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     Terrible Beauties: Messianic Time and the Image
     of Social Redemption in James Cameron's Titanic

     Patrick McGee
     Louisiana State University
     pmcgee@gateway.net

     © 1999 Patrick McGee.
     All rights reserved.
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          Mankind, which in Homer's time was an object of
          contemplation of the Olympian gods, now is one for
          itself.  Its self-alienation has reached such a degree
          that it can experience its own destruction as an
          aesthetic pleasure of the first order.
                  --Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age
                    of Mechanical Reproduction"

  1. The epigraph above comes from the last paragraph of Benjamin's
     celebrated essay on the movies. Writing on the culture industry
     some years later, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno implied that
     movies could not be true works of art because the latter "are
     ascetic and unashamed" while "the culture industry is
     pornographic and prudish" (Dialectic 140). Benjamin took the more
     radical stand that the term "work of art" has no essential
     meaning; and concerning the "futile thought" that "had been
     devoted to the question of whether photography [or film] is an
     art," he observed that the more significant question had to do
     with whether such inventions "had not transformed the entire
     nature of art" (Illuminations 227). He suggested that the work of
     art has only historical meaning and then proceeded to describe
     what constitutes the work of art in the age of mechanical
     reproduction. Still, when he described "the shriveling of the
     aura" in the traditional work of art, he also recognized "the
     phony smell of the commodity" produced by the money of the film
     industry. He concluded that "[s]o long as the movie-makers'
     capital sets the fashion, as a rule no other revolutionary merit
     can be accredited to today's film than the promotion of a
     revolutionary criticism of traditional concepts of art." Benjamin
     was particularly disgusted by the "cult of the movie star," which
     remains central to Hollywood's promotional strategies.
     Nonetheless, Benjamin recognized that "in some cases today's
     films can also promote revolutionary criticism of social
     conditions, even of the distribution of property" (Illuminations
     231). One would like to know exactly which films Benjamin had in
     mind, but I think it is necessary to grasp the implications of
     his theory of aesthetic history beyond what may have been his own
     aesthetic preferences in the field of cinematic art. If
     traditional concepts of the work of art have been called into
     question by the movies, then it follows that we cannot prejudge
     what constitutes "aesthetic value" or a "revolutionary criticism
     of social conditions" in the cinema. Though we should examine the
     function of capital in the production of cinematic art, it may
     also be necessary to see capital as one of the historical
     conditions of the age of mechanical reproduction that makes
     revolutionary criticism in the cinema possible. Benjamin
     developed the concept of the dialectical image to explain the
     revolutionary potential of the commodity in historical time and
     used this concept to analyze the revolutionary effect of a
     historical perception of the Paris arcades. This essay attempts
     to explore contemporary mass-cultural work from a similar
     perspective.

  2. When in the epigraph Benjamin refers to the aesthetic pleasure
     that the masses take from witnessing their own destruction,
     however, he is not talking about the movies per se but about
     politics, which by the 1930s in Germany and elsewhere had become
     almost as spectacular, almost as much of a show, as the movies.
     In particular, he addresses the most brutal form of politics and
     yet the form that lends itself most readily to the investments of
     aesthetic techniques and values--war. The "property system," as
     Benjamin names the social arrangements of capitalist society, has
     impeded "the natural utilization of productive forces" that have
     been released by technology in the modern world; and, as a
     result, these forces press for an "unnatural utilization." For
     example, the futurist Marinetti, one of Mussolini's backers,
     expected a new art "to supply the artistic gratification of a
     sense of perception that has been changed by technology"
     (Illuminations 242). These are the material conditions not only
     of fascism but of the more general society of the spectacle that
     has been said to characterize virtually all societies in which
     "modern conditions of production prevail" (Debord 12). In
     response to the fascism that he saw aestheticizing politics in
     the thirties, Benjamin wanted a form of communism or historical
     materialism that would politicize art. This critical response to
     fascism in 1936 can also be applied to postmodern versions of
     imperialistic war, the aesthetics of which was revealed by the
     television coverage of the Gulf War in the 1990s. Benjamin
     implicitly understood that we do not seriously challenge the
     aesthetics of war and social domination in the society of the
     spectacle by retreating into tradition and the religious cult of
     the autonomous work of art. In the movies as one of the epitomes
     of mass culture, he saw a manifestation of a new kind of social
     perception that destroys "the traditional value of the cultural
     heritage," or the "aura" (Illuminations 221). Though "the tasks
     which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning
     points of history cannot be solved... [exclusively] by
     contemplation," they can be "mastered gradually by habit." The
     movies require "[r]eception in a state of distraction" that can
     inculcate habits of visual perception and feeling that could lead
     to acts of social transformation. Since individuals avoid the
     tasks of social change because they are painful even to
     contemplate, "art [in the age of mechanical reproduction] will
     tackle the most difficult and most important ones where it is
     able to mobilize the masses." The recession of the cult value of
     art, its aura, has put "the public in the position of the
     critic," concludes Benjamin (Illuminations 240). Art is no longer
     "for the happy few." The task of the professional critic is to
     politicize mass culture by articulating the possible meanings
     that can be derived from its distracted critical reception--to
     unfold, in other words, the unconscious political discourse of
     the masses.

