TITANIC:
Important Themes, Motifs, and Ideas
Entire books have been written on
this film and its impact on our society. For
real in-depth look at the film I recommend
Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster or
Titanic by David M. Lubin. In this blog I’m just going to explain themes and ideas that
either I have picked up on while watching the film through the years, or have
read in essays and agree with by writers, critics, and fans.
Time:
The utmost important theme
and backbone to the film is the reoccurring focus on time. Past and present,
shifting between the two, and transcending both are pointed out over and over
again. Clocks and hands are shown symbolically throughout the movie to re-enforce
this idea of Time. When the ship begins to sink, Time is as tangible and heavy
as the iceberg. The amount of time left is ever-present. Throughout the film, images of hands reaching, and clocks
ticking are repeated to stress this idea.
The framing story is an ingenious plot device
that constructs a bridge between two time periods, and in the 3.25 hours we
walk seamlessly back and forth on this bridge that Rose makes for us and her
two different times, her past and her present--- 1912 and 1996.
The ship itself also symbolizes time in its
silent and dignified decay at the bottom of the Atlantic, juxtaposed with Rose’s
memories of it as white and new with china that had “never been used,” sheets
that had “never been slept in.” Time both stands startlingly still and
simultaneously decomposes before our eyes in the wreck of the Titanic. The
beginning of the film expresses this through showing us the objects. The real
objects, the real place. It was imperative that Cameron should go down to the
actual ship and film it. In this way we sense the actual presence of Time and
the Place. We see both personal and functional everyday objects, as well as the
knowledge that there are precious objects that had to be left behind, and are
still there. But time guarantees they will not be there for much longer.
A boot that is still tied, but empty, signifies its owner
wore it for an extended period after they died. A doll’s face tells us either
its child died here, or didn’t have Time to take it with her. The safe tells us
similarly that precious things were here and may still be here, dependent upon
Time. Did they have time to take what was important? Has it been too long? Is
it all decomposed? Or has the safe sealed it from Time?
"The key scene in the film is the dinner scene where Jack joins the upper class
for a brief time. To their credit, everyone, except for Cal and Ruth, accept his
presence and interact with him graciously. Jack then dazzles them with his
philosophy of life in response to Ruth's aggressive questioning. '... To make each day count.'"
"Soon after this, Jack gives Rose a note as he kisses her gloved hand. It
reads: "Make it count. Meet me at the clock." What is IT? It is Time itself to
which Jack refers, the symbolism reinforced by the location of the
request... " (Why People Hate Titanic)
The Reinvented Male Body in Titanic:
One of the most noticable things
about Leonardo DiCaprio as the hero Jack Dawson in Titanic is that he doesn’t
really have a body. What you notice is his pretty face. Very, very pretty face.
This is in strong contrast to the action films of the 80s and 90s that James
Cameron was a shaper of--- Terminator, True Lies, etc. Schwarzenegger, Willis,
and Stallone-type heros were the norm when Titanic was being filmed. The other
popular movie concept at the time was “love stories that …appeal to a fantasy
wherein a working-class man awakens sexuality within an attractive, upper-class
woman.” Why did Cameron shift so far away from the strong, tanned muscled-man
trope that he had practically invented? Not one moment in Titanic is Jack’s
body on display, not even the love scene.
Instead there is a focus on his eyes, his face, and his personality.
In “Something and Someone
Else: The Mind, The Body and Sexuality in Titanic”, Peter Lehman and Susan Hunt
state:
Titanic refashioned the body and
characterization of the working-class lover and the male action hero in such a manner that a type of character that
teenage girls normally cared little or nothing about suddenly became intensely
attractive to them.” (p 89)
This means that, in regards
to action-adventure movies, and love stories of the 80s/90s such as The Piano (1993) Dirty Dancing (1987) and Bridges of Madison County (1995) Cameron
used neither popular male embodiment for his hybrid love story/action flick,
but instead created a new trope with DiCaprio. This has been called the “you are very pretty” version of female
fantasy.
