that that happened.) Jack is not to blame. He did not purposefully ‘steal her heart’. He didn’t mean to seduce her or anything.

Then later we get the same theme again: Cal puts the diamond in his coat and then gives the coat to Rose. He thus gives her her own heart, but he does so inadvertently. He doesn’t mean to do so, but it happens anyway.

Because it was Cal’s appalling behaviour (and frankly his whole insufferable, privileged-beyond-belief personality) that pretty much drove Rose into the arms of another man…and even more importantly, it’s Cal’s whole awfulness that helped Rose realize that she had to take control of her own heart, i.e. control of the matters of heart in her life, herself.

Whichever way you turn it: Rose ends up with the diamond (i.e. in charge of her own heart, in control of her own love life) specifically because Cal is so awful. His behaviour ‘gives’ her the diamond – even though that’s certainly not his intention, and even though she doesn’t realize it at the time.

It is then only logical that Rose cannot lose that heart while she struggles to survive, right? It might not look terribly realistic when you see her run and fight for her life and be plunged into the ocean and thrash about in the water, etc. But subtextually, Rose cannot let go of her own heart anymore at this point. It’s hers now! She is in charge of her own love life and thus her whole emotional life.

It is only after the deed, i.e. the ordeal of the massive, massive character development, is finally done, after her transformation is complete, that she discovers that the heart is now in her possession. It’s at this point that she knows she is in charge of her own life…and her own love life.

I love this idea that she comes out of this ordeal, suddenly realizing that her heart belongs to her and to nobody (!) else but her.

And that’s why she keeps it for herself for all these decades. It is hers. It’s nobody else’s.

I don’t think this means she wasn’t in love with her husband Mr. Calvert, by the way (that would defeat the whole purpose of the movie, which is after all to make Rose happy). I think the reason why this heart stays with her means that she is free to make her own choices; she is in charge of her own life…and that includes her love life. She cannot give that blue heart to Mr. Calvert because she will never give up that autonomy anymore. (I don’t think this means she didn’t love her husband. I think it means to have a healthy understanding of what autonomy means. She will not surrender that ever again. Not to anyone.)

At the end of the movie, she is clearly dying.

You might ask, “Well, if the ship is a metaphor for this awfully hierarchical and stratified society and all of its cultural norms and rules…why is she returning to it in her dream as she dies?”

Oh, but I would reply, “Have you actually looked at that dream ship in her mind?”

That’s a completely different Titanic!

First-class passengers and third-class passengers happily mingle on that grand staircase, everyone is smiling and happy with each other. That’s not at all the Titanic Rose travelled on back in 1912, i.e. the metaphor for a culturally conservative society and the rules Rose was forced to internalize. This is a different ship altogether, i.e. a metaphor for a different society. That’s the dream here.

That’s the ship she comes to as she dies. And Jack is there. (Of course, he is. He is, after all, a part of her. He was such an important catalyst in her self-realization story. Where else would he be in her final moments? She is returning to this part of herself.) They meet at the clock. Remember that Jack gave Rose a note once, ‘To make it count, meet me at the clock.’ (The word ‘it’ referred to ‘the day’ in that note.)

Meeting at the clock means making it count. Now, as old Rose is dying, they meet at that clock again…in her dream.

So…it counts. This day counts. Because it is her last one.

‘To make it count’ on that slip of paper Jack wrote was a reference to what he had said earlier during that first-class dinner party, “I figure life’s a gift, and I don’t intend on wasting it. [...]To make each day count.” And then this turned into a toast as they all raised their glasses.

Then he hands Rose the note that reads, ‘To make it count, meet me at the clock.’

And 84 years later, Rose meets him again at that clock (clocks are the most obvious memento mori symbol there is, by the way). This meeting at the clock in her dream is about that whole question, about…‘making it count’.

This whole reunion in her dream is about the question of whether Rose managed to make each day of her life count. Did she waste her life? Or did she manage to make it meaningful as that gift that Jack mentioned it was?

