Summer 1999
Volume 25, Number 4

Towards the end of James Cameron's extraordinary and extraordinarily successful film Titanic, the heroine now known as Rose Calvert, charismatically played by Gloria Stuart, gives a numbing account of the rescue effort, or lack of it, mounted by those who had made it into the lifeboats. Only one boat came back to cruise the dark waters above the sunken ship: "Six were saved from the water . . . out of fifteen hundred." Stuart, playing a 101-year-old survivor, manages a delicate balance between the resignation associated with wise old age and the outrage she shares, we would hope, with those who are young. It is a dismal comment, presumably one claiming some historical accuracy, on the behavior of human beings in exigent conditions, conditions of life and death, a terrifying representation of those who stand by and mind themselves and their own business while others perish. As such it addresses what is perhaps the preeminent moral problem of our century, brought regularly to attention since 1945 and most recently in the discussions surrounding both the UN nonresponse to the Rwandan massacres and the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust: the problem of passivity or passive cruelty, of standing aside, of failing to act. By this time the film has shown us all the syndromes of class struggle, of homo homini lupus, associated with the myth of the Titanic. The third-class passengers are locked below decks while their "betters" commandeer the lifeboats that are available for only about half of those on board, the "better half," as Rose's odious suitor Cal puts it. We have been told of the outrageous disregard for safety that led to the underprovision of lifeboats--the owner, Bruce Ismay, found that the decks would have looked too "cluttered"--and we have seen Cal himself shoving a struggling swimmer away from his boat and consigning him or her to what seems to be certain death. But cruelty and cowardice are not just the property of the upper class and the rich, of the Cals and the Ismays. The person who prevents Molly Brown from going back to rescue more survivors is a mere midshipman, a humble Cockney hired hand whose metropolitan vowels signal a cynical working-class English self-interest forcibly and phonetically at odds with the clear Welsh baritone of the one sailor who does turn back, and who rescues Rose herself. At odds, too, with the tragical and complex Scots officer William Murdoch, who makes the hard decisions ("two thousand two hundred souls on board, sir") and who enacts justice upon himself with a service revolver. In this ship of state, the metropolis does not look good in any of its social classes. Only six were saved from the water.

One might suppose that this bleak representation of the historical fact of the tragedy as the war of every man against every man--only six were saved, even as many of the boats were half empty--would not constitute much of an advertisement for the cruise industry. Class culture remains inscribed in modes of transport (boats and planes) even where it is supposed to have disappeared from social life. We live in a democracy, but there are still first, business, and economy classes. Money talks itself into reified form as social category. Add in the polemic against the pretensions of modern technology, evident in Cameron's two Terminator films and visually inscribed here in the quotations from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times and in the cuts back and forth from the floating ship to the sunken wreck; add in the case against the control of that technology by male fantasy and by what Rose calls, citing Freud, "the male preoccupation with size"; add in further the faithfully re-created spectacle of people drowning and knowing that they are going to drown or freeze to death in the water--an aged couple, a mother with her children, the named and the unnamed--and one would even less expect an outpouring of popular desire to be heading to sea. One might suppose that the knowledge that this event really happened, that fifteen hundred people like us died these horrible deaths--a quite different matter, as my daughter Susanna pointedly remarked, from watching someone get snatched from the toilet seat in Jurassic Park, a death which did not and could not happen--might have generated some uneasiness about calling up the nearest travel agent to find out what's available for the Caribbean this season.