Again Lehman and Hunt say:
“Cameron here shifts away from it, and does so within a film
that not only critiques the notion of the awesome spectacle of phallic male power,
but does so through the eyes and mouth of a desiring woman who mocks that very
ideal. Thus, this love story simply could not have been told with Arnold
Schwarzenegger or even Bruce Willis in the DiCaprio role… Titanic, then, seems to be an action-adventure love story with a
different kind of male hero. One who lacks the excessive body-focused spectacle
of impressive phallic masculinity.”
This is particularly
interesting in a movie obsessed with size. The Titanic was enormous. That was
her mass-marketing appeal in 1912. She was huge, and unsinkable. Throughout the
first half of the film her grandeur and size are pointed out, over and over.
Not until she starts to sink do we suddenly realize how tiny she is in the
middle of the Atlantic ocean. Perhaps man’s obsession with size in this film is
one reason why Jack is so utterly unconcerned and un-muscular?
He is instead more sprite,
and androgynous. What we notice about him is that he is a freedom-seeker, and
has a playful, boyish personality that instantly attracts Rose who is trying to
escape phallic masculinity and strict Patriarchy. Her fiancé is strong and
masculine, but also arrogant, a misogynist and a class snob. He attempts to buy
her affection with a priceless diamond, and when this doesn’t work becomes
abusive. He overturns their breakfast table to intimidate her, verbally abuses
her, slaps her, and ultimately tries to kill her when she refuses to leave Jack.
From "Something and Someone Else":
“Cal’s impulsive brutality is similar to that of the
industrious New Zealand colonist Stewart (Sam Neill) in The Piano. His wife, Ada (Holly Hunter), is an accomplished
pianist, but he chops off one of her fingers with an ax after he learns of her
affair with Baines (Harvey Keitel).” – Lehman and Hunt, p 95
In stark contrast, Jack doesn’t seem to have a temper. The only time he loses it, it
is not geared toward Rose. When he does lose it, it makes him more human than anything else. Jack also seems to be free of any desire for wealth,
and holds no bitterness toward his lot in life. He rather “makes each day count”
and is grateful for the air in his lungs and a few blank sheets of paper.
Cameron is playing here with the Artist Bohemian, and Jack’s role as an artist
is a focus throughout the film.
There was originally one scene in which Jack gets in an actual fist-fight with Cal's henchman. Pre-viewers of the film hated the idea of Jack as being aggressive and literally wrestling with a man in the water that Cameron cut it. This male hero of an action-love story was not meant to show brute strength, and clearly it's not what women wanted.
This bohemian freedom and
lack of pretension are what Rose wants, she is “impressed by Jack’s energy, his
playfulness, and his sense of fun. (p.97)” Jack, like the stereotypical “body
man” in love story films from the 90s, lives outside community and family, and prefers the company of “the
other”. The prostitutes he draws from, the homeless old woman he befriends, and
in general Europeans, working class people, and artists. Cal, in contrast to
this, is only friends with other wealthy, white males, preferably of Old Money.
In addition, this freedom of
self also brings with it a theme of “trust your gut” and not over-thinking
life. Several examples of this are when Jack repeatedly asks Rose if she trusts
him. She responds yes, and this trust between them implies no questioning the
other, or thinking. Only an instinctual and firm trust. When Jack urges Rose to
dance, she says “I don’t know the steps,” to which he replies, “Neither do
I. Just go with it. Don’t think.”
As a guest at dinner in first
class, he makes “a banal statement denigrating critical thought: ‘You learn to
take life as it comes at you’.” Rose tells him that when the ship docks, she’s
getting off with him. He says “this is crazy,” and she responds in a manner
that echos his ideas: “I know. It doesn’t make any sense. That’s why I trust
it.”
