DVD Review: James Cameron’s Titanic on Paramount Home Entertainment

So The Onion headline wryly read, “World’s Largest Metaphor Hits Ice-Berg.” Agreed. As Kate Winslet’s own Freud-referencing character snips, Titanic is epic cinema’s grandest erection, and when the near-scale model set of the towering hulk of steel that was, at the time, the largest ship in the world severs down the middle, it then becomes the most vulgar representation of castration to ever cause millions of heartwarmed teenage girls to choke sobs into their fists. It’s a ready-made sarcophagus for everything that’s vulgar in mainstream cinema. Titanic both embodies and validates the excess that is its own subject.

And Titanic is arguably the most artlessly touching disaster movie of all. No, really. Time and a number of equally irony-free blockbusters in the interim (including Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds and the Lord of the Rings cycle) have dulled its impact somewhat, but Titanic was James Cameron’s strike against technophiliac hyper-masculinity in adventure features and a splashing, pre-millennial introduction to a premonitory brand of earnest, new-age spectacle.

It’s as perverse as it is completely guileless; it’s Cameron stripping off his boxers, winning the $200 million bet he placed on the incomparable, record-setting size of his own plumbing, and then slicing off the jewels at the nub to let them sink to the bottom of the ocean, just because he’s that much of a stud…but sensitive. Jocks, who had spent the previous decade slapping each other on their backs and paying lip service to Cameron’s brand of “feminism” (i.e., forcing Linda Hamilton and Sigourney Weaver to suck it up and learn how to do chin-ups) suddenly went apeshit at the perceived sellout found within Winslet’s gorgeously curved, indolently feminine form, to say nothing of Leonardo DiCaprio’s own willowy dimensions. (Apparently, a single girl spitting a loog in a cad’s face doesn’t quite hold the same psychosexual, XY-appeal as a sweaty Amazon ripping an android in two while protecting her surrogate child.)

Ludicrously, they turned Gus Van Sant’s shallow, self-absorbed Good Will Hunting into the dude movie of the moment, proving that there are times when it’s alright for a guy to cry like a little bitch…preferably when women aren’t actually the ones who bring down their defenses. When I first saw Titanic, it was at an employee showing in the multiplex I worked at during my breaks from college. After the film finished, one of my hardass co-workers quipped, “That ship should’ve caught fire when it went down!” (Apparently, death by liquid doesn’t quite hold the same psychosexual, XY-appeal to anyone who has never performed cunnilingus.)

Cameron’s corny screenplay rightly earned raspberries from even the film’s most ardent supporters, as though it even mattered. Even still, the wraparound structure invited grudging respect for clarifying the dispassionate physics of the ocean liner’s foundering. In other words, it gave everyone who couldn’t warm up to the film’s poop-deck love fantasy a dispassionate out.

The more significant residue of the jewel-hunter storytime interludes is how, in their clumsy, irritating obviousness, they highlight Cameron’s vendetta against latter-day popular culture—that is, his endorsement of naïveté. Surely that has to be the reason he plopped a Harry Knowles lookalike in a bullet-splattered happy-face T-shirt next to Bill Paxton’s Brock Lovett, right? So his grotesque, bubbly-guzzling, “fuck”-shouting, hipster quip-spouting crudity could cast even the Snidley Whiplash-as-fop dastardliness of a queenly Billy Zane, as Cal Hockley, in a complimentary light? He may break every code of moral etiquette, but at least Cal respects the mores enough to realize he’s breaking them. In contrast, Brock and his band of deep-sea pirates show no scruples about robbing a graveyard. (Neither, for that matter, does Cameron, who commissioned a series of similar dives—not necessarily to steal jewelry, but film footage.)

Titanic’s class-conscious romantic leads were described by critics as representations of turn-of-the-century optimism. It’s a concept pilfered from Walter Lord’s highly romanticized historical documentation of the disaster (in A Night to Remember and other books), only Lord’s ingénue was the Titanic itself, the Promethean manifestation of the Industrial Age’s hubris, fresh out of the showroom and promptly felled by the same confidence that birthed her.

In Cameron’s film, DiCaprio’s Jack Dawson and Winslet’s Rose Dewitt Bukater play an unwitting role in the ship’s collision with the northern Atlantic iceberg, as their discreet midnight smooch session distracts the crow’s nest’s blue-balled lookouts. As though their brand of post-Victorian romance can only succeed with the sacrifice of the Gilded Age’s golden calf, they sex it up and bathe in post-coital glow as the ship plows toward its hemorrhaging finale. It’s something of an ingenuous revision of the standard disaster-movie tenet: that the cataclysms are, in some small metaphysical part, extensions of either the characters’ own subconscious social negligence or misanthropy. Here, fate. Maybe that’s to explain for Cameron’s decision to completely excise any mention of the notoriously unresponsive nearby Californian.