We don’t have to ask these questions, we see her happy photographs as she sleeps and presumably dies in her sleep in her warm bed, just like Jack predicted and hoped she would. We see she didn’t die in 1912. We see that she had a happy life, a full life. Which is, after all, the whole basic premise of this movie: How to make sure Rose can be happy and have a fulfilled life? How to make sure she will make her life count?

In that last moment of her life, she meets Jack again at the clock. The clock shows the time when the last part (the stern) of the Titanic sank (2:20 am), i.e. the clock face shows the time when that society went under, when that big upheaval, Rose’s character transformation, happened, when she started to value life instead of wishing to throw it away, when she finally took charge of her life.

And yes, old Rose has just thrown the blue diamond into the ocean. She has thrown it there with her hand, no less! Her heart goes straight into the water; it returns to the primordial chaos, the chaos of emotions and feelings, the chaos that was necessary in order to destroy that awful, precision-driven, phallus-obsessed, masculine-coded society. Her heart goes into the water to where Jack is. Jack who is a part of her, a part of herself she meets again, as she dies, the thought of that necklace (her heart!) still swirling in her mind over and over and over…After all, she had spent an entire life in charge of this blue diamond, i.e. making autonomous decisions about her love life. So, the last thought in her brain as it shuts down is not of being a rational and well-read and insanely intelligent woman. Her last thought is all about her heart. Her heart in the water.

And that, dear ladies and gentlemen, is the story of the blue diamond.

Do I hear you shout ‘encore’ over there, dear reader?

Okay, here’s one interesting little detail: In the scene in which Cal gives Rose that blue diamond necklace, there’s a music box playing in the background at very the beginning. Since this type of music is usually used in movies whenever we are shown a scene that’s set in a little child’s bedroom (potentially, this can even be a tiny baby in his or her crib), this scene with Cal giving Rose the diamond comes across as massively creepy: He is this (bad, evil) daddy who has brought his ‘good girl’ a precious gift…and ugh, now he’s asking for sex. It’s so deranged. And the way the music box song gives way to some really ominous-sounding deep strings really gets this point across so well.

Now, contrast this with the scene in which Rose shows Jack the diamond (her heart!). Jack is completely engrossed. He is so, so fascinated by this stone (her heart!). In fact, he is so preoccupied that he doesn’t even get what she is hinting at: that she wants to take her kit off.

Translation: Jack thinks her heart is so beautiful that even the prospect of seeing her naked can’t tear him away from said heart at first. Awww. Her heart…is more important than sex to him.

What a nice metaphor this is!

And just to show us that these two scenes really need to be read together, James Cameron employs a little trick: Cal says ‘le cœur de la mer’ with a French accent in the scene where he gives Rose the diamond. And Jack says, “I’m not used to working in such ‘orrible conditions,” with a French accent in the scene in which Rose gives him the diamond. Cal’s accent is more proper. But Jack’s is way funnier and more honest. Aaaand Jack can talk to Rose about Monet, which Cal couldn’t if his life depended on it, so…

And then Jack can’t take his eyes off the diamond (her heart!) even when female nakedness is being suggested. He even misses her meaning entirely, so engrossed is he by her heart. Wow!

Is there anything else I would like to tell you about ‘Titanic’? (And boy, whyever did I think I could write you a short post about this film? Am I stupid? I must be. This is a film that’s more than three hours long and stuffed to the proverbial gunnels with subtext. Of course, this was never going to be a short post. Why exactly did I think I could write you a quick thing about this megalong film full of subtext?)

There’s a brilliant little detail, for example, the significance of which I realized only recently: When the ship finally breaks apart, wooden planks splintering, heavy steel being ripped apart with a monstrous roar…so, when the ship breaks apart, did you notice who is clinging to the railing at the exact spot where it’s being ripped apart? It’s Mr. Lovejoy, Cal’s valet. The man who chased Jack and Rose so mercilessly, the man who acted as a brutal enforcer of the norms and rules of this society on Cal’s behalf.

And while I had noticed that it was him back when I had watched this at the cinema, I didn’t really understand its meaning. (I guess, I just thought, ‘Serves him right for being a villain,’ or something in that vein. But it’s actually deeply meaningful.)