     I. True Lies

  3. James Cameron's Titanic may be called by some a work of genius
     and by others an assemblage of cheap thrills and romance, but in
     either case it is a pure product of mass culture--in fact, it is
     what I would call, with some degree of irony, the masterpiece of
     mass culture. Several reviewers have commented that, despite the
     visual power of the movie, the dialogue is often trite and
     cliché-ridden; and one could add to these criticisms the obvious
     fact that the plot consists of two central components that are
     cinematic clichés: the disaster formula (of which the sinking of
     the Titanic is the classic example, for the great ship has sunk
     on movie and television screens over and over again throughout
     this century) and the romance between rich girl and poor boy. In
     this age of gender studies and queer theory, there are no
     surprises in this movie, no challenges to the dominance of
     heterosexuality; and any gestures toward feminism are of the safe
     variety that have become commonplace in popular movies, including
     several of Cameron's earlier action dramas. Titanic is not a
     departure from Cameron's earlier work but its culmination. I will
     not be suggesting that everything in the movie can be reduced to
     the author's intention as auteur, but clearly Cameron is the
     central figure behind the choreographies of violence in The
     Terminator (1984), Aliens (1986), The Abyss (1989), The
     Terminator 2 (1991), and True Lies (1994). Still, Titanic is not
     strictly Cameron's masterpiece, in the auteurist sense, because
     its power derives from mass culture and from a history of images
     that can be discovered only in retrospect. Through its evocation
     of the truth of the capitalist social structure, it reveals those
     indestructible desires that may be the only force that keeps the
     world from becoming the slave ship of capital accumulation.

  4. The movie is also an interpretive moment within the history of
     mass culture, and of Hollywood films as exemplary products of
     mass culture. It discloses the dialectical meaning of the images
     in a kind of film that has come to be one of the dominant
     products of the Hollywood film industry since the mid-sixties.
     Loosely, this kind of film has been called the "action" movie,
     though this term takes on a different sense from what it had
     before the mid-sixties, when it referred merely to westerns, war
     films and other movies involving some physical action. Since that
     time, this kind of movie has become more than a genre because it
     incorporates other genres into its structure. Science fiction,
     horror, mystery thrillers, disaster movies, crime dramas,
     westerns, and (in Cameron's hands, not only in Titanic but in The
     Abyss, True Lies, and, to some extent, the original version of
     The Terminator) the passionate love story--all of these
     traditional film genres have tended to be absorbed into the
     structure of the action movie. Though the ground for this
     supergenre was carefully prepared by Sergio Leone's spaghetti
     westerns, John Boorman's 1967 movie Point Blank may have been the
     groundbreaking film that exposed the possibility of action as the
     pure object of cinematic representation. One of the
     characteristics of this movie is that the plot remains relatively
     unmotivated. Although the film begins with some enigmatic
     allusions to the background of the central character, to his
     involvement in a crime and his betrayal by another criminal, the
     revenge motif that seems to drive the action is never adequate to
     the action itself. The character played by Lee Marvin seems to
     want the money he was cheated out of more than revenge; so he
     goes on killing everyone who gets in his way even after he has
     killed the man who betrayed him; and, at the end of the film, it
     turns out that he has been killing the enemies of another man who
     mysteriously directs his actions and who actually holds the money
     he seeks. He never gets the money; but the implication is that
     the violence will continue until there is no longer anyone left
     to kill, anyone left to betray or to be betrayed by, anyone who
     can withhold the money that is the ruling object of desire in
     capitalist culture. The title of the movie refers not only to the
     Marvin character's tendency to shoot people point blank without
     hesitation or remorse but to the film's representation of
     violence without moral rationalization or justification. It
     violates the expected sensibility of its audience point blank;
     and, as I recall, that is how it was advertised at the time of
     its release. Though Lee Marvin's character still seems human, he
     acts out the drive toward destruction that will later find
     embodiment in Cameron's terminators. He represents the death
     drive of capitalist culture; and the movie itself exploits that
     drive as the essence of its own commodity status, of the pleasure
     it offers to an audience that shows itself to be hungry for
     images of destruction as the embodiment of its deepest social
     longings. This kind of action movie has become an international
     hit and has found some of its most sophisticated practitioners in
     Hong Kong, Latin America, and Europe. It embraces crime thrillers
     like Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1972) and Walter Hill's The
     Driver (1978), as well as disaster films like Irwin Allen's The
     Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974). More
     recent and more conservative examples include John McTiernan's
     Die Hard (1988), Jan de Bont's Speed (1994), and Kathryn
     Bigelow's witty Point Break (1991).

