Titanic (1997)

Spoiler Alert: The ship sinks in the end. (...that one never gets old, does it?)

-1-

this is where we first met

I love Titanic unconditionally. I hear a lot of people talk a lot of shit about it and I can see where they're coming from and I just don't care.

In eighth grade I went to see it a record seven times¹. That reel-'em-in formula mixture of romance and adventure worked on me back in middle school in a way no film since has come close to matching. It probably never will be topped, either²; I will never again (we can only hope) live with the same bleeding-hearted, adolescent, martyr-syndrome, romantic hopelessness that I wore around like a badge of honor in middle school. When you're the kind of twerp that daydreams about melodramatic heroism but you're too weird, bespectacled and chubby for any of the girls at school to take notice and you watch Star Wars all the time, an epic story like Titanic is your bread and butter.

Titanic and me? We go back a long way.

-2-
you want to go to a real party?

My age-old stance is that when something in Titanic rings untrue, 99 percent of the time it's the script. I remember when everybody agreed Leonardo DiCaprio was terrible here — he was so mediocre that in a massive Academy Awards sweep he couldn't even get a nomination.

At the same time, though, he certainly struck a chord with the young ladies of the era. Looks alone a great performance do not make, but given his time-and-again proven ability to ugly up and disappear into a role (even a ham-fisted one like the Dooley Ahppointed Feduhruhl Mahshall in Shutter Island), I have to take the side that he knew exactly what he was doing here. It's not that he's been maturing as an actor in his latter years; he's always been mature, even when playing somebody patently not.

Jack Dawson is a myth — or at least, he's mythological. There's no record of him onboard the ship (he won his ticket in a "lucky" hand at poker) or anywhere else in the world and (presumably all of) his drawings went down with the rest of the steerage. Titanic is the ship of dreams to everyone but Rose DeWitt Bukater, and Jack Dawson fills that void. Everything she's not and the polar opposite of everything she hates about her life, the love story works through Jack's casual one-dimensional charm.

Billy Zane's Caledon Hockley is that which Rose hates, which means that when people accuse Zane of overacting, he's actually just countering Leo's androgynous perfection (not an easy task), matching him charisma for charisma. I hem and haw occasionally in polite company when people ask me if I really think Titanic is one of the great movies of all time, but I never hesitate to sing Zane's praises. He's sniveling and dastardly, but he's also certainly a more layered character than Jack. When he opens his safe to discover the drawing of Rose, I really dig that Zane inflects Cal's reaction with a hint of actual heartbreak. He's only ever been the man society made him and he loses out to a resilient gutter rat who society tried its best to cast away. I dig every succeeding beat as Cal spends the rest of the movie vainly trying to buy, shoot and deceive his way off the sinking ship, finally stooping to pretending to be a little girl's father to earn passage onto a lifeboat.

Leo is unfortunately saddled with a good percentage of the film's bad dialogue (he runs neck and neck with Bill Paxton³ for a while, but surpasses him in screentime) as a result of being the paper-thin dream-boy his character has to be. Easily the worst scene in the film is the one set in the Titanic's gymnasium, in which Jack must talk Rose into reversing her (mother's) decision to never see him again.

ROSE: No, Jack, no. I'm engaged. I'm marrying Cal. I love Cal.
JACK: Rose, you're no picnic. All right, you're a spoiled little brat, even ... but under all that you're the most amazing, astounding, wonderful girl — woman — that I've ever known and-
ROSE: Jack, I-
JACK: No, no, let me try and get this out- you're- you're amaz- ...I'm not an idiot. I know how the world works, I've got ten bucks in my pocket, I have nothing to offer you, and I know that. I understand. But I'm too involved now. You jump, I jump, remember? I can't turn away without knowing you'll be all right. That's all that I want.
ROSE: Well I'm fine. I'll be fine. Really.
JACK: Really? I don't think so. They've got you trapped, Rose. And you're gonna die if you don't break free, maybe not right away because you're strong, but sooner or later, that fire that I love about you, Rose? That fire's gonna burn out.
ROSE: It's not up to you to save me, Jack.
JACK: No, it's not. You've got to do that yourself.

This stuff would be impossible to defend if Leonardo DiCaprio didn't sell it so hard. And the greatest defense of his performance is, finally, the fact that it worked on so many legions of teenage girls - exactly the demo Jack is delivering it to in the film.

