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In our current era, the big screen has ceded the stage to the small screen, a point brought home with great clarity on a recent flight when I noticed a woman one row ahead me was watching “Titanic” on her seatback screen. More than that, though, occasionally, she would take a picture with her phone of “Titanic” on her seatback screen. It was awe-inspiring. It would be like taking a picture of Mount Everest through the spotting scope. Then again, there is something to be said for watching “Titanic” on a 10-inch screen rather than a 52x20 one, at least, if you are watching it over someone’s shoulder. After all, what has been the preeminent the critique of “Titanic” lo these 29 years? The dialogue, of course, the clunky, sappy, wretched dialogue. And fair enough. Even I, staunch “Titanic” defender and lover, will cede that point. Yet, watching it sans dialogue only put into perspective the visual nature of James Cameron’s storytelling, the expert composition of Cameron and his co-editors Conrad Buff IV and Richard A. Harris, eliciting emotion and conveying information in equal measure. When I broke down my favorite scene some years ago shot-by-shot, I came away thinking that with some tailoring and tweaking, Cameron might have made “Titanic” as a silent movie, and after watching it over someone’s shoulder on a plane, I believe it even more. I mean, Billy Zane was acting like he was in a silent movie anyway.
Still. The dialogue. There is no scene as poorly written as the one in which Rose and Jack first meet at the back of the ship where she is threatening to jump. The verbiage there is so woebegone and wooden that you can virtually see Winslet and DiCaprio stiffening in real time, trying to find ways to say it, not quite being able to. As fate would have it, however, while watching over the other passenger’s shoulder, I was simultaneously listening on my headphones to Bruce Springsteen’s 1993 MTV Plugged album and almost the instant that scene started, so did The Boss’s “If I Should Fall Behind.” It wasn’t Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” while watching “The Wizard of Oz,” or anything, an eerie synchronization of the events onscreen, but the words did echo the visual cues that Cameron is setting up for later. Indeed, just as the visual cues foreshadow later events, so does Springsteen’s key observation – “If as we’re walking a hand should slip free / I’ll wait for you / And should I fall behind / wait for me” – eerily foreshadow “Titanic’s” heartrending conclusion. I realized this because due to a lot of taxiing, a lot of sitting on the tarmac, and a lot of the pilot trying to line up the door with the jet bridge, our flight literally took the 3 hours and 15 minutes of James Cameron’s movie. As I finally deplaned, I was already wondering what “Avatar” might look like scored to “Human Touch.”
