TITANIC
Overboard
The classic tragic hero of Aristotelian poetics is of noble derivation and nature. The fatal flaw of hubris -- the arrogant presumption that fate is his to mold rather than Divinity's -- precipitates catastrophic downfall, then a humbled acceptance of one's tiny place in the vast order of things. Identifying with the hero's fateful progress, the audience experiences its own healing: a cathartic blend of awe, pity, and enlargement of spirit.
Greek drama primarily focused upon individual ruin, with attendant violence taking place offstage. Nevertheless, it may be argued that Aristotle's theories have some pertinance to the graphic depiction of massive natural or manmade calamities. One suggests that the most potent portrayal of dire event is one which extends beyond mere spectacle, to arouse the reader or viewer's terror and pity; inciting a poignant awareness of our folly, arrogance -- or simply our aching vulnerability before the impenetrable powers that shape our ends.
An exemplary Aristotelian disaster scenario from antiquity is Thucydides' laconic description of the slaughter of an Athenian army commanded by General Nicias during the Peloponnesian war. Nicias' troops were attempting to escape from the harbor of Syracuse where they had been penned in by superior forces for several days. Goaded by thirst, hammered by the enemy on every side,
"The Athenians hurried on towards the river Assianarus...they rushed down into it, and now all discipline was at an end. Every man wanted to be the first to get across, and, as the enemy persisted in his attacks, the crossing now became a difficult matter. Forced to crowd in close together, they fell upon each other and trampled each other underfoot; some were killed immediately by their own spears, others got entangled among themselves and among the baggage and were swept away by the river. Syracusan troops were stationed on the opposite bank, which was a steep one. They hurled down their weapons from above on the Athenians, most of whom, in a disordered mass, were greedily drinking in the deep river-bed. And the Peloponnesians came down and slaughtered them, especially those who were in the river. The water immediately became foul, but nevertheless they went on drinking it, all muddy as it was, and stained with blood; indeed, most of them were fighting among themselves to have it." (l)
Lensing such mass tragedies has proven a tremendously profitable enterprise since the earliest days of cinema. Public appetite for wrack and ruin caused by every conceivable human or natural agency eventually lead to the creation of a special disaster subgenre. Its recurrent cycles have been hallmarked by ever more awesome special effects and hypertrophic budgets.
But for all the stereophonic sound and widescreen fury of Hollywood's long parade of cataclysms, it's striking -- and disheartening -- to observe how rarely any of them have engendered the pathos of Thucydides' sombre account of that military debacle two and a half millennia ago. One's eye may be titillated by the drowning of Pharoah's troops in The Ten Commandments (l956); one's pulse temporarily accelerated by the incineration of the hapless highrise party-goers in The Towering Inferno (l974). But one's soul remains essentially untouched.
There are signal exceptions to the vacuity of the standard Tinseltown apocalypse and the meagre emotional response it evokes. One has been brought to tears by the bloody martyrdom of nonviolent protesters in Gandhi (l982) before the guns of British infantry; by the magisterial slow camera pullback in Gone With The Wind (l939) which discloses thousands of once proud Confederate soldiery, lying mortally wounded in a squalid makeshift hospital Atlanta hospital; by the barbaric miscarriages of revolutionary zeal in Doctor Zhivago (l965). One had hoped that James Cameron's latest blockbuster, Titanic, would be as affecting. The subject certainly would seem to afford every opportunity for Aristotelian catharsis writ large: so much hubris in the great ship's defective construction, in the grandiose imperial aspirations of its age; so much potential awe, terror, and pity for the innocent victims of the owners' fatal decision to cruise this flawed leviathan at inordinate speed through dangerous arctic waters in hope of breaking the transatlantic crossing record.
Cameron had previously summoned up unexpected moments of intense pathos in workmanlike action hits like The Terminator (l984) and Terminator II: Judgement Day (l991) (T-l's hallucinatory sequences of a ragtag future humanity, ground under the heel of the pitiless robotic oppressor, are exceptionally scary and moving). But despite its claims to stir the heart while astonishing the senses, Titanic remains iceberg-frigid at core. And, setting aside a few by-the-number chills and thrills, it's also a crashing bore. Try enduring it a second time if you disagree.
The film's opening is promising, if founded on unstartling premises. A team of brash young explorers, reminiscent of Twister's (l989) computer cowboys, is diving upon the Titanic to discover if any basis exists for the perennial rumors of sunken treasure. The stunning underwater photography conveys an arresting impression of ruinous, irretrievable Otherness, of a cathedral-like immensity which will never be matched by the duplicate Cameron had constructed at staggering cost (reportedly two/thirds the original's size, it produces a curious whittled-down effect). Also perversely fascinating is an impudent techno-nerd's digitized recreation of the disaster, an eery bloodless cloning of the dreadful thing itself to come.
Cunning robots dismantle a safe from one of the luxury suites. The cash in it has long since decayed into sludge, but a still pristine sketch of a lovely young girl is recovered, her only raiment a fabulous diamond long thought to have gone down with the ship. lOl year old Rose Dawson Calvert now appears. She claims to be the model for the portrait; it's implied she knows the diamond's whereabouts. As she commences her story, the wreck morphs into teeming l9l2 dockside reality, and the fatal voyage's ample narrative potential is submerged by Cameron's inane plot.