Valets and servants in general occupied a strange in-between stratum of society, didn’t they? Nominally, they were all working class people (and we are even told in this case that Mr. Lovejoy used to be a policeman), but they were also awfully close to power. They were this strange hinge between two completely different classes in society. They were in between all those strata, constantly being pulled this way or that, almost being ripped in half.

And the film visualizes that by putting this guy right there, on that very spot where the, uhm, ‘ship’ (metaphor! metaphor!) is being ripped in half, literally at the fault line of society.

That is a brilliant, clever little detail I honestly did not realize was significant when I first watched this movie.

And since we’re again on the subject of the ship representing society, here’s one last thing I’d like you to think about:

We have already talked about the fact that the portrayal of Officer Murdoch isn’t very accurate in this movie.

Well, here’s another thing that enraged some harcore Titanic geeks: In the movie, Thomas Andrews, the shipbuilder and the chief designer of the ship, is last seen in a trance-like state of apathy in the first-class smoking room where it is implied he will die very soon. (In real life, Thomas Andrews was seen distributing lifebelts and helping people until the very last minute.)

So, why did James Cameron change history here again?

Because in a screenplay, the metaphorical subtext takes precedence over historical accuracy!

Throughout this post, I have kept referring to Cal, Rose’s fiancé, as someone who is taking on this role as Rose’s father. And I have added pretty much every time that he’s a ‘bad dad’, at that.

In reality, it doesn’t actually matter all that much, though, does it? When you’re dealing with somebody who treats you like an immature child, it doesn’t really matter if he plays the ‘bad dad’ or the ‘good dad’ part. The moment you’re not being treated as an equal, you’re screwed either way. A good patriarch is just a tiny step up from a bad patriarch. That situation is nowhere near real freedom.

And I think Cameron was trying to make that exact point here: Cal is the representation of this ‘bad dad’. He beats his future wife. He physically abuses her in other ways, too. He threatens her, yells at her, frightens her. In short, he is a pure horror show of a father figure. He is treating her as a little girl, yes, and he is taking on the role as this daddy, but it’s a ‘bad daddy’, that’s for sure.

Andrews is the opposite. He is actually quite the sympathetic character in the movie. He is kind to Rose. He listens to her questions. He tries to calm her and help her once the ship has hit the iceberg. He is clearly a warmhearted and kind man.

But that’s the whole point here: He still treats her like a child. He is still the father figure in this relationship. He might be a ‘good dad’ type. But theirs is still not a relationship of equals. “Sleep soundly, young Rose. I have built you a good ship,” he tells her when she expresses concern about the small number of lifeboats.

This is what you’d tell a child.

This is a patriarch.

Andrews is actually an allegorical representation of this patriarchal system: He built this ship! (Read: It’s this patriarchal system that built this society.)

He is not an evil guy, in the way I’m sure most men back then weren’t evil. They truly loved their wives and daughters and cared for them…but they couldn’t but see themselves as providers and protectors, as patriarchs; they made sure to be in control of their wives and daughters all the time. They never treated them as equals. (I mean, they didn’t even give women the vote, for Heaven’s sake.) These were good men, but their fundamental ideas and beliefs were utterly misguided. This ‘ship’ they built had to sink!

And now is it any wonder that Andrews goes down with his ship and that he does so specifically in the first-class smoking room? (In case the layout of the Titanic is still a bit confusing to you, dear reader, you can recognize the first-class smoking room by the fact that it’s the only room that had an actual working fireplace on this ship.)

Remember what Rose told Jack about this smoking room: “Now they’ll retreat into a cloud of smoke and congratulate each other on being masters of the universe.”

While it’s actually the coal trimmers and the firemen that keep this ‘ship’ (read: this society) going, while it’s the poorest of the poor who do all the hard work, these upper-class men have made their exclusively male spaces into the beating heart of this civilization. This is where all the business deals are made. This is where politics is discussed and decisions on matters of policy are made, too. This is truly where the masters of the universe reside.

