James Cameron’s Titanic was released in 1997—twelve years after the wreck had been found in the icy north Atlantic. By 2013, there had been enough empirical study on how the ship actually broke apart and went down that we could look back at the depiction in Cameron’s film as at least in part erroneous. Interestingly, Cameron himself sponsored and was actively involved with the studies that would effectively “semi-fictionalize” his own depiction. Rather than trying to protect his depiction by getting the studies to confirm what his best guess had been at the time of filming, Cameron engaged in a determined effort to get to a definitive answer as to what really happened. This in turn lead to some interesting questions.
According to Cameron's documentary in 2012, the back end of Titanic only reached 23 degrees, far less than depicted in this picture (and in the 1997 movie). Source: fxguide.
In any historical piece, the “film world” is not the same as what really happened. The sad truth is that the world of the past is forever lost once it is past. Seeing Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln (2012), I could not but think that the former president must really have been as depicted. However, much of my image of what Lincoln must have been like has come from the myriad of stories. As a child, I had seen his log cabin in Salem, Illinois, and his law office and house in Springfield, and I had watched other portrayals of the man on television. Even as I marveled at Lewis’s depiction of the man, I found the screenplay itself too idealistic. For instance, Lincoln represented large railroads as a lawyer in Illinois, and he overruled his own Secretary of the Interior in agreeing to pay the transcontinental railroads mountain rates for building track on flat land in the West. It is odd, therefore, that in trying to get votes on the anti-slavery amendment, he is depicted in the film as being so concerned that no bribes be paid. In short, Hollywood seems hardpressed to completely expunge the accumulated mythos element even when trying for historical realism.
To take advantage of having access to Titanic’s wreckage before it is completely eaten by bacteria, Cameron did not rest with what had been theorized at the time of his film-shoots. He sponsored additional studies, bringing the experts together and turning that meeting into a documentary in 2012. In doing so, he knowingly risked making his own depiction obsolete, or at least partially flawed. As shown in his documentary, he was more interested in getting as close to what really happened than protecting his depiction. The issue for him was whether to reshoot the ending. Seeing a potential series of such changes as more and more is grasped or theories change, he decided to keep his original ending.
His decision is in line with highlighting the dramatic, even if at the expense of new knowledge. I have in mind the scene in which the back of the ship is standing vertical in the air. The two protagonists “ride” the ship down until it submerges. As of Cameron’s documentary, the studies postulated that the steepest angle was 23 degrees, with the ship splitting in half at that point. The back end sank into the water, turning over as it did so. Of course, this too must be taken as conjecture. There was no video taken at the actual scene, and the eye-witness accounts differ. The frustrating truth is that we will never have a flawless picture of what really happened. This is not to say that progress cannot be made, and Cameron should be applauded for being so determined on this task even though his depiction in the film stood to lose ground. Indeed, after watching the video depiction that Cameron made in his documentary, I view his film differently—at least the now-rather-extreme vertical position of the back end of the ship.
In his documentary, Cameron points to the hubris that when into the ship “that could not sink.” The preoccupation with size got ahead of itself. Put another way, systemic risk was ignored. Similarly, he points out, we did not see the iceberg coming in 2008 as the economy hit an unknown quantity of mortgage-backed derivatives and insurance swaps. Even after that, he goes on, we were headed right for a global-warming “iceberg” with a “rudder” too small to avoid the obstacle in time. Just today, the Huffington Post ran a headline concerning climate change, “Its Happening.” At the end of his documentary, Cameron suggests that too many people holding power are making money in the status quo for a sufficient amount of change (i.e., rudder) to occur before “it hits.” It is as though Titanic’s captain could see the iceberg far out in front yet was too invested in the ship’s course to deviate.
Even in assuming back in 1997 that Cameron captured on film what really happened (I made that assumption), there is hubris. Even the updated graphic in Cameron’s documentary in 2012 should be taken as provisional. As stated above, we will never be able to know what really happened. Whether in what we think we know about a bygone world, building a ship that cannot sink, leaving new financial instruments unregulated, or putting off legislation that would counter global warming, we as a species presume we know more than we do. We naturally get ahead of ourselves, and thus ironically risk our own progress and indeed even our very future as a species.
