The 178th thing you’ll read about Titanic this week
But really, you should only be listening to me about these things anyway.
I don’t remember if I was excited about seeing Titanic when it first came out. Though the internet was in full effect by then, it was a different time, when it was easy to miss the buzz on upcoming movies. There was talk about how its budget had gotten out of hand (due mainly to writer-director James Cameron’s perfectionist streak) and concerns that the box office returns wouldn’t meet the effort put into it. Beyond that, it was just another extravagant holiday season release, something the whole family could see together, like Star Trek: First Contact the year before.
And then it became this huge thing, and by the time I saw Titanic a few weeks after its release, other people were already on their fourth or fifth viewing of it. I had a good reason for not being able to see it right away: I had just given birth, not even three weeks earlier. It was our first grown-ups night out since becoming parents, so we decided we should go to see what all the fuss was about while we still had the chance1, since it still took at least six months for movies to become available on home video after theatrical release.
Though I went into it with no real expectations other than two and a half hours of escapism, I knew immediately that I was seeing something pretty remarkable. Despite its exorbitant cost, every penny spent was accounted for on screen. The lines between what was real, what was CGI, and what were models were virtually seamless. A near-flawless eye for detail2 had been employed in the set design and costumes. Like with Jurassic Park five years earlier, I knew logically that what I was seeing couldn’t possibly be “real,” yet it sure looked real. It was immersive: I could smell the sea air mingling with the freshly polished wood of the decks and feel the chill coming off the water, even before disaster struck. It was an honest-to-goodness spectacle.
If I wasn’t particularly invested in the human aspect of the story at first, I certainly was by the second half. I know this because I spent much of the last hour of the movie sobbing like someone had just shot my dog. Maybe it was post-childbirth hormones (I had also cried at an episode of Roseanne and a Hallmark commercial), but I watched it again a year or two later and cried again, at the exact same moments, despite knowing what was coming. I watched it a third time after a decade, and still cried. It remains a masterful bit of playing with the audience’s emotions like a fiddle (a fiddle playing “Nearer My God to Thee,” one might say), and frankly I respect James Cameron’s audacity.
Is Titanic a great movie? On a technical level, yes, inarguably. The forbidden romance plot isn’t treading new ground, but it isn’t terrible either, merely bringing a great movie down to “very good.” Months after it came out, and even despite having heard “My Heart Will Go On” roughly 1,497 times (including a remixed version with snippets of dialogue), I still thought it was a good movie. Twenty-five years later, and you know what? Still good. I watched the “Nearer My God to Thee” scene on YouTube the other night while thinking about this piece, and you know what? I cried again. My heartstrings remained pulled.
I wonder what the social media discourse would be like if Titanic had been released now, and I think it’s safe to say that it would be insufferable. Beyond the general (and occasionally performative, let’s admit it) distaste for big budget spectacles, it is simply no longer possible for anything to achieve mainstream success without an eventual backlash – observe the heated debate this year over whether or not Everything Everywhere All at Once is Bad, Actually.
There would be complaints that the movie didn’t go far enough in exploring the societal issues that led to significantly more third class passengers dying in the wreck than first class (otherwise known as the ol’ “I wanted this to be a different movie” criticism). Fifteen second out of context clips would be posted as proof that the entire movie is garbage to be mocked, even though you’d have to be looking at it with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers to find anything technically wrong with it.
Social media has made it so we’re not capable of enjoying movies like normal people anymore. What should be spirited but friendly discussions about a film’s quality or lack thereof is instead couched in aggression, our opinions wielded like cudgels. People didn’t really like Titanic, you see, they were simply conned into thinking they did, by a filmmaker who has a lot of neat visual tricks up his sleeve, but no soul to back any of it up. I’m not sure how you can look at a movie like Titanic and not believe that it’s 100% earnest, and made by someone deeply invested in its story. Some of its most poignant moments – the elderly couple holding each other as their cabin fills with water, the ship’s builder Thomas Andrews staying behind to go down with his creation, and of course the ship’s musicians continuing to play despite facing their imminent doom – are all based at least in some part on fact. Its most haunting details – the ship standing almost entirely up on one end before snapping in half and sinking, the eerie silence immediately afterward – are all taken from survivors’ accounts.
If my crying over a scene of an Irish mum tucking her little children into bed with a story while knowing that they’re all about to die just means I was manipulated by a trickster, then I guess I’m alright with that. I like to think it means I have a heart, but whatever, tomato, toh-mah-toh.
Let me be clear, this is not actually about Avatar: the Way of Water, and the weird rooting I’ve seen online for it to be a humiliating failure for James Cameron. I’ve never seen Avatar, and have no immediate plans to see tWoW. I didn’t specifically choose not to see it, I just never did. So I have no skin in this particular game, but it remains very strange to me to see people all but licking their chops in anticipation that the long-awaited sequel to the most successful movie of all time would, for no discernible reason, be a massive flop. In a post-COVID world (well, mid-COVID really), the film industry is hanging on by a gossamer thread. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that within a decade a night out at the movies might be a fondly recalled activity of the past. So to cheer on the failure of an old-fashioned, non-comic book related event film seems a bit counterproductive, and smug for the sake of smugness.
So I think now, more than anything else, I appreciate Titanic not just for its strengths as a film, but as a reminder of when it was a more peaceful, enjoyable time to be a movie fan. You either saw it, or you didn’t, and that was fine. You either liked it, or you didn’t, and that was fine too, neither opinion was treated as an indictment of someone’s taste overall, or worse, turned into thinkpieces about what its popularity meant for American culture as a whole. I’d say “you had to be there,” but a lot of the same folks who play that tiresome “that thing you think is good isn’t really good” game were there. They’ve just lost the ability to look at things with an unjaundiced, uncritical eye, and enjoy the show for a little while.
We would have had plenty of time, as it stayed in theaters until the following October. We’ll never see those kind of long-term legs in a movie again, and it’s kind of depressing.
Roger Ebert in his otherwise four-star review wondered if it was historically accurate that Kate Winslet’s character would give someone the finger, and a quick Google search says that the first recorded incident of flipping the bird was in 1886, so…maybe?