The Writer's Journey

by Christopher Vogler

  THE END

  Titanic is certainly not a perfect movie, and there are boatloads of critics to point out its flaws — a certain bluntness in the writing: a tendency to end scenes with crude, obvious utterances like "Shit!", "Oh, shit!", and "I'll be God damned!" For a while at the beginning the movie seems to have Tourette's Syndrome. There is a sense of pandering to the modern audience in an exaggerated attempt to make the story "relevant" with contemporary dialogue and acting styles; and there is a one-dimensional quality to some characters, especially the sneering, unshaded villains.

  Although well played by Billy Zane, Cal in the screenplay is one of the weakest parts of the design, and would have been a more effective rival if he were more seductive, a better match for Rose, real competition for Jack, and not such an obvious monster. Then it would have been a real contest, not a one-sided match between the most attractive young man in the universe and a leering, abusive cad with a bag of money in one hand and a pistol in the other.

  The chase scene in which Cal is shooting at Jack and Rose while the Titanic is sinking strikes some people as absurd dramatic overkill and takes them out of the movie. Perhaps it serves a story purpose — Cameron may have felt he needed his heroes to endure one more round in the belly of the Titanic and used Cal to drive them there — but another device, such as needing to go back in to rescue someone, could have achieved the same effect.

  Maybe this round of ordeals isn't needed at all. The movie would benefit from cutting and this sequence of underwater tension seems repetitive after they've already burst through so many gates. The whole sequence seems to be structured to build up to a climactic shot in which Jack and Rose run from a wall of water — an iconic tableau of their struggle with the force of death. However, this shot is one of the least effective illusions in the movie, for the actors' faces are queasily pasted onto the stuntpeople's bodies by some electronic magic which has not quite been perfected. The whole sequence could be cut or trimmed — there's enough tension, already.

  However, we are here not to bury Caesar, but to analyze him — how does Cameron succeed, what outweighs the flaws in his design?

  A GREAT STORY

  First, the fate of the Titanic and its passengers is a great epic story in its own right, and has worked its fascination since the day the ship went down. A dramatization of the Titanic disaster, only recently unearthed in a film vault, was produced by a German company within weeks of the tragedy. It was only the first of many documentaries and feature films, not to mention countless books and articles, about the disaster. Like the tragic, fairy-tale story of Princess Diana, the events around the sinking of the Titanic fall into dramatic patterns that harmonize with deep, archetypal images, shared and understood by everyone.

  Epilogue: Looking Back on the Journey SYMBOLISM OF "TITANIC"

  From its archaic, archetypal name on down, the Titanic is laden with symbolism and meaning. The ship's name is a choice that reveals much about the psychology of its builders. In the movie, Rose asks Bruce Ismay, the businessman behind the Titanic project, why he chose that name. He replies that he wanted a name to evoke great magnitude, moving Rose to comment on the Freudian overtones of male preoccupation with size.

  However the movie doesn't address the mythological origins of the word "titanic," which were certainly known to the classics-trained English gentlemen who chose that name. It refers to the immense Titans, giant predecessors and deadly enemies of the gods. The Titans were fundamental forces from the beginning of time — greedy, rude, and ruthless — and the gods had to fight a great battle to defeat them and imprison them under the earth before they spoiled and looted everything. When the press of the time called first-class passengers like Astor and Guggenheim "Titans of industry and capital," they were indicating more than the gigantic size of their empires.

  A few years before the Titanic was built, German archaeologists unearthed a Hellenistic temple called the Pergamon Altar that depicted in dramatic relief the battle between the gods and the Giants, recalling an earlier epic struggle with the gods' age-old enemies, the Titans. This monument is virtually a storyboard in stone for what would be a great special-effects movie. The builders of the Titanic, who probably had seen pictures of these reliefs, chose to identify themselves and their clients not with the gods but with their ancient enemies, the Titans. They were truly challenging the gods by this choice. Many people felt, even before the ship sailed, that the builders were tempting fate to give the ship such a grandiose name. Even worse was to claim that it was unsinkable. That was a foolish blasphemy, challenging the almighty power of God. A superstitious aura surrounds the Titanic, something like the curse of King Tut's tomb, a belief that the builders called down the wrath of God by their arrogance and pride.

