Silver Anniversary Drivel On...Titanic

All these years later the hubris still astounds me, that James Cameron not only made the most expensive movie of all time but that he made the most expensive movie of all time about the Titanic, the go-to metaphor for hubris. You’re just asking for it, at that point, and though it can be hard to remember given what happened, for a while it appeared that Cameron would be his own story’s J. Robert Ismay. The release date was pushed three times as Cameron struggled to cut and complete the eventual three hour and fourteen-minute film while the trades pulsed with stories of the production’s disasters. The budget swelled. Kate Winslet nearly drowned. While filming in Nova Scotia, an aggrieved party took his/her displeasure to the extreme by poisoning the crew’s clam chowder with PCP. Cameron never said it wasn’t about Titanic, it was Titanic, in the vein of Frances Ford Coppola talking about “Apocalypse Now” and Vietnam but I’m sure he must have thought it. And yet, Cameron ultimately succeeded not only by transforming the most expensive movie of all time into the most profitable movie of all time but in winning the Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture along the way, monoculture’s last great hurrah. 

How did he do it? He made a good movie, of course, obviously, and he made a good movie despite the backlash always destined to accompany such an overwhelming success, the maddening ubiquity of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” the coded language of its box office success being attributed entirely to young girls, and the more recent preening punctiliousness about whether there was enough room for Jack to fit on the board with Rose at the end. Can I ask you a favor, reader, right up front? Is it ok if I don’t talk about the board? I am sick of talking about the board. There’s a scene in the movie when Old Rose is shown a CGI rendering of the sinking of the Titanic by a character who gets a little too giddy over the computer graphics. “Thank you for that fine forensic analysis,” Old Rose says, “of course, the experience of it was somewhat different.” If you want to talk about the board, if scientific nitpicking is how you prefer to consider works of art, fine, talk about it, but my experience of the movie was somewhat different.

Cameron has said he essentially wanted to make a movie of the Titanic simply, in a manner of speaking, so he could dive the wreck, which was first found by Robert Ballard in 1986 and planted the narrative seeds in the director’s mind in the first place, and he begins his epic by marrying that footage with a story of fortune hunters descending the 12,000 feet hoping to locate a priceless blue diamond called the Heart of the Ocean thought to be hidden amid the debris. All they find instead is a drawing of a young woman wearing those 56 carats, leading them to 101-year-old Rose Dawson (Gloria Stuart) who proceeds to spill her secrets, even as she keeps the biggest one, of the ship’s sinking and how it intertwines with her arranged marriage to Gilded Age psychopath Cal Hockley (Billy Zane) and a love affair with 3rd-class artist Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) who helps her chart a course to personal freedom.

But if these present-day scenes are a framing device, not to mention a 20th Century Fox-funded dive to the most famous shipwreck in history, they are so much more, not merely a means of setting up the narrative but inducing atmosphere. It’s one to thing know, as so many people cheekily told me 25 years ago, that the boat sinks but it’s another to see the sunken boat, an image tempering every other image to come. In the exuberant sequence of the ocean liner heading out to sea, Cameron and his co-editors Conrad Buff IV and Richard A. Harris cut from the bridge to the turbine room to the boiler room to the bow of the ship and then proffer a special effected shot of the whole ship moving from bow to stern, reveling in this mammoth manmade machine even as the planted memory of seeing it at the bottom of the Atlantic lingers. When Jack punctuates the scene by hollering “I’m the king of the world,” he may as well be speaking on behalf of the masters of the universe. 

Cameron brought the White Star Line’s passenger liner back to life in those moments, as well as those when it goes under, through a combination of model work and motion capture imagery, recording the movement of real people and translating those recordings to computer animation, though the most stunning effect in “Titanic” is in a sense the most practical. Paradoxically conceived to ease some of pricey computer animation, Cameron constructed a 775-foot replica of one side of the ocean liner, built so it could be split into sections and tilt into the water for the sinking scenes and providing an extraordinary verisimilitude no computer-generated image could hope to conjure. Though Cameron is not exactly a visual lyricist, a simple shot of peering over a lifeboat looking at the carbon copy of the slanted ship is like being inside a waking dream, and a crane shot alongside the replicated ocean liner as it nears its final moments first captures the panic from a distance, James Horner’s synthesized choir imbuing the moment with an elegiac reverence, before the camera moves in toward the rail and back aboard the ship, plunging us into the desperate fury. Indeed, Cameron eschews a docudrama approach a la “A Night to Remember” for vintage Hollywood hokum making that fury palpable. A scene in which Jack races to beat the quickly rising water below deck by finding the key that will unlock a closed gate might be a shameless suspense-generating trope, but to use a phrase of the film’s, it counts, epitomized in Winslet’s quietly doleful “Hurry, Jack” as pure guttural dread. 

