Titanic

Theme: Humanity  

Sharing is Caring: Marie Ziverk

Episode Title Ideas:

Titanic: Oh the Humanity and the Importance of Sharing the Damn Door/Raft

Titanic: The nature of Love and sharing the door

Titanic: For the Love of Humanity

Titanic: Sharing the Boat and Never Letting Go of Humanity

Movie Info:

IMDB Movie summary:

1997 G 3h 14m Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Zane, Kathy Bates, Bill Paxton

Directed and written by James

A seventeen-year-old aristocrat falls in love with a kind but poor artist aboard the luxurious, ill-fated R.M.S. Titanic.

84 years later, a 100 year-old woman named Rose DeWitt Bukater tells the story to her granddaughter Lizzy Calvert, Brock Lovett, Lewis Bodine, Bobby Buell and Anatoly Mikailavich on the Keldysh (treasure hunting ship) about her life set in April 10th 1912, on a ship called Titanic when young Rose boards the departing ship with the upper-class passengers and her mother, Ruth DeWitt Bukater, and her fiancé, Caledon Hockley. Meanwhile, a drifter and artist named Jack Dawson and his best friend Fabrizio De Rossi win third-class tickets to the ship in a game. And she explains the whole story from departure until the death of Titanic on its first and last voyage April 15th, 1912 at 2:20 in the morning.

Screen Shares Rating:

·      Buddy Screen: Screen with Friends- lots of awkwardness with family or loved one

·      Work Screen: Screen with Colleagues

·      Family Screen: Screen with Family

·      Little Screen: Screen with Kids

·      Love Screen: Screen with Significant Other (I mean maybe But No)

·      Solo Screen: Watch and reflect alone

Background:

Massive box office hit making more than 2.2 billion and making it the 3rd highest ranking film of all time. After watching a documentary on Robert Ballard’s 1985 discovery of the wreck of the RMS Titanic—which famously sank in the North Atlantic Ocean on April 15, 1912, killing approximately 1500 people—Cameron resolved to make a movie about the doomed ocean liner. It wound up being a massive undertaking, and when Titanic finally hit theaters in December 1997, it was $100 million over budget and six months late. Cameron did not want to have any lyrics on the soundtrack, but some have suggested that the film studio pressured him to allow the song to serve as a powerful marketing tool. The director simply didn’t think one would fit into his “very dramatic, historical drama.” Unbeknownst to the film’s producers, Titanic composer James Horner had already begun writing a song for the end credits. Thus we we received Celine Dions “My Heart Will Go On”.

Quickly Address

• Epic Romance- Difficult to say it’s love because they’re both so young and the interlude is so brief, but definitely captivating and steamy (I’m looking at you model T window)
• Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack…talk about a smoke show and Rose quite the “dish”
• Titanic was a bridge between the old-school blockbuster and the new-school global hit released in more than 56 countries
• Epic Special Effects
• Music by James Horner-Braveheart, Legends of the Falls, Land before time, American Tale, Honey I shrunk the kids
• Some problematic issues with this nouveau femenist/woke 90’s pic

Personal Connection:

• Saw many times as a child
• Loved romance then but see the connection to broader humanity now
• Led me to study Art History and Film
• Saw in Theaters when it was released with my parents and then in theaters another 5 times with my mom. At Wehrenberg Campbell 16 Cine where I would later go on  my first date with my now husband.

Shared Experiences = Connection across time and cultures

• Thrill of seeing a new movie with an excited crowd=Humanity Mirrored in the excitement of the throngs assembled to see the departure of the “unsinkable titanic in 1912. The spectacle that unites
• Would read and re-read the copy of the newspaper from the day of the wreck my school library had. The mundane details of the day in contrast to the horror of the event. (12 years old)
• Connection between material culture/artifacts and history shown in the film

• Treasure hunting ship showing macabre easter eggs at the bottom of the sea that we would spot in their living state during Rose’s retelling
• The significance of the “heart of the oceans” lineage through time
• The artwork literally bringing Rose back into the dream of the Titanic
• Dreams and history are made real by interaction with the artifacts themselves

• Titanic was part of my burgeoning romance with history and material culture that would eventually lead me to major in Art History and minor in film studies.
• The romance serves as a vehicle to invest us in the people aboard the ship and introduce us to the levels of humanity present

Take-Aways:

• Artifacts and ruins have the power to make history real and connect us to humanity we share across time and cultures (the shoes and dolls at the bottom of the ocean) and should be treated with due respect.
• Class and artifice are not real, but the outcomes are. Social injustices resulted very real atrocities. Those people did not need to die. Reminds me of a song I like by Lead Belly a folk blues singer born in 1888 “We’re in the Same Boat Brother”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxPdl4f7RYE So the question is…are we doing any better sharing the boat as humanity today?
• Part of being human is making mistakes romantic, financial, professional AND we make progress when we look back, learn, and let go of things that don’t serve us.

Sarah’s Questions for Jennie:

• I know they’ll be amazing and more thought provoking and challenging than I could imagine :-) (eeek, hope they will at least be decent!)
• Tell me about that newspaper article that you read when you were 12– what about it fascinated you so much?
• What do you think about the ethics related to the spectacle of near-voyeurism of large-scale violence or suffering? Do you think this applies here?  
• Using your own life experience and history, tell me about some of the artifacts that tell your own story, or the story of your family.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Screen Sparks:

The romance in Titanic serves as a vehicle to invest us in the people aboard the ship and introduces us to the levels of humanity present. As in life, not all of the characters made all of the best choices, but Titanic gives us a chance to engage with their experience and to ask ourselves how we would have behaved presented with such extraordinary circumstances. This weeks Screen Sparks focus on the idea of how Titanic can help us be more humane humans by inviting us to examine our own humanity.

• What role would you have played on the ship?

• Would we keep playing as the musicians
• Would we read our children a bedtime story
• Would we fight for a newfound love?
• Would we push people away from our own lifeboat or help them in like unsinkable molly brown?

• Is never letting go always a good thing?
• Can you think of any modern movies that so effectively marry cinematic spectacle and humanistic narrative?
• Class and artifice are not real, but the outcomes are. Social injustices resulted very real atrocities. Those people did not need to die. Reminds me of a song I like by Lead Belly a folk blues singer born in 1888 “We’re in the Same Boat Brother”  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxPdl4f7RYE So the question is…are we doing any better sharing the boat as humanity today?