The first-class smoking room represents all of that. It’s the centre of this society. The ship represents this type of society. And Andrews…well, Andrews is the patriarchy that built all of that.

Is it any wonder that he has to go down in that very room? He dies. And that room dies with him.

James Cameron is visually telling us that no matter how ‘well-fed’ and well taken care off all of these wives and daughters are, no matter how nice and warmhearted the patriarchs and how well-intentioned their institutions might be…These patriarchs still have to go. They still have to fall. Andrews’ whole ship (society) has to founder.

“I’m sorry that I didn’t build you a stronger ship, young Rose,” Andrews says as he bids Rose farewell.

The patriarch tried. The patriarch failed. His society just doesn’t really work.

And that’s why James Cameron changed history; that’s why this Andrews character had to die in the first-class smoking room while the real Mr. Andrews actually kept helping people up until the last moment.

Note the following interesting detail in the movie, too: Earlier on in the movie, Andrews tells Rose, “Sleep soundly, young Rose. I have built you a good ship. Strong and true. She’s all the lifeboat you need.” (The emphasis here is all mine.)

Andrews says the ship…is a boat!

I.e. to the patriarch, this society is all the lifeboat you need. You don’t jump ship when you live in a patriarchal society like that, he says. In Mr. Andrews’ mind, this society is ‘strong and true’, and even if something were to happen, even if there were some sort of trouble on the horizon, this society would act as its own lifeboat. You don’t need to rebel. You don’t need a revolution. You just stay aboard. You stay with the plan. You stay on course. This society will sort itself out. That’s what he thinks.

And now, think of young Cora! (Remember her?)

There’s a scene with her I was keeping from you up until now: When the Titanic can be seen in Southampton at the beginning of the movie, Cora and her father are admiring the ship (just as the infamous Renault is being lowered onto the ship’s deck by crane, by the way; we all know how important that car is going to be).

Cora’s father (!) says, “It’s a big boat, eh?”

And little Cora corrects him, “Daddy, it’s a ship.”

This seems like a cute and largely meaningless exchange at this point, but it’s not! Nothing in this screenplay is pointless. Everything serves a purpose.

Andrews thinks the ship…is a boat. I.e. the patriarchy thinks this society is its own lifeboat. He tells Rose as much.

And look here: This father (!) says essentially the same thing: The ship is a boat, to him.

And it’s his daughter (who’s a mirror character for Rose!) who corrects him.

(And about a split second after Cora has turned around to look at these new cars that have just arrived, we see young Rose for the first time. It’s really like the camera is trying to tell us visually that Cora is Rose’s mirror image.)

Nice little detail, right?

And you know what else Cora’s father says in that scene?

After Cora corrects him, “Daddy, it’s a ship,” her father replies, “You’re right.”

Well, that’s the whole movie in a nutshell: Andrews thinks this society is its own lifeboat. Rose thinks nope, no way. And then the disaster proves Andrews wrong and Rose right, and Andrews has to tell her that he’s sorry he didn’t build her a stronger ship (read: society). Because this ship…never was its own lifeboat. Rose was always right.

So, essentially: “Daddy, it’s a ship.” “You’re right.”

That’s the gist of the movie ‘Titanic’.

Glad that we’ve talked about this, ladies and gentlemen.

All in all, you might ask now: Is Rose actually just Rose? Or is she something more? Does she represent something broader? And I think a film wouldn’t be a proper film if its characters didn’t fulfil some sort of allegorical function even just vaguely.

Rose enters this story a child and she turns into an adult over the course of this coming-of-age story. She boards the ship a little girl and leaves it a grown woman. Doesn’t this also tell us something broader, historically speaking?

It has become a bit of a truism to state that society in 1912 was still pretty naïve: People really believed in the power of technology to defeat nature. Their can-do attitude and fervour can be read as a positive approach to life’s hardships, but often this just translated into hopeless naïveté, into delusions of grandeur and hubris. Humility in the face of nature’s vagaries was not really their kinda thing.