Not so. In the spring of 1998 bookings were up by about 15 percent at Holland America, and the QE2's next three crossings of the North Atlantic were fully booked.1 Notwithstanding a rash of questions from customers about the availability of lifeboats, the cruise industry, which expected the worst, has been happily surprised. My own first reaction upon reading this was one of moral outrage, along with an inclination to endorse Horkheimer and Adorno in all that they had written in Dialectic of Enlightenment about popular culture and its implacably negative functions in industrial capitalism. Surely there must be some terrible disconnection in the social imagination, some stultifying blockage that is preventing these moviegoers from seeing themselves drowning or freezing to death, or from feeling the pains of those who did. Is this an instance of some appalling postmodern narcissism, an assumption that we who cruise will get to the lifeboats, or that what happened then could not happen now (the myth of progress), or (worst of all) that what happened was not real because it has appeared in the movies? Is it the sign of a hope or understanding that the sacrifice has been made and will not need to be made again, a more subtle and not so deplorable human fantasy of the sort that allows people to feel able to board airplanes after major disasters? Or is it just a matter of gambling it all on a shot at dancing with Leonardo DiCaprio or Kate Winslet, or at shortening the odds on successful class mobility by meeting a millionaire and playing the Frog Prince or Princess in the first-class dining room?

Imagining some of these fantasies and motivations does at least soften the temptation to any simple moral outrage. Who would not want to be in a world where there is no middle class (ironically, the condition of most of us who go on cruises and therefore, of course, the defining social mode of those same cruises)? And where the numbers are small enough that one might just have one's true worth recognized by someone out of reach in ordinary life? Perhaps the long odds on a watery grave are worth it, given the shorter odds on one or more of the various fantasy gratifications that Titanic suggests. And there is more to Cameron's film than the romance element, or perhaps one should say that the romance element is itself so carefully and complexly situated that it cannot be dismissed as just a Leo and Kate show. Or, to put it another way, the droves of young people who have flocked to see the film, sometimes over and over again--and it is a quantifiably young audience--are seeing something they might not know they're seeing or be able to explain. If this were so, and of course I cannot prove that it is, then the culture industry would look a little more interesting than it looked to Horkheimer and Adorno in their gloomy analysis of the present and future life of the American mass media. At the very least, the variety of plausible motivations informing the cult of Titanomania darkens the hypothetically clear waters of ideological analysis and suggests that the interpretation of popular culture may be at least as indeterminate and baffling as that of elite culture, if not more so.

So it seems to me at least. The sinking of the Titanic was already an unignorable cultural reference point or myth long before Cameron dreamed up his movie, even long before the precursor movie, A Night to Remember, made in 1958 by Roy Ward Baker in the documentary-realist mode that also finds its way into Cameron's film as both quotation and replication. The special facsimile edition of the New York Times produced to piggyback on the movie's success suggests that the mythology was in place from the very start: the band playing on, the scandal of the lifeboats, the ironies of death the leveler, the case against what one column calls "Degenerate Luxuries."2 The path was so well trodden that many predicted that the movie would be a washout, a pastiche, a hopeless anachronism. But pastiche and anachronism are in fact highly marketable and theorized as such in the culture of the postmodern, and they do indeed find a place in Cameron's film, which may be an instance not just of nostalgia but of nostalgia for nostalgia.3 The Sotheby's employee who witnessed the auctioning of the scale model of the ship used in A Night to Remember had it right in noting that "'we're now into second-generation memorabilia.'"4 The location of the wreck itself generated a wide debate about whether it should or could be raised from the deep, and the existence of advanced submersible technology is now generating discussion about the tastefulness of deep sea tourism. Cameron mixes real footage of the wreck into his film. At least two projects are afoot to build a life-size facsimile of the ship, one in South Africa and the other sponsored by a Swiss-American consortium. This is a past that refuses to go away. It wants to be part of the future, to remain perpetually in facsimile. Most of the recent and current disaster movies are in fact future-oriented, promising catastrophes to come. After the huge success of Independence Day (1996) we have seen such variations on the theme as Armageddon and Deep Impact (both 1998), movies that seem or promise to depend also upon a sort of lottery deciding who will survive. Cameron's own previous films have been mostly futuristic, although they play upon a relation between present, past, and future within the fictional time scales of the narratives (Aliens, The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and The Abyss), as they also invest heavily in the more formal temporalities embodied in quotation of other films and of themselves. Titanic runs the numbers on the past. And we know what happened. History cannot be rewritten at large, but only in the interposition of a limited number of filmic life stories. We are looking at history as the foundation of these local fictions, and this history cannot be changed. The context of history even lends an aura of reality to what is in fact fictional; it is this, as well as her own performance, that lends power to Gloria Stuart. She "is" a survivor. It seems likely that our collective reparticipation in the fate of the Titanic puts us in touch with a cultural past that is also still available for present contemplation: Was it the end of an era (suspiciously substituting as such, perhaps, for the more unrepresentable carnage of 1914-18)? the beginning of the contemporary world? the twilight of class privilege (technological disaster spares no one merely on principle)? Is it the dark shadow thrown by the past on the now mundane familiarity of transcontinental travel? At least in thinking about the Titanic we are thinking about something our parents and grandparents also thought about and talked about; we are participating in an intergenerational myth and thereby in the validation of myth itself and in the history that generates it. The movie may be our light from Troy.

