By Thomas E. Simmons
Released in 1997, Titanic1 casts massive shadows. The film’s title mimics the gargantuan scale of the eponymous ocean liner herself (displacing 52,000 tons), the scope of her disastrous finish (the deadliest peacetime ship-sinking in history), and the film’s swollen budget (at $200 million, the most expensive film ever made at the time).2 Titanic’s profits were likewise immense. It won eleven Oscars. Its cultural largess is arguably greater still. Her wake is long.
Indeed, the film is so big that it invites critical disregard.3 It’s like the Yogi Berra line about an attraction being so popular that no one visits it anymore.4 But the critical neglect of Titanic is due less to its overbearing popularity and more a result of its unabashed sentimentality. It’s a tear-jerker. But it is precisely its sentimentality that makes the film work. Doomed romance tends toward schmaltz; there’s no avoiding it.
Most critics tend to write off Titanic as big – and nothing but big.5 Its scale eclipses its ability to touch some viewers. But if one ignores its outrageous popularity to discern its nuances – its values – one might sift for worthwhile truths beneath Titanic’s kitschy skin. Its inner workings deserve a closer inspection.
Like the ship’s many decks, the film operates on several levels. There is the adventure story and the tragic 1,500 deaths. There is occasional slapstick. There is the tone of obtuse hubris; a captain heedlessly plowing through an ice field with an inadequate inventory of lifeboats onboard. There is the Romeo and Juliet arc of Jack Dawson and Rose Bukater. There is the theme of class; Jack’s erase-ability against the concentric rings of authority which insulate Rose. There is the issue of gender; Rose’s evolution from hemmed-in suicidal push-over to plucky gallant. There is the constant reminder of time and how human lives exist within it through memory, recollection, and forgetting.
At the upper-most sun-splashed deck stands Rose and her discovery of meaning. Rose is a deeply textured character while Jack is barely sketched beyond his self-reliance, consistent virtue, and his lovability. Perhaps, given the eight decades between his death and Rose’s recollection of it, this is all that remains of him.
The psychological development of Rose over the course of the film inverts the typical rules governing tragedies versus comedies. The standard tragic hero is undone by his limitations; a refusal to change is the root cause of undoing. The comedic hero, by contrast, changes.6 Thus, the large number of comedic films which end with a marriage, signifying the new life and being of the protagonists. In Titanic, however, the protagonist Rose inverts this dichotomy by incorporating the new value system introduced to her by her lover. She is a tragic hero who is not cut down from her unbendingness. On another, however, her heroics are confirmed by her unbending adherence to that value system her whole life. After Jack’s death, she retains her new life-view. (This decades-long adherence all occurs offscreen and is reported to the viewer only through still pictures in old Rose’s cabin).
The film’s first focal moment occurs when Rose and Jack meet on the ship’s stern as Rose is contemplating suicide. Jack calmly questions her reasoning. She chooses life. Meanwhile, the ship steams on towards its tragic end. Given the well-known historical outcome of the ship’s maiden voyage, little in the way of explicit foreshadowing is necessary.
Underlying the development of Rose is an intense romance. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Boy and girl confront antagonism. Girl matures. In the film’s most iconic scene, Rose is held by Jack, jutting her body from the bow like a masthead. The scene from the bow is lit by the sun and underscored with a swelling score. In the end, an iceberg drowns the boy and thwarts the romance, though the girl – and, perhaps most importantly, that which the boy taught her – are plucked from the freezing void.
Yet the story is not that simple. The most controversial scene is Jack’s death. After the ship goes under, Jack secures a door as a flotation device for them both, but its buoyancy is inadequate for two. Jack insists that his beloved’s needs trump his own, sacrifices his warmth for hers, and dies so that she might live. Seemingly, though, Jack’s death flows not just from his own selflessness, but from Rose’s selfishness, or at least some have read the film that way. Does Rose “let go” of Jack? Or does she keep her promise to “never let go?” Before confronting the question, an examination of the phrase in the film is needed.
The film utilizes a fourfold repetition of “not letting go.” The phrase recurs four times in four different scenes. In the first – on the ship’s stern – Rose threatened to kill herself: “I’ll let go.” Jack refutes: “No you won’t,” to which Rose replies, “You don’t know me.” Jack counters that he knows her enough to know that she would have already jumped off the ship if she’d intended to and introduces a threat of his own: “If you let go, I have to jump in after you.” His stratagem works. Rose survives, matures from timidity to boldness, and their romance flowers.
