“I won’t let go.
I promise.”
Jack’s death at the end of Titanic isn’t about the amount of space
on that door.
There’s an ongoing debate about whether Jack could have fit
on the door with Rose - was it big enough for both of them,
could the life jackets add buoyancy, or would the hypothermia
have killed Jack anyway.
“Cameron said, quote, ‘You’re underwater tying
this thing on in 28-degree water…
so by the time you come back up
you’re already dead.’”
Director James Cameron himself has said that Jack had to die.
But why is that?
“Based on our experiments, we have to find that they both
could have survived on that board.”
“I think you guys are missing the point here.
The script says Jack dies.
He has to die.”
But the true reason that Jack has to die
doesn’t lie in the physics of surviving very cold water,
but in the inner logic of the story.
Jack has to die because he exists in order to empower Rose
and give her the will to live.
“You must promise me that you’ll survive.
That you won’t give up.”
And once that story purpose is fulfilled, he’s gone.
Before we go on we want to talk a little bit
about this video’s sponsor, Skillshare.
Skillshare is a superb online learning community
with thousands of classes about everything
Writing, blogging, fashion.
Click the link in the description below
to get 2 months access to all classes for free.
When we look back on Titanic as a culture,
we tend to fixate on the insanely iconic romance scenes.
“I’m flying!”
But a big focus of the actual movie is on the theme of finding
the will to live.
We’re told almost right away that Rose feel depressed and trapped.
“To me it was a slave ship, taking me back to America in chains.”
As she’s sitting in the dining room, we hear
“I felt like I was standing at a great precipice,
with no one to pull me back, no one who cared...
or even noticed.”
Then she runs out and considers suicide.
And this happens to be the very moment when Jack appears in her life --
he shows up to convince her not to jump.
“Don’t do it.”
Yes, we the viewers do see Jack before this point, of course,
and the two briefly lock eyes before this on the deck.
But from Rose’s perspective, it’s as if Jack conveniently
springs into existence precisely when she needs him --
to stop her from ending her life and reveal to her a better
way out of her misery.
“Come on… come on, give me your hand.
You don’t want to do this.”
Now, if we fast forward from this moment of their meeting
to near the end of the film, the moment when Jack dies
is also the moment when Rose finally commits wholeheartedly
to not dying.
She decides to cling to life even when at this point it would be
far easier to just let go and go gentle into that good night…
but no, she’s going to rage, rage against the dying of the light.
So by comparing these two scenes when Jack enters Rose’s life
and when he leaves it, we see can Jack’s dramatic purpose
in the story - and that’s to teach Rose
to keep the fire going within her -- to rekindle in her the desire to live.
“You’re going to die if you don’t break free.
Maybe not right away because you’re strong.
But… sooner or later that fire that I love about you, Rose…
that fire is gonna burn out.”
Rose feels she’s trapped because it’s inconceivable
in her society to leave a man as rich as her fiancé Cal.
“Your father left us nothing but a legacy of bad debts
hidden by a good name.
And that name is the only card we have to play.”
But Rose is deeply unhappy with Cal.
“I know what you must be thinking.
Poor little rich girl…
what does she know about misery.”
“No…
no, that’s not what I was thinking.
What I was thinking was what could have happened
to this girl to make her think she has no way out.”
Before the Titanic hits the iceberg, money, expressed as the classes onboard,
seems all-important, especially to the people in first class.
“Ain’t nothin’ to it, is there, Jack?
Remember, they love money, so just pretend like
you own a gold mine… and you’re in the club.”
But when we’re facing down death, all the riches in the world
are suddenly revealed to be worthless.
The movie illustrates this perfectly when Cal tries to bribe
First Officer Murdoch for a seat on the lifeboat.
But this man is about to die; so what use is money to him?
“Your money can’t save you any more than it can save me.”
Aside from the fact that first class women and children
get priority on the lifeboats, if your ship is going down
what does it matter what class you’re going to die in?
“Will the lifeboats be seated according to class?”
Near the end of the movie, we’re told Cal commits suicide
after losing much of his money in the Crash of ’29 --
“But the crash of ’29 hit his interests hard,
and he put a pistol in his mouth that year.”
So because Cal can’t understand that money really isn’t everything,
it’s as if he never actually learns what the value of life is.
When the Older Rose throws the Heart of the Ocean
into the water at the end, she’s again rejecting Cal’s value system
and the idea that wealth matters anywhere near as much as
those inner, spiritual things that drive us.
So Rose is giving the Heart of the Ocean back to Jack and recognizing
the way that he restored her heart to her --
helping her find the fire within that she needed to live
this long, full life.
“So that old woman.
She’s just a liar, right?”
“And a bit of a tramp if you ask me.”
So as much as our pop culture remembers Titanic for the romance,
“Hey, you cry every time somebody talks about Titanic.”
“Those two had only each other.”
fittingly the deepest theme of this movie about
so many tragic deaths is finding the will to live.
In order for Rose to recapture her will to live,
she needs to honestly face what’s wrong in her life,
and cut that out.
Committing to being alive means committing to living
authentically as oneself.
“I’d rather be his whore than your wife.”
Titanic begins with Rose without Jack, and ends with Rose without Jack.
Sometimes, viewers might remember Jack as the hero --
and he has all the trappings of a perfect heroic underdog.
“You got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”
Meanwhile, Rose appears at the start to be the “damsel in distress” type.
But it quickly becomes clear that Rose is our real hero --
she’s the one who undergoes a complete transformation,
and this is her story.
Jack exists to service Rose’s story.
“You’re the most amazingly astounding, wonderful girl… woman…
that I’ve ever know.”
And he’s essentially the male equivalent of the manic pixie dream girl trope.
