Monday 2 April 2012

The Unsinkable Titanic


James Cameron’s 1997 epic Titanic is shortly to be released in 3D to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the unsinkable this month. I saw, and loved, the original when I was a child. I’ve seen it several times since and am not likely to go to the cinema simply for a few wow-me visual afterthoughts.

I dare say a lot of people will go, a new generation who will be coming to it for the first time; coming to the story of Rose and Jack, star and class crossed lovers, playing out their time in the shadow of a greater drama.

The story of the Titanic itself has moved beyond history into mythology. Like all great myths it really stands as a metaphor for the human condition, capable of multiple interpretations, meanings shifting from one generation to the next. In one preview I read of the reissue of the Cameron film the writer said that it was a metaphor for a troubled global economy. Yes, I can just see how the ostentatious luxury of the first class passengers, oblivious to the icy crash to come, would feed happily into the preconceptions of the Occupy shower in London and New York!

The anniversary of the disaster has also occasioned a BBC mini-series scripted by Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, that risible parody of early twentieth century English life, upstairs and downstairs. The first episode was screened the weekend before last. I didn’t watch it but I’m told it’s the usual nobs and naffs tale of first class and steerage, the old tiresome clichés trotted out in a kind of Downton Abbey at Sea style.

The sinking of the real thing took almost three hours, time enough for all sorts of dramas to be played out, memorably caught not just by James Cameron but by earlier movie makers. Even the Nazis had a view. In the 1943 film Titanic they produced a propaganda piece highlighting supposed British profiteering. It’s a story of greed and corruption by the share holders of the White Star line that might very well find a sympathetic echo with the Occupy anarchists. The message at the end is that the death of fifteen hundred people remains unatoned for, “an eternal condemnation of England’s thirst for profit.” Banned in West Germany after the war it promptly became a hit in the Soviet zone!

Class and profiteering are two dimensions of the Titanic story. Another is that of human nobility, the nobility of men who sacrificed their own lives, holding to the principle of ‘women and children first’ when it came to places on the lifeboats. After the sinking the chief indictment against J Bruce Ismay, head of the White Star line, wasn’t profiteering but the fact that he secured a place for himself on one of the limited number of lifeboats. The suspicion of cowardice was to hang over every man who survived the sinking.

Ah, but such chivalric notions may now be as deeply sunk as the Titanic itself. In the recent Costa Concordia sinking some men, even members of the crew, muscled ahead of the women. Writing in the Spectator Melanie McDonagh gives the question a political spin. Which public figure, she asks, would you trust to give up his seat…George Osborne? Ken Livingstone? Richard Dawkins? Personally speaking I really can’t vouch for George but I hope I never sail with either Livingstone or Dawkins!

I suppose the issue here centres on changing notions of equality. Put another way, the woman of 2012 is not the woman of 1912. If women are no longer the ‘weaker sex’ then questions of precedence are as antiquated as chivalry. Actually such considerations are not entirely new. Soon after the sinking one anti-suffragette song contained a chorus extolling boats over votes. Progressive Woman, a Chicago-based feminist journal, took up the point, saying “If you please, the women are beginning to say that they are willing to exchange the chivalry for the right to help run a government that will build safer ships.”

It’s gone now, the Titanic, finally sunk from living memory with the death in 2009 of Millvina Dean, the last survivor. But it, and the stories it tells, the morals to be drawn, is fixed forever in the human imagination, where it really is unsinkable.

24 comments:

  1. Yes, it sank and now you can watch it sink again in 3D.

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  2. "A Dangerous Method" is a good film, have you seen it?

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    1. No, I have not. I'll Google it in a bit.

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    2. Something I need to watch at some point.

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  3. One of my cousins went down with her:

    http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/titanic-victim/john-james-borebank.html

    Clearly, he was familiar with the Birkenhead Drill:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Birkenhead_(1845)

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    1. Calvin, I've just checked the link on your cousin. I'm so sorry to learn that he did not survive.

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  4. I believe that the 1958 Kenneth More film, A Night to Remember, was more faithful to the actual facts.

    I deliberately abstained from watching "Titanic" when I read that it was yet another piece of Hollywood Brit-bashing along the lines of Braveheart and Gallipoli.

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    1. David, I didn't pick up on the Brit-bashing. I haven't seen Gallipoli but I really hated Braveheart. I'm surprised that the Scots did not see through this awful travesty of their history.

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  5. Ana you may enjoy Hardy's Convergence Of The Twain.
    "In a solitude of the sea Deep from human vanity,
    And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.
    Steel chambers, late the pyres
    Of her salamandrine fires,
    Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres."
    Women were never the weaker sex.
    For a great literary exploration of the theme of survivor guilt I bid you look no further than Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim. The hero spends his life trying to redeem a moment of cowardice.

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    1. Richard, yes, that's wonderful! I haven't read Lord Jim but I have it in my Conrad collection. I must get round to it soon.

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  6. For those of you who can't be bothered to see the film, here's a brief precis;

    The ship is officered by arrogant Englishmen. The 1st class cabins are peopled by arrogant English men and women. The ship is crewed by thick, ignorant English working class troglodites. The film depicts the struggle of heroic salt-of-the-earth Americans and Irish types against the arrogant and ignorant English. The ship sinks...the end.