If in the 100-plus years since its sinking the Titanic has emerged as go-to metaphor for hubris, so, too, has it emerged as a supreme allegory for class. After all, it’s right there in the delineations of the passenger list: 1st, 2nd, 3rd. There are hints of class struggle in Cameron’s version, but these tend toward the two-dimensional, like the glib cut from the steerage party to the business magnates discussing politics in the smoking room, inadvertently embodying the stereotype of the working class as unthinking. Later, during the sinking, Cameron briefly cuts to the steerage band leader crying out for help in the ocean, which comes across unnecessarily cruel, suggesting he and everyone else below decks were destined to die rather than arguing they did not have to die. But then, Cameron has always been less attuned to social strata through notions of wealth than sex, evinced in his gracing the macho 80s with screen warriors like Sarah Connor and (his version of) Ellen Ripley, and his “Titanic” becomes about the liberation of Rose.

One of the most frequent critiques of Cameron’s box office behemoth was the woebegone dialogue, valid if unfortunate because while many of the lines clunk, just as many were unnecessary; subtract the feeble verbiage and “Titanic” would work as a silent movie. You don’t need Cal’s braying about what the Heart of the Ocean signifies because the image alone in conjunction with Rose’s stricken face evoke her role as his possession, just as the way Jack eventually draws her in the nude wearing only the blue diamond suggests her resistance, the drawing scene itself casting Rose as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, emblematically triggering the sinking as much as the iceberg. Jack’s refusing to let go of Rose’s hand when she falls off the stern in their introductory scene connects to when she’s forced to let his hand go in the freezing north Atlantic, putting a dramatic point on how even as he helps free her, she ultimately must rescue herself. In the movie’s the most thrilling sequence (that I once broke down in a mere 122 screen shots), in fact, Rose rescues Jack rather than vice-versa, punching the patriarchy squarely in the face along the way (“Listen!” she screams, one word that is the movie’s best because it summarizes someone who’s never been heard), and grabbing the axe in the most thrilling crossing the threshold of the hero’s journey I can recall, showing both her determination and desperation, someone who is growing up before our very eyes and scared to death, not a still image like a cinematic painting but a moving picture, one epitomizing the physicality of Winslet’s performance, doing everything DiCaprio is doing but in a dress and heels. 

“Titanic” is Rose’s movie, and by extension Winslet’s movie too, but it’s also the movie that made DiCaprio a full-fledged star. That by some accounts he didn’t really want to do the movie, and didn’t really enjoy the experience of making the movie, is wicked irony because more than most of his performances, he feels less mannered and more at ease, his most Movie Star performance (which I have written about before). But if “Titanic” also belongs to Leo, it also belongs to Kate and Leo, less a cute sobriquet than a full-blown phenomenon, an emblem for true and timeless love, evinced in how they – I mean, it – gets quoted in Richard Curtis’s “Love Actually” like a lodestar. What is it about Kate and Leo that makes, nay, makes me, get all googly-eyed every time I see them together at awards shows smiling and laughing? I think it’s because their romance in “Titanic” was consciously written and performed as a youthful one, giggly, and goofy. When Jack teaches Rose to spit, or when they are dancing below deck, or evading Cal’s haughty valet (David Warner) and virtually falling into one another with laughter, it’s an astonishing expression not just of the first flush of infatuation but a kind of innocence that can only exist at that age, and that takes on a greater scope given the backdrop, as something found and then lost, neatly captured by Cameron in the early moment when old Rose closes her eyes and for a just an instant we see Jack, before we even know who he is, the golden hues of the past a jarring contrast to the cold blue of the present.

