The Heart Does Go On: The Legacy of Titanic Against the Movie Industry Today

Within a month we’ll be seeing for the first time in thirteen years a new James Cameron movie. Those Avatar sequels he’s been working on all this time are finally ready for the world, and whatever you thought of that movie it is exciting to have one of the formative blockbuster filmmakers back in the game after so long an absence. Of course it’s not his first lengthy hiatus, Avatar itself being separated by twelve years from Cameron’s previous feature success, the last time he made a movie not set in his world of blue aliens and space colonialism.

It was twenty-five years ago next month that James Cameron first shook the movie world, breaking box office records, Academy Awards records, and racking up all kinds of acclaim -the latter at least for a little bit. Titanic was one of the first movies I remember being popular to hate, alongside the Star Wars prequels and Schumacher Batman movies. Which is weird, because unlike those examples (for what charms they do possess), Titanic is a good movie -a really good movie in fact! One of those movies that is iconic for all the right reasons, as a story and as a spectacle. I might daresay even call it a masterpiece, the great epic romance of modern film history and simultaneously one of the best disaster movies. But for a long while saying any of this was incredibly unfashionable.

Part of it was just that Titanic was such a big movie that broke so many metrics it automatically had to be a topic of conversation -and all of its’ success at the dawn of the internet age made it that much more vulnerable to scrutiny and backlash. People wondered ‘why this movie’ should be the one to achieve all this. And of course when you consider that in conjunction with the overwhelming maleness of so many movie fans and movie discussion spaces, obviously some degree of toxicity slips through: judgement of Titanic as a “chick flick”, dismissal due to the mere fact of its’ open melodramatic romance; hell, I even remember the mockery of Leonardo DiCaprio for supposedly ‘looking like a girl’ -and of course he spent the next few years working with Scorsese and Spielberg to shed the teen idol image Titanic cemented for him. A whole parody culture emerged around Titanic, being so big it could be endlessly satirized, and this bled through into criticism of the film: mockery of lines of dialogue for rather arbitrary reasons, meme-ifying the movie before those were a thing, and interrogating the movies’ “plot holes” including the endless tired observation that “they could BOTH fit on that plywood”.

And this relationship between Titanic and popular culture has mostly stood, even as the backlash died down to be replaced with new outlets for rage. However I think the further out we’ve gotten from the movie and its’ dominant presence in pop culture, the more it is vindicated by history. Several critics who bought into the initial backlash have come back around to it. Empire magazine gave it a five-star review in 1997, reduced it in the years that followed under pressure of consensus, only to eventually restore it in 2019. Critics in general, or at least the ones I follow, look back on it relatively favourably. And I think even if you’re not hugely into the story of the film or the romance genre in general, you can certainly admire the ambition and craft of Titanic as a Hollywood product in light of what the current state of the film industry is. Movies like it simply can’t get made anymore, no studio is ever going to take such an expensive gamble on a filmmakers’ vision again -even with how well it worked out in that case. To me at least Titanic is in some ways indicative of almost everything great about the movie industry in the mid to late 90s, and consequently everything that sucks about it today.

So I think on this anniversary I want to talk about why that is, and take some time to gush a little about a movie that I had no strong feelings either way about until a couple years ago, watching it in lockdown for the first time in over a decade, to discover that I actually kinda love it. Since the last time I’d caught a part of it on some basic cable rerun, I’d fallen in love with the period epic genre and openly warmed to romance as a narrative device; but more than that, the technical aspects of it, the scale, and the unabashed sincerity of it felt so rare an experience, for as much as it may peddle in well-known tropes.

