Titanic
One of the biggest movies ever, both in size and emotion
Directed By: James Cameron
Other Notable Films From Cameron: The Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, Avatar
Starring: Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Bill Paxton
Screenplay By: James Cameron
Movie Synopsis: A young woman who feels suffocated by the upperclass future awaiting her falls in love with a poor artist on the grandest ship in the world.
Signature Line: “Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your French girls.”
THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context
The numbers attached to Titanic, a sprawling epic about two ill-fated lovers who meet and fall in love on the maiden voyage of the Titanic, read like the stats page for Wilt Chamberlain. It’s just a bunch of HOLY FUCKING SHITs and YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING MEs. To wit:
Titanic was, at the time, the most expensive movie ever made. (It had a budget of $200 million, which, if we adjust for inflation, would be $403 million today!) It was the No. 1 movie in the country for 15 consecutive weeks(!!!!), the longest ever run for a feature film, and it remained in theaters for over a year(!!!!). Titanic was nominated for 14(!!!!!) Academy Awards (tied for the most ever by a single movie1), and won 11(!!!!!) (also tied for the most ever by a single movie2). It had an initial worldwide box office gross of $1.8 billion ($3.6 billion in today’s money!!!!), making it not only the highest-grossing movie ever at the time3 but also the first film in history to top the billion-dollar mark. And that’s to say nothing of the income it generated through retail video sales, soundtrack sales, and US broadcasting rights ($3.2 billion!!!!!).
Again: a bunch of HOLY FUCKING SHITs and YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING MEs.
But here’s the thing: No meaningful conversation about Titanic has ever begun with a mention of its numbers.4 Because, to crib a line from Don Draper in Mad Men, “what man laid on his back counting stars and thought of a number?”
There’s a magic in Titanic; an indescribable feeling; joyful and aching, and exciting and devastating. You watch Jack and Rose attend an unofficial party several levels below deck at the beginning of their courtship, and you feel something. You watch the massive stern of the ship tilt up into the sky when the bow begins taking on water, and you feel something. You watch an old man and an old woman decide they want their final moments alive to be spent holding each other, and you feel something.
Time and time again, over and over; you feel something.
That’s why Titanic was so potent upon its arrival nearly 30 years ago, and why it remains so potent today; it’s a spectacle, yes, but that’s not what it’s concerned with. What it’s concerned with—what it’s truly, truly concerned with—is reminding every person who watches it that they are alive.
And there’s no number for that.
THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Titanic
1:53: Did you know there’s an entire section of James Cameron’s Wikipedia page dedicated to his real-life deep-sea exploration? Did you know that he’s gone as deep down into the ocean as any human ever (nearly 36,000 feet, which is literally the Earth’s deepest point)? Did you know that fewer than 250 people ever have visited the Titanic’s wreckage since it was discovered 40 years ago, but that James Cameron has been there 33(!!!!) times? Those are all true things. And I bring them up here to say: If you have to go underwater in your movie, James Cameron is the guy you want in charge. There’s literally nobody better.
3:07: Bill Paxton is here. He plays Brock Lovett, a treasure hunter with blonde highlights and a hoop earring. And let me tell you something: If you want me to immediately buy into your movie, all you gotta do is cast Bill Paxton as a treasure hunter with blonde highlights and a hoop earring named Brock Lovett.
6:53: Okay, so: Lovett’s team was exploring the Titanic wreckage in the hopes of finding a necklace worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They recovered the safe where the necklace was supposed to be, but the only thing in there was a nude illustration of a woman.
The woman in the picture is Rose (who we’ll meet later). And I’ll remind you right here that Rose was 17 when this picture was drawn, which means Brock Lovett dedicated three years of his life to hunting down a piece of jewelry that could’ve made him a quarter of a billion dollars and instead he just ended up accidentally finding some child pornography.
14:20: Gloria Stuart is here. She plays the older version of Rose. Lovett flies her out to his ship because he thinks that hearing her firsthand account of the Titanic sinking will help him find the necklace. Stuart is really wonderful in this. Just one of the all-time great Movie Grandmas, up with Nai Nai from The Farewell and Mama Coco from Coco (though she’s considerably hornier than both in her movie).