  The story of the Titanic resonates with an old literary concept, The Ship of Fools. Storytellers created this satirical form around the time of Columbus' first voyage to the New World. One of the first expressions was Sebastian Brant's narrative poem, "Das Narrenschiff," printed only two years after Columbus first successfully crossed the Atlantic. It tells of a ship's passengers bound for Narragonia, the land of fools, and is a scathing depiction of the follies of its time. It was widely translated and adapted into books and plays.

  The Ship of Fools is an allegory, a story in which all the conditions of life and levels of society are lampooned savagely in the situation of a boatful of pathetic passengers. It is a sardonic tale, harshly depicting the flaws in the people and social systems of its time.

  Titanic goes in for broad-brush social criticism as well, portraying the rich and powerful as foolish monsters, and the poor as their noble but helpless victims. The exceptions are Jack, who is poor but not helpless, and Molly Brown, who is rich but not monstrous. She is the nouveau riche American who rose from the same level as Jack and who may represent the healthy side of the American immigrant experience — ambitious, climbing the social ladder, but also big-hearted, egalitarian, generous, and fair. Titanic is more hopeful, less cynical than The Ship of Fools, suggesting that a few can transcend their foolishness and victimization to live full, meaningful lives.

  The irony of "The Ship of Fools" was derived from the point of view, the audience's knowledge that the struggles of the passengers are meaningless and foolish because they are all trapped and doomed anyway. Titanic has some of that ironic feeling as Jack and Fabrizio exult in their good fortune at winning tickets on a ship that we know will sink. Irony goes with the territory in a story about a ship that we know is fated to destruction.

  The idea of The Ship of Fools is summed up in the old phrase "We're all in the same boat." It shows that despite our foolish attention to superficial differences of birth, wealth, and status we are all trapped by the absolutes of life, all alike in being subject to inevitable forces like gravity, fate, death, and taxes.

  A ship isolated at sea on a long journey becomes a convenient symbol of the human condition, of the soul's lonely passage through life. The isolation of the Titanic in the North Atlantic makes her a little world, a microcosm, a nearly perfect model of the society of her time, in which the two thousand people on board represent all the millions alive at that time.

  Like the ship itself, the scale of this story is epic, larger than life, big enough to tell the story of a whole culture, in this case of the whole Western world at that time. This vast story is made comprehensible and digestible by selecting the lives and deaths of a few who represent qualities and polarities present to some degree in all members of the culture.

  Like its epic predecessors, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Arthurian romances, or the Ring Cycle of Wagner, Titanic tells part of a vast story, the bridging of two worlds, the Old World and the New. Within these enormous supertales are hundreds of substories and epic cycles, each with its own dramatic structure and completeness. No single work can tell all the threads, but the individual story can communicate the sense, the dramatic facts, of the entire situation. Titanic has been criticized for not dr
amatizing this or that substory — the Carpathias race to the scene, the stories of the Astors and Guggenheims, the difficulties of the telegrapher in getting out distress calls, etc. But no film could tell all the substories. Storytellers of the future can choose other incidents and personalities to highlight. It will take the combined output of many artists to fully tell the tale of the Titanic, just as it has taken Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Strauss, Kazantzakis, Hallmark Productions, Classic Comics, and thousands of other artists to fully tell the epic story of the Odyssey, itself only one of dozens of epic cycles in the superstory of the Trojan War.