This immature, naïve society had to grow up one way or another. It grew up the hard way.

It has become a commonplace platitude to point out that the sinking of the Titanic was how that happened, a sudden necessary shock. But once you look at the broader historical context, you will probably realize that it took much, much longer than just that: two World Wars and unimaginable suffering, and in the end, deeply transformed societies throughout the West.

Whether you agree with this assessment or not, I think it’s not far-fetched to assume that James Cameron had this in mind when he came up with Rose, the character who has to grow up through undergoing a horrific ordeal.

While I was writing this post, I did actually rewatch ‘Titanic’ at one point, which originally I hadn’t intended to do; originally I had wanted to write just one or two paragraphs about this movie in another ‘Young Royals’-related post (the one you will get next time). I had meant to include just one tiny thought, one idea, one paragraph about this movie in that post you’ll get next time, and somehow the whole ‘Titanic’ thing then just blew up and ballooned out of proportion, so now I wrote a whole 70+ page post about it. But it was worth it, there’s really a lot of fun stuff to find in this 28-year-old movie. And when I rewatched it (going against my original intentions), I realized that it has actually aged quite well.

There is some stuff you do obviously realize:

The CGI obviously isn’t up to today’s standards, for example. You can see where the computer graphics are barely held together at the seams, where Jack and Rose’s faces are pasted artificially onto some stuntmen’s bodies, say, or where the people strolling along the boat deck are simply computer generated.

You can see how this movie breathes the air of the time it was made in, too: Rose’s make-up throughout the film screams 1990s pop girl groups and ‘Pulp Fiction’, to be honest. And boy, does Billy Zane, as her fiancé Cal, look grunge.

And the film has other obvious flaws (or should we just call them characteristics?), too:

The characterization can be so black-and-white at times, it borders on cringe sometimes.

You get your cartoon villains in first class (I mean, if Cal had a moustache he would probably be twirling it all the time). Rose’s mother looks and acts like a caricature. All the other stiff-upper-lip millionaires are equally ridiculous. And don’t even get me started on the third-class characters: They are just clichés. You really get your fill of these rough-on-the-outside-with-a-heart-of-gold Irishmen that are just stereotypes, you know.

So, don’t expect any complexity on the characterization front, but then again…maybe that’s not really what’s important here. This film doesn’t give you terribly complicated characters because it’s not reality; it’s a fairy tale. You don’t read ‘Cinderella’ and expect there to be these complicated grey-morality type characters, do you? In a fairy tale, you expect irredeemably evil stepmothers and goody-two-shoes stepdaughters (well, technically, goody-one-shoe in ‘Cinderella’, right?).

Something that is probably more worthy of criticism is that infamous ‘nude-drawing scene’. I have talked about a few aspects of it in this post that are at least interesting, but even those can’t fully redeem the scene itself. It is and remains a prime example of the ‘male gaziness’ we had discussed in that post about the ‘Cinematic Language of Sexual Desire’.

The most erotic thing of young Rose’s teenage life that James Cameron could come up with, the thing she most desires is…to be desired? Really? Ooookay…The most erotic thing for a young woman like that is to be looked at in a naked state and desired by a man?

I think it’s much more likely that what happened here is that James Cameron tried to come up with something he thought would be insanely erotic and the only thing that he could think of was a scenario that he himself would find erotic (men are pretty visual creatures and like looking at naked women, no surprises there – well, straight men do, in any case). So, he took the thing that he found most erotic and made it Rose’s most erotic moment. The words ‘lack of empathy’ are echoing through my brain at that for some reason.

Honestly, all a scene like this requires is either a bit of empathy or (in case you cannot conjure that up in yourself)...you know…maybe just ask a couple of women what they found erotic when they were teenagers? Like, I’m sure there are a lot of female readers of this blog who could instantly write whole novels about what it felt like being a teenager and noticing what boys looked like and what specifically they found appealing about them. A scene like that could have been written very differently, not with Rose as the object being looked at, the ‘dish’ as old Rose puts it 84 years later, but as the one looking at Jack as an object of her desire. This movie flipped the conventional male-female character constellation in so many ways; it’s a shame Cameron didn’t manage to do so in this one particular scene.

