THE ROAD BACK is the battle for survival, which includes a classic CHASE as Cal, impatient for the ship to do its work, tries to hasten Jack and Rose's death with bullets. The other characters face life-and-death tests, some choosing to die with honor, others to live at all costs, and some, like Lovejoy, dying despite their most ignoble efforts to survive. Act Two concludes with Jack and Rose balancing on the stern rail and riding the ship as it plunges toward the bottom.
RESURRECTION commences as Jack and Rose fight to preserve the warmth of life in the frozen sea. Finding that the bit of floating wreckage they cling to will support only one person's weight, Jack puts Rose's life ahead of his in a classic HERO'S SACRIFICE. He has already lived a full life and has experienced perfect happiness with her. She is relatively new to freedom and life, and he charges her to live richly and fully enough for both of them. He lets go of life, confident of being RESURRECTED in her heart, in her memories.
Rose herself goes to the edge of death, but is RESURRECTED as the lone lifeboat searches for survivors in the sea of dead faces. In a final TEST of all she has learned from Jack, she summons the strength to swim to get a whistle from a dead officer's lips, calling for rescue. With that Old Rose concludes her story, returning us to the framing device in modern day and counting the toll of the Titanic's dead.
The robot sub leaves the wreck in peace and silence. On the research ship, Lovett tosses away the cigar he had saved to celebrate finding the diamond, a little SACRIFICE of an old personality trait. He admits to Rose's granddaughter that he spent three years thinking of the Titanic but never really got its message. He has been TRANSFORMED by the ORDEAL, and his REWARDS are his insight and the sympathy of Rose's granddaughter. Is there a glimmer of romance, a chance to fully live out the truncated love of Jack and Rose in another generation? He has not found the physical treasure he came seeking, but has he, like Jack, found a greater treasure in the new world of emotion?
Old Rose goes to the railing of the research ship, echoing her flying scene at the bow with Jack. She even climbs up on the railing as she did so long ago. In a final moment of SUSPENSE we don t know her intention — will she jump, joining Jack in the sea at last, like a belated Juliet joining her Romeo in death? But instead she pulls out the diamond and in a quick flash we see young Rose finding it in her pocket beneath the Statue of Liberty, an ELIXIR rewarded for survival. With a little cry of final dramatic CLIMAX, Old Rose releases it into the water where, like Jack, it spirals down into mystery, a last SACRIFICE that says her experience and memories are more important than any physical possession. This is the ELIXIR, the healing message the movie means to send the audience home with.
Dissolve now to Old Rose falling asleep, surrounded by photos of her long, full life. Here, after FINAL ORDEAL, is FINAL REWARD, fulfillment of Jacks prophecies — Rose is an adventuress, a pilot, an actress, riding horses by a California pier, having babies, living a life for both of them, part of the ELIXIR she brought back. The dark wounds of her family history have been healed.
Rose dreams, and in that SPECIAL WORLD the Titanic and its passengers live again, RESURRECTED by the power of the unconscious. Through Rose s eyes, we pass the THRESHOLD GUARDIANS of the White Star Line one last time, entering the heaven of First Class where all the good folk live eternally. (The villains are conspicuously absent, no doubt bobbing in a frigid, wet hell.) Jack stands at his old place by the clock, a supernatural being conquering time. He extends his hand, they touch again, they kiss, and the ship's company applaud this final SACRED MARRIAGE. Camera up to the ceiling dome, the vault of heaven, and its white purity fills the screen. Rose has her ELIXIR.
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.