by Laura Jane Wey
Pathetic, corny melodrama, some say scoffingly. The plot: old lady returns to site of the sunken Titanic, and goes back 80 years in her memory to recall the romance of her life. Boy meets girl on board the Titanic. Boy is poor – won 2nd-class passage on the Titanic in a poker game – sketches astonishingly well and is incredibly knowledgeable on all things as it seems. Girl is young, beautiful, engaged to one of the wealthiest men in the world, and very unhappy because of it (of course they always are). Under the most unlikely circumstances they meet – and despite the screams of reason and the protestations of common sense, the sparks fly. After a torrid 12-hour affair, after having torn the girl away from her fiance, turned all her plans upside down and ‘saved her in every way a person can possibly be saved,’ the boy dies in the cold embrace of the North Atlantic, having given his life to save hers. Certainly nothing remarkable about a story like this. So what, then, explains the record-breaking box office, the raving reviews, the 14 Oscar nominations, the movie posters and postcards (at least 20 different versions) that fill every poster shop? For weeks it was impossible to walk from one end of campus to the other without hearing half a dozen different people say 'Titanic’ with a tremour in their voices and a hundred exclamation marks at the end of the word. One’d have thought the Titanic just sank again. Why this craze over it, if the movie’s nothing more than a mediocre soap opera – as the summary of the plot seems to suggest? Because the summary says nothing of the way the story is told. It says nothing of the intricateness of the narration, as the plot line weaves back and forth through past and present, stirring the emotions of the viewer with the ever-recurring motif of 'then’ and 'now’: the bright, defiant blue eyes of the young belle shimmer and melt and then congeal again into the thoughtful, sunken, faded ones of the little old lady looking back into the distant past; the proud prow of the majestic ship wavers into distortion before coming into clear focus again, a decaying, forsaken ghost lying prostrate in the silent depths of the sea. It says nothing of the beauty of the imagery: the dark hull of the ship cutting through the waves, sailing straight on into a crimson dusk, straight on to its doom, a pair of young lovers standing on the prow, the girl’s white scarf blowing in the wind; neither does it tell of the lights blazing from every porthole on board as the ship begins to sink, glowing upon the midnight sea the way a comet would glow before falling into eternal darkness. Against this exquisite, poetic backdrop, with the shadow of tragedy falling like a shroud over everything, the aliveness and the passion of the young couple stand out like a single scarlet rose in a faded autumnal garden, reaching out and touching the hearts of the viewers in an unexpected way – for we all love life, and the thought of life being cut short in its sweetest bloom incites strong feelings of pity and sadness. And then there is the fact that the sinking of the Titanic is a true story. Everyone knows that the horrors pictured in the film really happened on the high seas that fateful night eighty years ago; it is all true, the portrayal of humanity in the face of death – the panic, the screams, the mindless prayers, the orchestra that goes down with the ship coaxing notes from the instruments until the last moment… And because of this, the viewers feel, if somewhat irrationally, that the story about the lovers has to be true too; that fantastic as it seems, there really was a Jack, and a Rose, and everything happened the way it is narrated in the film. The clever mixing of truth and fiction lends credibility to the story – for the duration of three hours anyway. So it doesn’t really matter there isn’t anything special about the story, or that Jack is too good to come across as a convincing character. There isn’t anything special about the Romeo and Juliet plot either, and Melanie Wilkes in Gone With the Wind is too sweet a character to be convincing also. Yet we still read Shakespeare and Mitchell. Now James Cameron, too, has given us an unremarkable story well-told. Enjoy the beauty and poetry of his work for what it is worth then, and don’t worry about the gap between the film and reality – for if we can’t have romance even in films, where else are we going to find it? a
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The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
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