I recently saw the movie Titanic for the first time. It honestly made me pretty mad how directly it relates to the problems of the intervening years since it came out. In the movie: rich people are not to be trusted, the experts are ignored in favor of media coverage, the poor are trapped below decks, there aren’t enough life boats, by the time people start accepting reality it’s too late. It’s almost all too perfect. The iceberg can be global warming, or the pandemic, or the return of fascism, basically any of the major calamities of the past 10 years. And everyone saw the movie. It was a massive hit. And all anyone took away from it was that Rose gets naked. So both the movie, and the response to the message of the movie, are almost too on the nose.
Titanic nerd here. There are definitely lessons that we’ve still not learned. Greed and hubris are easily spotted, but the more insidious enemy that doomed Titanic was complacency. In 1912 there was a real sentiment that man was the master of the universe, that war was a thing of the past, that modern science made ships practically unsinkable… none of that was true, of course.
Jack Thayer, a survivor, later wrote about how the Titanic sinking presaged a sea change in the world, and not for the better:
“There was peace and the world had an even tenor to its way. Nothing was revealed in the morning the trend of which was not known the night before. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start, keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since with less and less peace, satisfaction and happiness. To my mind the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912”
Really good points that I’ve not seen articulated this well before.
I remember seeing the movie at the cinema when it came out and it really upset me. I cried all the way home and I was still tearful the next day at school. I really struggled to explain to people that no, it wasn’t about Leonardo DiCaprio, it was this catastrophic and unnecessary loss of life caused by greed and hubris
Know what I took away from that movie… Rose is a bitch.
She states that she married a good man and was married for 40 years or whatever.
Then she dies and goes to her afterlife where she meets the guy she met for 3 days then fucked once.
And there’s her loyal husband, waiting to meet her in the afterlife, but then realizes that she harbored this love of this little fucker their entire marriage, living a lie with him. He realized she was just using him the whole time.
What I took away from the movie is that in the depths of his clearly extensive research, James Cameron decided that out of 885 crew members and 1,317 passengers, not one of them had a story worth basing a movie around, so he had to make up multiple new ones (not just Jack and Rose, Rose’s fiance, Rose’s mother and Jack’s Italian friend were all fictional).
Good thing none of them were alive anymore except maybe a baby or two or they would have probably gotten offended.
And it makes me think his research was mostly the sort that certain WWII buffs do- learn every single detail about the tanks and the guns and the uniforms but not the name of anyone ranked below general.
I recently saw the movie Titanic for the first time. It honestly made me pretty mad how directly it relates to the problems of the intervening years since it came out. In the movie: rich people are not to be trusted, the experts are ignored in favor of media coverage, the poor are trapped below decks, there aren’t enough life boats, by the time people start accepting reality it’s too late. It’s almost all too perfect. The iceberg can be global warming, or the pandemic, or the return of fascism, basically any of the major calamities of the past 10 years. And everyone saw the movie. It was a massive hit. And all anyone took away from it was that Rose gets naked. So both the movie, and the response to the message of the movie, are almost too on the nose.
Titanic nerd here. There are definitely lessons that we’ve still not learned. Greed and hubris are easily spotted, but the more insidious enemy that doomed Titanic was complacency. In 1912 there was a real sentiment that man was the master of the universe, that war was a thing of the past, that modern science made ships practically unsinkable… none of that was true, of course.
Jack Thayer, a survivor, later wrote about how the Titanic sinking presaged a sea change in the world, and not for the better:
“There was peace and the world had an even tenor to its way. Nothing was revealed in the morning the trend of which was not known the night before. It seems to me that the disaster about to occur was the event that not only made the world rub its eyes and awake, but woke it with a start, keeping it moving at a rapidly accelerating pace ever since with less and less peace, satisfaction and happiness. To my mind the world of today awoke April 15th, 1912”
A titanic fan are you? Name every iceberg 🔫
No possible comeback from this one.
Really good points that I’ve not seen articulated this well before.
I remember seeing the movie at the cinema when it came out and it really upset me. I cried all the way home and I was still tearful the next day at school. I really struggled to explain to people that no, it wasn’t about Leonardo DiCaprio, it was this catastrophic and unnecessary loss of life caused by greed and hubris
“Don’t look up” exemplifies this 1000x better. It’s frustrating AF but you have to remember to laugh or you’ll go nuts.
The real joke is always how people completely miss the point on these things.
Know what I took away from that movie… Rose is a bitch.
She states that she married a good man and was married for 40 years or whatever.
Then she dies and goes to her afterlife where she meets the guy she met for 3 days then fucked once.
And there’s her loyal husband, waiting to meet her in the afterlife, but then realizes that she harbored this love of this little fucker their entire marriage, living a lie with him. He realized she was just using him the whole time.
Rose is a bitch.
What I took away from the movie is that in the depths of his clearly extensive research, James Cameron decided that out of 885 crew members and 1,317 passengers, not one of them had a story worth basing a movie around, so he had to make up multiple new ones (not just Jack and Rose, Rose’s fiance, Rose’s mother and Jack’s Italian friend were all fictional).
Good thing none of them were alive anymore except maybe a baby or two or they would have probably gotten offended.
And it makes me think his research was mostly the sort that certain WWII buffs do- learn every single detail about the tanks and the guns and the uniforms but not the name of anyone ranked below general.