Titanic was a risk of a kind Hollywood would not attempt today, where everything greenlit is only done so with assurance a specific audience will be there for it. 20th Century Fox took on the project based solely on Cameron’s name and prior successes, even as they didn’t really buy into the concept of “Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic” as it was pitched to them. There was enough trust in the artistic vision guiding the project, which is unimaginable in a climate driven by I.P., where even established, filmmakers with receipts have a tough time getting new movies made. Titanic is nothing if not a testament to vision. Everything is as big as it could possibly be, from the sets and effects to the drama and a good deal of the characters. And Cameron knows that that is exactly what is demanded and expected for a movie called “Titanic”, which evokes not only the grand mythologized disaster in question but simply something of an enormous, operatic scale befitting the word. In many respects one could argue Cameron’s model for Titanic was the Titanic itself, save of course for its’ disastrous end -although many involved felt they were filming a genuine disaster, under Cameron’s austere perfectionism and often brutal directing techniques. Perhaps an aspect of that auteur approach better left behind. Still, Cameron was under immense pressure from the studio, as production went well over-budget, and executives would frequently harangue the director over excess costs, effects, and his choice of runtime -exceeding three hours. How many times would a modern executive simply step in and fire Cameron? Now that directors on big-budget projects are expendable. And how much worse would the finished result be?

The technical ambition of Titanic was enormous, and with no guarantee it would pay off. And even though there was more of a precedent for romance epics (The English Patient won the Oscar the year before Titanic), it was still a bold thing to pair against a disaster story that has enough weight to overshadow that vital aspect of the plot. It was betting on large audiences across the board accepting it, demographics that would turn out for one of the two features of the story, but be turned off by the other. There wasn’t any kind of movie like that before, that couched an earnest love story in a grand tragedy -it might even be seen as poor taste. Add to this that Titanic was not being led by movie stars during a time when star power was the most important commodity in Hollywood. It’s easy to forget but neither Leonardo DiCaprio nor Kate Winslet, though each known within the industry and the recipient of an Oscar nomination, were big name stars yet -he merely a teen hearthrob and she a new British ingenue. Now it’s clear to see they were waiting in the wings to be crowned Hollywood royalty, but they were not reliably popular enough to sell a movie to mainstream audiences. Casting these two, and especially Winslet who actively fought for the role over bigger name stars, was a gambit in its’ own right.

Yet these and every one of the risks Cameron took, the ones that terrified the upper-brass in Hollywood, paid off. The runtime was not a turn-off, the subject matter didn’t alienate audiences, DiCaprio and Winslet were made stars by the film, and the big expensive choices paid off the most dividends. It taught everyone in the industry not to bet against Cameron. On some level he knew audiences in a way they didn’t. And yet so few in positions of power would trust a filmmaker in the same way today.

But of course it’s not just the bold scale that makes Titanic, it’s the care put into its’ every facet. Perusing the James Cameron’s Titanic behind the scenes book by Ed W. Marsh there are dozens upon dozens of photos of just the sets and the art and the props replicated to the finest detail of the time; or even in some cases the actual Titanic itself. Several ornaments, such as a wood-carving clock were crafted off of actual measurements done of relics that had been saved from the wreck and sold to private buyers -Cameron’s team tracked them down! And it’s no wonder, Cameron was a self-confessed Titanic obsessive before making the movie; one of his biggest goals for it was to dive down and film the actual wreckage -which does appear in the finished movie. In that book he details with enthusiasm the expeditions that took him down there, the inspiration, and the emotion that overcame him being on the actual ship and swearing that he would bring the same feelings to the big screen. Heart was poured into the project, an authentic, unquenchable drive to bring the film to fruition. The kind of romance in filmmaking that is a creative ideal yet has always been practically rare.