And before we collapse into the truism that history is bound to appear only as simulacrum, as pastiche, and leave it at that, with a knowing citation of the sheer length and detail of the special effects projects that scroll up at the end of the movie, let us look at what Cameron does with the question of history and the options it can sponsor--options that include the documentary, the nostalgic, the epic imaginary, the golden age, the barbaric, and no doubt many others. The most breathtaking twist on the known plot is not provided by Winslet and DiCaprio but by the footage of the sunken wreck itself, apparently and occasionally real, and by the 101-year-old survivor who frames the movie as a narrative of remembrance and who calls up thereby all the other acts of remembrance that we continue to require even as we subside (it is often said) into a culture of simultaneity with no room for a past. The boldness of the move into charismatic old age makes one think of other films--Little Big Man, Fried Green Tomatoes, On Golden Pond, Driving Miss Daisy, and a few others--that are not traditional mainstream Hollywood, which still invests heavily in youth and beauty, but that are increasing in number perhaps as a response to the aging of America and thus to the changing demographics of moviegoers. Youth and beauty, the fantasy features of the other major sector of the consumer group, are here, too--in fact, they are aggressively overdone, in ways I will mention shortly. But the human core of the film begins and ends with Stuart as old Rose. She is the moral and narrative authority, the wry judge of Lewis Bodine's grotesquely irreverent summary of the disaster replayed as computer graphic ("that fine forensic analysis"), and the figure who suspends or arrests the routinely intimated romance of the young (the recovery team leader, Brock Lovett, and her granddaughter, Lizzie) by an unignorable tale of times past. Her narrative exposes and preempts the present, revealing its shoddy commercialism and linguistic vulgarity, which Cameron plays up in the early scenes of Lovett filming the wreck and adding melodramatic voice-over narration ("You're so full of shit, boss," says Bodine); in the video footage of the crew prematurely popping champagne (aggressively cut off by Lovett when the diamond is not found in the safe); and in Bodine's own amoral, nerdish delight in the ingenuity of the computer picture of the sinking liner ("Pretty cool, huh?"). The world Rose takes us back to speaks a more dignified language.
[. . .]
Going on cruises, then, may not or not just be the result of self-deception, of mere fantasy, or of some other unadmirable trait in the common psyche. It may also speak for an entirely mature recognition of one's limits. Perhaps it is because there were real people on the ship who really died that so many are now motivated to repeat the experience, if not as a death wish then as an admission of vulnerability and a wager on the outcome. Who is to know? No one can say for sure what people see when they see movies--there are so many of both.

1. "Allure of 'Titanic,' Minus Ice, Is Packing Cruise Ship Cabins," New York Times, 29 Mar. 1998, p. A1.

2. "Degenerate Luxuries," New York Times commemorative edition, 15 Apr. 1998, p. 13.

3. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C., 1991).

4 Christa Worthington, "In a Modest Home, a Grand Vestige of Titanic's Sister," New York Times, 10 May 1998, "Arts," p. 55.

David Simpson is professor and G. B. Needham Fellow in English at the University of California, Davis. His most recent book is The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature (1995).