Anyway, all in all, I can just reiterate what I wrote back in that post about ‘The Cinematic Language of Sexual Desire’: Even movies that have a feminist undercurrent, movies that are empowering and do push the idea that it’s important for women to make their own choices and stop being these passive objects…even these types of films can fall into this ‘male-gaze trap’ from time to time.

‘Titanic’ is an example of that. It is clearly a film with a feminist message, but in that particular instance, it just fails to take a couple of things into consideration. It’s like Cameron came up with an interesting and empowering basic premise for his movie and then suffered a bit of a brain fart at one point, to be honest. Oh, well…

But in the end, that doesn’t change what this whole movie is all about. It is about a woman who frees herself from the constraints put on her and makes a life for herself by making her own choices. It is an empowering movie, brain fart or no.

One other thing to like about this movie is the fact that it is one of the very rare cases in which a frame narrative actually works and also makes sense. This is really rare (and yes, I’m still shuddering after seeing that epic fail of a frame narrative in ‘Maestro’ last year). Here it works, and it works specifically because it supports the film’s main message: This is a coming-of-age story. Rose has to change. Rose has to grow up. She has to go through a cathartic experience (meeting Jack=hitting the iceberg) in order to make sure that that metaphorical ship inside herself (that ‘internalized society’) can sink. And then we have to see the result of that change, of course! We have to see if this worked for her! And it clearly did.

We have to see whether she lived that full life, making her own choices. And…yay!

The movie is about an incredibly unhappy, depressed, near-suicidal young girl, who is trapped inside the conventions of her time and class, and it is all about leading her out of this misery and making her happy. Of course, we have to see if she became happy in the end. And that was clearly the case.

That’s why old Rose and that whole frame narrative is so important. And the way it is done unambiguously works.

The other thing is exposition. Expositional scenes are the scenes in which the audience has to get some extra information in order to understand what is going on. Screenplays will often include a character whom film fans lovingly dub Mr. or Ms. Exposition for explaining everything that the audience needs to know. Ostensibly this will be explained to another character, but actually this is directed at the viewers at the cinema who just need to know stuff for the movie to make sense to them. And as you can probably guess, expositional scenes are very often incredibly clunky and downright cringe.

The frame narrative of ‘Titanic’ guarantees that the movie can stuff this frame with all sorts of expositional info without it becoming too obvious: There’s old Rose, and there is the nerd-type character Mr. Bodine in his cartoon t-shirt aboard the Keldysh, who’s showing her a computer simulation of how the ‘Titanic’ broke in half and sank. Nothing about this scene seems weird or clumsy; we watch it and we just accept it as something that is happening in the frame narrative of this movie. But it’s actually an expositional scene. It’s there to inform us, the audience, what went down during the sinking of the Titanic. This scene doesn’t really exist for old Rose’s sake in-universe. It’s all exposition. It’s just cleverly done. So, that’s another function of this frame narrative: It gives us these subtle, barely noticeable expositional scenes.

I think there was a scene later on where the exposition was a bit more clumsily done, but you know…Can’t be perfect all the time. It was that scene in the middle of the movie where that same Mr. Bodine gets all angry at Captain Smith for holding ‘an iceberg warning in his fucking hand, excuse me, his hand’. That scene. It’s less subtle as an expositional scene, but it’s still okay.

Another thing that stood out to me when I recently rewatched the movie for the purposes of writing this post is how insanely well-paced it actually is. Really. The pacing of this whole movie is amazing: The way it’s edited is just so great. No wonder it won an Oscar for Best Editing.

And by pacing I don’t just mean the more dramatic scenes in the second half; even the first half is so well-thought-out. Where it cuts into a scene, where it cuts away, where it lets scenes play out in real or near-real time…all of that is just brilliant.

