What to Think About Titanic: A Dialogue
When we wrote about Citizen Kane, I had a whole thing about how you only get so many times to view a great work of art for the first time. And as you get older there are fewer and fewer great works out there unwatched.
Does Titanic fall in that category? One of the great films of all time? That seems like a personal decision. Certainly by the box office, yes. But it got absolutely trounced by James Cameron’s followup epic Avatar, a movie everyone saw six times in the theater and ignored for the rest of time. Titanic was a gigantic movie when I was ten years old, and there was Leonardo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet and that song, and I never saw it.
But oh boy, did my spouse see it. It was very important to her, and her early awareness of sex and death. Does that make it good? Let’s discuss!
WTTAA: You introduced this movie with a very serious “state of the relationship” request, where you had to stop me in my work, and make eye contact, and tell me that you had A VERY SERIOUS MARITAL REQUEST, and it was that we watch Titanic together. And for the benefit of our readers, I’m not joking at all, it was a very serious request and I treated it with the seriousness it merited, and we watched the movie together as soon as we could.
But I think there was somewhat of a misunderstanding. You clearly thought that I was not into Titanic because it was a girls’ movie, and as we know during more or less that time, I was growing up in this very Catholic, all-boys-school, misogynist environment. But Titanic actually came out just before that period of my life began, so that’s really not all of it.
SPOUSE: You felt you didn’t need to see it, which I attribute in part to a certain cultural environment which disowned it to a great degree after it won all the Oscars.
Probably some of that. I mean, I haven’t seen Crash either, or The Artist, or Green Book. And we both regret seeing The King’s Speech. Best Picture Winners are often pretty basic. Proud to say I understood that at eleven years old.
Titanic was so massive that it sort of guaranteed its own backlash (though I’d bet that Avatar wouldn’t have shattered all those box office records had Titanic not come first - the huge anticipation for whatever James Cameron did next, especially because it came so many years later, seems to me at least partly a referendum on the impact of Titanic). And for what it’s worth, I honestly have no desire to watch Avatar ever again; it came and went and made no impact on me personally.
Titanic, however, was a foundational text of my figuring out what adulthood was going to look like. But even I eventually disowned it when it became uncool to like it. And yes, a lot of that had to do with it getting branded as a girl movie. In 21st-century parlance, liking Titanic was for basic bitches. Boy am I glad to report that that is incorrect! And boy would I like to see that term get retired.
The reason for the Serious Marital Request, then, was that I knew I needed to convey that whether or not you felt you “needed” to see this movie, it was something I actively wanted to see (an important theme, as we’ll no doubt unpack), specifically with you.
So I’d love for you to explain your relationship to this movie and your relationship to my relationship with this movie, but first I have A VERY SERIOUS MARITAL REQUEST of my own: there may come a time in our marriage when you have to choose how I die. I don’t mean you’re going to murder me (though you might!) but more likely that you have to make choices that dictate with a high probability the way that I die. That shit happens. And if it does, I want you to be very clear on this, I do not want to drown. Do not let me drown. Shoot me in the head, stab me in the heart, poison me, chop off my head, hang me. But do not trap me on a motherfucking boat.
Aw, sweetie. If I murder you, it’s definitely not up to you how I do it! But, noted!
I can accept that one day you’d murder me, but torture me too??? BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GOOD TIMES.
The idea of watching a movie where you know you’re going to watch a bunch of people dying, let alone drowning, has always horrified me. And so let me conclude this segment by noting also that (1) thank god, most of them froze to death, and (2) yes, Jack Dawson was very charming and it was a great performance by Leo and I can see why he was everybody’s fantasy boyfriend.
Jack Dawson wasn’t just charming, hombre: lots of slick dudes in movies are charming and they’re a dime a dozen. But we’ll get to that.
So, a little background - I wanted NOTHING more than to see this movie - it came out when I was in 6th grade, the uncool new kid in school, and literally (from my perspective) everyone in my class saw it before me. My mom resisted mightily - she was, I think, trying to hold her own in a sea of cool and rich parents in a private school community who seemingly never said no to anything - but ultimately she gave in to my begging and took me to see it. I’ll never forget how cool that felt. We saw it at the Fashion Square Mall in Scottsdale, AZ, after dinner one night, and I remember it being like 10pm when we left the theater, walking past all the stores in the mall that had closed already. Unreal, to be honest!!
Oh man, walking through a silent, closed shopping mall after a movie gets out. Such a specific milieu. Just the thought of that, I feel like I’m in middle school.