This youthful sensation caused some describe “Titanic” as Romeo & Juliet on a boat; that’s how Cameron first pitched his epic to 20th Century Fox. But that has never felt right to me. There are tragic elements to “Titanic,” obviously, it’s the Titanic, but Cameron’s film is less a classical tragedy in the vein of Shakespeare’s than an emotional melodrama. That word, melodrama, somewhere along the line became a dirty one in a movie industry that became obsessed with authenticity and grittiness, but Cameron, bless his heart, leans right into it, heightening every emotion and sensation, which is why even Zane’s performance, running on a different RPM than everyone else’s, like he should be accompanied by a theatre organ, fits. And it’s why “Titanic” craved such a profound, lasting effect on so many, including me, because it brilliantly raises its emotions by reducing them to their most elemental level. You see it clear as day in the movie’s most famous scene, when Rose finds Jack at the bow and starts to say something and he quiets her, almost a cosmic muffling of the bad dialogue, brings her up onto the railing, and they fly. In this moment, he sings her a bit of Come Josephine in My Flying Machine, because it was a popular tune of the era though it also makes me think of Roger Ebert’s line about movies as machines for generating empathy and how Cameron’s movie is like a machine for generating emotion, one that a quarter-century later still hits the moon.

Is Brad Pitt a Titanic Truther?

The Golden Globes, a cocktail party hosted by fawning junketeers, are an iffy barometer of their more formal non-counterparts, the Academy Awards, and so I hesitate to draw too much from a result of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association naming Brad Pitt Best Supporting Actor for “Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.” But still. If this next month is just a predictable, inexorable march to Pitt’s first Oscar (not to mention Laura Dern’s, who earned the Globe for Best Supporting Actress), I’m here for it. I did not do a Favorite Performances of 2019 list this year but Pitt would have been near the top, maybe at the top, giving a supremely, innately physical performance as Cliff Booth, befitting the character’s stunt man nature, evincing this almost preternatural ease in his body, going from cool swagger to sixty in the blink of an eye. Pitt’s past due for his Academy Award and I think it’s a fine time for it to finally be his Time.

But wait! What was that Mr. Pitt said in his Globes acceptance speech? Let’s check the tape. “I also have to thank my partner in crime, LDC.” (We’re calling Leo ‘LDC’ now?) “He’s an all-star. He’s a gent and I wouldn’t be here without you, man. I thank you. Still, I would have shared the raft.” This, as astute Internet users quickly pointed out, was a reference to the former Box Office Champion of the World, “Titanic” (1997), where Leo – er, LDC’s – character perishes in the icy North Atlantic when he deduces, his mind perhaps clouded by said icy water, that there was not enough room on the door-as-makeshift-raft for both he and Kate Winslet’s Rose.

This, of course, is the Internet’s foremost cinematic conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy theory  prominently flouted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, an astrophysicist who spends significant time in his areas of expertise combating so many tinfoil hat wearers, the kind of people who prefer elevating conspiracy theories simply because it makes them feel smarter than so many would-be sheeple. And that’s precisely why deGrasse Tyson peddling “Titanic” Truther flimflam has always perturbed me so much. Like, say, an astrologist telling an astrophysicist he just doesn’t get it, we cinephiles are forced to endure deGrasse Tyson ignoring aesthetics in the name of artistic truth to cherry pick scientific inaccuracies to ensure we all know he’s smarter than us. Bo-ring. And so I wondered, does this mean Brad Pitt is a “Titanic” Truther too? Will I have to root for Joe Pesci?

I don’t think so. Pitt’s line and Leo’s giggly reaction suggested something less than smirking superciliousness and more like a simple inside joke between co-stars. And besides, if Pitt’s Cliff Booth and Leo’s Rick Dalton had, for some far-fetched reason, wound up stranded in the icy North Atlantic I have no doubt they would have staked out that makeshift raft for themselves, while taking swigs from the margarita pitcher they had managed to pack while abandoning ship, and sunk straight to the bottom, whining about steerage scum the whole way down, just going to show once and for all that the scientific principle of buoyancy is no match for overbearing male wiseasses.

Dissecting My Favorite Sequence from Titanic

We meet 17 year old Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) on April 10, 1912 as she steps down from her Renault, though her face remains concealed beneath that purple wide-brimmed hat, and as she does, director James Cameron’s camera swoops down from above, closing in on her as she looks up, toward the colossal British passenger liner she is about to aboard, her face finally revealed. And her face looks less impressed than indignant, from teenage brattiness, I suppose, but also because to board this ship is to be taken back to America to be married off to possessive, snooty steel tycoon Cal (Billy Zane) not out of anything remotely resembling love, of course, but social obligation. To board is to relinquish control of her own life, which an on-the-nose voiceover makes clear moments later, but which Winslet’s expression conveys all on its own. She doesn’t know the damn thing is about to sink, but she still knows she is about to go under.  

