The Ship Sank -- My Pancreas Will Go On

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

My Pancreas Will Go On

The 15^th of April is the 100^th anniversary of, well, the ship sank.

In books and films the facts of the Titanic are posthumously cluttered with all sorts of interpretations about the symbolism: the Titanic represents the collapse of Edwardian England, the Titanic is an indictment of technology, the Titanic is a religious lesson about man’s hubris, the Titanic is about the evil of Big Business / Wall Street / The City, and, in a 1943 Nazi propaganda movie, the Titanic is all of the above.

And all that is just too much interpretation.  The Titanic was a really large motorized thingie that someone was driving too fast, at night, and without any headlights.  There’s just not a whole lot of cultural significance in that.

You might as well say that you realized that your life was an existential lie when you bent the shaft in your lawnmower by carelessly mowing into a chunk of wood obscured by weeds.

But folks do enjoying fooling around with the Titanic, and even now a new television film is in release. 

The ship sinks.

The 1997 version of Titanic is unlike other films about the tragedy in that it features a happy ending -- only a very grim man could find himself unable to shed tears of joy when Jack, long, tedious hours into the plot, finally disappears beneath the surface of the Atlantic, leaving only a floating sheen of cliches’. 

Mr. Cameron’s film is excellent in its use of decidedly post-1912 technology – the computerized ship is the star, and it works; the intrusion of the stereotype-sodden fictional lovers pinched from Romeo and Juliet is not only unnecessary but at times annoying.  The depictions of historic people, such as Mr. and Mrs. Isidor Straus, are much more interesting, even when they are cruelly wrong, as with Lightoller and Boxhall.

The best Titanic film is A Night to Remember, based on Walter Lord’s book.  Filmed in 1958 on a budget of mere thousands of dollars, the producers took care to avoid fiction altogether: every character in the film is grounded – or watered – in a real person, and every bit of dialogue is sourced and verified.  A browse through the ever-useful IMDB reveals a treasure of anecdotes, such as the matter of the Lucky Pig.

The hypercritical might at this point protest the historicity because in the end the ship sinks intact, which, as we now know, didn’t happen.  The producers researched survivors and found that although some reported that the ship broke in two, far more said that it remained intact, and the producers went with the majority opinion of people who were there.

Does this mean that the majority of the survivors were liars?  Not at all.  Witness narratives are unreliable because even when folks are doing their best to get the facts right they still perceive through a filter of upbringing, ideology, and wish-fulfillment.  The rivets and welds of the Titanic were asked to carry too much weight, both physical and cultural, when the bow submerged.

The underrated 1953 version with Clifton Webb and Barbara Stanwyck is no more accurate than John Wayne’s The Alamo, but is a hanky-twister because of the excellent ensemble acting.  Still, the ship sinks.

Another underrated ship of soaps is 1979’s SOS Titanic, with George C. Scott.  Surprisingly, the ship sinks. 

The documentaries, with their hours of filler and wild speculation can be dismissed.  Some say that the Titanic was ahead of its time, which it wasn’t.  Its time was 1912, and there it was.  You might as well say that you are ahead of your time because today is Wednesday and you really want to be in Friday.

One of the most interesting Titanics is a Teutonic one, the 1943 German production filmed in the North Sea aboard the SS Cap Arcona, whose own end in 1945 was a horror. 

As with all Titanic productions the film is very loose with the facts; as a Nazi propaganda film it could hardly be otherwise.  The plot features an unlikely romance between starfish-crossed lovers, a valuable jewel, an unsubtle contrast between the first-class fops and the humble but sturdy, clean, and honest volk in steerage, and dramatic scenes on the first-class staircase.  Sound familiar?

But, again, the ship sinks.

This film, the biggest-budgeted film in German cinema to that time, is very well made, and some of the scenes were appropriated for the 1953 and 1958 films without attribution. 

The director was 38-year-old Herbert Selpin, a biggie in the film industry who had directed musicals, light romance, and action flicks.  Mr. Selpin was not a happy Nazi, and for reasons never quite made clear was pulled from the production, arrested, and found (cough) hanged in his cell, a reported (cough) suicide.  Some have alleged that Mr. Selpin was open in his criticism of Nazism, which seems unlikely, and others that the anti-British sentiment is so cloddishly heavy that the film was meant by the director in a sort of double-irony to be a criticism of Nazism.

For whatever reason, Josef Goebbels, the supreme arbiter of film, found enough annoyance in Herbert Selpin to make him disappear into night and fog.  We should remember Mr. Selpin not only as a filmmaker but for annoying the Nazis and dying for it.

The Titanic will go on because, as with The Canterbury Tales, placing all sorts of different folks within a story creates its own sort of dynamic, and is worth hearing and watching again and again.

One wonders if future Titanic films will feature passengers being interrogated and strip-searched by their own countrymen.

Only one question remains unanswered: when the Titanic sailed, did the crew require all the passengers to close their books and newspapers while leaving port so that the ink wouldn’t interfere with the navigational charts?

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