She later bought me the two-volume VHS release, and I remember her opportunistically pausing the movie when Rose and Jack are steaming up those car windows and trying to get me to discuss what I thought might be happening in there. Though I wanted to die (and I think I responded with several minutes of absolute silence, causing her to eventually give up and unpause the movie, SCORE) I think she understood that this movie was introducing me to sex as something much more gut-level than what I’d learned in health class or read in Where did I come from? and she felt some degree of responsibility to stay with the discussion. To which I say, fair. Also, though, if you have a choice between your kid learning about sex from Titanic and your kid learning about sex from either porn or church (Unitarians notwithstanding, that came later), I think Titanic was a lucky break for her!
As awkward as that sounds, I think you both got pretty lucky. It’s a classy, hot, inoffensive scene. My first sex talk with mom was when I was four. And then when I was twelve she took me to see The Thomas Crown Affair, another film very much about visual art). Afterward she was irritated with me for being so awkward about the sex scene. We’re going to have to remember these moments when our child comes of age. She is absolutely not going to open up about sex after watching, like, Bluey Goes to College with us in 2026.
The now-infamous sweaty handprint on the foggy window is what everyone remembers about this scene; what really struck me this time was how tender it is. Rose initiates it by pulling Jack into the backseat with her; she tells him what she wants and he asks if she’s sure, and what unfolds is largely off-camera. What really gets me, then, is seeing how fulfilled, how happy both of them are after they have sex. And that it’s not just something happening TO Rose. And that Jack is clearly just as affected by it; we can surmise that he’s had sex before, but that doesn’t make this time with Rose any less a transformative experience for him.
Yeah, it’s well done and I don’t think most 90s or pre-90s films were so sex-positive and female-forward (obligatory American Pie comedic rape scene - don’t worry, they fuck in the sequel!).
I think if anything, watching this scene as an 11-year-old made me hope that someday, when I had sex for the first time, it would be just as important to the other person, and that they wouldn’t try to hide that or downplay it. No one is trying to be cool or aloof in this love story; the love of Rose and Jack is deeply felt on both sides and fully expressed. Once they choose each other, they’re both all in and neither of them holds back. And that love makes them courageous - as disaster sets in, they are both in the foreground not only trying to stay alive but taking opportunities to help others even at great risk to their own survival. You not only like them and root for them, you admire them. And I think the movie persuades us that their strength derives in part from their love for each other. AND YOU KNOW WHAT, I BUY IT.
Sidenote: my late-90s obsession with Titanic was such that my parents got me tickets to Titanic, the Broadway musical for my 12th birthday. We were living in lower Manhattan that summer for my dad’s job, and Titanic was the first Broadway musical I ever saw in my life. No sex, though, and therefore, forgettable.
Holy cow. I did not know that existed. But I am not surprised it existed, and it looks EXACTLY like you’d expect. Now THAT I don’t want to see.
Mmm. Since over a decade has passed since I killed my Titanic infatuation with my bare hands in deference to cultural backlash, I worried when I made this request of you that Titanic wouldn’t have aged well. I found myself really wanting to revisit it, but I didn’t quite trust the version of myself that loved it so much I saw it on Broadway - I might not have had great taste, you know? But boy, does it still work for me. And watching it with you, I got the feeling that you got it. Like, whether or not you ever want to watch it again, you got what the big deal was. Is that fair to say?
MORE IMPORTANTLY, how did you feel about Jack’s portrait drawings? Did artist game recognize artist game?
Well, I don’t think my obsession with visual art has fully been addressed on this blog—only one early post actually. I think that question is easy to answer - Jack is clearly technically talented. He gets a likeness. For an untrained homeless teenager, he’s pretty great. The drawings he shows of random passengers and so on I thought were subtle, interesting subject choices. From a real critical perspective, most of the drawings and the Rose portrait in particular, they’re reductive—the Rose drawing is a drawing of a sexy woman, not a drawing of what’s actually in front of the artist, the light bouncing into his eyeballs, and because of that it’s sort of stiff and symbolistic and the lighting is weird. (I don’t have the expertise for a fuller critique of that single drawing, but here is one; they are way more savage. Apparently James Cameron did that drawing! Dude, was there nobody in your life that could say no to you?) So as long as the movie is not trying to sell you that Jack is a diamond in the rough as a visual artist, that’s ok, it fits well enough with the context within the movie.