  As a story about the rapid crossing of the Atlantic, Titanic symbolizes this century's preoccupation with speedy travel and increasing global consciousness. It speaks of centuries of European culture passing to America, of the waves of immigrants filling the American continents, lured by the seductive promise of freedom. In the film the Statue of Liberty is a recurring symbol of the immigrant dream, a lighthouse beckoning the newcomer. Poor doomed Fabrizio pretends he can see her all the way from Cherbourg.

  The Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France to the people of America, is a colossal example of the ancient practice of sending statues of gods and goddesses from a founding city to its colonies to connect them by a psychic thread, a religious tie. France and the United States went through revolutions at the same time and are linked by their devotion to liberty, one of many cultural links between New World and Old.

  The context of Titanic's release has to be taken into account in evaluating its success. It came out at a time when we were becoming more aware of a global society and links between Europe and America. Shocks like the Gulf War, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the fall of Communism in Russia joined with unpredictably shifting worldwide weather patterns to make a time of uncertainty when the ship of life seems fragile. We were two years away from the end of the century and in a mood to look back at the beginnings.

  The stage was set for the new Titanic movie by the discovery a few years before of the wreck's location on the ocean floor. The finding of the ship was a major triumph of science and a powerful psychological moment. For centuries it has been impossible to find ships lost at such depths. The Titanic being buried in the sea for so long, then found again, makes a strong symbol of our surprising power to recover lost memories from the subconscious. It is a godlike thing to be able to go down and see the Titanic, and a true Hero's Journey to recover lost treasure from the subconscious.

  The discovery led to the fantasy of raising the Titanic, as described in Clive Cussler's novel, Raise the Titanic, but soon the fantasy became a real possibility. The experts agree it is feasible to raise the pieces of the ship, and many artifacts have been brought up, but for the moment the consensus is that it's better to leave the wreck where it lies as a monument to its victims. The spectacular drama of seeing live TV of the wreck with its poignant human remains helped provide the right climate for releasing another Titanic movie.

  Much has been made of the inclusion of a young love story as a factor in Titanic's great popularity. It was a kind of Romeo and Juliet plot device, an easily relatable tale of young people from warring factions falling in love.

  Romance is the genre Cameron has chosen to present the Titanic story, and by making that choice he opens the story invitingly to women. He could have chosen other genres, telling the Titanic story as a mystery, a detective story, a treasure hunt, or even as a comedy. At times it is all of those things, but the primary theme and design principle is romantic love, and the structure is that of a romance. For that choice he gains a clear-cut formula with a high degree of audience identification — a triangular relationship in which a woman must be saved from domination by a cruel older man through the intervention of a younger rescuer.

  This triangulated relationship is a familiar pattern in romance novels and in the country of film noir and hard-boiled fiction. It provides the three-cornered stage for conflict, jealousy, rivalry, betrayal, revenge, and rescue just as do the stories of Guinevere, Lancelot, and King Arthur, the romance novels where the heroine must choose between two men, and the film noir motif of the young woman who must choose between Mr. Big and the young drifter or detective.

  Leonardo DiCaprio plays the drifter corner of the triangle in Titanic. The secret of his remarkable attractive powers may be that he projects the archetypal mask of the sensitive young man, displaying both masculine action and feminine sensitivity. He is well suited to play Jack, a Peter Pan, a puer aeternas (eternal youth) who remains forever young by his beautiful, sacrificial death. Rose is another Wendy, a girl in bedclothes running around a ship dodging an evil Captain Hook while the eternal youth teaches her how to fly and how to embrace life. The iceberg and the ticking of the clock fulfill the same archetypal purpose as the crocodile which has swallowed a clock in Peter Pan. They are projections of the Shadow, the unconscious force that threatens to destroy us, sooner or later, if we don't acknowledge it.

  Further back in our mythic past, Jack's slight, youthful persona resonates with David, the giant-killer, and especially with doomed young gods like Adonis and Balder, who die tragically young. Jack is also a twin with Dionysus, the god of revelry, passion, intoxication, who appeals to the wild side of women, who drives them wild. The drunken dance in the lower depths of steerage, in which Rose is drenched head to foot in beer, is a true Dionysian revel and her initiation into those ancient mysteries, with Jack as her initiator.

