Originally posted February 23rd, 2023.
A terrible and whimsical fate has befallen my television: it’s blue.
Quite literally, it is blue. Its hex code is #0000FF. It’s so blue I don’t know what to do. I watched The Shining recently, for reasons I might one day disclose, and… well…
Anyway, Titanic is back in theaters! You remember Titanic! It’s that movie about how people are so incapable of accepting tragic endings that they have to get MythBusters involved. Or so it has been demonstrated to me. Nobody likes feeling sad; everybody likes feeling smart. Never occurs to anyone that the disaster upon which the film is based was, in fact, very sad, and for James Cameron to adapt it into a movie where his original characters survive to be like, “Damn, that was wild,” might be in kind of poor taste? Look at me, trying to outsmart the nerds trying to outsmart the movie Titanic. Disgusting.
To avoid that swirling vortex of pedantry, let’s go back to my blue TV. Why would I use it to watch Titanic when in my last post, I called it a real go-to-the-thea’er film movie — perhaps even the go-to-the-thea’er film movie? Because they’re only showing it in 3D, that’s why! That’s three hours and fourteen minutes of my only life in a pair of gross, plastic glasses, and for what? To feel like I’m drowning in the wheelhouse with the Captain? To see Propeller Guy fly directly into my face? Fifteen Hundred People Die and It Actually Happened: Now in 3D!
So I have a blue TV, and I watched Titanic on it. I watched the 2012 digitally remastered edition of Titanic on Blu-Ray on my blue TV, and before you ask I am NOT going to watch James Cameron’s blue duology (blueology) no matter how many people insist that it’s good now. I could’ve watched Titanic on two DVDs the way we as a society used to have to watch it on two VHS tapes, but that would not have mimicked the theater experience, and I was already pushing the immersion with the whole blue thing and also the whole staying at home and not watching it in a theater at all thing.
You know Titanic! Kate Winslet is Rose, Leonardo DiCaprio is Jack. Rose is from a wealthy family, and Jack is a starving artist, and also on this viewing they’re both blue.
Rose has a garbage fiancé named Cal, (played by Billy Zane, who is having the time of his fucking life) but she falls in love with Jack when they meet aboard the RMS Titanic in 1912. And then the craziest thing happens.
Cue opening titles.
No, no, no, blue opening titles.
It’s been 84 years, and a group of irreverent treasure hunters led by Brock Lovett (Bill Paxton) and Lewis Bodine (Lewis Abernathy) is searching for the BLUE (!!!) diamond necklace Cal gave Rose as an engagement present during the voyage. They dive to the wreck, recover a safe from Cal’s stateroom, and do not find the blue diamond inside it. But they do find a naked drawing of Rose wearing the blue diamond. This makes international news, and 101-year-old Rose sees the broadcast, contacts Brock, and informs him that she’s the subject of the drawing. He brings her aboard his research vessel, and she tells them about her experiences on Titanic in such excruciating detail that they cease to care about the diamond out of pure shame. Then she drops the necklace, which she’s had the entire time, into the ocean, where it remains until Britney’s boyfriend goes down and gets it for her.
I’ve seen this movie a lot of times in my life because I’m a human being living on the planet Earth, but not quite enough times that I never notice anything new. I’m not even talking about the blue thing right now. Like Brock Lovett and his pals, I went into this watch feeling silly, (only to be emotionally pistol-whipped with the reminder that this is Fifteen Hundred People Die and It Actually Happened: The Movie) and there’s a lot in the first half with which you can have a silly good time. For example, in stateroom B-52, DiCaprio as Jack begins his sketch of Rose with a hilariously confident straight, dark, vertical line that appears nowhere on the subject nor in the finished product, before James Cameron splices in the mirrored footage of his own hand (he’s normal, but Leo is a righty) drawing the portrait with, by contrast, the most delicate pencil strokes I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Another example: if you pay attention while Brock is opening Cal’s safe, you can see Lewis pop open a bottle of champagne and pour it… over himself? And not long after, while trying to convince Brock that Rose, who was presumed dead in the sinking, can’t be who she says she is, this same fool delivers what should be the most memed line in the film — “Like that Russian babe, Anesthesia!” I even had some laughs post-iceberg, such as when Jack complains, “Now what?” when Lovejoy searches his jacket for the diamond, and when Cal accidentally shoots a piece of decorative wood off the Grand Staircase banister, runs down the stairs, and immediately slips on it.
