Romance is the genre Cameron has chosen to present the Titanic story, and by making that choice he opens the story invitingly to women. He could have chosen other genres, telling the Titanic story as a mystery, a detective story, a treasure hunt, or even as a comedy. At times it is all of those things, but the primary theme and design principle is romantic love, and the structure is that of a romance. For that choice he gains a clear-cut formula with a high degree of audience identification — a triangular relationship in which a woman must be saved from domination by a cruel older man through the intervention of a younger rescuer.
This triangulated relationship is a familiar pattern in romance novels and in the country of film noir and hard-boiled fiction. It provides the three-cornered stage for conflict, jealousy, rivalry, betrayal, revenge, and rescue just as do the stories of Guinevere, Lancelot, and King Arthur, the romance novels where the heroine must choose between two men, and the film noir motif of the young woman who must choose between Mr. Big and the young drifter or detective.
Leonardo DiCaprio plays the drifter corner of the triangle in Titanic. The secret of his remarkable attractive powers may be that he projects the archetypal mask of the sensitive young man, displaying both masculine action and feminine sensitivity. He is well suited to play Jack, a Peter Pan, a puer aeternas (eternal youth) who remains forever young by his beautiful, sacrificial death. Rose is another Wendy, a girl in bedclothes running around a ship dodging an evil Captain Hook while the eternal youth teaches her how to fly and how to embrace life. The iceberg and the ticking of the clock fulfill the same archetypal purpose as the crocodile which has swallowed a clock in Peter Pan. They are projections of the Shadow, the unconscious force that threatens to destroy us, sooner or later, if we don't acknowledge it.
Further back in our mythic past, Jack's slight, youthful persona resonates with David, the giant-killer, and especially with doomed young gods like Adonis and Balder, who die tragically young. Jack is also a twin with Dionysus, the god of revelry, passion, intoxication, who appeals to the wild side of women, who drives them wild. The drunken dance in the lower depths of steerage, in which Rose is drenched head to foot in beer, is a true Dionysian revel and her initiation into those ancient mysteries, with Jack as her initiator.
Jack is a HERO, but of a specialized type, a CATALYST hero, a WANDERER who is not greatly changed by the story but who triggers change in the other characters. Jack is an ethereal, otherworldly creation who leaves no trace except in Rose's heart. There's no record of him being aboard the Titanic and he left no legacy, not even a silver bullet, unless you count Old Rose's memories. One character, Bodine, Lovett's sidekick and a kind of THRESHOLD GUARDIAN to Old Rose, even suggests that the whole thing could have been her romantic invention, a story too good to be true. Like all travelers to the other world, Rose has to be taken on faith.
The character of young Rose is a manifestation of the "damsel in distress" archetype. As such she is a sister of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, princesses caught between life and death and wakened by a kiss; the Twelve Dancing Princesses rescued from enchantment by a young man who makes himself invisible to follow them into their world; Psyche in love with the mysterious young flying god Cupid (Eros); Persephone kidnapped to an underworld hell by a cruel king; Helen of Troy snatched away from her brutal husband by a sensuous young admirer; and Ariadne rescued from a bad marriage by the passionate, artistic god Dionysus.
Women struggle with the "damsel in distress" archetype because it perpetuates patterns of domination and submission, and can encourage a passive, victimized attitude. However, it is an easy archetype to identify and empathize with, representing the feelings of anyone who has felt powerless, trapped, or imprisoned. The "woman in jeopardy" is a staple of movie and TV plots because it creates instant identification and sympathy and raises the emotional involvement of the audience. In Titanic the audience can both feel sorry for Rose in her imprisonment and enjoy seeing her become free and active as she tears away the "damsel in distress" mask and grows into the role of Hero.
There may be another factor in the movie's particular appeal to women. Titanic is a special-effects movie that does not scream science fiction, war, or macho male adventure. It offers a spectacle that does not exclude or ignore the interests of women, and is given human scale with an emotional melodrama dealing with issues of love and fidelity.
For men as well as women, Titanic fulfills another contract with the audience, providing an unparalleled opportunity for COMPARISON. The movie offers examples of human behavior in a set of dire, extreme circumstances against which viewers can measure themselves. People can enjoy speculating, from the safety of their seats, on how they would act in a similar situation. How would I have handled the challenge of the Titanic? Would I face death with honor and courage, or would I panic and act with selfish frenzy? Would I fight for life or would I sacrifice my place in the lifeboat so women and children could go first?
The movie has the fascination of a train wreck or a highway smashup. It's natural to contemplate and compare when we see such a disaster, to measure our own luck against that of the victims. We watch with compassion but also with relief that we are not among the suffering. We seek lessons and make conclusions about fate and honor from what we see.
People describe certain movies as spectacular, but forget that the word comes from the ancient Roman spectacles, which were ritual dramas, combats, races, games, and contests enacted in the arenas and amphitheaters throughout the empire. In those days the most thrilling (and expensive) form of entertainment was the "Naumachiae," the staging of great sea battles, in which the arena would be flooded and the spectators treated to the sight of ships ramming each other and capsizing, of sailors and doomed passengers drowning.
Titanic is a spectacle in this tradition. Lives were certainly sacrificed to the effort to put on this show, and the movie itself presents a feast of death, the deaths of fifteen hundred people being re-enacted for our entertainment and edification. There is still something compelling about the spectacle of death on such a massive scale, like the gladiatorial combats and ritual sacrifices of the ancient world. A vast amount of life force is being released all at once, and in an almost ghoulish way we feast on it. At the sight of people hurtling from a great height to smash against various machinery our eyes grow big, as if we are drinking in the sight of death. We study the sea of frozen faces for signs of how they died and how it will be for us.
Titanic plays on fears that have a high degree of identification for the audience — the universal fear of heights, fear of being trapped and imprisoned, fear of drowning in a bottomless sea, fear of fire and explosion, fear of loneliness and isolation.
The movie offers an imaginable horror. It could happen to anyone. Since it provides a complete spectrum of the society of its time, any viewer can find an identity there, as a well-off member of the ruling class, as a worker, as an immigrant, as a dreamer, as a lover. And we can appreciate the truth that certain inexorable forces — nature, death, physics, fate, accident — affect all of us, across the spectrum without exception. For a while the human story is reduced to one archetype — the Victim.
Titanic is a coherent design in part because it observes the unities of time, place, and theme. The confinement of the central story to the time from the Titanic's sailing to her death concentrates the dramatic energy. This concentration intensifies in the second half of the film which follows the surging events in real time, moment by moment. Confining the action to one place, the world of the ship alone at sea, makes it into a microcosm of life. It is an island of life in a dead sea, just as this island Earth is adrift in an ocean of space. And the ideas and arguments of Titanic are woven into a coherent design by concentrating on a single theme — that love liberates us and transcends death.