So one thing I wondered about, is that Jack sees all the paintings in Rose’s stateroom and the one he wants to look at is a Monet Water Lilies. And there’s an alternate version of Damoiselles D’Avignon there, which I think at the time would’ve been a much more famous painting if not exactly more popular, and it’s more in line with Jack’s subject matter and it would tell you about how he relates to the larger art world. I would’ve thought he’d gravitate to that one (also because of the sort of joke that, had that painting survived, it would be worth literally billions of dollars, maybe more than the McGuffin).
My dad’s main gripe with the movie was Jack’s comment about Monet’s “use of color” - Dad maintains he MEANT to say “use of LIGHT.” Well actually…
Light is color! TAKE THAT, DAD. Also, Monet is famously, uh, good at color. I mean, that comment was, if anything, just too basic for me, like so basic that an artist of Jack’s calibur would find some more elegant way to say it because otherwise it’s such a cliche. Monet! Look at the pretty colors!
That was also how it came across to me this time.
I actually googled this, and apparently there’s a deleted scene where he talks about how he doesn’t like fancy-pants modernist art like cubism and dadaism. I guess that was further than they wanted to go in the film, and the Water Lilies moment tells us enough about him, which is that he’s salt-of-the-earth, deeply conservative but expresses real subtlety and empathy within a constrained view of human potential. And I guess Rose is more of the Picasso, trying to break out of her constraints but in a different way also reaching deep into humanity and asking to be seen. It’s a good pairing and a great metaphor.
I really like this! Titanic, not just for basic bitches! (Dad!)
Anyway, I truly had no idea this movie was so much about visual art, and that part of it was very enjoyable for me and definitely added a dimension to the viewing experience.
So if that didn’t do it for you, yes, I think I got the picture.
LOL.
It is in many ways a great film. The characters and the story are really very well done.
I mean, even beyond the whole waiting-to-watch-people-drown thing, I have some complaints. And I’m really looking forward to telling you what they are. But I’m interested to know first what you think doesn’t hold up, or doesn’t work.
There were lines that were WAY too on the nose that we both guffawed at - the writing isn’t note-perfect on a dialogue level. Impressively, though, the laugh lines still work (Jack, after seeing Rose’s axe-handling skills: “Okay, that’s enough practice!”) because they’re just subtle enough and the actors can sell them with, like, their eyes alone.
Yes. Although I will say, Kate Winslet has only gotten better since then.
Definitely. Would not have seen a future Mare of Easttown in her.
Her performance here is definitely good enough, but not, like, best-of-her-generation, and as a fan of Kate Winslet, this was a fascinating contrast. Whereas I think Leo was already at that level.
Yeah - he had already worked a lot by this point, which is crazy given how young he is! His eyes in this movie. They do not miss a thing. The scene where he’s just rescued Rose from throwing herself off the boat and Cal et al are trying to decide how big of a criminal he is, the glances across the table between him and Rose at the big fancy dinner, the part where he’s going along with Cal’s lie about there being a boat for them both…just watching his eyes whenever he’s on screen and you can tell he misses nothing.
Yes.
And yet for all that subtlety, there are many many times when the movie feels too broad, and I think that’s why all these years later the one part I am all the way out on (which thankfully doesn’t interfere until the credits) is Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.” It tells us things we do not need to be told if we’ve been paying attention (or even if we haven’t!!). “Every night in my dreams, I see you, I feel you.” Rose has been keeping this a total secret for 84 years and she never told her husband about Jack. That’s because that shit is just for HER. The song feels like it’s doing way more work than it needs to and it lands with a thud. No knock on Celine, but that song getting played at every middle-school dance for a good 5-10 years did not do the film’s reputation any favors, because it’s sappy and overdone! I think you could be forgiven for hearing that song and thinking “sounds like a really saccharine movie plus people drowning, no thanks.”
I appreciate your forgiveness. Yeah that was pretty much it. I actually had a piano teacher (the one who replaced the piano teacher who retired during my lesson, and died very shortly thereafter) who made me learn that song, I guess because all the kids were into it?
WHAT? That’s a hate crime.
That teacher didn’t last long. I hadn’t seen the movie or been to a middle school dance yet, so I was just very annoyed with it. I don’t know if anyone would enjoy that song if they hadn’t experienced three hours of Pavlovian motivic programming to associate it with one of the great love stories of our time. The melody is playing constantly through the movie.