Achieving historical authenticity meant painstakingly designed sets and costumes, which sounds arduous and no doubt was, but that richness of detail counts for a lot. We see it in the famous transition between Jack and Rose on the ships’ bow at dusk and the partially collapsed bow of the wreckage that looks an exact deterioration of the sound-stage creation. They went the extra mile on this one (no doubt costing the studio) in ways a production wouldn’t dare nowadays. Working off of the blueprints from the company in Ireland that designed the real Titanic, a scale double was constructed on a waterfront in Mexico, with a mini-studio built up around it. And emanating the opulence of the vessel, it was fitted with all kinds of genuine finery, to say nothing of the elegant costumes for the first class passengers -based directly off of and often using fabrics from photos of the time. Titanic (along with Lord of the Rings a few years later) was one of the last movies to go this hard on it’s immersive details in a practical sense. I could see a movie now green-screening an entire room behind DiCaprio and Kathy Bates or reducing the ship itself to a CGI model with only the basest of sets built by hand.

And the thing is, all of this was to an excess length in 1996, but the practice itself wasn’t anything unique. Movies were allowed and expected to feature high levels of craft, design was a fundamental importance to these period pieces especially -the better to illuminate their world and create that image of a time long gone. The art of it all was a virtue. I look at Titanic and see exceptional cinematography, gorgeous lighting, I hear stirring music, I feel the maritime atmosphere. And I’m reminded of those other movies from this era: Dances with Wolves, Braveheart, The English Patient -but even the non-epics: The Age of Innocence, Sense and Sensibility, even Amistad that cared deeply about all the same things -and which many similar praises could be sung about.

Still, though Cameron may be a perfectionist to a fault, where he achieves that perfection it makes for the kind of cinema that takes your breath away. Even in the less notable scenes, there is colour and life -the nighttime disaster is never out of focus or visually confusing and it plays out, like the noble violinists, with the utmost grace. If an executive were foolhardy enough to greenlight a movie like Titanic in the modern age there is almost no chance it could look this good -what with the ever-homogenous nature of the current Hollywood product standards.

For certain it would be sapped of its’ emotional resonance as well. I haven’t really discussed yet the story, theme, and tone components of the movie that feel unique to their time, but the attitude towards those might well be its’ most important character. Above all else in its’ narrative construction, Titanic is a sincere movie, and sincerity by and large does not fly in any kind of a mainstream way anymore. Even Spielberg, who made the most recent earnest romance a year ago with West Side Story, couldn’t get folks to turn out for it. There is an argument that this point is a chicken-and-the-egg scenario, as the Titanic backlash (and following that, The Notebook) could feasibly be blamed for a general disinterest in melodramatic romance within Hollywood and the audience it most endeavours to court. As mentioned before, there have been several moments from the movie that have achieved pop cultural notoriety for being mocked, to the point it could be hard for a viewer to take them at face value. Especially now when just about any love story that appears in a major movie is drenched in highly inauthentic cynicism: couched within precisely toned humour, scrubbed clean of any eroticism or sexual tension, and played with only a mild enthusiasm for what should be the most buoyant of human emotions. Not that Titanic and its’ classical intonations are any more authentic mind, but its’ healthy to have a diversity in the way we communicate romance through cinema.

And Jack and Rose’s genuinely is a romance for the ages. Part of this is through the performances and chemistry of DiCaprio and Winslet whose seeming adoration of one another really shines through. Another part is how Cameron envisions their romantic scenes, from their first meeting to the passenger deck jig to the painting and subsequent steamy lovemaking in the old car; and of course the several that occur during the sinking. Again, Cameron thinks in scale and has a real creative eye for how to articulate visually the central love story in the strongest and most passionate ways: the sunset on the bow, the hand against the window, the embrace at the Grand Staircase -these are impeccable romantic images. And yes, the script adds immensely to the emotional power of their relationship. People remember the lines that could be corny read a certain way, but they don’t remember the personality and the character development that goes on; how fully-fleshed both Jack and Rose are with minimal backstory or exposition. The performance of Gloria Stuart as the old Rose adds a lot too, it gives everything this wistful, longing quality that hooks you before you even see the younger actors, and keeps the tragic core of their story always present. All of this works to make the sentimentality of the romance not only earned, but necessary. I would hate to see Titanic wrung through the modern screenplay algorithm, Jack and Rose made mere vessels for irreverence, their love story losing all resonance. Perhaps it is only the power of hindsight that shows just how special what they had was. No love scene since 1997 has moved me anywhere close to that final long take of Rose and Jack reuniting on the Titanic in the afterlife (or her dream, your interpretation depending) to the applause of the ships’ entire compliment.

