Mack
Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
My Pancreas Will Go
On
The
15th of April is the 100th 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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