Cameron casts his arms wide in beckoning the audience to identify with his story. There's room enough on that ship for all of us. We can all identify with touches like the Turk who, while the boat sinks, frantically tries to read a corridor sign with a Turkish-English dictionary. We are all strangers somewhere. We're all in the same boat.
The movie is cast to appeal to a broad range of age groups. The young have the youthful love story to relate to, the old are invited to identify with Old Rose, who is still lively and active, and the baby-boomer generation is represented by the scientist-explorer and Rose's granddaughter.
The movie is not quite universal in that you don't see black or Asian faces. Certainly the slave experience is mentioned as a metaphor of Rose's emotional captivity, although here is where metaphor breaks down — Rose's pampered life is hardly the same as the Middle Passage in the bowels of the Amistad. However, the symbols of Titanic seem broad enough that almost everyone around the world can find something of themselves in it.
Where Cameron is most successful is as a visual and emotional poet. Titanic is a tapestry, a weaving of plots and threads. He finds poetry in braiding together the big story and the little story. He articulates connections very well, connections between the little story of Lovett and the big story of Old Rose's colorful life, between the little story of Jack and Rose and the big story of the Titanic, which is in turn part of the bigger story of the 20th century.
He organizes all this connection by finding a SYMBOL to concentrate and focus it, the narrow eye of a needle to pass all the threads through. "The Heart of the Ocean," connecting in its name the threads of romance and the sea, is a metaphor tying together all the plot lines, making them into a coherent design. (Cameron uses a wedding band to similar purpose in The Abyss.)
The jewel has a European pedigree, was once a crown jewel of the ill-fated Louis XVI, and makes a good symbol of the treasure of European experience and wisdom, art and beauty, but also class warfare and bloodshed.
Old Rose's action of tossing away the diamond at the end is a powerful poetic image that brings all the plot threads together for a real DENOUEMENT, an untying of all the knots and a smooth finish for all the plot threads. Lovett doesn't get the treasure but has a shot at love, Cal is thwarted and doesn't get Rose's heart or the diamond, Old Rose has kept her secret and now returns it to the sea. It was something private between her and Jack, hers to withhold all these years, hers to give back now.
The audience feels the material value of the stone — it's still a shock to see something worth so much money tossed away — but by that shock the whole experience of Titanic is concentrated into a symbol of fading memory. The emotions, the unconscious materials stirred up by the movie can recede to their proper place, though the memory will linger. As the stone spins away, we see how the filmmaker wants us to regard the Titanic. Let it remain where it is, a mystery and a monument to the human tragedy.
Old Rose, like every hero returning from a journey to the unconscious, had a choice to face. Do I scream and shout about my elixir, try to exploit it or evangelize about it? Or do I simply go about the business of my life, letting what I have learned radiate out from me and inevitably change, revive, rejuvenate those around me, and then the whole world? Do I choose an outer or an inner path to express my elixir? Obviously, Rose took the latter path, containing and internalizing the treasure from the special world, a poetic lesson taught by the Celtic tales, where heroes who come back and brag about their adventures in the Underworld find nothing but seaweed where they thought they'd collected fairy treasure. But the rare one, like Rose, keeps the fairies' secrets and lives a long and happy life.
James Cameron honors his Celtic ancestors with the folk music that plays below decks and whenever emotion surges. It makes a strong contrast with the courtly European dance and church music played in first class, and contributes to the poetic feeling. This is the epic telling of the Titanic by a Celtic bard, accompanied by pipes and harps as in days of yore.
This is supported by visual poetry and structural connectedness like the serpentine braiding of a Celtic graphic design. Simple polarities, bow and stern, above decks and below, first class and third, light and dark, give strong symmetrical axes for an almost mathematical composition. Cameron's design offers a number of poetic metaphors — the boat as a model of the world, the diamond as a symbol of value and love, the clock as a symbol of fleeting time, the angel statue on the main staircase as an image of Rose s innocence. In the broad strokes of a pop song, the movie provides metaphors against which the audience can compare themselves, a set of tools for interpreting their own lives.
Finally, CATHARSIS is the elixir this movie provides, the healthy purging of emotions that Aristotle identified and that audiences still want above anything. People rewarded this story for giving them the rare chance to feel something. We are well defended against emotion, and the movie hammers away with shocking effects and strong sentiments until even the most jaded and guarded must feel some reaction, some release of tension. Shots of panicking passengers fighting for lifeboat spaces, of Jack and Rose battling to survive, and of terrified victims falling to their horrid deaths bring the tension to an almost unbearable pitch, and yet there must be something rewarding and satisfying about this, for people stayed in their seats and many returned for multiple viewings. They couldn't get enough of the emotions released by this film. It gives the chance for a shudder of horror and a good cry, valuable sensations in any age.
The audience witnessing this spectacle goes through an ordeal along with the characters. Joseph Campbell used to say that the purpose of ritual is to wear you out, to grind down your defenses so that you fall open to the transcendent experience. Wearing you out seems to be part of Titanic's strategy, making you feel something of what the passengers felt by immersing you in the Titanic world for so long.
In this cynical, jaded time, it takes courage to be so nakedly emotional, for both the filmmaker and the audience. Movies like Titanic, The English Patient, Braveheart, Dances with Wolves, and Glory are taking a big risk in being sentimental on a grand scale. The darkness of the theatre offers the audience some protection — they can cry silently and few will witness their emotional vulnerability. But the filmmakers must expose emotions in public, under the full light of a cynical society, and deserve some respect for this act of courage.
IN THE WAKE OF TITANIC
What will be the long-term effect of Titanic on the movie industry? Its success shows that the big gamble sometimes pays off Big production values generally do pay off in the long run — even Cleopatra, the film that nearly sank 20th Century Fox in the 1960s, eventually made back its production costs and is now a jewel in the company crown. Titanic turned a profit quickly, and its success will undoubtedly encourage others to spend big in hopes of hitting the same kind of jackpot.