Not just the love story is depicted in earnest though. Permeating the movie is an unabashed love for the Titanic and its’ crew -omitting that one officer ahistorically depicted as killing himself in the pressure of the crowd. The officers are bastions of decency and professionalism, refusing bribes during the crisis and steadfastly searching for survivors in its’ wake. Bernard Hill’s Captain nobly going down with the ship is given poignant gravitas. And there’s a particular affection shown for the ships’ designer Thomas Andrews, played by Victor Garber in what is subtly one of the movie’s best performances. Cameron clearly feels some kinship with this well-meaning architect who suffers the biggest background tragedy of the film. That scene in his study as the ship floods, based on a legend, has such power to it. And of course other real figures like Kathy Bates’ Unsinkable Molly Brown are treated with the utmost respect -with of course the exception of Jonathan Hyde’s J. Bruce Ismay, often seen as the villain of the Titanic story for being the highest-ranked figure to escape, and Cameron takes no different a view: characterizing him as even a potential catalyst of the disaster.

As the disaster creates its’ share of thrills, Cameron never ceases his reverence for the lost against the romanticization of the whole story. He somehow is able to achieve this whilst criticizing the class and wealth disparities that existed onboard. Warts and all, the Titanic compels him, and the movie is as such a work of palpable passion that takes itself seriously. Post-Lord of the Rings, so few movies compare on that front and several others. It’s a shame.

A modern history of film cannot be adequately discussed without touching on Titanic. It made too much of an imprint, was too much of a cinematic event to be dismissed as insignificant or unsophisticated. But what can be reasonably argued with twenty-five years’ hindsight is that it didn’t change cinema much. Its’ lingering effects on the Hollywood movie, especially as we know it today, are minimal. In fact, for all the talk of its’ lesser cultural impact, Cameron’s next movie Avatar has had a much stronger influence on the mainstream cinema of today -we’re still going to see 3D after all, despite it being shit 90% of the time. Titanic is a great movie, but watching it is to watch something from a far-off era of film history, one so dramatically removed from where we are now and that Titanic closed out more than it opened. Even just a few years later it seemed impossible that a movie like Titanic would ever be as successful again -Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor arguably proved that the case. Titanic was like this last gasp of a certain kind of Hollywood magic.

I don’t mean to imply that that landscape of the late 90s/early 2000s was all perfect, but when you look at it compared to now, it was infinitely more interesting where Hollywood studios were putting their efforts. The I.P. machine that governs the industry now was but a sliver of that environment within which achievements in technology could stand alongside bold artistic visions, impassioned storytelling, and a reverence for filmmaking craft. I see blockbuster movies now, and I may enjoy them, but they don’t have anywhere near that kind of chemistry of elements.

Perhaps that is why I am genuinely excited about Avatar: The Way of Water, which already by its’ trailers looks better than most mainstream CGI ilk. It’s why the success of Top Gun: Maverick and the love for RRR by just about everyone who’s seen it gives me hope. For years now the greatest movies have come from indie or international sources, and that’s not a bad thing at all. But it would be nice to see a grand Hollywood spectacle as beautiful, ambitious, intricate, and sincere as Titanic or Lord of the Rings again. Right now the system is averse to anything approximating those, but it might someday happen.

Titanic is a movie worth cherishing, and that has become more apparent as the years have gone by, the more it has receded from immediate vitriol and passed into the pantheon of classic cinema. Like the disaster it is based on, it’ll never be forgotten. And it still has that power it had in 1997, timeless for how indicative of its’ era it remains. A movie that twenty-five years on is in that sense and in spite of the industry left in its wake, still King of the World.

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