InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 6

go, as we’re here writing this on the eve of the film’s third
re-release, this time updated with 4K HDR and HFR. And in the
intervening years, he’s featured in several documentaries poring
back over the details, updating his model of the sinking with all
the discoveries made since (another was announced only a few
days ago). In the ironically titled Titanic: The Final Word with
James Cameron (2012), he and his team quite crassly speculate
on hypotheticals where everyone could have survived; Cameron’s
idea is to put them onto the iceberg since that wasn’t going to
sink. The event is stripped of all the weight and reality the film
was supposed to imbue the catastrophe with. At the end of
Titanic, Cameron’s stand-in Lovett says: “[For] three years I
thought about nothing but Titanic, but I never got it; I never let it
in,” yet he seems to be trying to push it back out.
There’s some sense that not only could Titanic fail, but that
maybe it did; and these contradictions can only lead to
implosion. Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) is all about fluidity
and transformation: emotionally, as the Terminator learns to be
more human, and technologically, with the liquid metal villain
demonstrating the new possibilities of CGI. But even then, the
Terminator can only understand why people feel — he can’t feel
himself, and there’s no promise that the apocalyptic future that
these characters have come back from has been prevented, even
though the material conditions that created it have been
changed. Cameron could only locate a small glimmer of hope.
And so in Titanic, which is bound by history, trying to reach back
and in some way bring this long-dead past back to life seems
totally insurmountable.
Maybe that’s because Cameron holds himself to the standards of
Hollywood, limiting himself to what works within a false
hegemony. But by speaking through that language — and drawing
attention to it through the friction of the framing and central
story — he shows its limits; he shows a film fighting against itself
and losing. The past escaping into the void. The film's final shot
starts as a POV, winding through the Titanic, toward Jack, as if
we’ve finally gone back. But then Rose walks in front of the
camera, and we’re put at a remove, showing whose perspective
we’re seeing. And anyway, this isn’t even a memory but a dying
dream, one that soon enough fades into white forever. For
someone who sees the world as literally as Cameron does, there
is a deeper tragedy to the end of living memory. Experience and
emotion exist in the cracks of material reality, and so once they
are gone, they are profoundly so — there is no wreckage left to
search through.— ESMÉ HOLDEN