Hollywood Utopia

14 Hollywood Utopia
be read using these lenses. Especially when interpreted in terms of myth, together
with its engagement with textual excess and spectacle, the film provides a
provocative forum for articulating an ecological agenda.
The most common question critics address in relation to Titanic is why such an
‘old-fashioned’ film has become so commercially successful. Gilbert Adair
explains its fascination in terms of myth:
In the north Atlantic on 14th April 1912 at 11.40 pm, an immovable object met an
irresistible force, a state of the art Goliath was felled by a State-of-the-Nature David,
and our love affair with the Titanic was born
(Adair 1997: 223).
But why specifically do audiences want to experience (and re-experience) the
visceral sensation of a ship going down in all its awesome horror and observe its
passengers drown or freeze to death, especially while the heroine recounts her
personal epic and fulfils her destiny with her dead lover by sending the most
expensive diamond back to the bottom of the sea. A straightforward ideological
reading would critique the film's apparent romantic renunciation of materialism in
favour of ‘love’, 4 which consequently problematises its feel-good, utopian
expression.
However, adapting Adair's idea, one could also argue that mythical harmony, which
can be translated into the language of deep ecology, has also been restored by the
narrative. Audiences and protagonists experience how the past cannot always be
successfully salvaged for financial profit, in spite of advanced technology.
Conspicuous consumption is effectively critiqued when the most authentically
evidenced valuables are destroyed and slowly disappear as the ship succumbs to the
pull of the sea. Many of the films to be discussed similarly explore how primal
elemental forces of nature finally provide a renewed form of balance within the
narrative and become potent metaphors for a renewed expression of eco-praxis.
Extended moments of almost Gothic visual excess, often expressed through long
static takes of a sublime nature that help resolve the narrative, also serve as an
effective cautionary tale for audiences ruled by materialist values. Thomas Berry,
for example, reads Titanic as a ‘parable’ of humanity's ‘over-confidence’ when, even
in dire situations, ‘we often do not have the energy required to alter our way of
acting on the scale that is required’ (Berry 1988: 210).
Speed, movement and action remain synonymous with the myth of America itself.
This is very much evidenced by the popular male lead, Leonardo DiCaprio,
standing on the prow of the fantasy ship with his hands outstretched like a