“World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg,” read the The Onion headline. Agreed. As Kate Winslet’s own Freud-referencing Rose Dewitt Bukater snips, James Cameron’s Titanic is epic cinema’s grandest erection, and when the near-scale model set of the towering hulk of steel that was, at the time, the largest ship in the world severs down the middle, it then becomes the most vulgar representation of castration to ever cause millions of heartwarmed teenage girls to choke sobs into their fists. It’s a ready-made sarcophagus for everything that’s vulgar in mainstream cinema. Titanic both embodies and validates the excess that is its own subject.
And Titanic is arguably the most artlessly touching disaster movie of all. No, really. Time and a number of equally irony-free blockbusters in the interim (including Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and Peter Jackson’s original Lord of the Rings trilogy) have dulled its impact somewhat, but Titanic was Cameron’s strike against technophiliac hyper-masculinity in adventure features and a splashing, pre-millennial introduction to a premonitory brand of earnest, new-age spectacle.
It’s as perverse as it is completely guileless; it’s Cameron stripping off his boxers, winning the $200 million bet he placed on the incomparable, record-setting size of his own plumbing, and then slicing off the jewels at the nub to let them sink to the bottom of the ocean, just because he’s that much of a stud…but sensitive. Jocks, who had spent the previous decade slapping each other on their backs and paying lip service to Cameron’s brand of “feminism” (i.e., forcing Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver to suck it up and learn how to do chin-ups) suddenly went apeshit at the perceived sellout found within Winslet’s gorgeously curved, indolently feminine form, to say nothing of Leonardo DiCaprio’s own willowy dimensions. (Apparently, a single girl spitting a loog in a cad’s face doesn’t quite hold the same psychosexual, XY-appeal as a sweaty Amazon ripping an android in two while protecting her surrogate child.)
Ludicrously, they turned Gus Van Sant’s shallow, self-absorbed Good Will Hunting into the dude movie of the moment, proving that there are times when it’s alright for a guy to cry like a little bitch…preferably when women aren’t actually the ones who bring down their defenses. When I first saw Titanic, it was at an employee showing in the multiplex I worked at during my breaks from college. After the film finished, one of my hardass co-workers quipped, “That ship should’ve caught fire when it went down!” (Apparently, death by liquid doesn’t quite hold the same psychosexual, XY-appeal to anyone who has never performed cunnilingus.)
Cameron’s corny screenplay rightly earned raspberries from even the film’s most ardent supporters, as though it even mattered. Even still, the wraparound structure invited grudging respect for clarifying the dispassionate physics of the ocean liner’s foundering. In other words, it gave everyone who couldn’t warm up to the film’s poop-deck love fantasy a dispassionate out.
The more significant residue of the jewel-hunter storytime interludes is how, in their clumsy, irritating obviousness, they highlight Cameron’s vendetta against latter-day popular culture—that is, his endorsement of naïveté. Surely that has to be the reason he plopped a Harry Knowles lookalike in a bullet-splattered happy-face T-shirt next to Bill Paxton’s Brock Lovett, right? So his grotesque, bubbly-guzzling, “fuck”-shouting, hipster quip-spouting crudity could cast even the Snidley Whiplash-as-fop dastardliness of a queenly Billy Zane, as Cal Hockley, in a complimentary light? He may break every code of moral etiquette, but at least Cal respects the mores enough to realize he’s breaking them. In contrast, Brock and his band of deep-sea pirates show no scruples about robbing a graveyard. (Neither, for that matter, does Cameron, who commissioned a series of similar dives—not necessarily to steal jewelry, but film footage.)
Titanic’s class-conscious romantic leads were described by critics as representations of turn-of-the-century optimism. It’s a concept pilfered from Walter Lord’s highly romanticized historical documentation of the disaster (in A Night to Remember and other books), only Lord’s ingénue was the Titanic itself, the Promethean manifestation of the Industrial Age’s hubris, fresh out of the showroom and promptly felled by the same confidence that birthed her.