Which, of course, is where Cameron really gets turned on. The film’s second half is an unparalleled blitz of organized, systematic destruction, a D.W. Griffith-like montage of crosscutting effects sequences (farmed out to nearly every graphics house extant to varying results, some ridiculous, others jaw-dropping CGI-enhanced verité). The ingenuity of Cameron’s compassionate sadism is unrelenting—rivets and panels groaning like the foundation of the house in Poltergeist, mooring lines of the ship’s funnels snapping like lightening and picking off flailing bodies in the ocean, walls of water cascading through the gleaming white hallways of the lower decks and rushing underneath the beds of elderly couples too infirm to try to swim for it.

Again like Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, the brutal efficiency with which disaster is meted out (two words: propeller guy) is terrifying, relentless, and, in the absence of the sort of grand themes (war, injustice) that usually “excuse” violence, oddly dignified. To call Titanic’s crème brûlée mise-en-scène pure or elemental is to invite the vitriolic label “simple-minded” of its contemporaneous backlash (roughly the moment that the film won 11 Oscars and Cameron demanded a moment of silence or, even worse, when the soft-rock-guitar theme song won the Record of the Year Grammy a full year later). But that’s kind of the point.

Image/Sound

Titanic has never looked as good on video as it did in theaters. In particular, the digital rendering of the night sky remains as fucked up and Neapolitan ice-cream layered as it was on VHS. I guess that’s the price you pay for trying to cheat what was, in actuality, a jet-black night with a range of rich blues. And the inadequacy of some of the more rushed and/or experimental effects shots (like when Winslet and DiCaprio’s faces are unconvincingly matted over their running stunt doubles’ heads) is only amplified on DVD. Which is a backhanded way of saying that this special collector’s edition transfer is almost too good. At least up until the F/X bonanza, the film’s color balance is well balanced and the minor edge enhancement isn’t completely out of control. The 5.1 sound mix (available in Dolby or DTS) is even better and, in contrast to the video transfer, only improves as the film plunges into high-seas drama. My biggest complaint is that, thanks to the trio of commentary tracks, the film still gets chopped in half and spread over two discs. Seeing Billy Zane slap Winslet’s face eight ways to the Promenade Deck has now officially entered my gestalt as the official “Act Two” opening number.

Extras

Housed in a hideous blue box with faux-crushed leather overlay (and Cameron’s face on the cover), the collector’s edition is certainly an improvement on the bare-bones previous edition. In some cases, it’s too much of a good thing. There are three commentary tracks: one for James Cameron and his ego, one for the film’s producers intercut with the two actresses playing Rose (Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart) and Lewis Abernathy (the aforementioned fat fuck), and one for the Titanic historian tag team of Don Lynch and Ken Marschall (who also provided commentary for the Criterion DVD of A Night to Remember). Cameron’s commentary track is measured, maybe even a little nostalgic for what has increasingly revealed itself as perhaps his last great hurrah, his Thriller. To his credit, he can laugh a little bit about his appropriation of the “king of the world” bit at the Oscar ceremony. Winslet, too, is relatively forthcoming about the grueling shoot. But, to my taste, the most rewarding commentary is Lynch and Marschall’s. The two clearly get off on seeing the ship’s recreation and, perversely, their enthusiasm only increases once the iceberg grazes its hull.

Placed sporadically throughout the film are triggers you can use to switch over to three or four dozen behind-the-scenes clips showcasing various effects or production details, most running one or two minutes long. Included as footnotes on the second disc are Celine Dion’s not-campy-enough video for “My Heart Will Go On” and the extended alternate ending titled “Brock’s epiphany.” Anyone who remembers Saturday Night Live’s hysterical parody of the film’s finale, in which Cheri O’Teri is laid flat by Paxton after he discovers she had the diamond all along, will just looove it when they discover that Cameron’s original ending is almost exactly the same! When Stuart steps onto the railing, the entire diving crew rush up to her thinking she’s going to commit suicide. After she lectures them at great length, goes “ah” and drops the diamond, and Paxton reacts with a big, widescreen shit-eating grin to the heavens for his newfound enlightenment, you’ll wish she had.

None of the 45 minutes’ worth of deleted scenes on the third disc are quite as expansive or ruinous as that ending (the most conspicuous miscue is a five-minute game of cat and mouse between DiCaprio and Billy Zane’s thug bodyguard), and a couple of them are actually pretty haunting, like the swift, brutal death of Cora, the cute little girl who dances with DiCaprio at the third class soiree, in corridor flash flood. The remainder of the disc is overrun with promotional featurettes, effects demonstrations (though nowhere near as many as there could be, considering all the processes used in the film), still galleries (including a lovely collection of Ken Marschall’s paintings), Fox Network’s shameless half-hour commercial for the film and a jokey montage of crew members yucking it up on the tense set, obviously thrown together for a wrap party. All in all, there’s actually well over the three hours of extra features promised on the back of the box, though perhaps only three hours of it is worth the voyage.

Overall

Cameron’s dialogue was wrong. With Titanic, he clearly discovered that it is a woman’s vagina that is a deep ocean of many secrets.