It deliberately mirrors a shot near the end of the film, almost three hours later, when Rose, having been rescued from the icy north Atlantic after the Titanic has sunk, is aboard the Carpathia as it enters New York Harbor. This time, Cameron does not conceal her face. It is right there, naked, no longer beholden to the status quo. The camera gazes down on her as she gazes up at the Statue of Liberty, and it is quite clear simply from the image itself how much she has changed. Gone are the fancy clothes, makeup and haughtily dissatisfied countenance and in its place is something like a laid-bare expression, standing in the rain in the midst of a baptism. Gone is Rose DeWitt Bukater, bride; here is Rose Dawson, rocket queen.

Of course, the question becomes: how did she get from there to here? She meets Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), yes, a young American artist, and the boat sinks, of course, as it is fated to, and she escapes, though Jack does not. But there is so much more, bound up in both the boy and the boat, and while Jack helps her learn how to live, she has to make the decisions for herself, she has to press forward, keep moving, not let herself be caught with what she does not want. This is never brought home better than in the movie’s most pivotal scene, which is evinced with James Cameron’s fluid camera, underscoring the necessity of her forward movement. Aside from selected scenes of “Last of the Mohicans”, it might be my favorite cinematic sequence of the thousands upon thousands I have seen, which I saw for the first time twenty years ago tomorrow because “Titanic” was released twenty years ago today, and which I will now break down virtually shot by shot. There are a whopping 122 screen shots in this post and we cannot stress how much we do not apologize. I made this as much for me as you. 

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For all intents and purposes, the sequence in question begins here, as Rose waits for a lifeboat after her snooty, overprotective fiancé has seen to it that Jack is separated from his future bride by framing the young artist for theft and having him locked far below deck in the office of the Master-at-Arms. Being stupid, however, in addition to iniquitious, Cal has said something giving away the whole game.

And as Rose realizes this, a signal flare is shot off to her left, illuminating her face, a luminous visual underlining of the A Ha! moment. But of course, the light has not just gone for Jack; the light has gone on for her whole life.

Rose’s mother (Frances Fisher) then summons her daughter toward the lifeboat.

And as the camera cuts back to Rose looking back toward her mother, Winslet invests this moment with the weight of someone on the verge of re-altering her entire life, of saying goodbye to everything and everyone she has known, to see what she can do, to test the limits and break through. Rose DeWitt Bukater was letting it go years before Queen Elsa. These kids today, man, these kids don’t even know.

And as Cal expectedly commands her to climb aboard, as if she’s his pretty little marionette, she turns her self-actualizing gaze on him.

That self-actualization is met by Rose’s mother re-commanding her daughter to get into the boat, like she still thinks her daughter is merely throwing a temper tantrum rather than about to officially declare her independence.

Rose says goodbye. And I like how Winslet takes a beat to sort of size up Fisher as she says it, like she’s snapping a mental picture before moving on, and also says it with this sort of proper, if you will, cadence, like she is asking to be released from the dinner table.

Cameron frames Rose turning to go so that she is directly in the line of vision of mom.

And while Cal chases her down, and she spits in his face, a nifty callback to an earlier moment she shared with Jack, and Cal is too stunned to follow, it is this shot, the lifeboat lowering as Rose’s mother ineffectually grabs hold of the ship railing as she descends that brings home what’s up. Here Fisher lets her character’s prim facade disintegrate, turning that lowering of the lifeboat into something like her own burial.

Ever mindful of the full scope of the situation, Cameron then cuts to a shot of Jack down below, looking up through a porthole that is now underwater.

And then cuts to water beginning to fill the lower decks, conveying that Rose is now on a clock.

Cameron’s almost rhythmic quality throughout the ensuing sequence is on display instantly, with a static shot of the hallway as that passenger in the left of the frame moves to the right...

...and disappears from view as Rose emerges from the right.

Then she moves forward, practically lunging into the frame, the low camera angle giving her the scope of the heroine she very much is, frantically calling for Mr. Andrews (Victor Garber), the shipbuilder, the one who might know where to find Jack.

Here we see Mr. Andrews checking rooms to make sure everyone is evacuated, though Cameron conspicuously leaves that big chunk of frame open...

...so that Rose can hustle right into it...

...and then rush toward him...

...and right up to him, filling the frame with her determined panic.

Andrews, however, not certain this is the best course of action considering the ship’s precarious state, tries to talk her down.

