TITANIC

The tale of Love and its triumphs has been told over and over again in our society, through books, through songs, through all forms of Art. We’ve been captivated and inspired by all these stories that true love can be found out there. We can all identify with finding happiness in unexpected places. As a matter of fact, we’ve grown tired of the same old pattern of love that’s been painted so many times it’s become like a broken record.

So what’s the solution then? Do we continue the cycle of meeting new people, getting tired of them, and moving on to the next one? Or would we prefer a love so pure in essence that it had to end almost as soon as it started?
This leads me to my review of the day. In my opinion, this is the purest love story of all time. It captures every aspect of true love; Diversity, Acceptance, but most of all …Selflessness. The fact that such love could be found in a time of segregation between the rich and the poor ON an edifice designed to further that isolation points to the fact that of a truth, Love can be found in the most unexpected places. I’m sure you already know what I’m talking about. I’m talking about… TITANIC.

We (should) have all watched the movie “Titanic”, if you haven’t seen this movie; you’re probably way too young or far too old. The Titanic was a ship built to perfection. It was called the unsinkable ship. I remember back when I hadn’t seen the movie my friends had different speculations as to why the ship sank. Some said because the ship was too big, some said it was because it had been said that even God couldn’t sink the ship. The fact that my friends talked so much about this movie caused me to search it out. As it turns out, the movie was released the year I was born, to think that I got to watch it about 15 years later. Well, I HAD watched it a couple years before but I was way too young to actually comprehend the movie on an artistic level, on any level really. So when I finally got to see the movie in 2012, it was like I had never seen it before. I must confess, I actually cried towards the end.

The movie’s foundation was based on the actual “Titanic” tragedy that happened decades earlier. That alone would give the film a lot of attention because the truth was that no one could actually relate to the actual event; I mean, sure there had been books about it and we had heard the stories, but the books were merely facts and figures, and the stories? Well…there were as many stories about the event as there were the amount of people that boarded the actual ship. The world needed to capture that event more strongly, on a more personal level: and that was exactly what the filmmakers gave us.

My favorite arc was the love story between Jack and Rose; nothing beats that kind of love. Two people from different spheres of life, colliding.

Jack: An incredible artist, who takes pride in moving with the tide and living in the moment. A man of “meager means” as Rose so tastefully put it, who falls in love with this royal “not so royal as it turns out” beauty and ultimately puts her before himself.   

Rose: A beautiful lady who longs to be free from the apron strings of her mother, who actually just wants the best  for the both of them, as well as  to pay off the  huge debts her husband left them in his death. Her daughter’s beauty being the key to both, she engages her to a rich young narcissist.
The story develops as Rose decides she’d rather die than be a puppet in the hands of her mother and runs to the edge of the boat to jump off, and Jack in the corner enjoying a good old smoke sees her and tells her he knows she won’t jump. I laughed at her response.

“DON’T PRESUME TO TELL ME WHAT I WILL AND WILL NOT DO, YOU DON’T KNOW ME”
And then the cool Jack casually says “IF YOU WERE GOING TO JUMP, YOU WOULD HAVE ALREADY”

Then the conversation goes on and on until he finally talks her into not jumping, saying that if she jumped, he’d have to jump in after her.

“YOU JUMP, I JUMP”
     

That line is repeated in the later stages of the movie when they begin to lower the lifeboats. As expected, preference is given to women and children and extra preference to those in the first Class. Rose refuses to go into the lifeboat with her mother because she doesn’t want to leave Jack.  Then Jack tells her a reassuring lie of how there’s another boat waiting for him on the other side of the boat. She enters the boat and as it’s been lowered, she looks into his eyes as he becomes farther and farther to reach, and suddenly she jumps out of the boat back into the sinking ship, ALL BECAUSE OF JACK! They run to each other and Jack kisses her in intervals while reprimanding her for doing something so stupid, a beautiful irony, and then she reminds him in tears the promise they had made to each other in the earlier stages of the movie

                 “YOU JUMP, I JUMP, REMEMBER?”

That for me was the peak of the movie; I had totally forgotten about that promise earlier in the movie until I heard Rose say it again. I must confess that tears filled my eyes as I heard her reiterate the promise. I daresay that was the most selfless act of the movie. The realization that her survival wasn’t complete without his: Love in its purest form.

     The beauty of it, and I don’t think a lot of people noticed this is the fact that as selfless as her sacrifice was, Jack reciprocated by making a more selfless sacrifice…No…by making the Ultimate sacrifice that cost  him his life. When the ship finally sunk and they both plunged into the water holding each other’s hands, Jack found a door floating and put Rose on it. As he proceeded to join her on, it turned out that the door couldn’t handle the weight of the both of them, leaving him to decide who’s survival came first; hers or his. Selflessly, he chose her survival and let her stay on the door while he just put his arms on the door to keep him afloat and  close to her; and with the rest of his body in icy cold water, he held her hand and made her promise to live her life in his absence and to “never  let go”. Another classic irony because hours later when the lifeboats came back, she had to let go of his hand, which was the only live part of his body by then, to go blow the whistle that brought the lifeboat to their direction. Jack died in the ocean that night.

I could go on and on about the different characters and story arcs that took place in the movie but that would take up too much time…and writing space!. The truth is, After watching Titanic, I really didn’t give a **** about why the ship sank, although I felt like blasting Mr. Ismay’s head off when I saw him cowering in the lifeboat, after being the one to talk the captain into firing up the last boilers. Anyway, the truth is that the ship did sink and I got to realize once again how much our lives matter. You never know how much time you have left or how much time you don’t have. So we owe it to ourselves to find happiness.

The movie didn’t just give account of what happened that night, we got to see through the eyes of everyone on that ship how it felt to stare death in the face, to feel it’s  icy sting not nearly as cold as the water that took them. We saw how different people chose to leave this world. Some chose to leave with honor, some died in the arms of the ones they loved. Some decided to play their last notes before they left. Some decided to seek God before death took them away, and some chose to be their own god and make their own luck. Different strokes for different folks, all faced with the harsh reality that the ship of dreams would sail them into oblivion.

The movie Titanic was and is still for me the most epic love story ever written. It was a short one but it was the purest and the most sincere. A love brought about by fate and destroyed by tragedy. A love that crossed the boundary between rich and poor. A love so selfless that one had to die to save another: the purest form of Love one could ever hope to experience.

I therefore rate this movie a whopping 9/10