When Rose is in the lifeboat,
leaving the ship, there is a clear moment when she realizes she has to stop
thinking, and just “do”. Then she jumps out, and lands back onto the sinking
vessel. When Jack reaches her, he says over and over “you’re so stupid Rose!”
but the words are spoken in a way that implies he’s more happy and scared than he’s
ever been in his life. Rose tells him “you jump, I jump, right?” “Right.” When
you jump, you can’t think, or you won’t do it.
The Titanic as an Extension of Rose:
There is a definite connection between the body of
Rose and the body of the ship. They parallel throughout the film, starting in
the beginning with the wreckage of the Titanic on the ocean floor,
and the incredibly aged 100 year old Rose. Images of the deteriorating ship and
the aging Rose’s flashbacks are shown from one to the other, and from Rose to
the ship as they see each other for the first time in more than 80 years.
As the ship departs from Southampton and Rose is boarding,
she narrates that although: “outwardly, I was everything a well-brought up girl
should be, inside I was screaming” there is an abrupt CUT TO: a steam whistle
on board the ship literally “screaming” its call; and apparently this call is
to Jack. The film cuts to him playing a game of poker with several other men in
a pub nearby. It’s here he wins tickets for the Titanic and yells back in
delight “I’m going home!”
Peter Kramer states in his notes for the essay Women First, “As if the ship was calling
him on her behalf, as if her relayed internal scream brought him into
existence”.
Soon after Rose threatens herself with the idea of throwing
herself overboard. She’s placed herself at the very end of the ship, and it
becomes Jack’s desire to not only save her from killing herself, but to bring
her to her rightful place as the ships Figurehead, at the front of the ship.
Kramer goes on to say:
“The sinking of the
Titanic, then, would appear to be an extension of Rose’s earlier death wish.
Furthermore, the
two are linked through the motif of virginity. The Titanic is
on her maiden voyage, and Rose is still a virgin; the
Titanic’s voyage comes to
an end when she loses that virginity… The connection between her sexual
liberation
and death is also hinted at by the peculiar postcoital exchange in
which she points out to Jack that he is shaking, and
he replies, as if he had
been severly wounded: ‘Don’t worry, I’ll be alright’. In the end, of course, he
won’t.”
The Titanic, like Rose, is a prized possession among men, and
is accordingly flaunted and bragged about. Titanic is commented continuously as
being not only beautiful but also “the largest moving object created by man in
all history.” Comments aside as to Kate Winslet’s “size”, she is also talked
about as an object by the men in first class, as Archibald Gracie says to Cal
“Hockley, she’s stunning” and his responding snicker of “Why, thank you”. She
is, like the Heart of the Ocean, a valuable possession.
The Heart of the Ocean:
Most symbolically heavy object in the film. It originally represents money--
but also male possession. Cal wraps this around Rose’s neck as a symbol of his
ownership over her body. Rose re-claims ownership of her body by posing naked
with it for a drawing of her, paying for this drawing with Cal’s money, the
money that bought the object in the first place, and bought her.
In deciding to model nude for Jack (or for herself, since she commissions the portrait), she aligns
herself with Manet’s 'Olympia', and the stigma at the time of an “impure woman”, since no woman
of her social standing would ever, ever pose nude, especially for
a “poor person”. Cal later makes this clear to the audience when he says to her
“well it is a little slut, isn’t it”? Taking away even her status as a woman,
or a person, and then later calling her a “whore to a gutter rat”.
In reference to the drawing scene, Munich and Spiegel state:
“The
scene neatly reverses the logic of the male
gaze, as Rose shifts her position from model to purchaser of the drawing.
In addition, Rose is no passive receiver of the male gaze. She is the erotic
subject of the scene, not only in control of the events, but explicitly
aroused. Again, reversing gender roles, Rose remarks ‘I believe you are
blushing, Mister Big Artiste’.”
-'Heart of the Ocean: Diamonds and Democratic Desire in
Titanic' (1999)
Also, it represents the ocean. The
heart of the ocean. Which is the present-day Titanic. Which is where she must
bring it to lie.
It travels throughout the second half of the film in coat
pockets. Both Jack and Rose don’t know they are concealing it. Again they are
“given” it by Cal, first intentionally, and then unintentionally.