-3-
never let go

Speaking of Jack being perfect for Rose, she's perfect for him as well. See, in a way, they're both psychopaths. Rose hangs off the edge of a boat not because she wants to jump but because she wants somebody to 'save' her (which is exactly what Jack is talking about in the gym). If Rose was actually going to jump, Jack says to her: "You woulda done it already." She needs a specific kind of attention she doesn't get from Cal and along comes this boy with a serious savior complex. Many have dismissed Jack and Rose's relationship as being too heavy on him telling her what to do and how to live her life, but that's exactly what she's asking for. He teaches her to save herself (and she saves him right back a couple times along the way) — leave it to Cameron to write a scene as poorly as "They've got you trapped!" and still make it be a turning point in the central relationship's arc.

Anybody who's ever dealt with people like this can tell you that relationships like these burn out fast. In fact, there's a lot more to the Romeo and Juliet comparison than you might think. Though not as well written, here is a pair of teenagers who put romance at a premium, even (maybe especially) at the expense of logic, personal well-being and the opinions of their respective communities. They aren't in love with each other so much as they're in love with the idea of each other and so they plunge into it with wild abandon.

That the ship sinks the night they consummate becomes, actually, thematically cross-stitched with their doomed romance. What happens to Rose and Jack, after all, when the ship docks at New York? She's gonna go with him, claims Rose - but given Cal's violent temper, his former-policeman right-hand man and her mother's dependence on their marriage for her social status, it's difficult to imagine her flight not impeded by crewmen, the master-at-arms or the New York City cops.

Jack and Rose would each get the most out of each other if they went separate ways after they leave the ship - Rose by living a full life and not riding side-saddle, Jack by having successfully convinced Rose that life is worth living.

And this is, to me, a beautiful, profound breed of love. It's something that only exists in the vacuum of adolescence and, when you experience it, it sticks with you for the rest of your life, even if the effect it has is one that must be denied or bottled up. You hear people talking about their relationships in high school or middle school and they say, "That doesn't count." We were foolish and naïve and innocent and now, red-faced and taciturn, we pretend to be different, better people. Likely, Rose and Jack would've done the same if they didn't meet the same fate as their Shakespearean predecessors.

This, by the way, is also why my generation has turned against Titanic, a film they went out for in droves at the time. It's an adolescent zeitgeist of which we are now ashamed, as though it were merely a fad like Pogs or the Macarena.

-4-
my heart will go on

I saw this movie seven times in middle school and even then I knew about the power of the audience: each of seven times they loved it. I still remember the gasps, laughter and tears elicited by this film across hundreds upon hundreds of movie-goers in three different Western Massachusetts theaters. I can feel the nervous, erotic tension during Kate's nude scene and I can hear the gentle sobbing of every teenage girl as Leo fails to wake up when the boats come back. This wasn't the kind of audience that hoots and hollers at cheap racism and fast action of the Michael Bay variety.

No, Cameron connects with his audience through a visceral mixture of raw emotion and peerless action. Titanic features one the great setup-and-payoffs in the history of action cinema: Bodine's computer reenactment of the sinking during the prologue. For the uninitiated, Cameron sets up every detail of the Titanic's demise in one hot minute so we know exactly what is going to happen. We just don't know when. This is why little moments like the smokestack's collapse on poor Fabrizio or the infamous "propeller guy" are so dramatically satisfying. Cameron takes a historical event, lays out the beats and then shows it happening to human beings (of arguable dimension).

There was a time when everybody loved this movie. I was there. I can admit I was deluded by the cloudy situations of middle school, but I swear I was not alone.

We all loved it then. But now, for some reason, we're embarrassed. Is it because the film absorbed us and made us vulnerable in a way we weren't quite comfortable with from our mainstream entertainment? It's not a challenging piece of art. Were we all shocked that it moved us with its simplicity? What's happened to Titanic is the quintessential backlash — it is the nature of a thing so massively popular.

Ever since middle school I've been living with this scenario wherein somebody cooler than I gasps, "Whoa, you like Titanic?" and compares me to a teenage girl. I tuck my tail in and stare at the floor, wondering how can I be the only person who loved a 1.8 billion dollar movie that made everyone cry and swept the major awards. Well, you know what, oh you masses of strong-hearted, stable-minded cool kids? Even if it is through something as simple as a connection to my lost youth and innocence, I love this movie with all of my heart and I'm not ashamed to admit it. To be ashamed requires too much effort. The heart will go on and on.

