InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 6

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TITANIC Courting Disaster There’s a contradiction at the heart of James Cameron’s work, and the reason he’s such a quintessential Hollywood figure is because of, not despite, that contradiction. Cameron is an artist, but he’s also a technician; cinema is an art, but also a technology. The medium has become inextricable from commerce and popular culture partly because of its unique expense, but also Hollywood has made a conscious effort to promote this idea: Going all the way back to the silent era, the industry ballooned costs to maintain a feeling of inaccessibility. When Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives (1922) went wildly over budget, that frustration was spun into a virtue by an advertising campaign that called it “the first real million dollar picture,” sometimes citing the specific cost of $1,104,000.
Cameron is part of a lineage, then. Avatar (2009) was developed alongside the technology needed to make it, and its sequel cost so much that, according to Cameron, it needed to become “the third or fourth highest-grossing film in history” just to break even. Yet both Avatar films are about escaping the world of industry and capital, returning to a simpler, more natural mode of living that’s rendered entirely in cutting-edge CGI; the contradictions between art and technology are immediately established at their most obvious but also at their most deeply entangled. On the other hand, Titanic (1997) establishes these two forces clearly and separately in its opening scenes. First, there are the researchers exploring the remains of the famous vessel — as Cameron did himself, for his rendering — trying to understand every forensic detail of the sinking. And then there’s Rose (Gloria Stuart), the survivor now nearly 101 years old, who dryly remarks after seeing the researchers' digital recreation: “Of course, the experience of it was somewhat different.” It’s this human perspective, rife with deep feeling, that turns a cold copy into art; those emotions are really what bring the Titanic back to life for the screen, not all of the precise technical detail. But when Rose tells her story to the researchers, it doesn’t exactly transcend that contradiction; her recreation, of course, is still quite bound up in the conventions of Hollywood storytelling. Titanic evokes other, “higher” arts both generally — in the broad idea of Romeo & Juliet that it borrows — and specifically — as when Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), the Romeo to Rose’s Juliet (Kate Winslet, in the past), admires a Monet recreation. But both speak to its insularity, and all that Jack can say about the painting is that it has a great “use of color,” but without commenting on how it is used or to what end. It’s the received wisdom about art compressed through layers of Hollywood language. This dedication to “movie-ness,” which runs deep in Cameron’s work, might reflect a serious limit to his imagination, and at the very least, caps what he’s able to do. It might seem novel here that the man is the figure of fantasy for the woman rather than the other way around, for example, but one character is still reduced to their function in the emotional life of the other. It’s the same structure with a few pieces superficially moved around. Still, Cameron’s use of conventions and tropes is quite conscious, and he’s found more use for them as his career has gone on (though their use hasn’t quite reached the point of abstraction in
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InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 6

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