16:45: This is Lewis. He’s part of Brock’s treasure hunting crew. He’s super skeptical of everything, and so when Old Rose shows up he basically just keeps going, “Hey, man. This old lady is a fucking liar.” That’s why he’s my favorite.
18:45: James Cameron does a really clever trick here where he has Lewis explain via a video diagram how, exactly, the Titanic ended up getting pulled down to the bottom of the Atlantic. It places a very simple-to-understand image in your head of the ship going down, which makes processing the scale of the actual shipwreck later on much easier.
20:27: Okay. It’s time to jump back in time. From here on out, the movie will toggle back and forth between (a) 1997, when Old Rose is telling the story of the Titanic’s sinking to Lovett and his crew; and (b) 1912, when Young Rose is experiencing it happening. I’m very excited right now.
21:16: Bang. We’re back in 1912. I bet being alive back then was so cool. I mean, minus the virulent racism. And the thing of women not being able to vote. And the socioeconomic inequality exacerbated by the rapid industrialization that defined the times. And children working 12-hour shifts in factories and mines. And the widespread political corruption that helped roll back gains made by Black Americans during the Reconstruction Era. And the rampant bigotry against immigrants. And the… you know what? Never mind. Being alive back then probably sucked a lot. But at least they had cool hats.
22:01: Kate Winslet is here. She plays Rose DeWitt Bukater, a 17-year-old girl who has been forced into an engagement with a very wealthy 30-year-old man. As electric as Leonardo DiCaprio is, Titanic is Winslet’s movie, through and through. She’s ten-feet tall in it. Every time she’s on screen, you’re just sitting there watching her like, “Fucking hell, man. What a star.”
22:02: P.S. Here’s a stat for you: Over the course of her career, Winslet, who filmed Titanic when she was just 22, has been nominated for 241 awards(!!!), including seven (!!!) Oscars. She’s in that upper, upper, uppermost tier of actors.
22:08: Billy Zane and his eyebrows are here. He plays Cal Hockley, Rose’s aforementioned 30-year-old fiancé. He is an absolute a-hole in this movie. He’s slimy, and he’s petulant, and he’s awful, and, eventually, a cuckold-turned-attempted-murderer. He’s the perfect counterbalance to how joyful and sweet Rose and Jack are together. It’s the best work of Zane’s career.
23:18: Here’s Old Rose narrating the moment Young Rose steps onto Titanic for the first time: “It was the ship of dreams to everyone else. To me, it was a slave ship, taking me back to America in chains.” I’m a little surprised Lewis wasn’t like, “Okay, relax a little, Old Rose. Maybe use a different metaphor here. They didn’t have foie gras on the Amistad.”
24:08: Leonardo DiCaprio is here. He plays Jack Dawson, an itinerant orphan with an absolutely perfect haircut. There have only been two times in my life where I was watching a movie and the girls in the audience screamed at the screen when a character was introduced. The first was when I was in middle school and we had an end-of-the-year viewing of The Sandlot and Benny “The Jet” Rodriguez had his hero introduction, and the second was when I watched Titanic at the theater in 1997 and this scene happened.
24:09: P.S. This is a small thing, but: The movie makes it seem like Jack wins his (and his friend’s) ticket onto Titanic during a very dramatic moment where he draws a lucky final card during a poker game. But if you pause the movie right as Jack is raking in his winnings, you can see that his opponent (Sven) has two pairs (8s and 6s) and Jack has a full house (10s over aces). Regardless of what the final card was, his hand would’ve beaten Sven’s.
24:10: P.P.S. How fucking happy do you think Sven was about losing that hand when he read in the papers that the Titanic had sunk? I bet he told that near-miss story every single time he got drunk for the rest of his life.
26:37: The CGI here looks really, really good for 1997.
28:44: Rose brought a bunch of paintings onto the ship with her. Two of them, we learn, were done by Picasso. This is slightly embarrassing, but up until just a few months ago I thought that Picasso was alive during, like, when Leonardo da Vinci and Michaelangelo were alive. I thought he was one of those BACK IN THE 1500s artists. But nope. He died in 1973! He was alive to see The Godfather! He heard Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together”!
30:24: Is this still a job? Throwing coal into a boiler to power a ship, I mean. Does that still happen? Is that what Below Deck is about?
