TITANIC

TITANIC. James Cameron, dir., script, prod. USA: 20th Century Fox, Lightstorm Entertainment, Paramount Pictures (prod., with Jon Landau et al.) / 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures (dist.), 1997. 194 min. Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Billy Zane, Bill Paxton, stars.

Hugely popular "mundane" film (or "mainstream"), necessarily of the disaster-at-sea variety, relevant here for presenting Titanic as a very large mechanized environment rigidly and explicitly embodying the class system, with the rich on high and the lower orders locked below (cf. and contrast METROPOLIS, BLADE RUNNER, this Category). Note mildly hellish imagery in the scenes of the stokers in the boiler room (cf. MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME, Cameron and Hurd's ALIENS (film), Welles's Time Machine, etc.); note also the beautiful shots of beautiful machinery in action, moving the ship—toward disaster (cf. and contrast S. Eisenstein's OLD AND NEW). Final vision of the film is that of the dying (we infer) heroine, who, in "A lightning before death," images for herself and us Titanic as a eutopia with its large machinery unseen, where all people can share first class, with a beloved at the center. Note also contrasts between modern(ist) machinery on the Titanic and the very modern, but not po-mo, VR units, waldoes, submersibles, and computers we see in the frame story of the salvage operation by Brock Lovett (Paxton) et al.