1.) The record was later broken by Monsters, Inc., which still holds it at nine. I had all the showtimes memorized; I would get out of high school Senior year and go catch the three o'clock. [back]

2.) Unless they figure out a way to sell over-priced IMAX tickets to my heart. [back]

3.) Paxton gives the only truly bad performance in the film. In the opening minutes, Brock Lovett (which really sounds like a porn name) delivers an (ostensibly intentional) melodramatic speech into his camcorder about the Titanic's "long journey down from the world above" only to get mocked by portly sub-mate Bodine. His reaction is to put the camera down and continue speaking slowly and melodramatically. Paxton is like a singer without a sense of pitch. [back]

Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains

What follows is a lengthy rant about the unsatisfying conclusion to the twentieth season of Survivor. It'll probably make the most sense if you watched it, but I'm going to include some footnotes for the uninitiated. If you aren't watching Survivor, you're seriously missing out.


"There's a flaw in the game of Survivor," said Russell Hantz in the Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains reunion show this weekend. He's right, though his proposed solution of giving America a percentage of the vote is nonsense. The problem with Survivor - and I say this as a vocal, devout fan of the game - is the decline over the past two seasons in sensible jury votes¹.

Russell is a divisive character. I used to hate him, too, back in the early days of Survivor: Samoa². I can understand why people get mad at him — but anger is irrational and what I can't figure out is the inability to let go of your anger and admit that he is hands-down the best Survivor to ever play the game. It's one thing when you're a television audience — we're an irrational lot and still we've awarded Russell the $100,000 audience vote twice consecutively — but it's another thing when you're playing the game and another thing still when you're a veteran.

In two consecutive games, Russell whipped the competition and landed squarely in the Final Three only to lose the vote from a bitter jury. Obviously, playing to the jury is crucial to any Survivor's strategy. But the point is that they're never going to want to vote for anybody. It's up to the jury to decide who is most deserving of the million-dollar prize. Not who they feel made them look less like a bunch of fools.

But in the past two seasons, this is exactly what happened. And so Sandra Diaz-Twine was crowned the first two-time winner of the game, despite being an unlikable failure from day one to day 39. Here is a 'Sole Survivor' who discussed at Final Tribal that her single mission the entire game was to get Russell voted off. And she couldn't do it. Ever.

Russell played this entire game with a target tattooed on his increasingly-skinny back and out-maneuvered the competition every single time.

Let's examine the incident with Tyson Apostol, who changed his vote at the last minute despite a rock-solid Plan Voodoo³ of Boston Rob Mariano's devising and ended up getting the boot himself. This has been heralded as a dumb move on Tyson's part (and it is), even getting him nominated for the cruelly lame "Dumbest Move in Survivor History" fan vote at the end of the season. But has everyone forgotten that this was entirely Russell's doing? He had an idol and everyone knew it; Boston Rob had a (nearly) fool-proof plan to split the votes three-three for Russell and ally Parvati Shallow⁴, eliminating whichever one of them played Russell's idol.

What did Russell do? He selected Tyson, pulled him aside and got in his head, telling him he was voting for Parvati and Tyson might as well do the same. Tyson made a dumb move, but it was the result of Russell's manipulation. This is an incredible thing that Russell does every single time he's in a bind — using only his wits, he manages to manipulate the competition into acting against their better interests. This is a founding tenet of Survivor strategy⁵.

Russell did the same thing to Danielle DiLorenzo much later in the season. He tried to play her and Parvati off each other, which failed — their alliance was too strong and Russell immediately got caught in the lie. Rather than back down, he blazed ahead with full confidence right into Tribal Council, where he berated Danielle until she broke down in tears and confessed to an unbreakable alliance with Parvati. Russell then called an audible, mouthing "Danielle" at Jerri Manthey, the swing vote that sent Danielle packing.

These are the actions of a born Survivor player. Russell is so good at the game that he made even the Heroes vs. Villains cast of veteran all-stars look like the amateur schlubs of Foa Foa and Galu with which he swept the beach in Season 19. Russell didn't lose the jury vote because he played 'dishonestly'. He lost the jury vote because he bruised the fragile egos of 9 veteran reality TV stars.

Russell doesn't play to assuage the jury — he admits it, and I can admit it, too. His strategy is to convince them that he is the most deserving of the Sole Survivor not through kind words at Final Tribal but through absolute domination through 39 days of game play. Russell's undoing in Survivor: Samoa was that he counted on a jury of amateurs to observe his professional game. His loss in Heroes vs. Villains, it turns out, is the same harsh lesson folded upon itself.