It’s the kind of movie you should watch if you’re interested in all things film making just in general: From the clever editing to all the different shot types and sizes it employs so effectively…Hell, even where old Rose voice-over comes in and where it fades away again is done so well throughout the movie (and I’m usually not the biggest fan of voice-over narration in movies, but here’s it’s done sparingly and at just the right intervals).

Well, and last but not least: This film really has a great screenplay. It is really well-written. You can see how even the tiniest remarks and little jokes are actually deeply meaningful. There’s quite a lot of depth to the whole thing in general, which personally I think makes films just so much more enjoyable than just a lot of bombastic special effects and great art direction (although the bombastic special effects and great art direction are pretty amazing in this one, obviously; this is a film of an incredible scale and scope, after all). I hope I was able to show you above why this screenplay is so great and why you shouldn’t knock ‘Titanic’ for being an epic blockbuster with broad mainstream appeal. Just because a lot of people like something doesn’t mean it’s bad! It’s perfectly possible that most people who like it don’t really see why it’s great, anyway. How many people do you think really understand this screenplay?

The screenplay is great, and to return to our earlier food analogy: It’s a bit as though you had ordered a steak at one of those chain steakhouse restaurants, expected a pretty decent steak and got a really, really delicious one instead. And now you’re surprised and don’t know how to tell all of your friends about it. Will they just scoff at you because you didn’t eat this wonderful steak at an insanely expensive gourmet restaurant? Will they ever give that steakhouse a chance? Or will they think that that’s just a cheap venue for the masses? Lots to think about…

I mean, one of the reasons why you should watch (or rewatch) ‘Titanic’ is just the meme factor in and of itself. Rarely has there been a film that is as meme-able as this one. Can you even participate in modern life on social media if you don’t know it? You need to have watched ‘The Matrix’ for its blue pill/red pill routine, and you need to have watched ‘Titanic’, right? Just think of all the political memes that start with old Rose’s “It’s been 84 years…” being used completely out of context. Or the gazillion frankly hilarious mockeries people have made out of, “Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your French girls.”

In short, it’s one of those films one just has to have seen in order to be able to participate in that common Western internet culture; there’s no way around it. It’s part of our cultural subconscious now.

But there is honestly more to this movie than just that, and the screenplay, as I said, is actually far cleverer and deeper than you might think at first glance.

Above all, I hope I managed to get one thing across in this post here (and yes, it’s the thing I keep saying over and over again): Fiction is not reality. And reality is not fiction.

While we’re watching this movie and enjoying the secret sizzle of seeing icebergs and so much water as we sit in our warm living rooms on our comfy couch, while we’re watching the dying and drowning and can stay safe with our arms wrapped around the person we love, while we’re watching this and analyzing the screenplay and its subtext, i.e. while we’re watching this as a work of fiction…let us never forget that behind this fictional story, there lies a real tragedy. Let us never forget that those were real people.

I know we tend to come up with all sorts of jokes about the sinking of the Titanic; there are countless slapstick routines, sitcom scenes, cartoons etc. about this historical event now, and obviously there’s enough temporal distance between us and the past, by now. So we feel a little humour from time to time is justified. The sinking of the Titanic has become this quasi-pop culture event; something so iconic we can all get a good laugh out of it. But I’m sure that that laughter is sometimes just a way to distance ourselves from thinking about death, loss and tragedy too deeply; we feel uncomfortable to think about the unimaginable pain and suffering these people went through, so…we just don’t. We distance ourselves from that realization with a good, fat dollop of humour.

But despite all the jokes, despite this historical event’s pop culture status…let’s not forget what this really meant, what it really was, and that those…were real people.

If you find it difficult to connect to your own, true emotions when it comes to a historical event like this…

Imagine how incredibly hard the body recovery work on the CS Mackay-Bennett (one of the ships that recovered at least some of the bodies that were eventually found floating in the ocean) must have been. Imagine the gut-wrenching moments on board when these dead bodies turned out to be children.

And if heroism isn’t a word in your vocabulary, and you find it difficult to imagine what that even means…

Think of the engineers on the Titanic, who kept working deep down in the bowels of the ship in order to keep the generators running. They literally kept the lights on…and even more importantly perhaps, they kept the pumps running. And most importantly: It’s only thanks to them that the Marconi equipment still had the power, so the radio operators could even send those CQD and SOS distress calls.

