non-romance, romance, #19: Titanic (1997, dir. James Cameron)

don't let's ask for the moon

This is another entry in my monthly Non-Romance Romance series, a monthly series where I talk about literature/film that is not typically classed as romances with romance as a framework. This month, I’m writing about a great big love story and some pieces that add up to a romance, even if the movie ends with two dead main characters.

For the first time, I feel no need to describe even a hint of plot about what I’m talking about today. Even if you haven’t seen the movie (I mean, go watch the movie, it’s a banger), the happenings of Titanic (1997) are never really more complicated than it’s pitch of “Romeo and Juliet on a boat” and on a boat that famously sinks, so you know what we’re dealing with here. The exhausting discussion of “Jack could have fit on the door!”¹ clues even the uninitiated into the tragedy of Jack Dawson dying during the sinking of the Titanic.

Referencing the title is an easy shorthand to call up a pedestrian melodramatic weeper in a sitcom, especially if the character is someone who is not typically lachrymose. The reputation of the film has waxed and waned, but I’ve been conscious for about as long as Titanic has existed, and it’s never felt like it receded all that much from being a shared experience, at least in the United States.

Still, for all the talk about Titanic’s large scale, the dominant description of the ship, the film, and the box office, when I rewatched it this week,² explicitly to write about it for this series, the aspect of singularity that stood out to me scaled up down instead of up. This movie only gets made at that moment in time. In its 1996 setting, with 101-year-old Rose, age 17 when the ship sinks, we’re stretching the scale basically to its limits. We have to meet in the middle of “James Cameron can capture the underwater footage of the Titanic wreck” and “Rose can believably still be alive.” On top of that, now almost thirty years out, there’s an overriding sense that nothing will ever happen like this again, with the loss of the monoculture of it all. That necessitates a huge scale, but a zenith of something is also a fine point.

The form of the movie also scales down the scope of the disaster picture to focus on Jack and Rose, our Romeo and Juliet. For all of Cameron’s interest in the wreckage, he borrows a lot of the Titanic hagiography from A Night to Remember (1958, Roy Ward Baker), but that film is an ensemble piece. There’s no question that fictional Rose, Jack, and their romance are the center of Cameron’s take on the disaster. Though Rose’s flashback fades in and out as the central focus and viewers almost immediately get objectively framed scenes that Rose has no access to (like Jack winning the tickets, or Jack looking at and becoming smitten with Rose when he looks up at the first class deck), until the iceberg hits, the story has very little interest outside of the couple, with the people and history as set dressing.

Even more than Love Story, an earlier edition of this series, the cultural footprint of Titanic makes it hard for me to ignore as a nexus point on the mental map of romance. The film itself is in conversation with the arc of Hollywood romances, particularly ones that don’t have a straight happily-ever-after, but end in some sort of triumph. Two romances that complicate happy endings came to mind on this watch as useful precedents for considering how Titanic’s romance works: Now, Voyager and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.

Now Voyager (1942, dir. Irving Rapper)

The other great English-language ship romance to me³ is Now, Voyager, and many of its heroine’s plot beats feel like an inversion of Rose’s arc in Titanic. Charlotte Vale has an overbearing mother, but instead of marrying her off at 17, her mother keeps Charlotte so close that she has a mental breakdown at 30. She has a youthful love affair on a European cruise, complete with a tryst in a car on the ship, momentarily paralling where Rose asks Jack to drive her to the stars and where they have sex. But when Charlotte is caught, her mother’s controls tighten even more and now, a decade later, she is a frumpy, depressed old man. A single memeber of Charlotte’s family worries about her mental health and calls a doctor to come speak with her.

Dr. Jaquith (played by Claude Rains and it’s the hottest he’s ever looked) convinces Charlotte’s family to first let her go to a sanitarium and then on a cruise in South America. Bette Davis sheds the mousy makeup and padding in her clothes, and Charlotte borrows a wardrobe, attempting to transform herself anew on the ship. She still approaches most interactions with suspicion, assuming that everyone who is kind to her or finds her interesting is pulling a joke on her. She embarks the ship with great trepidation and a great hat, much like another nervous, sailing heroine.

big hat summer

That is, until she meets Jerry Durrance (Paul Henreid), a married man, trapped in a loveless marriage. Now she gets a second attempt at her ship romance. Jerry’s earnest attention initially confuses Charlotte, but their chemistry is undeniable. It’s incredible watching Paul Henreid, the great cuckold from Casablanca, so convincingly sweetly seduce and fall in love with a woman.

Jerry and Charlotte struggle with the terminal nature of their affair, and on their last night together, Jerry asks Charlotte if she believes in immortality. She’s unsure, but he says, “I want to believe there’s a chance for such happiness to carry on somehow.” This scene also introduces the recurring image of Jerry silently lighting two cigarettes and passing one to Charlotte, cinema’s greatest argument in favor of smoking. They separate the next morning, and Charlotte returns to her oppressive family, but with a new confidence and boldness that attracts affection from her extended family and a new suitor from the Boston elite.

When Jerry and Charlotte incidentally meet at a Boston society party, they speak in out-loud code and hushed whispered truths to hide their relationship and anguish over seeing each other. Seeing Jerry again inspires Charlotte to break with her suitor, though she knows she cannot be with Jerry. When she reveals this to her mother, her mother suffers a heart attack and dies, leading Charlotte to return to the sanitarium, where Jerry’s young, awkward daughter Tina is also now staying.

