David M. Lubin - Titanic

True love or true hype?

This is not to say that critics of Titanic are unjustified in finding it a crude, tawdry, manipulative example of cinematic art. There are, indeed, sound aesthetic reasons for considering the film closer in kinship and kitsch to Ship of Fools, The Poseidon Adventure and even The Love Boat than to Battleship Potempkin. But, still, the critical backlash against Titanic in some of the popular and trade press was so excessive that one can only wonder if the bombardment against Camerons ship of dreams wasnt really aimed at a larger target than the particular film in question.

Leading the onslaught was the influential senior film reviewer for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turan, who availed himself of every opportunity to pepper Titanic with grapeshot from the moment of its US premire in late December 1997 to its film-industry apotheosis the following March when at the Academy Awards ceremony it tied the illustrious record set in 1959 by Ben-Hur for the most Oscars (11) ever

The enemy here appears to be contemporary popular taste, mass culture, the McDonaldization of sensibility with regard to hamburgers and blockbusters alike. Not that Turan assigns the blame for this degradation of standards to the masses themselves, but rather to the culture industry that has seduced or otherwise commandeered their attention: Titanics ability to attract a crowd, he continues, shows how desperate the mainstream audience alienated by studio reliance on the kind of mindless violence that can be counted on to sell overseas has become for anything even resembling old-fashioned entertainment. Deadened by exposure to nonstop trash audiences have been sadly eager to embrace a film that, putting the best face on it, is a witless counterfeit of Hollywoods Golden Age, a compendium of clichs that add up to a reasonable facsimile of a film.

Film studies professor Jos Arroyo concurs not only with Turans assessment of Titanics flaws but his conviction that these flaws are endemic to the current state of market-driven film-making: It is because of its lack of story-telling skills and its execrable character delineation that Titanic is emblematic of contemporary Hollywood action / spectacle it is also because of this that it is not a good film.

The Newsweek piece drew upon a variety of media producers and pundits to suggest that the movie was tapping into widespread public desires to move beyond, in Camille Paglias words, shallow postmodernist irony and cynicism toward a cynicism-free product that celebrates themes of selflessness, self-sacrifice and cross-class bonding. Feminist author Mary Pipher (Reviving Orphelia) contended that the movie was really about [Jack] helping [Rose] become an authentic whole person, while 29-year-old male Japanese magazine editor Naoshi Kayashima valued it as an examination of male cowardice and courage (a movie about how men choose their endings), and 63-year-old theatre director Andr Gregory explained that, for him, the movie was really about that old woman. I was moved that she could fight her way out of a life that was imposed on her by her family, and by society.

The thrust of the Newsweek coverage was to designate Titanic as a womens film with crossover appeal to men who want more from a movie than simply colossal effects and brutal physical action. Yet despite Newsweeks acknowledgment of the films emotional appeal to male as well as female filmgoers, it characterized Titanics typical viewer particularly its repeat viewer as a female under the age of 25. Polls cited by the article found that 60 per cent of