Jack the Manic Pixie Dream Boy is perfect love interest --
he’s free, inspiring, handsome enough to inspire
the lifelong zeal of pretty much every preteen girl who watched
the movie at the time, and he’s everything
that’s missing in Rose, the protagonist’s, life.
“Why can't I be like you, Jack?
Just head out for the horizon whenever I feel like it.”
His purpose in Titanic is to enable Rose’s character growth.
Jack has given her all the tools necessary for her survival,
so his role in the story is complete.
And that, essentially, is why he has to die at the end.
Not because he can’t fit on the door --
but because the story has no more use for him.
In the later story, the crew searching
for the diamond tell us
“We never found anything on Jack.
There’s no record of him at all.”
The story gives us an excuse for this --
Jack won his ticket last minute in a poker game.
“We’re goin’ to America!
Full house, boys, woohoo!”
But it seems intentional that the movie plants
the tiniest seed of doubt as to whether Jack was really
on the ship after all.
At the end of Rose’s life, Jack’s memory is completely
erased from the world, except for the indelible impact
he’s left on her -- so he’s alive
only in her heart.
“He exists now… only in my memory.”
It’s a bit of a stretch to read Titanic as Rose’s romance
with a guy who’s totally imaginary -- of course, many others
interact with Jack.
But the point is that Jack has a subtle air
of unreality about him… he feels like some fantasy
of a sexy life-coach that every girl needs
from time to time to help her reorient her heart in the right direction.
“I’m getting off with you.”
“This is crazy.”
“I know.
It doesn’t make any sense… that’s why I trust it.”
Using the framework of Carl Jung, we could say that Jack
is Rose’s animus… essentially, the male
piece of her that’s missing.
“Teach me to ride like a man.”
“And chew tobacco like a man.”
“And spit like a man.”
So, in Jung’s view, a woman getting in touch
with her animus often involves finding
strength of will and determination to act.
These are things that historically society hasn’t really encouraged in women.
“So unfair.”
“Of course it’s unfair.
We’re women.”
But as soon as Rose merges with Jack, her animus,
she becomes daring and bold, her own woman.
“I’m not a foreman in one of your mills
that you can command.”
In an incredibly accelerated timeline, she ditches her fiancé
and turns her back on her family and social class.
Rose shows sexual agency, too, actively pursuing Jack
in their romance.
“Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your French girls.”
“Put your hands on me, Jack.”
And after she has sex with Jack, Rose is assertive,
holding and comforting him.
“You’re trembling.”
When she arrives on the other shore,
she assumes a new name in a new country.
“Dawson.
Rose Dawson.”
Taking his last name is a symbolic commitment to Jack,
representing the idea that in her secret mind
she is forever married to him.
But if we say that he’s her animus, her “marriage” to this piece of herself
would symbolize a promise that she’ll never abandon
her own agency and will again.
Jack’s death can be read as the moment when her animus
ceases to be something separate from her -
and the result is Rose Dawson.
“The press knows the size of Titanic.
Now I want them to marvel at her speed.”
To Rose, the Titanic doesn’t symbolize progress and the future --
to her, this ship is a prison.
And the Titanic that we’re shown, when it’s still thought
to be unsinkable, is a microcosm of
a very structured, oppressive, unequal society.
“You hold a third class ticket and your presence here
is no longer appropriate.”
It’s symbolic that Rose wants to literally jump ship
because she can’t bear what her future holds for her.
The film is set in 1912, in a time when women
still primarily worked in the home, they couldn’t vote,
and divorce was frowned upon.
The scene where Rose’s mother harshly laces her into a corset
is a visual image of how imprisoned she is
by social expectations.
As Rose changes, so do her clothes -
she wears more flowing dresses, allowing herself more physical freedom.
Rose begins as a victim of her time and transforms into a rebel.
“Do you know of Dr. Freud, Mr. Ismay?
His ideas about the male preoccupation with size
might be of particular interest to you.”
“Freud, who is he?
Is he a passenger?”
Rose’s spatial travel through the ship visually represents
her mind’s journey to reject the social constraints
she’s believed before now were unbreakable.
The Titanic was a cultural symbol of might and power,
the unsinkable ship.
“He envisioned a steamer so grand in scale,
and so luxurious in its appointments,
that its supremacy would never be challenged.”
So when the over-confident behemoth sinks, it represents
the undermining of a lot of other things
a classist, patriarchal society posited as the norm.
Sadly, many poor, innocent people
are the casualties of this trauma and change.
But Rose surviving the crash shows that she’ll go on
into a new, brighter future.
As we look at all of this, it’s overwhelmingly clear
that the science of whether Rose and Jack could have fit
on the door together is irrelevant.
What matters is that Rose has completed her transformation.
She’s now ready to take on the world
as Rose Dawson -- an independent woman,
and a trailblazer in a new era.
“It’s not up to you to save me, Jack.”
“You’re right.
Only you can do that.”
This is Emily Gould.
Emily is an acclaimed author and a former editor of Gawker.
She’s also the co-owner of indie publisher Emily Books.
And she teaches a class on creative writing
on Skillshare.
“This class is a ten-day challenge that’s designed
to unlock your creativity by getting you to notice
new details about your world.”
This is why we love Skillshare’s service.
The classes are taught by amazing, accomplished working professionals
in design, photography,
social media, business, entrepreneurship, and more.
In fact, SkillShare has helped us at ScreenPrism to learn more
about animation and design.
They offer 20,000 classes about any skill
you might want to learn all for less than $10 a month.
And right now you can get 2 months access to
all of their classes for free.
But that’s only if you’re one of the first 500 people
who click the link in our description below.
It’s a great deal, so hurry up
and don’t miss out.