Another thing that delighted me is how much weirder some of James Cameron’s original characters’ names are than those of the historical figures they interact with. Aboard a lifeboat, the Unsinkable Molly Brown (Kathy Bates!) comforts Rose’s mother Ruth DeWitt-Bukater over the presumed loss of her daughter. First Officer William Murdoch is unsuccessfully bribed for lifeboat access with a wad of cash by… fictional cartoon villains Caledon Hockley and SPICER LOVEJOY. A regular (albeit blue) human man in this film is running around the doomed ship Titanic with the name Spicer Lovejoy, and no one comments on it, nor has any discussion of the movie I’ve ever read. For shame.
The single thing I was most intrigued to see through this impenetrable blue lens was the pale pink wool coat Rose dons after the ship hits the iceberg and Jack is arrested. You can see it best in the scene where shipbuilder Thomas Andrews (played by my boy Victor Garber, owner of the roundest face in Hollywood) confides in her that the ship will sink, and then she wears it until about halfway through her rescue mission when she sadly ditches it so she can maneuver through the flooded E deck more easily. SO. How blue is it?
The single thing I was most excited to hear, as is true on every viewing, is what I’ve lazily dubbed the ethereal apocalypse choir. They pop in a few times during the sinking to emphasize how devastating the whole affair is, most notably during the Grand Staircase dome implosion. And that sounded the same! Not affected by my blue TV. Good to know!
(…Okay, I’m so sorry, I know it has nothing to do with how the movie looks, blue or otherwise, but I love James Horner’s score. I love it so much. Every word of those sentences links to a different piece, so have fun. I love it so much that I am prone to two-week bouts of insanity where I listen to nothing else. You’re lucky my TV is blue; otherwise, I’d have no excuse not to make the article all about this. When I heard the news of Horner’s passing in 2015 I’m pretty sure I just went to bed. Like, for the night. It was probably around 5:00 P.M.)
Even if it were short enough to fit on one VHS tape, Titanic would still really kind of be two movies glued together; thus over the years I’ve noticed myself defaulting to one of two viewing experiences: the “where the fuck is the iceberg?” kind, and the “oh god not the fucking iceberg” kind. As far as I can tell, there is no way to determine which I will get, and this watch was very much of the “oh god not the fucking iceberg” sort. I cannot say for sure whether the blue tint had anything to do with this, but I was really vibing with the love story. This is a double-edged sword — it makes the pre-iceberg film more engaging, and makes Jack’s death more tragic, but it also makes Jack’s death more tragic. I did not want this blue motherfucker to succumb to hypothermia, and I’m as unimpressed with the current state of Leonardo DiCaprio as anyone.
Let’s talk about what I went through with that immediate post-sinking scene for a moment. This is the open ocean at 2:00 in the morning — even on a functioning screen, it’s a blue stretch of a film, and I had to watch Jack slowly die on top of that.
While not as hotly debated as Jack’s capacity for survival, there is some disagreement over whether Rose is dying or dreaming in the final scene. She goes to sleep and we pan down to the shipwreck, which morphs back to its former glory, inhabited by all the characters, historical and fictional, that we saw die (or didn’t see die, but I totally concur that no one needed this, even though it stretches the ethereal apocalypse choir for a few more measures) at the ages of their passing. This area of the ship originally reserved for first class passengers is now open to everyone, and we get to see the 1% chatting amiably with Jack’s friends Fabrizio and Tommy. It’s like they say — all are equal in death, and all are blue on my TV. Rose enters, not at the age she died, (or will die) and walks up the Grand Staircase to kiss Jack. Everyone applauds, pan up to the dome, fade to white—
And at this point I began to wonder: did James Cameron cause this, somehow? Did he turn my TV blue in an attempt to brainwash me into giving Avatar another shot? Because I’m not giving Avatar another shot. I had to take Dramamine to survive the Disney World ride. But this was my first “oh god not the fucking iceberg” viewing experience since maybe the eighth grade, which means Cameron got me emotionally! I got got by the most famous love story of the 1990s, in 2023, at the age of old! And all he had to do was make it look like the Twilight baseball scene!
I did remove my tinfoil hat long enough to look up why my TV actually might have turned blue. It’s an LG from before 2019; therefore the LED backlight is probably defective. “Here’s how to fix it!” say some of these articles, helpfully. “No need to watch Titanic on a blue TV!” Like those who try to convince Cameron to go on record saying Jack could’ve survived, they don’t get it. As if that isn’t the entire point. Jack has to freeze to death, and I have to ruin my fucking eyes. The alternative just isn’t a very engaging story.
And I would say conclusively that yes, Titanic does hold up, even if it’s blue, or in 3D, or you have to stop in the middle to swap VHS tapes, because it’s a really good movie that fucking rules.