Later, another scene at the stern mirrors the first. The lovers reunite in the same spot – but this time, having sideswiped an iceberg, as the ship skews towards destruction. Rose breathlessly observes that this is where she and Jack first met. It’s more than a spatial repeat. The place where the two first met was at the point of the possibility of a human existence ceasing to exist. The first time on the stern, Rose’s survival was in question; now, theirs (and thousands of others) are. It’s a place where mortality must be confronted. It’s where corporality is disclosed; we all die.
The ship lists. Then it tilts. Finally, it jackknives. Standing on the stern, grasping the railing, Jack and Rose turn, the rear of the ship at their backs, orienting their eyes in the same direction as when Rose soared in Jack’s arms, though now from the opposite end of the vessel and looking straight down at the vortex of black ocean swallowing first the bow and then the poop deck.
The ship dives, taking countless lives with it. In this intermediate scene, “not letting go” is reprised the second time. Some passengers lose their grips and plummet to their deaths. As the ship goes under, Jack cautions Rose, “Don’t let go of my hand.” Rose obeys – or tries to – and the two become momentarily separated. They submerge, kick, struggle, reemerge, and find each other on the glassy surface whipped into a froth by a thousand plus fellow passengers.
Now we come to the third “not letting go” scene: Freezing and bobbing among the other survivors (most of them in lifejackets), the pair exchange the “not letting go” pledge a third time. Jack extracts a promise from Rose to “never give up” and to “never let go of that promise.” Rose promises him, “I’ll never let go.” According to the film’s script, the scene closes with Rose gripping Jack’s hand: “They lie with their heads together. It is quiet now, except for the lapping of the water.”
We cut to a delayed rescue mission led by 5th officer George Lowe commanding a lifeboat, then back to Jack and Rose, their hands still locked together. This is the fourth and final “not letting go” scene. Jack has frozen to death and Rose knows it. The script states: “Her hand, she realizes, is actually frozen to Jack’s. She breathes on it, melting the ice a little, and gently unclasps their hands, breaking away a thin tinkling film.”7 Rose restates her promise: “I won’t let go. I promise.” Then she released him, and he sinks.
At first glance, the incongruity of Rose’s promise to “not let go” followed by her release of Jack’s grasp is startling. Critics like Slavoj Žižek insist that Rose rid herself of him in order to pursue an untarnished bourgeois life.8 Others might maintain that Jack never existed at all, except as a figment of Rose’s imagination; Jack is her inner voice made flesh.
Both readings are opposed by the logic and tone of Titanic’s narrative; a tragic romance with Rose at its heroic center. But the film represents something greater than a disaster and a doomed romance. It considers a way of living. It speaks to unspoken values. And because those values are introduced to Rose by another human being, the film suggests that its value set resides outside the individual, although the individual must internalize them before a transformation can take place.
The values embedded in the Titanic are never verbalized except in Jack’s hazy admonition to “make it count.” What makes it count, exactly? What is it that Rose maintains a grasp on, if not Jack himself?9 Rose keeps her promise of never letting go of the covenant she swore to – to “never give up.” But what does this consist of, exactly? The film is intentionally vague on this point, although there are a few hints.
What is the lesson Rose learns, exactly? Some find Rose’s lesson in the rejection of riches or class. The contrast between Rose and Jack’s economic positions is noteworthy. So are the different moral faces of the rich and the poor. Faced with imminent disaster and a shortage of lifeboats, the rich on board tend to behave badly while most of the steerage passengers exhibit greater virtue.10 But Jack does not reject money as a medium of exchange. Rose insists that she pay him his going rate (a dime) for her portrait. Still, in the film, wealth does hold a risk of tainting one’s decisions.
The key to Rose’s promise resides in the more obviously symbolic element of the film; Rose’s diamond – the Heart of the Ocean (Le Coeur de la Mer). Cal, Rose’s fiancé, may have wrongfully obtained it (how else would a person who has not yet come into his wealth hold such riches?). Cal plants the jewel on Jack and then accuses him of stealing it. After the ship sinks, Rose maintains it (secretly) her entire life. The diamond is what motivates the fortune-hunters who excavate the shipwreck in the story which frames Rose’s recollections, bringing a centenarian Rose along. But the fortune-hunters uncover only Jack’s charcoal portrait of Rose (the one she paid a dime for). Finally, Rose, unwatched, drops the obscenely expensive jewel into the sea. Certainly, this supports an anti-materialist reading of Rose’s lesson.
