A few years before the Titanic was built, German archaeologists unearthed a Hellenistic temple called the Pergamon Altar that depicted in dramatic relief the battle between the gods and the Giants, recalling an earlier epic struggle with the gods' age-old enemies, the Titans. This monument is virtually a storyboard in stone for what would be a great special-effects movie. The builders of the Titanic, who probably had seen pictures of these reliefs, chose to identify themselves and their clients not with the gods but with their ancient enemies, the Titans. They were truly challenging the gods by this choice. Many people felt, even before the ship sailed, that the builders were tempting fate to give the ship such a grandiose name. Even worse was to claim that it was unsinkable. That was a foolish blasphemy, challenging the almighty power of God. A superstitious aura surrounds the Titanic, something like the curse of King Tut's tomb, a belief that the builders called down the wrath of God by their arrogance and pride.
The story of the Titanic resonates with an old literary concept, The Ship of Fools. Storytellers created this satirical form around the time of Columbus' first voyage to the New World. One of the first expressions was Sebastian Brant's narrative poem, "Das Narrenschiff," printed only two years after Columbus first successfully crossed the Atlantic. It tells of a ship's passengers bound for Narragonia, the land of fools, and is a scathing depiction of the follies of its time. It was widely translated and adapted into books and plays.
The Ship of Fools is an allegory, a story in which all the conditions of life and levels of society are lampooned savagely in the situation of a boatful of pathetic passengers. It is a sardonic tale, harshly depicting the flaws in the people and social systems of its time.
Titanic goes in for broad-brush social criticism as well, portraying the rich and powerful as foolish monsters, and the poor as their noble but helpless victims. The exceptions are Jack, who is poor but not helpless, and Molly Brown, who is rich but not monstrous. She is the nouveau riche American who rose from the same level as Jack and who may represent the healthy side of the American immigrant experience — ambitious, climbing the social ladder, but also big-hearted, egalitarian, generous, and fair. Titanic is more hopeful, less cynical than The Ship of Fools, suggesting that a few can transcend their foolishness and victimization to live full, meaningful lives.
The irony of "The Ship of Fools" was derived from the point of view, the audience's knowledge that the struggles of the passengers are meaningless and foolish because they are all trapped and doomed anyway. Titanic has some of that ironic feeling as Jack and Fabrizio exult in their good fortune at winning tickets on a ship that we know will sink. Irony goes with the territory in a story about a ship that we know is fated to destruction.
The idea of The Ship of Fools is summed up in the old phrase "We're all in the same boat." It shows that despite our foolish attention to superficial differences of birth, wealth, and status we are all trapped by the absolutes of life, all alike in being subject to inevitable forces like gravity, fate, death, and taxes.
A ship isolated at sea on a long journey becomes a convenient symbol of the human condition, of the soul's lonely passage through life. The isolation of the Titanic in the North Atlantic makes her a little world, a microcosm, a nearly perfect model of the society of her time, in which the two thousand people on board represent all the millions alive at that time.
Like the ship itself, the scale of this story is epic, larger than life, big enough to tell the story of a whole culture, in this case of the whole Western world at that time. This vast story is made comprehensible and digestible by selecting the lives and deaths of a few who represent qualities and polarities present to some degree in all members of the culture.
Like its epic predecessors, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, the Arthurian romances, or the Ring Cycle of Wagner, Titanic tells part of a vast story, the bridging of two worlds, the Old World and the New. Within these enormous supertales are hundreds of substories and epic cycles, each with its own dramatic structure and completeness. No single work can tell all the threads, but the individual story can communicate the sense, the dramatic facts, of the entire situation. Titanic has been criticized for not dramatizing this or that substory — the Carpathias race to the scene, the stories of the Astors and Guggenheims, the difficulties of the telegrapher in getting out distress calls, etc. But no film could tell all the substories. Storytellers of the future can choose other incidents and personalities to highlight. It will take the combined output of many artists to fully tell the tale of the Titanic, just as it has taken Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Strauss, Kazantzakis, Hallmark Productions, Classic Comics, and thousands of other artists to fully tell the epic story of the Odyssey, itself only one of dozens of epic cycles in the superstory of the Trojan War.
As a story about the rapid crossing of the Atlantic, Titanic symbolizes this century's preoccupation with speedy travel and increasing global consciousness. It speaks of centuries of European culture passing to America, of the waves of immigrants filling the American continents, lured by the seductive promise of freedom. In the film the Statue of Liberty is a recurring symbol of the immigrant dream, a lighthouse beckoning the newcomer. Poor doomed Fabrizio pretends he can see her all the way from Cherbourg.
The Statue of Liberty, a gift from the people of France to the people of America, is a colossal example of the ancient practice of sending statues of gods and goddesses from a founding city to its colonies to connect them by a psychic thread, a religious tie. France and the United States went through revolutions at the same time and are linked by their devotion to liberty, one of many cultural links between New World and Old.
The context of Titanic's release has to be taken into account in evaluating its success. It came out at a time when we were becoming more aware of a global society and links between Europe and America. Shocks like the Gulf War, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the fall of Communism in Russia joined with unpredictably shifting worldwide weather patterns to make a time of uncertainty when the ship of life seems fragile. We were two years away from the end of the century and in a mood to look back at the beginnings.
The stage was set for the new Titanic movie by the discovery a few years before of the wreck's location on the ocean floor. The finding of the ship was a major triumph of science and a powerful psychological moment. For centuries it has been impossible to find ships lost at such depths. The Titanic being buried in the sea for so long, then found again, makes a strong symbol of our surprising power to recover lost memories from the subconscious. It is a godlike thing to be able to go down and see the Titanic, and a true Hero's Journey to recover lost treasure from the subconscious.
The discovery led to the fantasy of raising the Titanic, as described in Clive Cussler's novel, Raise the Titanic, but soon the fantasy became a real possibility. The experts agree it is feasible to raise the pieces of the ship, and many artifacts have been brought up, but for the moment the consensus is that it's better to leave the wreck where it lies as a monument to its victims. The spectacular drama of seeing live TV of the wreck with its poignant human remains helped provide the right climate for releasing another Titanic movie.
Much has been made of the inclusion of a young love story as a factor in Titanic's great popularity. It was a kind of Romeo and Juliet plot device, an easily relatable tale of young people from warring factions falling in love.