#83 ‘Titanic’
Icebergs, Ideals, and the Unsinkable Burden of Being a Woman in a James Cameron Love Story
Titanic (1997) is James Cameron’s monument to doomed romance, tragic hubris, and the endurance of cheekbones under extreme aquatic pressure. It’s three hours of spectacle, soft lighting, and class warfare, all pinned to a love story that has been declared “epic” so many times it’s practically in the Louvre. But beneath the grandeur, Titanic is less a romance and more a gothic horror about what a woman has to survive just to reclaim her own goddamn name.
Kate Winslet’s Rose is the caged dove of the piece: a 17-year-old aristocrat with a corset, a fiancé she despises, and a mother who weaponizes social class like it’s a loaded pistol. Her life is a gilded coffin—until Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), a penniless artist with hair like a shampoo ad and zero boundaries, swoops in and teaches her the sacred rites of living free: spitting off balconies, dancing with the Irish, and posing nude for a sketch that every millennial still references in therapy.
Jack is not a character. He’s a concept: the male fantasy of himself as savior, rendered in charcoal and abs. He exists solely to awaken Rose’s inner rebel, then nobly die so she can discover indoor plumbing and personal agency. He’s not complicated—he’s correct. He’s the kind of man who respects women’s bodies while still getting them naked on a chaise lounge. The dream.
But let’s not forget: this is Rose’s story, even if the film pretends it’s Jack’s right up until he’s frozen into a romantic popsicle. Rose is the one who changes, who dares to live, who throws a priceless necklace into the ocean instead of giving it to her traumatized granddaughter. She’s an icon—but also a burdened one. Because the film frames her liberation as something granted by Jack, rather than forged by her own rage and resilience.
The class politics? Just aesthetic. The poor dance better, the rich dine slower, and everyone’s doomed either way. The ship isn’t just a metaphor—it’s a floating morality play, complete with string quartet. When the iceberg hits, the film kicks into survival mode and becomes a masterpiece of tension, chaos, and watery despair. Cameron’s direction here is impeccable. The sinking sequence is a technical and emotional marvel—because nothing says “tragedy” like a man clinging to wood while Celine Dion soars over the credits.
But the tragedy underneath the tragedy is that Rose, like so many heroines before and after her, must lose everything—including the man who “saves” her—to become fully herself. It’s emancipation by attrition. Empowerment via trauma. She gets to tell her story—at 101 years old, with trembling hands and Hollywood-grade makeup—because everyone else is gone. How inspiring.
4 out of 5 floating doors that definitely could’ve fit two people
(One for Winslet’s fire. One for the ship as feminist metaphor. One for the scale of the disaster. One for the fact that Cameron accidentally made the most enduring critique of the male savior complex in cinema. The missing star? Sank with the idea that a woman needs to be nearly drowned, disowned, and widowed just to live a little.)