Charlotte sees her own ugly duckling self in Tina, who is also resented by her unfeeling mother, and becomes a mentor to the young girl, further ingratiating herself into Jerry’s life, albeit without the romance. Jerry struggles to comprehend Charlotte’s devotion to Tina, think she is sacrificing a potential romance and a family of her own by volunteering to raise and sponsor his daughter. But in a reverse Wuthering Heights, he concludes that them both doing what is best for Tina is a way of maintaining their love for each other, even if it does not manifest romantically.

Like the Titanic, the boon of the ship’s romance that cannot stretch beyond the finite space of the vessel or the vacation away from home, is the transformative property of the romance on the participants. Like Jack, Jerry is almost a sacrifice for Charlotte and Tina’s continued happiness as a constructed family unit. Jerry could have an affair with Charlotte and maintain a half-measure romance with her, but to the detriment of Tina’s inclusion in the family, and thus to the detriment of Charlotte’s equally important process to the romance, the undoing of the maternal suffering she experienced as a child. The “He saved me... in every way that a person can be saved” of it all. The film famously ends with Jerry asking, “Will you be happy, Charlotte?” and Charlotte responding, “Oh Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the stars.” Maybe not a happily-ever-after, but a compromise negotiated by the romantic participants.

The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1949, dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz)

I don’t know what James Cameron is on about when he says “The answer has to be something you supply personally, individually” on whether Rose is dead at the end of the movie. In the film, she is 101. If not now, when, James?? Jack references her dying in her own bed! Why have that line if the movie doesn’t end with her death? If she doesn’t die now, she’ll die shortly, outside the frame of the movie? But I don’t understand how Cameron’s brain works, which is why I am neither a deep-sea explorer nor the director of some of the biggest movies of all time.

So I’m working under the premise that Rose is dead when she walks up the Grand Staircase of the Titanic and is greeted by all those who died in the disaster, including Jack.

This ending recalls for me The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, my personal favorite Gene Tierney film. Gene Tierney plays Lucy Muir, a young widow, trying to rent a cottage in Cornwall. Like Rose, she has the aim of shirking off the convention that restricts her in her oppressive family and Edwardian setting. She finds a cottage for cheap and is delighted to learn that it is haunted. The late salty sea captain who is haunting the place initially wants her out, but they fall into an easy, domestic detente. They work together to improve the cottage and end up collaborating on a memoir of the Captain’s life. I think it is up there with the most romantic movies ever made.

When Lucy has the opportunity to marry a suitor (who later reveals himself to be a cad), the Captain chooses to let her go, rather than keep her stagnant in her affection to an apparition. He sacrifices his connection with her so that she may go on and live amongst the living: “I can only confuse you more and destroy whatever chance you have left of happiness. You must make your own life amongst the living. And whether you'll meet fair winds or foul...find your own way to harbor in the end.”

Though not in a frame narrative, the film does end with Mrs. Muir (Gene Tierney in pretty awful old lady makeup) reminiscing about her life. She’s long since thought that the Captain was a figment of her imagination. Talking to her daughter and her maid returns her to thinking about this erstwhile, phantom romance. She goes upstairs and dies in her sleep. In the last scene of the film, the Captain comes to escort her away, and her spirit is now the age that she was when she fell in love with the Captain. Her way to the harbor in the end is some sort of afterlife with the Captain. They exit the house into a foggy landscape, and that’s the end of the movie.

Whether or not any individual viewer believes in an afterlife is a moot point for the way these happily-ever-afters work. Within the narratives of both Titanic and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, we see the couple reunite and embrace in some sort of spectral plane, together in a place that we can’t access for more than a moment. The romance gives them some access to the infinite.

Romantic Singularity

I plucked two of my favorite films to connect to the beats of Titanic, but I could have done this with dozens of films from the 20th century: Only Angels Have Wings, most Merle Oberon movies, Gone with the Wind, most David Lean movies, Roman Holiday, most Douglas Sirk movies, The English Patient. It’s so specifically a descendant of romantic love that is temporaly finite, but immortal in some way, only accessible in a film, writ large on Hollywood screens.

As much as I love romance novels, moving images in film create access to an immortality and indelibility that makes my reaction to tragic love stories in films more akin to the happily-ever-afters in romance novels. There’s also a wider cultural network⁴ to tap into, magnifying those images through community reaction. Titanic works as an immortal romance because it speaks to 20th-century love stories and is then spoken to by 21st-century ones. While I did not watch Titanic the year it came out, I did watch Entertainment Tonight every night I was home from 1996-2009 and learned to read by reading Entertainment Weekly, and James Cameron’s self-assuredness and cockiness about the scale of the film is what I remember, leading up to and then concluding with his infamous “I’m the King of the World” call back in his Best Director Oscar speech.

But almost thirty years later, when a four-quadrant blockbuster almost certainly means a IP movie that I have no interest in seeing and will assert no place in any context outside it’s own characters’ extended universe, of course Titanic is an pinnacle because in what world could we ever go back to a movie like that even existing? Cameron was cocky, but he wasn’t wrong. The singularity of the moment, speaking to so much that came before it, is what makes it romantic.

1. He couldn’t, but also don’t you want the movie to have a plot? Imagine it is a smaller piece of wood if you need to.

2. I rewatch it every couple years, but I do really struggle to watch it without having nightmares. The ocean, a cruel terrifying mistress!

3. L’Atalante (1934, dir. Jean Vigo) is up there, but in French, and I do not like An Affair to Remember. I get so mad while I’m watching it because I feel like I should like it, that I end up hating it.

4. Since individual films are watched more people, the effect does not have to happen in the aggregate, like genre fiction, but also genre fiction readers don’t help themselves here by insisting on silos of entertainment, with hyper specific labels and anxiety about something being marketed broadly or incorrectly.