Or think of the radio operators themselves: Jack Phillips and Harold Bride. The night before the collision their wireless machine had broken down. Marconi Company guidelines said the operators were not to repair it but to leave that to a Marconi Company technician in the next port the ship would arrive at. Phillips and Bride went against those guidelines and repaired the thing themselves the night before the disaster. Had they not done so, none of their distress calls could have been sent after the ship hit that iceberg. Every single person in the lifeboats would have perished because nobody would have come to their rescue. Phillips and Bride kept working throughout the sinking of the Titanic up until the power went out. Bride survived; Phillips did not make it.

Or think of the musicians (my people). Everyone knows all eight of them played to the very end in order to keep the passengers on board from panicking. All eight of them perished in the line of duty.

And I won’t deny it: I like myself a little joke here and there, too. I like saying how I would never get into a situation like this because I don’t take jobs on boats (back in my university days, I used to take pretty much any job, play virtually any venue – except for cruise ships; because my seasickness and the idea of a gig turning into this…do not mix). So, guilty as charged: I like to distance myself from these kinds of emotions, too. But when I think what those two bands on the Titanic, the trio and the quintet, did, I’m honestly moved to tears.

Yes, we like to drown out with humour the unthinkable, the unimaginable, the thoughts that keep nagging us nonetheless: “What would you have done?”

There is no answer to this question that would make me look like a sane, brave, much less a heroic person. I suspect I would have been the greatest coward known to mankind in a situation like this. In any case, I hope none of us ever end up being put to the test.

And if there’s one glimpse of light in all this darkness, one spark of hope in all this horror…then it’s the RMS Carpathia, the ship that came to the rescue of the survivors. If your faith in humanity ever falters, read up on what the crew and the passengers on that ship did in order to come to the rescue of those that needed them most. Just read about them, and you will be astonished. Their behaviour is a testament to what human beings can achieve when they all pull together and focus on one goal and one goal only: help people. And yes, somebody should make a film that focuses entirely on what was going on on board the RMS Carpathia; it would be about the most uplifting and awe-inspiring film ever made.

So, yes…yes, the sinking of the Titanic was a tragedy. A terrible, terrible tragedy.

And it’s frankly just astounding…amazing that James Cameron managed to write this life-affirming, empowering story about this disaster.

Because that film is not a tragedy. It is about a tragedy. But the film itself isn’t one.

Which is why asking this one question, the question we started our discussion with today, is so important: What is it exactly that I’m watching?

Cameron managed to take this terrible tragedy and turn it into something else, a positive story, a story that screams with every frame and every shot that life is valuable, oh-so-valuable and that you have to take control of it and live it without fear, that you have to make your own choices and take fate into your own hands, that life is the most precious thing you’ve been given on this earth and that you should never give up and never think you could just throw it away. It’s a movie about being your own true self even when that’s scary. A movie about taking risks if these risks mean you can eventually break free. It’s a movie about how you shouldn’t live a lie, how you should live authentically…

At the end of the day…all filmmakers love films. And James Cameron told us what living authentically means in his opinion: Rose dreamed of becoming an actress, and once she took control of her life, that’s who she became.

As Jack kissed her hand, that hand that represented taking control of your life, he told Rose (in another one of those self-referential metatextual moments) that he had seen that being done in a nickelodeon once. He did it in front of the clock that came to mean ‘make each day count’.

In a sense, we have all seen this story in a ‘nickelodeon’ now, in James Cameron’s big, bold nickelodeon programme called…‘Titanic’. We just have to act on it now.

Make it count.

~fin~

P.S. And now for my personal feelings of extreme miffed-ness:

Fabriziooooooo! Why did Fabrizio have to die? Why????!!! Cameron, you…you…bastardo! *shakes fist forever*

I mean, if you absolutely had to whack him with a huge, phallic object, did it have to be this one?

~tvmicroscope over and out~