Titanic / James Cameron (1997; Paramount)
For those of us who grew up in the 1990s, there was no bigger cinematic event than James Cameron’s Titanic. Not even the massive anticipation and subsequent disillusion surrounding the release of George Lucas’s long awaited Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace later in the decade could compare to the cultural juggernaut that was Cameron’s epic. You couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing Celine Dion’s ubiquitous hit, “My Heart Will Go On” (a staple at many a middle and high school dance). You couldn’t walk into a store without seeing the youthful face of Leonardo DiCaprio smoldering on the covers of teen magazines and quickie biographies that seemed to have been written overnight to capitalize on his newfound success. The film swept the Oscars, winning a nearly unprecedented 11 Academy Awards (tying the record previously held by Ben-Hur and repeated only once by The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King). It is perhaps because of that cultural over-saturation that it became somewhat de rigueur to make fun of Titanic. Quickly it became just as impossible to escape the endless parodies of people yelling, “I’m the king of the world!” or mimicking Rose’s whimper of “I’ll never let go, Jack!” All of this served to tarnish the grandeur of Titanic; it became less of a film and more of a cultural whipping post. Everyone saw it, everyone knew it — and with great popularity always comes great backlash. But think back for a minute to Titanic the film, before Titanic the phenomenon. The unprecedented visual wonder, the rapturous emotion — a grand, sweeping epic of staggering scale. It was, in short, our generation’s Gone with the Wind.
While cynics would point to the film’s admittedly simplistic dialogue, its occasionally naïve sense of life and romance, and its one-dimensional characterizations (rarely had there ever been a more immediately hissable character than Billy Zane’s Caledon Hockley), Cameron made up for it by tapping into something deeply primal about young love, evoking the burning passion and wild abandon of your first time. He unequivocally embraces that naiveté without any trace of irony. This is a tragedy, yes, but one can’t help but detect a distinctly 90s-era sense of optimism in its view of enduring love. That’s what elevates Titanic above the typical big budget epic. It was a historical film, in a sense; one that actually goes to painstaking length to recreate the famous disaster at its core. But it managed to tap into something that audiences identified with in a nearly unprecedented way. Its central star-crossed lovers may have been Shakespearean archetypes, but rarely has young love felt so palpable on screen. Cameron’s consummate showmanship has never been in doubt, but here he created his most human characters: There’s a heart at the core of Titanic that transcends its spectacle. Even after all the parodies and jokes told at its expense, the story of Jack and Rose, two kids in love in the face of the most famous maritime disaster in history, buoyed by the aching strains of James Horner’s score, still has the power to move us. By giving us two instantly identifiable characters, Cameron brought history to life in a breathtaking and unforgettable way, and like Gone with the Wind before it, Titanic has become a certifiable classic with the capacity to endure through the ages.
— Matthew Lucas (@matthew_lucas)
Part of Kicking the Canon