In Cameron’s film, Winslet’s Rose and DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson play an unwitting role in the ship’s collision with the northern Atlantic iceberg, as their discreet midnight smooch session distracts the crow’s nest’s blue-balled lookouts. As though their brand of post-Victorian romance can only succeed with the sacrifice of the Gilded Age’s golden calf, they sex it up and bathe in post-coital glow as the ship plows toward its hemorrhaging finale. It’s something of an ingenuous revision of the standard disaster-movie tenet: that the cataclysms are, in some small metaphysical part, extensions of either the characters’ own subconscious social negligence or misanthropy. Here, fate. Maybe that’s to explain for Cameron’s decision to completely excise any mention of the notoriously unresponsive nearby Californian.
Which, of course, is where Cameron really gets turned on. The film’s second half is an unparalleled blitz of organized, systematic destruction, a D.W. Griffith-like montage of crosscutting effects sequences (farmed out to nearly every graphics house extant to varying results, some ridiculous, others jaw-dropping CGI-enhanced verité). The ingenuity of Cameron’s compassionate sadism is unrelenting—rivets and panels groaning like the foundation of the house in Poltergeist, mooring lines of the ship’s funnels snapping like lightening and picking off flailing bodies in the ocean, walls of water cascading through the gleaming white hallways of the lower decks and rushing underneath the beds of elderly couples too infirm to try to swim for it.
Again like Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, the brutal efficiency with which disaster is meted out (two words: propeller guy) is terrifying, relentless, and, in the absence of the sort of grand themes (war, injustice) that usually “excuse” violence, oddly dignified. To call Titanic’s crème brûlée mise-en-scène pure or elemental is to invite the vitriolic label “simple-minded” of its contemporaneous backlash (roughly the moment that the film won 11 Oscars and Cameron demanded a moment of silence or, even worse, when the soft-rock-guitar theme song won the Record of the Year Grammy a full year later). But that’s kind of the point.
Image/Sound
For a filmmaker so monomaniacally focused on technical craft, James Cameron’s work has long been poorly served by home video, though Paramount’s 2012 Blu-ray of Titanic was a rare exception that contained a stellar A/V transfer. Nonetheless, this UHD disc, sourced from a recent 4K remaster, is a massive upgrade over its predecessor. The film’s rich colors—from sepia-toned transitions from the present to the past to the florid dresses of first-class passengers to the already-fading fresh paint in steerage—are boosted while maintaining clear separation between the deliberate clashes of palettes. Detail is so fine that you can see the peach fuzz on shaved lips and women’s arms, and black levels in the inky nighttime scenes are so crisp that the final act feels even more ominous as the ship slowly sinks into the desolate patch of ocean.
A newly prepared Dolby Atmos mix amps up the ambient noise on the soundtrack, as well as the melodramatic strains of James Horner’s score, without simply escalating the volume or drowning out the dialogue. And, now, it’s easier than ever to appreciate the constant, subtle hum of the ship’s engines right up until the moment they go deathly silent.
Extras
Paramount’s Blu-ray matched its exceptional A/V quality with a horde of in-depth extras, all of which save a roundtable discussion on the wreck have been ported over to this release. That includes three richly informative commentary tracks—one with Cameron, one with various cast and crew members recorded separately but spliced into a cohesive whole, and one with historians Don Lynch and Ken Marschall breaking down the film’s accuracy—as well as full-length making-of and retrospective documentaries and a host of shorter, themed featurettes on topics ranging from visual effects to Cameron’s deep-sea dives to the real shipwreck.
Paramount could have left it at that, but the home video label also commissioned a few new bonus features, with Cameron, Kate Winslet, producer Jon Landau, and others reflecting on the film’s legacy on the occasion of its 25th anniversary. Hilariously, the longest of the new extras spends an inordinate amount of time first addressing myths and legends surrounding the real-life Titanic before Cameron turns his attention to discussing the long-running argument that both Rose and Jack could have fit on that door at the end of the film.
Overall
Paramount brings James Cameron’s colossal opus to ultra-high-def just under the year-end wire to claim the title of the best studio catalog release of 2023, with a flawless A/V presentation and enough extras to drag an unsinkable ship to the bottom of the Atlantic.
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