    In other words, it's "Hollywood History" - yet another distortion of the truth to fit the current American liberal-left worldview (yes, I know it was released in 1997....it's still how they think).

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    1. TAT, a brilliant précis! Actually, I think that you will find that most of the first class passengers are American. Anyway, as I say, this is a subject with endless perspectives. :-)

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  7. Ana, as always, a fascinating subject!

    Of course, Cameron's film is what I would call a "Historical Fantasy" - a film produced with meticulous attention to historical accuracy for the sets, props, & costuming, but total fantasy as regards personal relationships. Rose and Jack may get billed as "star crossed lovers" but the Montegues & Capulets were both WEALTHY families! It was just too improbabable (knowing what I do about how stratified AMERICAN society was at that time, much less you Brits) for me to accept a plot that had a wealthy young woman giving up everything to be with a penniless steerage class lout. That being said, I did LOVE those sets! :-)

    Two aspects of the Titanic disaster interest me - the first (due to my passing interest in naval architecture) being the engineering studies. I found an interesting paper that you might enjoy reading (if you can tolerate that it was composed by an undergrad mechanical engineering student and NOT a historian ) from Virgina Tech's Engineering Review: [http://www.writing.eng.vt.edu/uer/bassett.html] In it, Ms. Bassett points out that despite the luxurious appointments, the hull was built with plates and rivets of poor quality steel (too much sulphur) which shattered (instead of bending) when the ship struck the iceberg. She also made some interesting comments about flaws in the ship design.

    A second area of interest to me is considering what effect did it have on the American economic system when so many of its "best and brightest" died at once. I found an interesting site [http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org] which contains VERY complete passenger info. If you hunt through the 1st Class fatalities, you will not only see obvious VIPs like John Astor (and other "blue bloods"), but also a whole collection of financiers, stockbrokers, and Presidential advisors.

    Did loosing so many major players (with their obvious international connections) contribute to the US's reluctance to enter WW1 (that started just 2 years later)?

    Most of their children survived - but what effect did loosing their fathers so prematurely have on their view on the world? Did it contribute to the risky behaviour that caused the collapse of the US financial system just 25 years later?

    Lots of points to ponder - when you compare the 1500 that drowned to the millions that died in France within the next 5 years, the loss of this one ship has had an outsized effect on Western history.

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    1. CB, this is absolutely fascinating. There are dimensions here I simply had not considered. I don't know an awful lot about naval architecture though I do know that some of the much lauded naval warships built at the time were eventually proved inferior to their German counterparts. So far as American entry into is concerned there were two large and influential constituencies that militated against that - the Irish and the Germans.

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    2. *the war. I've lost my edit function!

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  8. @ ColonialBoy: Never use money to measure wealth.

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  9. Hi Ana, I see that you've elicited many comments already on this post, and Calvin, Richard Godwin, Angry Toad, and colonial boy have already written particularly fascinating responses . . .

    In comparison, mine is really quite a minor, wispy pensee, at best . . . but here goes:

    When I was a young New York banker in the early 80s, I used to reflect that the elaborate courtesy and order of precedence I observed every time a lift (aka elevator) arrived on the 44th floor of the skyscraper in which I worked--older women would enter first, followed by younger women, then older men, and at last younger men--would play out very differently if the lift were a life boat. My view at the time was that the underlying commercial ferocity of the milieu was merely cloaked in social rituals because little was, in fact, at stake.

    A generation later, I confess that at least a decade ago I ceased to hesitate before stepping into lifts as soon as physically possible, after I repeatedly experienced the lift door slamming once I had allowed a young woman to enter the lift first--only to have her fail to hold open the door for anybody else--including me, her (very minor) benefactor.

    I realise that your other readers, particularly those cited above, have made far weightier comments about other aspects of your post, but I add one only because it seems to be in harmony with your own reflections and because I recall the old dictum that "Men make laws and women make mores--and mores rule society" as justification for this apparently trivial exercise in "A la recherche du temps perdu" . . .

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    1. Not at all trivial, Richard, a good illustration of the descent of manners!

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    2. "Richard"?

      With all respect to Richard Godwin, I am suddenly reminded of one of my favourite scenes in Shakespeare: Act I, Scene II of RICHARD III, from which I offer this slightly amended excerpt:

      LADY ANA

      Where is he?

      RICHARD

      Here.

      She spitteth at him

      Why dost thou spit at me?

      LADY ANA

      Would it were mortal poison, for thy sake!

      RICHARD

      Never came poison from so sweet a place.

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    3. Oops, I crave your pardon, my good lord. :-)

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  10. Ana, just as a late addendum, I just ran across this interesting online article at The NewYorker:

    newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/16/120416fa_fact_mendelsohn

    It includes many interesting details I hadn't seen before, especially descriptions of notable books and films about the disaster.

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    1. CB, thanks. My apologies for missing this comment. I don't think I got an email alert.

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  11. Thanks, CB. I picked up all sorts of fascinating snippets of information while researching this article. For example, the body of Jacob Astor was found with over $3000 soggy dollars in his pockets. That would be the equivalent of, oh, about $60000 in today’s values. Just imagine carrying that amount around on your person. I know he died in the age before plastic but even so.

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