Being There

TITANIC
A Remembrance

Written and directed by James Cameron
Starring Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Zane, Gloria Stewart, Bill Paxton, and Kathy Bates

by Matt Brown
October 15 2005

For about six or seven hours, Titanic was the best-kept secret in the world.

I had heard all the horror stories, seen the irritatingly vague trailer, read the Time Magazine article about the sinking ship and the man who was sinking it. Two hundred million dollars, all evidently funnelling down into a great unreclameable whirlpool: there was no way in hell that this film could ever escape the excesses of its own production. Titanic was a done deal. Fait accompli. Iceberg inevitable.

As an enthusiastic young filmmaker, I had followed James Cameron's cruel and obsessive M.O. over the course of 5½ films (The Terminator, Aliens, The Abyss, Terminator 2, True Lies, and kinda Strange Days). Premiere magazine had dubbed him "Iron Jim" in their article about True Lies, and for me, the name stuck. I came to know that aside from his reportedly vicious on-set temperament and exhaustive attention to detail, he was a filmmaker of at least one other noteworthy distinction: Iron Jim had never let me down. Not even once. His films were infrequent (every three or four years at best) and an even greater rarity in that each and every one of them worked. Iron Jim was money in the bank.

Nevertheless, Titanic seemed to be something different. This was no techno-gearhead adventure story. This was not a fetishization of steel and electricity and cold blue light, like his boys-toys movies of years gone by. Titanic, as proclaimed by Iron Jim himself, was to be a love story - and not in the "Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio drowning together" sort of way. Titanic would be melodramatic. Titanic would be soft. Titanic would be... for girls.

I still remember the feeling in the pit of my stomach when I wandered into an HMV in December of that year and had a look at the back of the Titanic soundtrack CD. Fourteen tracks by James Horner, as expected... and the kicker, the ultimate kowtow to the prevailing style of big Hollywood melodramas of the mid-'90s. That most loathed bit of end-credits confection, and Iron Jim's final statement on all of the things Titanic would be: the Celine Dion song.

In that moment, I understood. I am not referring to the jump to conclusions that most people might have made by that association - that Titanic would suck as much as Dion sucks - but something else. I understood, for the first time, what Cameron was attempting to do with this film, and how far he was willing to go to do it. Hell, this is a man who must hate Celine Dion more than I do! And yet, there she was, crowning Cameron's largest film to date. Whatever he'd been doing out there in the ocean for the past three years, Iron Jim wasn't backing off. Fuck, when did he ever back off?

I was 21 years old in the year that Titanic came out. I was in love, with a whip-smart teenager who had the face of an angel and the sneaky aspirations towards mayhem of the finest of Lucifer's minions. I dragged the girl, who was reluctant as all getout, to the Eglinton Theatre at 12:15 in the afternoon on Friday, December 19th, 1997. She did not want to be there, did not think there was any way Titanic could appeal to her or me or any of the other brave Cameroids who were standing in the light snow outside the theatre on that preternaturally clear winter day.

Little did she know. Little did any of us. Titanic's success would come in trumping that very assumption. It did appeal. It appealed to all of us, and whole lot more.

The film is three and a half hours long, and that first screening of it was sparsely populated with the handful of people who had been willing to give it a try. I remember the reviews in the paper that morning as having been uncommonly merciful - probably based on the assumption that since Titanic would undoubtedly be the biggest flop in the history of Hollywood, why not give it a break? Those same reviewers would issue stark about-faces months later, decrying that Titanic wasn't that good, that they had only been trying to be nice, that the world had gone crazy. On December 19th, though, it hadn't happened yet. We left the theatre, and we went home, and the only warning of the tsunami that was building in the distance - not unlike the one in Cameron's own The Abyss - was the series of exhilarated grins on the faces of the people who came out of the Eglinton that day. And, of course, the feeling in our own hearts.

Back at my house, my girlfriend and I fell asleep. A few hours later, dazed and half-lucid, wrapped up in each other, I offered her what would become my first rudimentary review of Titanic: I mumbled "It felt like I was really there."

Maybe I broke the silence too soon, or not soon enough, or just at the right time, but it seemed like as soon as those words escaped my lips, the world caught on. Titanic never had the hundred-million-dollar opening weekend required of a blockbuster nowadays... but it never had the 60% dropoff on the following weekend, either. It became the all-time box office champ in the most unassuming way possible: it made thirty million dollars on its first weekend. And then, to everyone's surprise it did it again, the following week. And again, the week after that. And again, and again, and again. And for about twelve or thirteen straight weeks, it seemed like everyone in the world was going to see Titanic at least once. And some of us were going to see it again, and again, and again.

Titanic's success, both as a film and as a box office phenomenon, can be easily attributed to the simplest, yet costliest to acquire, of elements: it appeals to everyone. It is a cross-demo, cross-market construction at a level of polish that hasn't been seen since the three champs of the golden age: Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz, and Gone with the Wind. Maybe this is Titanic's true sin: that it arrived fifty years too late. It hearkens back to a time when you really could have romance, drama, adventure, action, comedy, and even a bit of social history all walled up together in a splendidly opulent box, and get away with it. When Titanic's march to glory had gone past the point of the ridiculous, and its initial supporters began turning on it in droves because its success had outweighed its presumed value, the first thing to go was respect for Cameron's deceptively clever script. "Poorly written," they said. "Horrible dialogue." "Terrible story."