In the end the diamond comes to represent something different from what it did
when it first was introduced to us, placed on the figurehead of the ship. It
represents what money cannot buy.
Money:
In Titanic, money often seems
to represent greed, selfishness, corruption, and cowardice. The penultimate
moment perhaps being the depiction of the true-to-life actions of Mr. Ismay
boarding a lifeboat when it was considered at the time to be an act of
cowardice to leave your sinking ship. For the rest of his life Ismay was
shunned and hated by others for saving his own life, after ordering the
ship to speed unnecessarily through ice fields.
When lifeboats begin to run out, Cal tries to buy his
way into one. To which Officer Murdock eventually realizes, “Your money can’t
save you any more than it can save me.”
At a time when the American middle class is growing smaller and smaller, "and the gap between haves and have-nots is growing wider, Titanic's romantic resolution of class may be pleasurable--- but it is hardly subversive. (Ship of Dreams p.171)" In Titanic, the 2nd class is nonexistant. Americans in 2012 don't have too hard a time relating to that. Our economy is increasingly split between the 1% at the top, and the 99% below. If we were all on the Titanic right now, who do you think would get those under-calculated lifeboats first? Who would be locked behind the gates?
Money is also essentially what sparks the
entire plot of the film, and the “treasure hunters” looking for the diamond
said to still be on board. They desire money, and notoriety. Brock Lovett can
think of nothing but the diamond at the beginning of the film. Money is all they talk about in Rose's social circles, and the "cigars and brandy" in the smoking room is another excuse to obsess over money. Money is why Rose is marrying Cal-- Her father died and left them without Money. In the end, Rose has to make the choice whether to care about Money like everyone else does, or to not.
Liberation and
Proto-Feminism:
One last important theme is that of liberation. As has been said, Jack helped to "save" Rose. She says herself in the film "he saved me in every way a person can be saved". Not just from her unhappy pairing with Caledon Hockley, but also from her deadening social world. "Tropes of entrapment and escape are woven throughout the narrative. Characters repeatedly escape from handcuffs, break through locked gates, lock and unlock a safe" and of course break through social and gender boundaries.
One of the first things Jack and Rose do together is take part in lessons on how to "
spit like a man". When Rose is with Jack, not only do social boundaries begin to crumble, but boundaries based around her sex as well. They talk of drinking beer and riding
rollercoasters until they throw up, riding horses like cowboys on the beach,
and chewing tobacco and spitting like men. She parties with him as an equal, drinking beer, smoking,
and dancing. Later in the film she gives someone the middle finger—obviously
something women weren’t supposed to do at the time, and considered incredibly
obscene coming from a woman of first class.
This theme of freedom is visually expressed in the film best by the flying
scene. This is the moment she chooses to reject her former life and to ally
herself with Jack, and her own desires. The metaphor of a bird taking flight is
obvious, but fitting and powerful. Another scene that can easily be argued as
Rose’s moment of personal freedom is Rose as she stands beneath the Statue of
Liberty after surviving the sinking, that this moment represents her ultimate
liberation.
Lehman and Hunt suggest a “proto-feminist consciousness” present in
Titanic, supported by the above scenes,
and dialogue like; “Of course it’s unfair. We’re women. Our choices are never
easy.”
A small motif probably only noticable to nerds like me is that her painting of a Degas' ballerina is always in the room when she's talking to either Cal or her mother. This is symbolic considering what little freedom the ballerinas at the time had. They were barely better off than indentured servants or slaves. A ballerina's life was, as Germaine Greer states, "a one-way ticket to prostitution."
When that ballerina sinks with the Titanic, so do Rose's chains, so to speak.
I could go on forever, but... let's end this with a quote from the film. For a movie known for its bad dialogue, it has some pretty great lines.
"Afterward, the 700 people in the boats had nothing to do but wait. Wait to die, wait to live... Wait for an Absolution, that would never come."
