Titanic | Review
Added 2021-10-17 16:32:20 +0000 UTCFor years, the general cultural resentment and cynicism towards Titanic has really bothered me. I grew up watching this movie at my grandma’s house. She, my cousins and I would huddle on her bed and sit transfixed for all three hours of the movie’s runtime. Stifling our tears when the band plays their final song, and awkwardly avoiding each other’s eyes when Kate Winslet poses nude for her portrait, this movie represented a lot of firsts in my life. The familiarity of its scenes - Jack standing at the foot of the stairs in his tux, Cal yelling “I put the diamond in the coat, and I put the coat on her!”, Mr. Andrews standing in the tilted ruins of his creation in utter shock and shame, Rose lying on her raft and singing a feeble song - the cliches that this movie is so reviled for are the very reason it’s important. Titanic gave me a fundamental understanding of love, and what this complicated and often elusive emotion truly feels like. It took a tragedy of great distance from our contemporary world and made it claustrophobically close, allowing us to resonate with the many universal emotions that are amplified in times of disaster. It builds up a glamorous and grandiose veneer, only to tear it apart in the third act - in tribute to a disaster that signified, what Titanic survivor Eva Hart called, “man’s great arrogance”. My viewing of Titanic last week was my 14th viewing to date. And still, I found myself sobbing at the exact moment that has broken me since I was 6 (when the band’s final song, “Nearer my God to thee!”, swells and we watch an elderly couple embrace in their bed as the water washes over them). It is at this moment I experience a catharsis that I don’t think I’ve felt with any other movie. My grandmother, who survived Covid this year, is very frail, and every moment I spend we spend together is precious. Titanic, and its many cliches, will always remind me of her. I think James Cameron managed to create a movie with such universal signs and symbols, with so many legendary quotes and leitmotifs, that Titanic probably represents to millions of other people what it does to me. And to me that is really powerful.
Comments
I feel like Titanic and other cultural touchstones of film are almost familial in the way people talk of them. They are influential parts of who we were and are despite their flaws. They are often our first window that we view other similar things from; a type of baseline. I too remember watching Titanic from a young age many times on VHS, and it was probably the first romantic movie I encountered that was not a comedy. As I aged and became more rebellious against my family my rebellion against things I loved as a child grew as well. I don't think this happened because of a change in taste or a need to feel edgy -teenage me wearing bondage pants might prove otherwise- but because of a broadening of perspective. When we start drawing comparisons between things is when our old baselines, whether familial or film, start to show their flaws. I don't think Titanic is above this trend. Film that relies on the novelty of it's spectacle often does not age well, and Cameron is notorious for draping spectacle over the corpses of old stories. I think criticizing his work is necessary, but attacking people's feelings about his work is not. We all love our family, even if they suck.
Phil Kuzmicz
2021-10-27 13:12:46 +0000 UTCgreat piece on Titanic here! i love getting to see your writing style, that we get to know in your videos, condensed into a smaller form factor in these reviews. you hit all the beats of measuring your experience against that of the sneering critical response towards the film in the past decade and i feel your personal love for it really shines through. thanks for all these reads!
Dylan Robinson
2021-10-17 18:44:29 +0000 UTC