Wrong. Of all the Academy Awards it received - and lordy, it seemed to bag 'em all - the one that Titanic most deserved was the one it didn't get, wasn't even nominated for: the screenplay. Titanic's screenplay is a veritable marvel. It is the clockwork construction of a writer knowing exactly what he wants to achieve with his film, and carefully piecing together all of the film's elements - character, location, plot points - into a combined whole that fully exploits the intended premise.

So, Cameron gives us fiery Rose Dewitt-Bukater (Kate Winslet, forever winning my heart), whose distance as an out-of-reach socialite quickly evaporates once she's attempting suicide on the back of the ship. In that moment, Rose reveals to every teenaged girl in the audience that the trappings may have changed, but the trap remains the same: being a girl sucks, especially when you can't get what you want. We also get Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio, in that single instant when he went from up-and-comer to film icon), an impossibly self-assured guide and guardian, who will take Rose by the hand, and then coax, propel, and ultimately drag her to her own survival. She's a first-class female passenger; he's a steerage male passenger. We don't notice until well past the two hour mark, but our two principals are the living emblems of the opposing poles of Titanic's apocalypse: statistically, her chances of survival were the best on the ship. His were the worst. And by the simple fact that Jack will never, ever let go of Rose's hand, we're going to see exactly how much force will try to pull them apart.

Travelling with Jack and Rose is the film's third most important character, Titanic herself. Early in the first reel, Cameron gives us a full virtual-reality tour of the ship's sinking, a canny move. This frees the picture from ever having to tell us why things are happening ever again; we simply know where Jack and Rose need to be in order to survive.

Over the ensuing two hours, right up until that glorious sequence where the fateful iceberg finally comes into view and gives the starboard side of the ship a good smacking, Cameron supplements our bird's-eye view of Titanic with on-the-ground experience: somehow, in the course of their adventures, Jack and Rose wander through every single area of the great ship. This is far more than marvellous historical documentation (although, of course, under Cameron's meticulous guidance, it becomes exactly that); it's also simple foreshadowing of the disaster to come. From bow to stern, Titanic becomes a real world in a way that few film locations have accomplished before. "It felt like I was really there," indeed. In the last hour of the film, we must suffer the ignominy of watching this beautiful sphere fall victim to its own great hubris.

Why do we keep jumping back to the present in the midst of a really entertaining period story? Why must every heartfelt moment with Jack and Rose on the prow of the ship give way to ghostly images of the real Titanic, sunken to the bottom of the Atlantic? Can't these two young lovers snog in peace without the phantom face of Gloria Stewart crowding into the image to remind us that everything withers and decays? Well, no, for that reason, exactly. Cameron the writer never lets us become too greatly mired in the fantasy of a happy ending on Titanic (that first jump out of the past, after over an hour of story, is an incredible jolt to the system); Cameron the director concocts linking imagery (observe Rose's flowing skirt fading into nothingness in that same first segue, from bow kiss to ghostly wreck) so appallingly beautiful that it truly haunts, truly hurts, in a way that none of his work had done before.

We know it's coming before it happens, can feel it in our gut with such visceral reality that when the film's great hinge-point finally does arrive (it is almost the exact chronological middle of the running time), and Murdoch is screaming "Hard-a-port!" at a chunk of ice that won't move, we're a nervous wreck - hoping against hope that somehow, this time, the trick will work, and the great ship will slide past its oppressor and keep on chugging into the perfect crystal night. It can't, and it won't, and it never will, but maybe Titanic's great success lies buries in that feeble desire. Maybe we all crowded back into the theatre again and again that winter to see if, this time, they changed the ending. To see if at long last we would be allowed to enjoy the sumptuous love story and all its lusty joy, but forego the gorgeous visual pornography of watching a really big piece of metal sink forever under the waves while screaming masses cling to her last dry rails. But we can't, of course, and neither could they, those 1500 people in 1912, and therein lies the point. An obvious point, perhaps, but a good one.

So the inevitability of it all becomes overwhelming - I still get chills on an early, quiet shot of the bow of the ship sinking beneath the surface for the first time, never to return to daylight - and when push comes to shove, Cameron's older, more practiced assurance comes out in spades: nobody does big, bad, and disastrous quite as well as this guy. The final sucker-punch, then, is what he does after; after the glorious fetish shots of the great liner splitting in half and crashing back down into the water, killing hundreds of people in an instant; after the elevator ride to hell that consumes the stern of the ship in its final moments. After all the screaming and wailing and dying: a single scene, lit by starlight, between two frozen people on a single piece of wood. That single moment, when Jack is gone, when Rose must decide between easy death and a ferociously difficult life. It only takes her a moment.

There was something perfect about being in love that year; not just in love, but young and in love, a pair of hell-chasing Jack and Roses our own selves, even if such things - like Jack and Rose themselves - are never meant to last. A lot of people since 1997 have dismissed my love of Titanic as the foolish by-product of the circumstances in which the film entered my life. They are both completely right, and entirely wrong. While it's true that Titanic will never be the same for me as it was that year - too many wounds, too much crustification that comes with the inevitable dulling effects of getting older - there's still no accounting for the way in which Titanic still sees me off to sleep on cold, clear winter nights; still sails with me in my dreams. At the end of the film, Rose lies in her bed, dreaming or dying, and is carried once more to the arms of her lover and the great ship that can never exist again. This is the gift that Titanic gives me, every time I watch it: it reminds me of what I love, and why I love it, and how lucky I am to be alive in a world where such marvels are possible.