When the film Titanic was released, it was released to an audience that was unsure about the potential success of the film. James Cameron, the director, had approached the film with such fastidiousness that caused the release of the film to be delayed significantly, and caused it to become one of the most expensive movies ever made up to that point (Maslin). There is no doubt that Titanic was a landmark piece for James Cameron, and Cameron’s ability and willingness to broach the hard subjects of death and class during the film made it even more powerful. While it would be easy to look at Titanic and see a film designed for entertainment, there are deeper messages and a deeper lure for viewers than just entertainment: this film speaks to the audience about the deeper, base needs of human nature.
Perhaps one of the reasons the ship became so famous was because of the hubris of the creators. The creators created what they thought was an “unsinkable ship”—and this hubris comes across extremely strongly in the film. The actors who play the ship’s builder and captain, while well-meaning and kind, do not seem to really understand they ways that they are tempting fate by running the ship too fast with too few lifeboats. The hubris of humanity is one of the underlying themes of the film, as it is pride and greed that drives so much of the storyline forward. Pride drove the engineer and the captain to declare that their ship is unsinkable; however, the average viewer knows, from the very start of the film, that this statement is both inaccurate and deadly.
Hubris is not limited to the captain and the engineer, however; there are other characters in the film who demonstrate just as much hubris (Titanic). The first half of the romantic couple in the film, Rose, has been destined to marry a horrible man named Cal because of his money (Titanic). Cal gives Rose a gift: a beautiful blue diamond necklace, worth an immense fortune, as a promise that they will get married. She sees this potential marriage as a life sentence rather than something she can be excited about; however, Cal’s arrogance and hubris is so overwhelming that he assumes that he owns Rose because her mother has acquiesced to the wedding (Titanic).
It is unsurprising that a film about the Titanic would be rife with themes of hubris. After all, the story of the Titanic is the story of Gilded Age exuberance and arrogance; the Titanic was built at a time when man believed, deep in his collective soul, that he could conquer nature with science. The failure of the Titanic and the massive disaster that followed seems to almost mark the beginning of the end of the Gilded Age. Although it extended into the 1920s, the Titanic disaster remains at the forefront of American and European consciousness even today. After all, it was one of the most significant seafaring disasters of all time: the arrogance needed to fail to provide adequate safety precautions on this kind of voyage is massive.
Although the film is set against a backdrop of impending doom, the goal of the film is essentially to tell a love story. It is a kind of forbidden love story: the two characters that are destined to fall for each other are the penniless artist and the rich society girl (Titanic). This story could have been told against any backdrop of this day and age: the Gilded Age is an interesting time for racial and class relations, and may such stories have been told. However, there is a power to the love story in Titanic, because the viewer has insight into future events that the characters of the story cannot have.
As the viewer watches Rose and Jack’s love story unfold over the course of the film, there is a growing sense that not all will be well with the lovers. Although they seem attached and infatuated with each other, there is always the sense that something has been put into motion to break them apart and keep them from each other. Rose’s horrible fiancé Cal spends much of the film chasing Rose and Jack, trying to keep them apart: however, there is also an underlying sense that even if these two lovers had been on a different ship, something would have torn them apart anyway: societal expectation and class separation.
Rose and Jack are a successful love story because they never make it past the earliest stages of their relationship. While they might truly have fallen in love and been successful as a relationship, the social pressures of the time were very significant, and it was rare for people to be able to switch socioeconomic classes and truly climb the social ladder. Jack and Rose were doomed from the start, whether they had been on the Titanic or elsewhere; Jack’s death, while horribly sad for audiences, was one of the only ways to preserve their love off the ship itself (Maslin).
The discussion of class in Titanic seems secondary to the discussion of the love story between the main two characters, but there is an undercurrent of conflict throughout the whole film (Titanic). One of the most heart-wrenching scenes in the film occurs when the third-class passengers are locked in the lower levels of the ship, as those lower levels are filling up with water (Titanic). One of the passengers reminds the workers that there are “women and children down here,” but the workers look on impassively. This scene does an excellent job of illustrating the truly horrific way that the poor were treated by nearly everyone; to be poor during this time was to be less than human, and this simple scene illustrated the true depth of the problem much more significantly than any of the other scenes or discussions about class and wealth in the film itself (Titanic).
It has been nearly two decades since the release of the film, and Titanic has become an iconic film in many ways. Cameron’s use of special effects was groundbreaking for the time, and the film is visually appealing to audiences of all ages. While not a perfect film by any means, it is one that is visually striking and emotionally appealing; the fact that the audience knows the outcome for the ship and most of the people on it does not lessen the impact of the scene where the ship slips under water for the final time, nor does it lessen the blow of knowing thousands died in the Atlantic that night due to human arrogance and error.
Works Cited
Maslin, Janet. " Movie Review - Titanic - FILM REVIEW; A Spectacle As Sweeping As The Sea - Nytimes.Com". N. p., 2016. Web. 20 Feb. 2016.
Titanic. Hollywood: James Cameron, 1997. DVD.
