I recently watched The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, a film where philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues (among many other things) that the true catastrophe in the movie Titanic would have been Jack and Rose leaving the ship together, unsunk.
Titanic is a movie about Rose (first class (wealthy), engaged) meeting and falling for Jack (thrid class (poor), single). The two of them meet and flirt, Jack, an artist, draws her ‘like one of his French girls’ (a plot point that triggers the entire movie), and then they have sex in a car in the hold of the ship. At the end of the film, the ship crashes into an iceburg, and Rose gently pushes Jack into the icy water moments after promising to never let go of (him? her memories of him?), allowing the driftwood she is on to remain bouyant long enough for rescue. 85 years later, she recounts the story in all its (shockingly) PG-13 glory to a group of treasure hunters who found her nude sketch when they were looking for a jewel she’d secreted away.
This movie passed Jurassic Park (1993), becoming the most profitable movie of all time until Avatar (2008).
Žižek argues that the two lack the fundamentals of a lasting relationship. That they would escape to New York, have “intense sex” over a honeymoon period, and then fall apart, the attaction and the forbidden nature of their romance dissolving into dust.
He doesn’t stop there, but expands the point further, claiming that all upper class people get bored and lose their vitality, and like vampires, descend to the lower class to steal their ‘authentic’ life away from them before shucking them off like a discarded banana peel, returning to their upper class environs.
It’s a sentiment that reminds me more than a little of Pulp’s Common People (wonderfully performed here by William Shatner).
In that song, we start with
“I wanna live like common people I wanna do whatever common people do Wanna sleep with common people I wanna sleep with common people like you” Well, what else could I do? I said “I’ll, I’ll see what I can do”
and by the end of the song, our narrator realizes that she is a tourist of poverty, that even if she moves into a roach-infested flat, she can call her dad to stop it all.
But still you’ll never get it right ‘Cause when you’re laid in bed at night Watching roaches climb the wall If you called your dad he could stop it all
Shatner (or Cocker, I suppose) concludes that our “Rose” is incapable of living a low-class life, that she “will never understand / how it feels to live [her] life with no control.” It’s easy to read this song as the inevitibality of Jack and Rose in a world where the Titanic does not sink1, and Rose is forced to reckon with the reality of the marriage she threw away for the life that Jack can provide.
Rose survived, and Jack didn’t. So like the joke about Frank’s widow, she can forever live with the ideal fantasy of what could have been, since reality is incapable of tarnishing the perfect night she spent on a doomed ship.
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Ignoring, of course, that the movie is only made (and thus Jack and Rose only exist) because the ship sank. ↩