From Michael Pereira's, "Vox's, Fall '98 From Michael Pereira's, "Vox's, Fall '98In Leicester Square in London, they set up a kind of shrine around the big movie. Dull black siding mimics a landlocked hull, and a giant billboard stretches skyward, red letters like smokestacks advertising the movie, the myth. Theater walls are hung with memories, pastel sunsets digitalized, Celine Dion singing on deck, young lovers embracing amidships. Also a few frames from behind the scenes, for context: James Cameron knee-deep in a sinking sequence, the giant model ship half sunk and fully illuminated in a mock Atlantic, Leonardo waving to Japanese fans. We laughed, we cried, we loved it. Titanic, in short, is all-encompassing: a name and a description, both sides of a system of meaning, a complete experience. But like any historical epic, the emotional impact of Titanic derives not so much from the movie itself but from themes adumbrated in the story. Like Gone With the Wind or a David Lean effort, Titanic makes personal the invisible hand of history. It illustrates the interaction between individuals and institutions, how people make society which in turn determines personhood in a hierarchy. The legend of Titanic is a metaphor with multiple resonances, a simple tale with a big budget, a kind of parable. Hubris at sea, as played out in Titanic, is a staple of American tragedy. Indeed, seafaring fictions regularly pit man against his most merciless, mysterious adversary. The profundities of untold fathoms reflect the depths of man's soul, they challenge his resolution and rust his mettle. The sea, in short, reveals man to himself. Hemingway's Old Man discovers his unbounded, impossible ambition at sea; like Narcissus, he sees himself reflected in the water. Man, we might say, creates or fails in the vast nothingness of watery isolation, the existential echo of amniotic beginnings. The sea itself represents a release from society, while ship and crew demand a rehearsal of terrestrial themes, a microcosm of political passions. Moby Dick comes to mind, that greatest exemplar of democracy afloat. Consequently, ship metaphors, from Plato on down, have been linked with politics, specifically the politics of hierarchy. Who steers? Who's in steerage? The bow of Melville's Pequod, like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, is a democratic workshop, an ethnic amalgam in practice. "Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian." Titanic thus becomes another iteration in a long argosy of figurative vessels, conveyors of the political context in which they are fabricated. But unlike Melville's ship, Titanic -- in fiction and in fact -- is freighted with aristocratic tradition, that moribund hierarchy doomed de jure, but destined to live in vestigial practice. As Ibsen said, "we travel with a corpse in the cargo." For America, that dead weight was England's monarchic heritage, certainly undemocratic, but a convenient recourse when the ship is going down. Titanic's unfair seafaring comments on the sometimes perverse optimism of a time when anything seemed possible. The idea of "speed" was a goal and a worldview in early-century American fictions, speed in production, in competition and in lifestyle. The material realization of speed, of course, is mass production; its results are mass culture and consumption, and a general lust for gigantism. So bigness becomes a cultural obsession in the early decades: Tin lizzies pour off assembly lines en masse, Howard Huges builds the Spruce Goose (the airplane that couldn't fly), the Empire State Building goes up and Titanic is assembled -- the biggest, fastest, most luxurious oceanliner of all time. But haste, as the industrial paradox goes, makes waste. Thus the car crash recurs as a leitmotif of tragedy in the period, the symbolic meeting point of technology and its doomed subjects. The story of Titanic highlights the moral repercussions of that headlong scramble for modernization -- uniquely American pride punctured by nature, and the fatal reality of widening class inequity. The romantic fiction grafted onto the historical account proposes to bridge class and probability. It offers an imaginary solution to a real contradiction. Compared to glimpses of the boiler room and scenes of third class cabins filling with water, the romantic plot seems a trite rendition of class distinction. Leonardo breathes life into the tight-corseted girl who would rather dance with the hoi polli than marry her high-strung, heavily-mascara'd betrothed. But the romance, interwoven into the context of real tragedy, achieves a kind of poignancy by propinquity. Titanic's imaginary love story is effective precisely because we know their love is doomed from the beginning -- a love, as it were, corrupted by historical contingency. The happier they are, the sadder becomes the movie's inevitable denouement. Indeed, all the meticulous detail of the film are set up only to be toppled in the end; cognizant of the outcome, we can appreciate better the titanic transience of vanity, the silly games adults play while children are learning to love. Basically, Titanic stages the misguided optimism of an era in all its excess; the better to sink it in the end. The space of time affords us the luxury of being sad instead of worried. Misty-eyed reactions to the movie mix genuine empathy with an historical condescension, perhaps unconsciously. There is a sense that "this could not happen today," that the Titanic tragedy represents the ambition of an era run amok. However, if Titanic, as I have argued, is a parable at sea -- another incarnation of a genre that speaks to the American experience -- then its themes are indeed universal. Overweening pride transcends time and technology; and classes, which Plato separated like metals, may never exist in happy equilibrium. Titanic condenses life to a few hours, and offers different reactions to the inverted hourglass. Some pray for salvation in their last minutes, some crack up and dissolve the social contract, some hold tenaciously to tradition and go down with a stiff upper lip. And some simply choose love. Love cannot solve the nasty and brutish realities of history, but perhaps it can offer a glimmer of hope and a final chance for meaning. Like fiction, love can rearrange the worst of times into unsinkable memories.
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