I've written previously about the four types of Survivor contestant⁶. Russell is the quintessential Challenged Self: a man who swore on his first of 78 consecutive days of Survivor that he was the best and would prove it. Prove it he did, and soundly.

The silver lining to Russell's backhanding by the Samoa jury was the knowledge that he would immediately have a one-off shot at revenge. The Heroes vs. Villains season billed itself as one of revenge and redemption. These are returning champions and almost-champions looking to prove what they failed to prove the first (or second) time around. As the seasons were filmed back-to-back, Russell had this one fleeting chance to play again and use his revolutionary cutthroat strategy, unleashing it on an(other) unknowing tribe of castaways.

There's no question that Russell is great at what he does: the problem starts when he reaches the jury and everybody is too pissed off to vote for him to win. My hope — and Russell's — was that the Survivor veterans would see what he was doing and reward him for doing it so damn well. Instead Russell was so much better than the JTs and the Boston Robs of the Survivor Pantheon that the seasoned veterans were actually more upset at him than the cast of Season 19.


Obviously, playing for the jury vote is a huge part of Survivor. The facet of Russell's strategy that sets it apart from the rest of the "villains" is that his grab for jury votes is never borne of false sympathy, flattery or modesty. He tells it like it is: "I'm the best and that's why I deserve it."

The problem with Survivor — not every season, but certainly in these past two and especially in Heroes vs. Villains — is when the jury fails to recognize excellent game play and votes not for the best player but for the one who had the least to do with bruising their egos. This is apparent not solely in their refusal to give Russell a single vote but in the awarding of the million dollars to Sandra over Parvati.

Now, I can't stand Parvati, but I begrudgingly admit that she's an excellent player. I compare her to the New York Yankees: she's evil, but dammit if she's not great at the game. Though Parvati undeniably did some coattail riding off Russell in Heroes vs. Villains (look at her sharing all the idols he found and escaping votes thank to his manipulation) she also did have several big moves of her own. In addition to dominating in challenges, her idol split between Jerri and Sandra was one of the season's great blindsides that nobody saw coming. Not Russell, not Sandra or Jerri, not the Heroes, not the television audience. Russell admitted as much at the reunion show: between Parvati and Sandra, Parvati should've won. All Sandra ever did the entire season was talk about her husband in Afghanistan and fail to get rid of the two more-powerful players. The only reason she made it to the finals was because circumstance consistently brought her to the block last in her dying alliances.

Giving Sandra the million dollars was the action of a cowardly jury. In a 6-3-0 vote, Danielle, Jerri and Benjamin "Coach" Wade voted for Parvati — Danielle because Parvati's hand-holding got her as far as she did and Jerri and Coach because they held on to a modicum of respect for the game Parvati played. In that jury, I have a lingering affection for JT, Amanda Kimmel, Rupert Boneham, Colby Donaldson and maybe even Candice Woodcock and I am so disappointed in them — "heroes" all — for taking the avenue of the reality fame whore, upset because their spotlight got dimmed.

This is not the role of the jury. Making it to the jury on Survivor is an honor all its own, and with it should come a sense of duty to the game. If you get ousted by a player of Russell's caliber, you owe it to that player and you owe it to the game to show some goddamn respect. If Amanda Kimmel and Colby Donaldson and "America's Tribal Council" winner Rupert Boneham can't muster any respect for the game, how am I ever going to get anybody else to?

1.) The jury is the linchpin to the Survivor rules. Every season, with two-or-three finalists, the previous nine-to-twelve cast members "voted off the island" cast the votes for who wins the million dollar prize. This means that if you want to win, you have a Final Tribal Council during which you must convince the people you double-crossed why you deserve the money more than your fellow finalists. [back]

2.) Hantz played consecutively on the last two seasons. After stealing the show and losing the final vote in season 19 (Survivor: Samoa), he was invited back for this most recent one, the all-star Heroes vs. Villains, which was filmed in Samoa immediately after the previous season wrapped. [back]

3.) One of the devices added to the game several seasons in is the Hidden Immunity Idol, which can be discovered any number of ways (usually buried and located by following a series of clues) and may or may not be kept a secret from the other tribe members. The Idol is played at Tribal Council after votes are cast, nullifying any votes for the Survivor who played it and voting out the person with the next highest number (often this person gets the boot with only one or two votes). Russell is a mastermind at locating them, and likes to brag about it. So: when the rest of your tribe knows you have an idol, one way to get rid of you (and/or it) is to execute Plan Voodoo. The outnumbering alliance splits their votes — half for the idol-bearer and the next person they want to get rid of (usually the idol-bearer's ally). If either one of them plays the idol, the other one will get the boot. [back]

