IN the immortal words of Brock Lovett, are you ready to go back to Titanic?
I sincerely hope so because in the next couple of weeks, the only way you’ll be able to escape from it is by going to live in an exclusive gated community of icebergs patrolled by media-hating polar bears.
If, on the other hand, you can never get your fill of maritime disasters, your luck is in. April 15 is, of course, the 100th anniversary of the sinking of Titanic, in the name of which occasion, a thousand commemorative events of not always appropriate character are being launched.
My personal pick of the bunch is the Southampton-New York memorial cruises aboard the MS Balmoral (which, incidentally, is a Fred Olsen cruise ship; sister interest Fred Olsen Energy owns Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipyard which built Titanic). Oh, the delicious frisson of spending the whole cruise wondering if some unforeseen disaster is going to make yours the most ironic holiday ever!
I was also moved to hear that online retailers QVC are unveiling a line of Titanic-inspired giftware; it replaces the giant inflatable Titanic slide, on which children from Scotland to Canada have been injuring themselves for a decade now, as my favourite doom-ship merchandise. Sadly, there’s no Heart of the Ocean for your gran to flush down the toilet but you’ll be glad to know there’s a perfume – Legacy 1912: Titanic. I think it prudent to leave you in charge of your own puns at this point.
James Cameron, fighting hard against his naturally retiring disposition, is making sure that the Titanic centenary doesn’t go under the radar by releasing a 3D version of his 1997 feature film (I forget the name) and outdoing the shipwreck itself by sinking 6.8 miles to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, Earth’s deepest oceanic realm.
Happily, he rejoined us at the surface to swat away rumours that Titanic 3D was originally going to be titled ‘Shameless Cash-In: The Sequel’ and to promise that the enhanced version would be more ‘immersive’ than the original – ‘it kind of turns the experience up to 11 instead of 10’. I don’t know about you but I found that the first film met all my immersion needs, what with the real-time sinking of the world’s largest oceangoing liner, and the agonising deaths of 1,514 people, from babies to the elderly, their dying throes drowned out by the squeal of uilleann pipes and Celine Dion’s nuclear bellowing.
No doubt I’ll be eating my words when Di Caprio’s spittle comes flying right through the screen towards me but if Cameron had to revisit his epic, I would rather it had been to give it the following minor tweaks: a completely new script, two different leads with convincing chemistry, and a different ending. Not for the ship to stay afloat – that would be silly, even by Hollywood standards – but for Rose not to toss overboard, in an act of monstrous selfishness, a priceless diamond that would have seen her granddaughter right for perpetuity.
‘Saved’, my foot – I always want Jack’s skeleton to burst up from the depths and shout: ‘What happened to never letting go, eh? Looks like I sacrificed myself for nothing, you rotten old biddy!’
For all this, Titanic is ridiculously enjoyable to me: an odd word, maybe, given the subject matter, but there it is. As it was the highest-grossing film of all time until Avatar came along, I’m guessing a few other people felt the same way. Is it wrong for a director to fashion entertainment from real-life tragedy and for the public to enjoy this tragedy as a dramatic spectacle? While I didn’t find Sebastian Junger’s book The Perfect Storm remotely distasteful, the film dramatisation – an extended gurn-off between George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, the world’s least convincing salts of the earth – really stuck in my craw. Does it simply depend on the passage of time and, if so, at what point does ‘their’ story become ‘our’ story?
There have been more devastating shipwrecks in history (the Lusitania, for instance, just three years after Titanic, and, in recent times, the Doña Paz) but Titanic has the distinction of having given form to a story that seemed already to exist and somehow needed telling. A fable of ambition and hubris, an iniquitous class system, fatal human error, and man versus nature, all riveted into an ironclad whole; the fact that people have always thrilled to shipwreck tales just sews things up.
A cinematic taste for disaster is nothing new, either. Early to mid-1970s audiences had The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno (masterpieces all), whose theme of grim redemption chimed with the lowering mood of the Vietnam and Watergate era. Now, with economic crises and social division claiming headlines weekly, Titanic is still a tale for the times.
And for all times, perhaps: a recent study conducted by Ohio State University as to why ‘sad films make people happy’ concluded that ‘tragic stories often focus on themes of eternal love, and this leads viewers to think about their loved ones and count their blessings’.
That’s one way of putting it: personally, I’m just glad it’s not me dying. But there is a sort of catharsis to be had from vicarious trauma –the emotional equivalent of listening to a thunderstorm from the warm depths of your bed. It’s worth bearing in mind, the next time you’re enduring a hellish crossing on the Ben-my-Chree, that you’re making any number of landlubbers feel better about their own circumstances.