And, James Cameron, bless your heart, but you could have edited this down. Maybe an unpopular opinion among Titanic stans, but we see a LOT of people falling to their deaths, chaos, lifeboats being horribly misused, and we didn’t need all of it. I did like the slow creep from rich people going back inside because it’s too cold and noisy to people getting anxious for a seat on a lifeboat to the existential horror of slowly realizing you’re not getting on one of those boats, but it could have been more efficient and I would bet more effective.
Yes. When you’re two hours in and people are starting to die, and you realize you have 90 minutes left of just watching a fuckton of people dying–and you KNOW HOW IT ENDS BECAUSE IT’S THE FUCKING TITANIC–that was not a good feeling. But I get the sense James Cameron and his creative team really got off on it.
Still, there is plenty that works, though I would say not because of its bigness. That sequence where the string quartet almost breaks up, then the one violinist just starts playing and they all rejoin him…that montage is devastating, and part of why it’s devastating is because it’s quiet. The people who know they are going to die and are doing their best to just live their last moments on earth with dignity (per Guggenheim “prepared to go down like gentlemen”) are some of the most affecting in the movie’s last, grueling hour.
I don’t think the overly big stuff ruins the beauty of the small stuff (see above, visual art etc) but it gives the movie’s critics a LOT of fodder for nitpicking and eyerolling, which I am guessing you’ve been waiting to start doing.
Not really! I think we hit my main complaint, and I agree about the questionable dialogue.
Not all of the CGI holds up, the ship looks a bit too clean and CGI-sparkly at times.
I also noticed that this time.
I also think Billy Zane’s character is just pretty one note, they could’ve made him more interesting and less singularly evil and that would’ve deepened Rose’s character. The Alma Garrett/Brom Garrett relationship in Deadwood is basically that–roughly the same period, young high society couple, she’s married for money and feeling trapped, he’s boorish, she falls for the talented roughneck, etc. But I suppose Deadwood came later.
Yeah, that’s a fair criticism. But Billy Zane is SO SHITTY it’s kind of fun. I don’t hate it.
He did spend years poking fun at himself over it, pretty funny appearance in Zoolander. (Honestly, should we do one of these about Zoolander? Just rewatching this scene I want to—so much going on! Billy Zane’s reaction shots totally redeem him.)
But anyway those are pretty minor complaints, and I think you actually just hit on the central genius of James Cameron though–he’s famous for these big action movies, but the small character moments in his films are SO GREAT. Like, when you think about Terminator 2, you think “Hasta la vista, baby,” not like, some silver metal dude killing people. Aliens is iconically about Ripley’s traumatic relation to motherhood; Bill Paxton’s character in that movie is funny (as in Titanic) but we don’t watch it to see either of them shoot guns at slimy shit.
Yes, that’s totally right. I think I’ve cited the Cine-Files podcast on here before - one of the things those dudes articulated (in their discussion of Die Hard) is how some of the best action movies like the ones we’re talking about often have the surprising effect of ruining Hollywood a little bit, which is to say begetting some real shitty movies. And the reason this happens is that people - studios - misunderstand that it’s the little character stuff in those big movies that actually makes the movies stand out, not the explosions, the helicopters crashing into skyscrapers, the big chase sequences, what have you. So when you try to imitate Terminator 2 with bigass machines killing people in the biggest way, without paying just as much attention to character-building (yes I am talking about you, Michael Bay), you just end up with expensive, flashy crap.
What I found so startling and compelling about this was that you have nearly an entire act of the film that is about all these people just trying to comprehend the awfulness of what has happened. It really takes a while! And I think I knew that it took 2 hours for the ship to sink, but I’m not sure I thought through (because why would you) exactly how those 2 hours would look and feel, and how much confusion and incompetence there would be.
Even having seen the movie many times, it’s easy to forget just how long we spend watching this happen. And it’s basically in real time! When asked how long it will take after hitting the iceberg, Victor Garber says “an hour, two at most” - yeah, that’s pretty much the remaining run time of the movie! It’s actually kind of shocking how fast it happened in real life.
So you do have these moments where characters are established just enough (the ship designer, Molly Brown, various of the crew, the steerage characters) that they can have a brilliant, quiet little moment, or several, where we watch them make mistakes and then we watch the gears turn before it becomes an awful panic.
Yes, and the way they react is truly achingly human. A major question that the film forces you to contemplate is what you would have done had you been aboard the Titanic, and I don’t think it makes it easy for you to assume that you’d know what to do or how to act.
Ha, yes. I thought of a bunch of stuff–lash the chairs and tables together into rafts! Swim to the lifeboats, don’t let your body cool down! But the fact is I probably would’ve panicked and done shit that either I would’ve regretted, or would’ve killed me. Not a lot of choice between the two.