But she expresses her intent to forge on with or without his help, and while the camera has to look down since it is over the shoulder of Andrews, it doubles as a conscious flip from a lower angle to a higher angle, diminishing just a bit that heroism of the moment before, also conveyed in how Winslet sort of lets her voice droop and looks down and away from her eyes. There is a push and pull all throughout this scene. She is not simply furnished the status of action hero; she carves that distinction out for herself in spite of her fear.

Andrews tells her where to find Jack, and as he does, Cameron circles them with the camera, illustrating the enveloping confusion of Andrews giving a quick, detailed explanation of where to go...

...a confusion that Winslet plays (though you cannot completely tell from this screenshot) with a series of blinks and grimaces like a math-illiterate trying to follow an algebra equation on the blackboard.

Cameron then ups the urgency of Rose’s already urgent quest by cutting back to Jack where he watches as the water begins flooding the room.

Back to Rose, pushing her way past passengers, but always politely saying “Excuse me” or “Pardon me” as she does. However...

...that politeness, so instilled in a 17 year old socialite, gets tested to the extreme when she asks the lift operator to take her down to the crew quarters and the lift operator declines her request.

Winslet has Rose first look into the lift, like it’s the promised land, so close, so far away, and also like she’s debating whether to ask again nicely...

...or tell this bloke what’s what...

...at which point Rose, who has been forced all her life to put on airs, finally, once and for all, lets those airs go scattering in the wind, bellowing “I’m through being polite goddamit!” (both italics are necessary because Winslet emphasizes both words)...

...and shoves him into the lift...

...and then points toward the lever as she commands him to take her where she wants to go, which is not the upper crust belittling the help but the bold taking the reigns from the meek.

Cameron follows the lift operator over to the lever in one motion sickness kind of jerk of the camera.

In the elevator on the way into the ship’s innards, Cameron lets the camera linger on Rose’s face, darkened by eerie shadows thrown by the lift, where her preceding ferocity has morphed into something more like fright, another of the infinite swings of the emotional pendelum throughout this sequence.

An overhead shot shows the descent...

...and catches the turn from fear to terror when water rushes in.

Not that Rose is about to tuck tail and run. She goes right for that gate, throwing it open.

And tromps into the water of a flooded deck.

The lift operator, just another cowardly dude, announces his intention to flee.

And as he sends the elevator back up, Rose turns to watch-

-as Cameron cuts closer to Rose’s face, watching the lift depart, realizing she is on her own, that flip again from all-in resiliency to oh-my-god-what-have-I-done.

And as she presses on, Cameron makes sure to catch sight of the lift in the background moving up and away, as if Rose is turning her back on safety.

She looks up-

-spies the crew passage entrance that Andrews cited (she says this aloud to herself, which is not unnecessary verbal reinforcement of the visual but someone out of her element talking herself through this)-

-and forges ahead.

Reminding us of the clock that Rose is very much on, Cameron then returns to Jack...

...who is now forced to climb onto a desk, signaling that the water is swiftly rising.

But here comes Rose! Picking up a floating drawer that is in her way and hurling that shit to the side!

She wades down the hall...

...and into another hall, looking right, looking left...

...at which point Cameron jump cuts to close-up of Rose...

...and then switches to her point-of-view, which he does a couple times in this sequence, and which I love because each time it stresses the foreboding vastness of the situation...

...and then employs a whip pan to provide an acute evocation of her disorientation as she spins around to look the other way.

Knowing she is disoriented, knowing she does not know exactly where Jack is, she just shouts his name.

And then keeps moving and shouting, hoping the sound of her voice will carry to him.

But as she does, the lights flicker and dim...

...and then come back up...

At which point, Jack finally hears her and shouts back.

As he does, Cameron smash cuts to Rose-

-and then does a jump cut to close-up of Rose as she pivots back around toward the sound of his voice, all these quick cuts eliciting his palpable sensation of how every single second of this sequence is lived under extraordinary pressure.

She calls his name again.

He bangs his handcuffs against the pipe to give her an audio beacon.

She rushes forward.

Into the room, finally, where Jack waits.

And that look on Leo’s face, man, is a flash of such innocence in the midst of such terror that it just scorches you.

So he shows her the situation with the handcuffs...

...and she goes looking for the key.

But as she does, Cameron cuts to an exterior shot of the ship, its bow going under. Shit was already real, but its getting realer still.

No key, says Rose.

So Jack tells her to go find some help.