4.) Her last name is Shallow. I hate her. [back]

5.) Not only did this move get rid of Tyson, but Russell's speech in handing the idol over to Parvati was deliberately delivered to the pompous Coach, attempting to put the Dragonslayer squarely in Russell's pocket with nothing but flattery and a little talk of "honor". [back]

6.) The four types of Survivor contestant: The Walkabout, The Challenged Self, The Fame Whore and The Crazy. [back]

Babies

On the surface, Babies is a masterwork of precision. The documentary, following the first year in the life of four human babies, is frame-by-frame exactly what it intends to be — that is, not very much. It offers a slim 80 minutes of footage of babies being cute. If director Thomas Balmes is trying to offer any kind of thesis or perspective, it's nothing more than "babies are cute", illustrated by the similarity of behavior across racial and cultural divides. Without even a hint of narrative (falsely constructed or otherwise), the film plays out like an 80-minute YouTube video. Why should we be taking this seriously?

According to the audience I saw it with, this thing is a laugh riot from start to finish. It recalls the inaugural Springfield Film Festival entry "Man Getting Hit By Football", which would later be remade with George C. Scott to beat out "A Burns For All Seasons" at that year's Academy Awards. It's an uneasy aggregate — a juncture between high and low art that asks nothing of its audience and is applauded for its simplicity. But what really bothers me about Babies is that the film is a stepping stone in our cultural devolution, and a deeply exploitative one at that.

The film plays out like any nature documentary (that's exactly what it is), with the infant hero a rare human subject that will not visibly alter its behavior under the influence of observation. Babies will laugh, cry and fall over whether or not they are being recorded. However, Balmes goes to great lengths to establish a fourth wall to 'protect' them: from the careful excision of the omnipresent parents to the stasis of the camera throughout the running time, we are (mis)lead to believe we are watching them through an inert window. It is as though we somehow deserve to do so - as though we are there with them.

But the fact is, unlike a lizard or a bird, these four will one day become self-aware. How will they feel about being the subject of something like this, having their naked bathtub photos already preserved on DVD and Blu-ray long before they have a chance to bring home a boyfriend or girlfriend? Did this occur to the parents, edited in here as though they are no more aware of the cameras than their children? It's a dazzling stylistic choice: a manipulation of our observation such that we forget we are witnessing this through the middleman of a film crew invasion. If there isn't a camera, the babies aren't being recorded and they're just there being cute. In pursuit of its purity of content — "Babies are cute!" — it omits the necessary facet of a film of this conceit: that babies are people.


We're here laughing at the foibles of strangers, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the white American girl gets the least screen time. To draw up another Simpsons reference, let us recall the incident of Homer watching a Bollywood musical suggested by Apu:

BART: This movie you rented sucks.
HOMER: No it doesn't, it's funny! Their clothes are different from my clothes! Look at what they're wearing!

Have we so little conscience about the sources of our entertainment that we're willing to make a cheap joke out of a goat drinking the baby's bathwater in Mongolia? Calling this a low common denominator doesn't really seem to do justice to the project, as a transcultural simplicity seems to have been Balmes' plan all along. The jokes are cheap, yes: easy, and of little value, but also they ring out as indicators of how little we require in our quest for superiority. We say we are laughing because the babies are cute, but really it's because they are different from us and in their pratfalls we can feel the wisdom of our age — we condescend to canonize them in a clip show with a wisp of relief that our babies, see, they don't have goats drinking out of their tubs.

On the other hand, if we choose not to laugh at the helpless infants, there remains some value in the piece as a great example of how anyone can film anything these days, and anyone will.

Perhaps we don't think about it too deeply because the little red light is ubiquitous now. Millions and millions of babies born to Americans in the past few years have already generated the raw footage necessary to cull together a "documentary" like this, and a sizable percentage of their parents have already done so on YouTube and Facebook. As we pawn off our privacy for the cheap cost of fifteen seconds of internet fame, the value of our children's privacy becomes difficult to calculate. They'll have facebook pages set up in their names before they know how to speak and if their clip on YouTube gets a million hits then, oh, then they've earned their Gerber.

They won't even have a chance to defend themselves.