We see a lot of despicable and self-interested behavior from the rich (“Will the lifeboats be seated according to class?”) and a lot of frantic self-preservation from the steerage characters who are prevented from accessing lifeboats until it’s too late. We also see a lot of quiet and non-flashy heroism, and a lot of sad, sad mistakes, many of them made by people we know to be smart. Nothing in this movie can save you except maybe being rich. I never understood that line as a kid, when Rose Calvert’s voiceover says that the 700 people in the lifeboats just have to wait: “wait to die, wait to live, wait for an absolution that would never come.” I was thinking about it this time - I think the absolution that will never come is a nod to the fact that the people who lived were the people of means, and they in no way deserved to live any more than those who died; they just got to benefit from an inherently fucked-up situation (created with their aesthetic desires in mind: sufficient life boats would have made the deck look “too cluttered”) because of their wealth. And they will now have to live with that forever.
And the main reason why this works is that despite some of their questionable moral conduct, we are invested in these characters, too - we’ve spent enough time with them that when the camera cuts to Rose’s shell-shocked mother leaning on the shoulder of Molly Brown, object of her utter disdain, that says something to us.
James Cameron clearly got off on those moments and I’m sure the movie is so long because he wanted to make it a realistic depiction of the variety and complexity of the experience. Kind of a weird thing to want to do, frankly, but after you make Terminator 2 I guess you get to make whatever you want, and for him that’s a sprawling, near-documentary/romance about your favorite maritime disaster and your deep-sea exploration hobby.
Yes, and you can do it with very few people willing to make you edit it down more than you yourself see fit (not unlike the later works of one Stephen Edwin King).
Or Larry David. God damn, latter-day Curb Your Enthusiasm needs some discipline.
But you have those kinds of moments in Terminator, Terminator 2, Aliens, The Abyss, a lot of James Cameron films. He’s known for action movies, and production design, where he started, but his movies are so great because he makes room for characters to just be interesting and fun to be around. At the same time, they’re not hangout movies, and every scene and line (like the painting scenes) clearly serve a purpose.
Chekhov’s everything in this movie. Chekhov’s Loogie in Cal’s Face, though, a definite fave.
Yes. And of course, he’s also great at action. It’s a very tense film. The stakes feel incredibly high for a solid hour. It’s exhausting, but it’s not like you just give up and stop caring about the whole situation. And that comes down to strong character building but also just great visual direction. Though I can quibble about the CGI, the ship really has a sense of place. You start to get the layout. When the characters move, the camera cuts show you exactly where they’re going, and where the water is, and what it will take for them to get back to safety and so on. There’s no gimmick, no cheap tricks. You feel like you’re there.
Exactly, and the well-placed shots of where the ship is in the water at various points. Not to mention the straightforward synopsis of how the crash and subsequent sinking unfolds delivered in the first act by Present-Day Ponytail Dude (“pretty cool, huh??”) which absolutely helps you follow what is happening - we know that the split between bow and stern is coming, we know that the stern is going to crash back down but then get pulled vertical again as the bow sinks. It’s critical that we’re honestly never confused about what’s happening despite the absolute chaos of that last hour, and it’s a real feat.
Speaking of Ponytail Dude, we haven’t addressed the framing device yet! Bill Paxton, the treasure hunter who somehow got wind of this major insurance claim and who just looooooves him some submersibles. Is this guy a stand-in for James Cameron? Who, yes, made this movie in large part to support his deep-sea diving obsession?
So, yeah he seems like a cool guy. I must admit: Paul F. Tompkins plays a version of Brock Lovett in some appearances on the podcast Comedy Bang Bang, in which he professes to be unaware of the film Titanic. (The character actually first appeared on a totally underrated episode, one of my all time favorites, in which Tawny Newsome appears as the Rum Tum Tugger from Cats, which was a hilariously poor choice.) So that was 95% of what I thought about watching Bill Paxton.
I don’t think Brock Lovett is entirely a stand-in for Cameron. He’s sort of a slick 90s guy, which is a purposeful contrast from all the 1912 clothes and manners, so it establishes the contrast you need. If he were serious and intense and wearing nice clothes, it would be harder to distance yourself from the 1912 story.
No cable-knit sweaters on the 1912 people; honestly some of them could have used one. That dress Rose is wearing during the sinking made me so cold to look at.
