The hold of the demise of RMS Titanic on the imagination a century later

by Ken

With the timely rerelease of James Cameron's Titanic I'm finding myself tempted finally to see it, maybe even in 3D. (I haven't seen any of the new generation of 3D flicks. I only remember the cheesy efforts of my youth.) In itself the fact that I've never seen the film interests me, because the subject of the sinking of the "unsinkable" superliner on its maiden voyage has long held as strong a fascination for me as for anyone.

I'm thinking my muted interest has to do with the fact that, for all Cameron and company's attempt at historical accuracy, the film is still a work of fiction, and fiction is the exact opposite of what interests me about Titanic. Isn't what's of interest about it the fact that it happened? That this mammoth steamship was built using every state-of-the-art technology, and was claimed and widely believed to be unsinkable, and yet in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic it was crumpled by an iceberg?

This doesn't mean that I'm entirely resistant to fictional piggybacking. I can still shudder remembering the moment in Upstairs Downstairs (do I have to issue a "spoiler alert" all these decades later?) when the formerly superciliious lady's maid Roberts (Patsy Smart, seen at right in drier times) showed up at the servants' entrance of Eaton Place, as drenched as if she had just been fished out of the water, following the death of her mistress, Lady Marjorie Bellamy (the lovely Rachel Gurney), and Lady Marjorie's brother Hugo, the earl of Southwold, on the great ship -- one of the more dramatic ways of writing a character out of an ongoing story. (Of course the Downton Abbey team poached to plot device, but without any of the dramatic effect. A still of the waterlogged Miss Roberts, as it were returned from the dead, must surely exist online, but I didn't turn it up in a quick search.)

And while it's been ages since I saw A Night to Remember, the 1958 film (with Kenneth More as, um, somebody or other -- the ship's captain? I remember him being very grave, which I guess isn't hard to understand), I remember seeing it on television several times and being gripped by it each time. The fact that the result is preordained somehow didn't detract from this, and must in fact have been part of the fascination. How could such a thing have happened?

Interestingly, though, I see that IMDb's one-sentence summary reads: "The Titanic disaster is depicted in straightforward fashion without the addition of fictional subplots."

It seems worth noting that some eight years more have passed since the making of A Night to Remember than had passed between the actual event and the release of the film. Over the years researchers and historians have continued to sift through the surviving evidence of what happened on board the great ship, going back to its construction (and before) and continuing on to its disappearance below those icy waves, leaving at once: (a) an enormous toll in lost lives, and yet (b) more survivors than one might expect under the circumstances.

And of course since the making of A Night to Remember an entire new field of Titanic study opened up with the discovery of the wreckage lying on that inhospitable floor of the North Atlantic some 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. Once upon a time I doubt that most of us imagined the actual ship would ever return to our consciousness. And yet there it is, and despite the ferocious difficulty of access to it, it has, as I said, opened an entire new field of Titanic study and of course speculation.

For a long while as observers began to close in on the wreckage, there was enormous fascination in the pieces of the story it could finally fill in as to what actually happened to cause its demise and -- filling in the massive jumble of survivor accounts -- how that demise unfolded.

But I realized as I finally sat down and started to watch my DVR recording of the National Geographic Channel special Titanic: The Final Word with James Cameron ("National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence") that the myriad mysteries for which he gathered his team of experts to thrash out answers, once and for all, to the limit of our present knowledge, don't much interest me. Yes, I get it that the "mystery" of the ship's sinking won't be fully solved until the position and condition of every bit of discovered wreckage is puzzled out. But fascinating as those mysteries may be to experts, they just don't interest me much except insofar as they have a bearing on the fate of the ship up to the point of its final disappearance into the ocean.

Meet the Titanic Experts

National Geographic Channel caption: In the shadow of a massive 42-foot replica of the Titanic from his blockbuster film, Cameron has brought together some the world’s leading Titanic experts to solve the iconic shipwreck's lingering mysteries. Learn more about these engineers, naval architects, artists, and historians, whose combined expertise may reveal new insights.

That could just be me, of course. And I should add that the NGC webpage to which I've directed attention has links for any number of online reports that really do have to do with what happened to the ship up to the point of its final demise, some of which I expect to be checking out. Goodness knows, there's plenty to know about the ship and its one and only voyage which I don't know. I was moved by a piece in BBC Music Magazine that gathered what has been pieced together about the ship's musical crew, which earned its place in history by continuing to play, according to the eyewitness testimony, until the ship went down. I find it hard to imagine anyone, reading what's known about the musicians' prior careers and what's known about their musical duties at sea, not being choked up.

I suppose eventually I'll get through Cameron's NGC Final Word on the subject (my goodness, are there really four hours of it? I recorded two two-hour blocks), but it may take a number of sittings. And I'm thinking maybe I won't get around to seeing Titanic the movie after all, in any number of dimensions. I might want to take another look at A Night to Remember, though. I don't think the disaster of the sinking of Titanic has lost its hold on my imagination; I'm just getting a better grasp of the size and shape of that hold, and I don't think Leonardo di Caprio figures in it.

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