  Jack is a HERO, but of a specialized type, a CATALYST hero, a WANDERER who is not greatly changed by the story but who triggers change in the other characters. Jack is an ethereal, otherworldly creation who leaves no trace except in Rose's heart. There's no record of him being aboard the Titanic and he left no legacy, not even a silver bullet, unless you count Old Rose's memories. One character, Bodine, Lovett's sidekick and a kind of THRESHOLD GUARDIAN to Old Rose, even suggests that the whole thing could have been her romantic invention, a story too good to be true. Like all travelers to the other world, Rose has to be taken on faith.

  The character of young Rose is a manifestation of the "damsel in distress" archetype. As such she is a sister of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, princesses caught between life and death and wakened by a kiss; the Twelve Dancing Princesses rescued from enchantment by a young man who makes himself invisible to follow them into their world; Psyche in love with the mysterious young flying god Cupid (Eros); Persephone kidnapped to an underworld hell by a cruel king; Helen of Troy snatched away from her brutal husband by a sensuous young admirer; and Ariadne rescued from a bad marriage by the passionate, artistic god Dionysus.

  Women struggle with the "damsel in distress" archetype because it perpetuates patterns of domination and submission, and can encourage a passive, victimized attitude. However, it is an easy archetype to identify and empathize with, representing the feelings of anyone who has felt powerless, trapped, or imprisoned. The "woman in jeopardy" is a staple of movie and TV plots because it creates instant identification and sympathy and raises the emotional involvement of the audience. In Titanic the audience can both feel sorry for Rose in her imprisonment and enjoy seeing her become free and active as she tears away the "damsel in distress" mask and grows into the role of Hero.

  There may be another factor in the movie's particular appeal to women. Titanic is a special-effects movie that does not scream science fiction, war, or macho male adventure. It offers a spectacle that does not exclude or ignore the interests of women, and is given human scale with an emotional melodrama dealing with issues of love and fidelity.

  For men as well as women, Titanic fulfills another contract with the audience, providing an unparalleled opportunity for COMPARISON. The movie offers examples of human behavior in a set of dire, extreme circumstances against which viewers can measure themselves. People can enjoy speculating, from the safety of their seats, on how they would act in a similar situation. How would I have handled the challenge of the Titanic? Would I face death with honor
and courage, or would I panic and act with selfish frenzy? Would I fight for life or would I sacrifice my place in the lifeboat so women and children could go first?

  The movie has the fascination of a train wreck or a highway smashup. It's natural to contemplate and compare when we see such a disaster, to measure our own luck against that of the victims. We watch with compassion but also with relief that we are not among the suffering. We seek lessons and make conclusions about fate and honor from what we see.

  People describe certain movies as spectacular, but forget that the word comes from the ancient Roman spectacles, which were ritual dramas, combats, races, games, and contests enacted in the arenas and amphitheaters throughout the empire. In those days the most thrilling (and expensive) form of entertainment was the "Naumachiae," the staging of great sea battles, in which the arena would be flooded and the spectators treated to the sight of ships ramming each other and capsizing, of sailors and doomed passengers drowning.

  Titanic is a spectacle in this tradition. Lives were certainly sacrificed to the effort to put on this show, and the movie itself presents a feast of death, the deaths of fifteen hundred people being re-enacted for our entertainment and edification. There is still something compelling about the spectacle of death on such a massive scale, like the gladiatorial combats and ritual sacrifices of the ancient world. A vast amount of life force is being released all at once, and in an almost ghoulish way we feast on it. At the sight of people hurtling from a great height to smash against various machinery our eyes grow big, as if we are drinking in the sight of death. We study the sea of frozen faces for signs of how they died and how it will be for us.