InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 6

Titanic that it will in Avatar, where a character is never more than
a loose sketch of a certain type). This could quite easily be
regarded as a cynical move, as thinking in four-quadrant terms
and patronizing his audience, assuming they need the
comfortably familiar story at the core of Avatar to hold their hand
through its digital fantasy world. And while that might be true to
a certain extent, it’s largely because Cameron looks at
storytelling from the vantage of a technician: he builds with the
parts that have been proven to work. The fact that there is still
life in Titanic, that it feels less mechanical than its functional
parts, is surely in some part due to the chemistry between
DiCaprio and Winslet, but there’s more to it than that.
And this is the miracle of Hollywood: that art can form within,
against, the great commercial forces and highly formalized and
abstracted language (which was at an even further remove in the
so-called Golden Age, when Hollywood was creating more
masterpieces than ever). The famous “draw me like one your
French girls” scene evinces some of how this actually happens,
beyond pure mythology. The scene is both obviously sexual —
Rose asks Jack to draw her naked — but it’s also tasteful, one
breast obscured behind the sketchbook, so that it can play as an
awakening of sorts to (generally speaking) young boys without
upsetting parents' sensibilities. It’s also genuinely erotic for both
parties — and so too for the adults of both genders whom
Cameron imagines watching. Jack looks but can’t touch, and
Rose not only gets to be seen as desirable and beautiful, but also
gets to feel powerful through her initiation of the act, clearly the
one in control of the situation. All of these threads are playing to
different audiences at once, executed perfectly and woven
together seamlessly so that they create something like texture;
it’s an undeniably dense scene. So even if it’s targeted, to target is
to interpret desire, which in turn says something about people
and society at large, which is the scale such a scene is aiming
for.
Even though Cameron is attuned to his audience, though, he isn’t
bound by their expectations. The “French girls” scene ends with a
fade from a close-up of Rose as she lays naked to a close-up of
her in the present day, bringing an elderly person far closer to
sex than taboo usually allows. She even here expresses her
sexuality — it’s she who describes the scene as erotic. This isn’t
exactly something that a studio head or anyone who’s thinking
only in commercial terms would suggest — it’s likely not even