When it became clear, sometime in December, that Titanic was going to be an enormous success, critical opinion of the movie and of producer, director, and writer James Cameron underwent a curious mass conversion. Having spent weeks deriding Cameron for blowing an unprecedented amount of money on the production, the nation’s tastemakers turned on their heels and stampeded to hail his genius. Clever aphorisms comparing doomed ship to doomed film quickly gave way to reverent declarations of What This Says About Us. Why do the American people, in their inscrutable majesty, like this so much? What hidden facet of the American soul does Titanic throw into brilliant illumination?
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But in the rush to celebrate Cameron’s bold clinch with class, American critics have largely overlooked the fact that the class story Titanic tells is not really the class story of the period it purports to depict. To be sure, the years just before World War I were dramatic for workers and robber barons alike, the air filled with the battle cries of the IWW and the bayonets of the various state militias that were called out to keep the social order intact. Industrial conflict, however, is not the subject of Titanic. In fact, the only glimpses of labor the film gives us are brief scenes inside the ship’s boiler room, where jolly stokers tend gleaming engines and all is teamwork and common purpose.
In other words, Titanic’s first-class decks are not only doomed; they are a floating pesthouse of anomie, a boatful of sufferers from the suburban curse. Fortunately, the masses are standing by to offer counseling and therapy. While the WASPs chew their white bread, the ship’s steerage is a riot of glorious multiculturalism, as Slavs, Celts, and even the stoic Scandinavians whoop it up with pints of strong beer. Out of this zesty social bouillabaisse comes proto-rocker Jack Dawson, a hot-blooded consumer of life destined to restore color to the pallid cheeks of the wilted Rose. Uninhibited Jack instructs Rose in the frontier arcana of expectorating and shipwreck surviving, wows a table of effete aristocrats with a statement of principles that might be a slogan for soda pop–“Take life as it comes at you. Make each day count”–and is even privy to the mysteries of impressionism, which is enough to persuade Rose to dispense with the restrictions of clothing altogether.
Then there’s the film’s present-day management team–the sailors who are salvaging treasure from the vessel with bathysphere and submarine robot. They might well be descendants of the freewheeling Jack Dawson, so contemptuous are they of rules, etiquette, and hierarchy. The hard-nosed leader, addressed familiarly as “boss,” works by intuition, able to “smell” precious bits of wreckage from behind the cold hard data. His sidekick, a can-do nerd of the increasingly stock variety, speaks of the salvage caper as though it were a hacking operation or a panty raid (“We’re in, baby!”) and viciously deflates the airy pretensions of those around him. And they are ready multiculturalists, employing a gang of Russians–quickly assuming their new Hollywood role as the enthusiastic foot soldiers of rule-free global acquisition–to ferry them about the north Atlantic on their search. So you don’t miss the Jack connection, Cameron throws in an otherwise pointless concluding scene in which the boss, who sports the same blond haircut as Jack, begins to put the moves on Rose’s granddaughter.