Alternatively, one might surmise that that which is literally at the heart of the ocean in Titanic is a graveyard. Deep down, the ocean holds a necropolis. Perhaps Rose’s lesson is an existential one. But it is not death – rather, it is cognizance of the way it gives meaning to one’s days by numbering them – which forms the heart of the film: celebrating existence, resisting death without vice, and justly honoring those who succumb to it. Life is not an end unto itself. It is something more. These are Titanic’s values. Indeed, they are titanic values. In the visual language of Titanic, it means facing the bow, facing forward, even if one is trapped at the stern and everything is going to hell. It means embracing love.
There is no trace of a religious impulse, however. Rose does not honor her existence on account of any traditional divine obligation, though it seems to be an obligation external to the individual. External even to the loving relationship of Jack and Rose. When Jack and Rose huddle on the bow and the ship descends, some utter prayers. Neither Jack nor Rose scoff at them exactly, but neither do they join them. After her lover’s death, Rose holds no illusions that Jack enjoys any sort of afterlife; he exists only in her memory. Even the unnamed Irish mother comforting her doomed daughter holds no hope of salvation, only that “it will be over soon.” At the heart of the Titanic there is neither God nor heaven.
Clearly the heart of the story (as represented in Rose’s diamond) is unconnected to material comforts or a conventional religion. In the first stern scene, Jack saves Rose from jumping to her death. Later, he instructs her how to climb the bow – and celebrate her existence. In the second stern scene, the couple must pivot and again face the bow, facing forward, despite the fact that the bow is sinking. Rose and Jack oppose death as best they can, cooperatively, and without recourse to bribes or trickery (unlike some of the passengers) – without even lifejackets.
Lifejackets would at least offer some material support for the threatened vitality of Rose and Jack, yet the couple goes without even manufactured personal flotation devices (though those same devices save none of the flailing passengers, either). It’s not an accident that Rose lies upon the flotation device that was not specifically designed for that purpose – a door. That which keeps Rose afloat is itself a doorway of sorts leading to a life well lived.
That which Rose covenants to hold onto, she does. Rose maintains the correct posture with which to face life and confront death; she makes her days count because they are numbered. She finds true freedom; to dance, to paint, and to avoid the moral hazards of wealth. Just before her own death, in releasing the diamond to the waves, she offers a memorial to Jack while confirming that that the Heart of the Ocean belongs there, in the heart of the North Atlantic, where her lover perished and her promise to him was cemented.
Rose’s epithet is a fitting lament. It underscores the values, submerged in the film’s text, which permit this blockbuster to touch hearts.
Footnotes:
1: Titanic (Paramount Pictures 1997).
2: Marc Graser, Titanic tide tumbles o’seas video records, Variety p. 7 (Jan. 11, 1999).
3: “It’s easy to scoff at this movie,” wrote one critic. Michael Wilmington, See-Worthy: Romance and Catastrophe Make for a Highly Entertaining Mix in the Three-Hour-Plus Epic Thriller Titanic, Chicago Tribune p. 2A (Dec. 18, 1997).
4: Houston Mitchell, Yogi Berra dies at 90: Here are some of his greatest quotes, L.A. Times (May 12, 2015), https://www.latimes.com/sports/sportsnow/la-sp-sn-yogi-berra-turns-90-quotes-20150512-story.html. Berra said of a restaurant: “No one goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”
5: For example, Frank Thompson writes, “Cameron has simply telescoped the experiences, real or imagined, of many different passengers, in many different parts of the ship, into the adventures of Jack and Rose.” Frank Thompson, Songe de Titanic, Film Comment p. 67 (Jan./Feb. 1998).
6: Ian Johnson, Introductory Lecture to Studies in Shakespeare, available at https://www.siue.edu/~ejoy/eng111TragedyComedyJohnston.htm.
7: James Cameron, Titanic (Script), available at http://sites.inka.de/humpty/titanic/script.html.
8: The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology (P Guide Productions 2012).
9: Some critics claim that Rose retains her grip on Jack by becoming him: Rose “turns, by the film’s indication, into a perfect modern woman – one entirely of Jack’s making.” Martin Barker and Thomas Austin, From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis p. 99 (Pluto Press 2000).
10: Oral histories suggest that the “women and children first rule” was followed on one side of the sinking ship, while on the other, men were ushered into lifeboats ahead of women and children. Ann E. Larabee, The American Hero and His Mechanical Bride: Gender Myths of the Titanic Disaster, American Studies p. 9 (Spring 1990).
Simmons is a lawyer and a professor at the Knudson School of Law in Vermillion, South Dakota and the author of “Soviets on Venus,” a collection of historical poems.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 