And these two expressions...O.M.G. Again, if half this sequence she is sort of channeling Jeanette Goldstein in “Aliens”, the other half she is a very much a 17 year old girl who just ditched her mom in the mall on purpose and now isn’t so sure it was the best idea.

But fuck that. Right back to Jeanette Goldstein, as she shoves this chair aside blocking her path to Rose, which is sort of this callback to Cal shoving aside the table as he comes at her violently in an earlier scene.

And leans into this kiss, which is the best kiss in the movie, because it’s this kiss wrapped up in this passionate frenzy born of desperation, this Not A Last Kiss but, like, maybe A Last Kiss?

Rose wades back out the door.

As she disappears into the hall, Cameron cuts back to Jack, this nice wide angle where he is stranded, entirely dependent on Rose. He says: “I’ll just wait here!” It’s a line I remember getting some guff at the time, particularly from older, more harumph-y critics, which I find ironic, because when I was younger I thought the line was a little stupid but, like a lot of seemingly stupid lines, as I have aged and been made to reckon that much more with mortality, I now hear this line and wish that were I in a similar situation that I might manage to mirror Jack Dawson’s self-efficacy.

In the hall, lights have gone out but still Rose presses on.

And presses right into the kind of close-up that lets you know what she is looking at before the camera has a chance to show you...

...which it does in the next shot.

So she climbs up the stairs to her right instead...

...and into a dry hallway where Cameron again escalates the drama by returning to her point-of-view.

Looking down one hallway.

Turning rapidly to look down another one, and another one, and another one.

Cameron finally cuts back to her as she shouts for help.

And as she does, this random passenger appears over her shoulder in the background, as lost as she is.

She turns and moves toward him...

...and he moves toward her, though with a faraway look in his eye that suggests he barely registers her presence.

Sure enough, he blows right past her and disappears from view.

In the reverse shot, she watches, helplessly.

Which Cameron underlines by cutting to a wider shot to illustrate the emptiness of her surroundings.

That emptiness turns scary when he cuts to another shot behind her, like something ominous is creeping up, which, in a way, it is.

The lights flicker and dim again, as Cameron cuts to a close-up as a means to let us feel the panic that Winslet lets fill her face.

And that panic then seems to take the form of incredible, indelible moan that belches forth from the ship as darkness ensconces her, a moment I will never forget experiencing for that first time inside the glorious, old school wraparound theater, which seemed to creak itself, like we were living inside the movie, which is what it felt like to me.

The lights comes back up,

She hears something and manages to emit a “Hello?”

Sure enough, a crew member appears. But, look at his face. That’s a man who has gone around the bend...

...and even as Rose tries to explain the situation...

...he just grabs hold of her hand and drags her forward, not listening to a word she’s saying.

She pleads for him to listen.

He tells her not to panic with, as is usually the way of these things, a look in his eye that betrays all the panic in the world.

And Rose, tired, so tired, of being told how to feel by men and being told where to go by men, tries to impede their progress.

And tries to yank her hand free.

And tries to tell him to just stop yammering, dammit, and “LISTEN!”

He’s not going to obviously, so she rears back...

...and punches him right in the face.

And then she falls back with this expression that a girl might have in 1912 if she’s just straight up physically assualted the patriarchy.

The hell with you, he expectedly says before fleeing on his own. It’s a line good for a laugh, sure, but it’s not accidental that both people Rose encounters who spurn her cries for help, and who is literally has to shove into helping her, are men. This is part of her hero’s journey to independence, evoked in these next shots.

All on her own.

Eyes closed.

Which she then slowly opens to see...well, something.

It’s a fire axe behind In The Case Of Fire Break glass which she does break to grab the blade by its wooden handle.

Life comes at you fast, that’s what the kids meme on Twitter these days, and life never came at anyone faster than it did Rose DeWitt Bukater, which is sort of what this shot embodies, where one minute the dude you don’t want to marry is taking your cigarette and stubbing it out and the next minute you’re grabbing an axe and carrying it through a sinking ship.

And though she returns to Jack, of course, and breaks him free of those handcuffs with the axe even as she swings the axe with her eyes closed, a moment that always seemed less a stretch than an embodiment of Hysterical Strength, the sequence, for me, ends right here. Because this shot reflects both extremes, fear and Jeanette Goldstein in “Aliens”, because no one is one thing, not even in their life-defining moment, and Rose DeWitt Bukater (Dawson) is everything, my hero not just for those times when I first met her and not just for these times when I still need her but for all times, an ineradicable reminder to turn and face the strange.