Boy Movies #20
1400 words about James Cameron's Titanic
Welcome back to Boy Movies. A very warm hello to all the new subscribers! I am honored and terrified of you. I hope you stick around even after you realize that I won’t be publishing an exhaustive and irreverent oral history of a beloved 2010s film every week. If you’re unbothered by that, consider telling a friend about this newsletter — particularly if they’re famous and influential, and/or very wealthy in an irresponsible way.
Inside, I was screaming
My mom called me during Titanic’s end credits. The end credits of Titanic aren’t anything special to look at, made remarkable by the song that plays over them, the one the film edges you with for the duration until it finally hits in full as you’re trying to recover from what you’ve just seen — “My Heart Will Go On,” of course. I couldn’t move from my seat, paralyzed by the sound of Celine Dion’s voice: airy, and then all at once sweepingly powerful. I watched my mom’s contact photo flash across my phone until it went dark and then looked, dazed, back up at the screen. I don’t habitually ignore calls from the woman who gave birth to me, but I was certain that if I tried to exit the theater to speak to her, some gravitational pull would prevent me from doing so.
I glanced over my shoulder; the couple seated behind me seemed to be having the same emotional experience, staring in silence up at the endless scroll of names who had done their part in giving us the gift of the previous three hours. They were both hunched forward like they were about to stand — ready to leave, but not ready to let go of the moment. Not until Celine was done with us. “We'll stay forever this way,” she promised. For those few minutes, I believed her.
When the spell eventually broke and I was able to exit AMC Lincoln Square 13 (if you ever want to hang out or fist fight, you can often find me here), I called my mom back.
“I just saw Titanic,” I told her. “They re-released it in theaters for the anniversary.”
“What’d you think?”
What did I think? At a loss, I replied, “It’s like the best movie I’ve ever seen in my life.”
“You know that’s one of my all time favorite movies,” she told me.
“It is? In my whole life you’ve never once mentioned Titanic.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “I can’t believe you’ve never seen it! What’s up with that?”
Yeah, so, I should note: Before this year, I’d never seen Titanic. But it went beyond that; friends have told me that they have no memory of ever sitting down to watch it but were certain they’d seen the entirety of it in pieces via cable replays. Not me! I couldn’t possibly tell you how, but in the twenty-five years since its release my only frame of reference for this film was the brief clip that’s shown during Love Actually1. I sort of knew what happened in the way that everyone sort of knows what happened — he draws her like one of his French girls, the boat sinks, they all die, Celine goes off — but not really. “Well, what about ‘Oops, I Did It Again’2’?” you might be asking. To that I say: I didn’t know Britney was talking about Titanic because I was five years old when that song came out and by the time I had access to the internet I didn’t think, “Let me interrogate this.” I thought it was just another nonsense aside that Max Martin’s deranged Swedish brain cooked up! No one ever told me otherwise. How was I to know all that I didn’t know?
“It’s amazing that you avoided learning anything about the most famous movie of all time,” a friend told me after I expressed this. “And also — really weird?”
I know. But listen, as loyal Boy Movies readers will know, I’ve written about a number of films that have been made in the years since Titanic for this newsletter, and I have to tell you, after seeing what James Cameron was able to pull off in 1997, I’m not sure why they even bothered. Movies could have ended with Titanic and the Hollywood experiment would have still been a success. I left the theater thinking, “Oh, that’s why this man is going to die making Avatar sequels.” There is no exaggerating the power of Titanic. Girl, it’s Titanic.
One of the most magnificent things about Titanic, and the key to its lasting success, is the way it hit the sweet spot between boy movie and girl movie. It harnesses crossover appeal by speaking to the most basic concept of the gender binary: girls like kissing, boys like boats. It’s such a no-brainer that it almost circles back around to being completely stupid, but James Cameron isn’t a stupid director. (Absolutely cuckoo bananas crazy, yes, but stupid? No way.) Titanic made me wistful for a time when there was space in culture for blockbuster movies that were as breathtaking in scale as they were in emotional resonance.
You see something like that wretched new Ant-Man movie, which 1. looks like shit and 2. was written by AI, and long for a time when a madman was allowed to do whatever had to be done to bring his gargantuan vision to life. Even my beloved Top Gun: Maverick (the closest thing we’ve gotten to a Titanic-level blockbuster in years), with its pointless Tom Cruise-Jennifer Connelly “romance” microplot, couldn’t quite do what Cameron did when he made Rose jump off that lifeboat because she couldn’t bear to escape with her life without trying harder to save Jack, too. We believe in the love between Jack and Rose because he believed in the love between Jack and Rose.
My extensive post-film Googling has taught me about the film’s fraught production, that the studio was convinced it would be a box office flop, that it has, apparently, been maligned as corny, or whatever. It reminds me of that time where making fun of The Beatles was cool, before Peter Jackson reminded everyone of how hard they ruled with Get Back — sometimes the things that were once the most impressive are still the most impressive, and it feels good and important to acknowledge that.
Look, man, James Cameron went on an underwater expedition to film the ruins of the actual Titanic. Okay? Come on! He made the ship crack in half. He gave us that preternaturally beautiful version of Leo. He let Billy Zane play a gay villain. He made the ship crack in half. There’s an earnestness to it all, an astonishing lack of cynicism that probably speaks to a good amount of the reason why it gets written off as some sort of hackneyed schlock. Even the film’s most disillusioned character, Bill Paxton’s Brock Lovett, is moved by the elderly Rose’s story, by her commitment to keeping Jack alive by talking about him. It is in itself a challenge — Cameron daring us not to care, and all of us failing.
I can’t help but appreciate Cameron’s willingness to resist the urge to thumb his nose at the audience. He never winks at us, or asks us to participate in a collective eye roll. There’s no underlying sinister quality to the story, and for how hard everyone involved had to try in order to get the film out into the world, the final product is one that lacks any tryhard qualities. Forgive me for what I’m about to say and how I’m about to say it, but the ship has totally sailed on movies like this. We can’t stay forever this way, not like Celine swore, but at least we’ll always have Titanic, the perfect union between boy movie and girl movie, one of a kind and eternally preserved as such.
All of this is to say… I should rewatch Titanic, shouldn’t I?
Bits and bobs from Titanic that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: Bill Paxton’s earring, the quiet powerhouse that is Victor Garber, Rose swinging that ax to save her twink, that first shot of Kate Winslet from under the hat, Jack having an Italian bestie named Fabrizio, every single thing Kathy Bates says and does, “You are so annoying!”/“You’re so stupid, Rose!”
Coincidentally, this issue of Boy Movies happens to be falling on the last day of Oscar voting. Academy, you know what has to be done.
I finally understand what Liam Neeson meant when he said, “We need Kate, we need Leo, and we need them now.”
AN EARLIER VERSION OF THIS NEWSLETTER MISPRINTED “OOPS, I DID IT AGAIN” AS “BABY ONE MORE TIME.” WE AT BOY MOVIES SINCERELY REGRET THE ERROR AND CHALK IT UP TO THIS BEING A FREE PUBLICATION THAT DOES NOT PAY FOR A TEAM OF EDITORS. Please forgive the humiliating mistake.
sometimes i lay awake at night thinking about billy zane's delivery of "i put the diamond in the coat, i put the coat on her". or every choice that bernard hill makes with a teacup in his hands. james may have done a lifetime's worth of psychic damage to that whole cast but he had them firing on all cylinders!!!!