Generally I think the 1912 story needed the framing story, probably for that reason, to create distance. The framing story allows the film to push the boundaries of romanticism in the 1912 story, because you know you’re watching a memory, and you know that at least one important character survives. Otherwise it could be just a tawdry period drama where everybody dies in the end, so why does any of it matter?
Also, it gives Cameron a chance to make really effective use of that underwater footage of the wreck, which is very moving, especially when Rose sees it for the first time.
Yes, that moment was nice. I think the framing story serves a few other purposes. I’m not sure I understand the “Heart of the Ocean” metaphor, other than it’s simply Rose’s heart, or her memory or her trauma, which she held onto for 87 years and finally got closure on in 1997 or whatever. When she dropped it into the water that had no special resonance for me. Perhaps because I know that there would’ve been no real way for her to wear it, or sell it, or really do anything with it, without exposing her whole secret history and undoing the new life she built for herself after the ship went down. So what was it? It was a memory. So she got closure and let it go. I guess I was hoping it was more than a McGuffin.
That moment also didn’t do it for me this time, but overall I like the character of Rose Calvert a lot; she has a strong presence as a 101-year-old woman, and despite her limited screen time we actually get a lot of very efficient detail about who Rose DeWitt-Bukator (a name I had no idea how to spell until just now) became when she made it to New York and changed her name to Dawson. Rose travels with all her stuff (love that shot of them trying to deal with her ridiculous luggage, another tiny moment that does so much work for the character), and that includes pictures of herself and the badass things she did in her life, none of that side-saddle stuff. She lived a life she was proud of, just like she promised Jack she would.
My best working theory about why she throws the diamond into the ocean is that she knows she is ready to die and she wants the diamond to die with her. Rose DeWitt-Bukator ceased to exist in 1912 and that necklace is all that remains of her and of the life Rose Dawson left behind, very much by choice. She doesn’t want that dredged up. What she’s leaving behind on earth is the real story of her and Jack, and that is how she wants to be remembered. And I’ve always thought that it does end with her dying - in her sleep, an old, old woman, fulfilling Jack’s wishes for her. That last sequence with her in the white dress marrying Jack in the next life: that’s her going out on her terms.
But, so much money for her descendants! But also, Hockley money? Would her descendants ever get any of it? I don’t know. I do think it’s slightly more than a McGuffin - possibly no more than a symbol, however.
I think the second that diamond surfaces in public it gets claimed by the insurance company that paid the Hockley claim, or whatever global conglomerate is the successor to that insurance company. Chubb, probably. That diamond and the proceeds of any sale of it would be buried in litigation forever. It made it tedious for me to even think about. That’s like a law school professor’s dream. In fact I’m 100% certain that more than one law school professor has designed an exam around it. (Just googled to confirm - confirmed.) Ugh.
Well, so now let’s keep it PG, but perhaps to close it out why don’t you talk about how it was to watch this movie with me? We started dating at pretty close to the age that Rose and Jack were in the film.
Jesus, you’re right.
Not a super long time, all things considered, after you saw the film. Now we’re approaching middle age. You finally got to watch Titanic with your husband, who has arthritis and co-signed a mortgage with you. And, you know, a kid. Do you wish we’d seen it together earlier? How does the baggage of our relationship color this movie about horny teenagers?
Well, you know, a woman’s heart is a deep ocean of secrets.
JK.
Woof.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
I am glad we didn’t watch it sooner. We’ve been married for 11 years (that’s how many years old I was when I saw Titanic!) and I think I still tried to act cool for your benefit for a pretty long time after we met, and even for a pretty long time after we got married. I wasn’t ready to FULLY disclose how much this movie meant to me until now!
I think it’s a testament to how I’ve grown, but also to how you’ve grown (at least in my estimation). I told you midway through that I think straight men claim to hate this movie because they know they don’t hold a candle to Jack Dawson and it intimidates them to think that women might find out that they could do so much better. Jack Dawson is an amazingly open-hearted dude! He’s not slick, he’s not the strong silent type, he’s really pretty distant from a lot of masculine tropes, but…he fucks, man!
I was ready to watch this movie with you because a) I trusted you to give it a chance, b) I had a pretty good idea you’d be more into it than you thought and c) I knew that any latent comparison with Jack Dawson wasn’t going to leave you looking like an asshole. And d) if it held up really poorly after all, I trusted that I’d be ok with that and we’d both laugh about it.
You jump, I jump, right?
Metaphorically speaking? Because I truly fear drowning.
Right, right; I was definitely paying attention when you said that.