The Titanic, the Blockbuster Film and its Wreck
As I write this, from the other side, I question the aphorisms of love. It was as a kind of joke, laughing through tears, that I wrote in my diary then, “I am lonely because I really want to fall in love.” Whenever I have begun to keep a diary I am infected by the worst kind of egoism, whereas, when I write my little stories and poems, I am certain they are destined for obscurity and even take comfort in that obscurity as the perfect vantage from which to witness the world (I mean dunce-capped in the corner with a view of all). I become irrevocably convinced that it is my diaries that will somehow become well-read, studied for their grammar and mined by the press for the private scandal of my friends, so that what should be the most intimate of my writings has the dramatic, sentimental polish and rhetoric of a tell-all. Once I fell into the habit of leaving my diary in increasingly overt places in the hopes that my roommate in New Orleans would surreptitiously read it, while I was away, for hints at my soul—I’d leave it splayed in the nudity of its softcover in the plainest sight—and it was only after I literally left the book in her bed with the weakly implied pretense that I had been writing by the window AC that I confronted her for having such a respect for my privacy that it approached a complete apathy towards my person. She assured me that, of course, she had been reading my diary, scrupulously, nearly every day since I started keeping it months ago, even taking special and considerate care not to hide her snooping too expertly. This was even more damaging. I would have never imagined that witnessing my increasingly dramatic confessions she’d been treating me just as kindly, just as casually as before. I wouldn’t keep a diary again until the plague. In it, I wrote, “I am lonely because I really want to fall in love.”
One dismal February night I watched Titanic on my laptop. I’d forgotten entirely about the framing device, treasure hunter Brock Lovett looking for the Heart of the Ocean, finding a drawing, nude, of a woman wearing it instead, Rose fixing her old self to this image and the film blooming out of her telling. She tells the story of Jack Dawson, who literally saves her from suicide at their first meeting then saves her life with the redemptive power of love. Now a lot of mean and petty girls care a great deal about romantic love so it’s kind of frowned upon in the high brow and it gets a bad reputation even on the street—but as I watched The Titanic engulfed in the meta-loneliness of watching The Titanic on a thirteen inch laptop screen instead, I became, with the raw sting of epiphany, convinced.
The reality of Jack Dawson’s character in cinema is singular. We are drowning in the put-on complexity of characters made so by the false, reflexive addition of a little bit of cynicism or fallibility or second-rate resistance to evil when the complex, difficult reality of our world is that it is often heartbreakingly pure. Some of the most upsetting artworks are trying to justify themselves with this complexity. Did we forget you can just prance right up to the front of the stage and scream, I mean really scream, I Love You? Desperately, desperately, we want this to be naive. Even Sappho invented the word bittersweet just as a modifier for Eros. I am not bragging when I say this but I have actually made love. Eros backwards is sore. Maybe it’s that simple.
Even Cameron squirms under the unflinching truth of his creation and gives us the alibi of noting, even in the film’s fiction, that there’s no record of a passenger named Jack Dawson on the Titanic; I mean the framing gives room for us to cut our disbelief down from its fatal suspension, for the possibility of Rose’s invention. In his poem “I Went into the Maverick Bar,” Gary Snyder writes, “America—your stupidity. / I could almost love you again.” Love is good. I realized this very slowly—that film is more than three hours—the way the revelation of a sunrise lasts a literal lifetime but takes an early morning. During the loneliest month of my life I slept in the pews of a church under the care of a Padre Umberto who tended to his citrus grove and generated sage wisdom by that tending, one of which he offered me at last. He defined the soul as whatever you are pregnant with.
It’s become a kind of meme that sure, there does seem like room on that plank at the end in the freezing sea for Jack to save himself. But Jack, and it’s clear he knows this, had to die for the same reason Christ had to die. We still have not had an imagination come around in art or life to tell us what it’s like to keep living with love after it has saved your life. Jack dies—and this is a prime piece of his reality, for nowhere does this happen more than in life where people are most vulnerable to dying from narrative convention, for their country, from heartbreak or propriety. Films are filled with fathers who will literally kill dozens of people to save their daughters but for whom it is unthinkable that they would remember, every single day for the rest of their lives, how their daughters like their grilled cheese cut. Love is as unbearable as it is good: honest Hollywood, perhaps despite itself, can shock us with its heat—but it is up to us, blinking outside the theater, to learn to live with it, or die. The Titanic never reached New York but its wreck.