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Originally posted by kyliecassidy at Titanic - James Cameron's subversive masterpiece : South Korea Springhill Group
Titanic - James Cameron's subversive masterpiece

How a Hollywood blockbuster blasted a century’s worth of reactionary pieties straight out of the water

JAMES CAMERON’S TITANIC IS back in cinemas this month, now in a 3D makeover, to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the mighty ship’s sinking on April 15, 1912. The rerelease, unlike the lingering memory of the collision and the resulting 1,514 lost lives, has been something of a non-story, aside from the inevitable debate over the quality or necessity of the 3D conversion, with the only visible debate arising from a Huffington Post article that decries the Twitter generation’s alleged confusion over whether “the story is true or not.” Huffpost became typically huffy, suggesting that it is a disgrace for millennials to be unaware of the sinking as an historical fact and of the “lessons” the event contains for us all.
I have not written on the ensuing debate myself (although I did add my two cents worth to Scott Mendelson’s thoughtful blog entry a few days ago), but I would like to cut the kids some slack – not over whether or not Rose and Jack were real (there have been stranger love stories, after all, as most readers of this essay can probably attest from personal experience), but rather over the “lessons” the tragedy has supposedly bequeathed to us. In fact, young filmgoers are facing a real dilemma, for even though the film recreates the disaster with remarkable historical accuracy, it systematically trashes nearly everything the Titanic has ever stood for in popular culture. And if you ask me, Cameron is about a century overdue.

Titanic as grand cinema

What of the film itself? Let me state for the record that I adore it and have watched it at least a dozen times, including no fewer than five times in the cinema. Not for me the typical response I regularly hear in my own pseudo-intellectual milieu, namely that “it’s horrible Hollywood schlock, sickly and superficial, and I absolutely refuse to watch it!” Okay, I’ll concede that there may well be people out there who are simply too intelligent to watch Titanic, but I love it –the whole thing: Trite plot, bland dialogue, “king of the world” and all the rest of the usual complaints. I actually like the love story, driven as it is by the sheer charisma of the two youthful leads – I can even identify with them a little for my own obscure personal reasons, and who doesn’t long to be swept off his or her feet like that at a decisive moment in their lives? – and the dialogue doesn’t bother me. Instead, I have long been impressed at the film’s narrative economy, the way it squeezes a personal drama, a major maritime disaster, and a modern treasure hunt into a mere three hours and fourteen minutes. And the story is undeniably effective – at a cinema in Stockholm where I was watching it back in 1998 a teenage girl started sobbing during the raft scene, and her friends practically had to carry her out of the theater at the end of the credits. Anyway, when I’m in the mood for complex relationships and mind-blowing dialogue I’m more likely to reach for Kenneth Branagh’s production of Hamlet . . . . READ MORE
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