Amidst the throngs boarding the Titanic are first-class travellers young Rose (a shrill, plumped-up Kate Winslet, checking her undeniable talent at the door for the occasion); her prim mother, Ruth; and her odious gotrocks fiancee, Cal. Ruth has prevailed upon Rose to marry Cal for his wealth in aid of restoring the family's exhausted fortunes. Rose's dreams of bohemian independence -- signified by the anachronistic Picassos she's collected abroad -- are quickly dashed, as Cal turns out to be as brutal as he's insufferably dull.
Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), an impoverished artist who won his steerage ticket in a poker game, rescues Rose from jumping overboard (both would actually have been blown off the prow by headwind, but as Michael Curtiz said during the making of Casablanca (l942), "Don't worry what's realistic, I make it go so fast nobody notices!"). Jack then introduces Rose to the grimy joys of steerage (like James Bond, his haberdashery betrays never a trace of grit). The comparison between lower deck vitality and upper crust stagnation is highlighted by the wild Irish dance Jack invites her to join. It's a scene so relentlessly affirmative as to make one's molars ache, abetted by Jack/DiCaprio's discouraging rabbity cheerfulness.
To assert her newfound liberation, Rose asks Jack to sketch her in the buff, which inflates the pheranome level sufficiently for her to leave the detestable Cal. Again at the ship's prow, the couple pledges everlasting love. Two lookouts, distracted by their smooching, miss the crucial early sighting of the stupendous berg which would have averted tragedy. And I'm Marie of Roumania.
The rest is history -- more of Cameron's trivialized history. Abundant documentation exists about Titanic's passengers and crew. Their vicissitudes and classbound interactions were addressed with considerable power in the l958 adaptation of Walter Lord's A Night To Remember. Titanic's screenplay virtually sacrifices the rich play of vivid characterizations which a director like Robert Altman would have savored to focus upon the central question of Irwin Allen l950's disaster flicks: which star will live and which will die? In this case, will Jack and Rose escape Cal's wrath, personified by his avenging butler (David Warner's most appalling acting to date), then can they survive the Titanic's monumental death-throes?
As horizontal inexorably turns vertical, Cameron attempts to sledgehammer the viewer into compassion with generic quick-fixes -- children lying cozily abed while their mother reads them to their impending eternal sleep, so forth. One knows intellectually one is supposed to empathize with the horde of rich and poor alike scrabbling for deliverance. Yet inevitably one succumbs to the disaster flick's guiltless schadenfreude, the yen to indulge in morbid, where-is-Waldo bean-counting -- from a safely popcorned viewpoint -- of anonymous fatal jumpers, struggling swimmers, bobbling corpsicles, few quick, most dead. And could that be Rose clinging to the floating Steinway?
The descent to Davy Jones' locker is not without other predictable enjoyments, not the least a childlike delight in beholding the exquisitely recreated signets of luxury smashed to shards and kindling. This destructive orgy duly reflects the film's $200,000,OOO plus pricetag. (It's implicitly verboten to question whether the unholy sum would have been better spent upon relief for genuine victims, the planetary glut of hapless refugees, a cure for cancer or AIDS inter alia.)
But of the unforced awe, pity, terror that compelled radio announcer Herb Morrison's anguished cry as he watched the Hindenberg explode -- "Oh, the humanity, the humanity!" -- there's precious little in Cameron's bloated enterprise:(2) a jot is supplied by the establishing underwater sequences; the restrained farewells amongst the band after playing their last piece; and one shot, from a staggering Olympian height, which renders the dying giant into a foresaken sliver of light upon an immense expanse of dark, indifferent ocean.
Had the rest of the picture been cut from similar cloth, Titanic would surely have matched or outdone the best of its kind. But Cameron has pitched us a true disaster movie, a titanic turkey more tedious and banal than last year's The English Patient (l996) -- Romeo and Juliet (more aptly, Barbie and Ken) meets The Poseidon Adventure (l972).
Less is more: as antidote to Titanic's wretched excesses, one recommends The Sweet Hereafter (l997), Atom Agoyan's heartrending account of a Canadian town's mortal trauma following a school bus accident which kills or maims most of its children. Ian Holm gives the finest performance of an eminent career as the attorney urging a lawsuit against parties yet to be known (and quite probably nonexistant), in aid of assuaging the parents' sorrow, and his own private agony. Demanding an explanation for the inexplicable, Holm unwittingly prescribes a cure for the haunted survivors more intolerable than the disease. Identification with their suffering is so hurtful that one wants to turn away, even as one is riveted by Agoyan's mysterious fable of utterly unredeemable grief.
REFERENCES
l. Thucydides: History of the Peloponneian War. Rex Warner, transl., Middlesex: Penguin Books, l9742, pp. 532-533.
2. The conclusion of the otherwise undistinguished The Hindenberg (l975) stunningly achieves the poignant meld of pathos and nostalgia which has curiously eluded Cameron in Titanic. After a second-by-second deconstruction of Hindenberg's explosion and its immediate aftermath, the great airship is seen again, as if miraculously reconstituted. To a repetition of Morrison's famous commentary, it sails majestically into a bank of clouds. As the announcer's voice frantic voice fades, Hindenberg slowly vanishes, fading into the mists -- and the mythification -- of history.