Aesthetic analysis of the Titanic movie and argumentation strategies

Titanic

James Cameron's 1997 film Titanic has an aesthetic approach that is based on the gap between a historical event and our present-day reality. 2012 is the centennial of the sinking of the actual Titanic -- the last survivor of the disaster died three years ago in 2009 -- and has occasioned a re-release in 3D of the fifteen-year-old film. The film is framed by a story that makes the gap in time apparent -- in the frame narrative, a researcher played by Bill Paxton has discovered the location of the sunken ship in the 1990s, and brings up a locked safe containing a sketch of a nude woman wearing a necklace. It turns out that the nude woman in the drawing, Rose (Kate Winslet), is still alive. The elderly Rose (Gloria Stuart) is then summoned to the research vessel in the North Atlantic to tell her story. The long central section consists of this story, although it is framed and interspersed with the sections set in the 1990s. The aesthetic of the film, then, is predicated upon this nostalgia: we watch the past be re-created for us by Rose's character, who will tell her own story. It is also a useful way of keeping the audience interested in a story when the film's title already tells us how the film is going to end: there is not going to be a shock ending where the iceberg is destroyed by space-aliens moments before sinking the ship. Instead, the plot is maintained by the knowledge that the boat will sink, but Rose did not -- the question is not what happens, but how.

Because the film's aesthetic is based on nostalgia, it is interesting to see how this nostalgia is constructed within the film. Kate Winslet's Rose is, according to the screenplay, well ahead of her time -- the film depicts a scene in which she is shown with artworks purchased in Paris, in anticipation of her voyage back to America. These include some of the most avant-garde possible work that would be available for purchase in 1912, including Picasso's "Demoiselles d'Avignon." Why is this included in the film? It is not historically accurate, since this particular painting by Picasso still exists, and was never carried on the Titanic. Within the context of the film, it exists as a joke about the irony of history -- the film's villain, played by Billy Zane, is given the opportunity to sneer at Picasso, and announce that he will clearly never have a career as a painter. Because Picasso's name is a byword for aesthetic achievement in the twentieth century overall, we are meant to understand Rose as having a greater sensitivity for art than her callous fiance. Yet this is bizarre in terms of the overall aesthetic of the movie -- the artwork sketched by Rose's loverboy Jack (Leonardo di Caprio) is about as aesthetically different from Picasso as Celine Dion is from Arnold Schoenberg, or Titanic itself is from Un Chien Andalou. Instead, we are meant to understand Rose's character -- and her sensitivity to Picasso -- as part of the film's overall construction of the past. The conflict over Picasso between Kate Winslet and Billy Zane is not really an endorsement of a modern anti-realistic aesthetic: instead, it establishes the 1912 setting as a time when women were routinely oppressed. There is no way to dramatize the fact that Rose, or the other women on the Titanic, don't have the right to vote -- instead, the film must present Rose as being ahead of her time.