  5. Since the mid-eighties, James Cameron has been one of the more
     successful of the action movie-makers. The two early films, The
     Terminator and Aliens, have a self-conscious "B-movie" look that
     flies in the face of the effort at detailed authenticity that
     characterizes films like Ridley Scott's original Alien (1979) and
     Blade Runner (1982). The first Terminator implicitly undermines
     the quest for human authenticity that lies problematically at the
     center of Blade Runner in both of its versions. Cameron's
     machines are not simply anti-human or the creations of humans:
     they are the embodiment of the death drive, the end and spirit of
     capitalist civilization. At one point, the roommate of Sara
     Connor plays back her answering machine, which contains the
     message that "machines need love too." The meaning of this line
     only takes on its real significance in Cameron's later movies,
     but already in the first Terminator it is clear that the human is
     a simulacrum.

  6. In the future, where humans must struggle to survive the world of
     machines they have created, Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) falls in
     love with a woman's picture (Linda Hamilton as Sara Connor) and
     eventually, as he says, comes across time to meet the object of
     his desire. This is a postmodern love affair in which every
     reality is virtual and many possible futures can be substituted
     for one another through the slightest adjustment of the present.
     The B-movie texture of this Terminator foregrounds the
     constructed nature of the characters and of the terminator as the
     embodiment of the drive (see Zizek 22). The latter is not evil in
     itself but expresses the evil of instrumental reason that has
     come to substitute means for the goal of human rationality. He
     can't be stopped by humans because he embodies their own darkest
     wish for the end of civilization. The only thing that can redeem
     the drive is love--I don't mean love in the romantic sense,
     however, but a passionate desire that can transform the image of
     the past (Sara Connor, in this case) into the hope of the future.
     Sara Connor becomes what Benjamin would call a dialectical image,
     which, according to John McCole, is "one that results from the
     reciprocal relationship between two discrete historical moments"
     (249). Such an image is fleeting because it emerges from the
     rupture of temporal continuity that brings the present into the
     past and the past into the present. In the first Terminator, the
     past and the future coincide in the present: for Kyle, Sara
     Connor is the past; for Sara, Kyle is the future; but as the film
     announces at the very outset, the battle is fought in the
     present, the now. In my view, the meaning of the action movie,
     the effect that distinguishes it from other films that deploy
     violence such as the Bond movies, is the rupture of time, the
     subjection of the past and the future to a fleeting present,
     which "loads time into itself until the energies generated by the
     dialectic of recognition produce an irruption of discontinuity"
     (McCole 249). Although not all action movies play with time in
     the same way as the first Terminator, they always produce an
     image of human history as disruptive violence that contracts
     linear time into the time of the now or messianic time, from
     which can emerge the hope for apocalyptic social change.

  7. In my view, Aliens foregrounds the same apocalyptic desire, which
     is why it is less a sequel to Scott's original Alien than to the
     first Terminator. Once again, even though Cameron had the budget
     to create a different look, he chooses to foreground the B-movie
     image, and thus to insist on the simulated nature of reality. No
     longer, as in Scott's movie, do we have frail human flesh at war
     with the unthinkable phallic beast; on the contrary, the marines
     and a transformed Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) are almost as tough
     as the aliens themselves, who seem to embody the desire for
     self-destruction that could be the essence of postmodern culture.
     The real villain is not the alien culture that simply mirrors
     human desire but the representative of the capitalist drive for
     the accumulation of wealth. Burke (Paul Reiser) wants to
     transform the alien into a commodity; but Ripley instinctively
     knows that it is her own nature that she must confront in the
     final battle with the alien mother, her own simulated desire to
     be other. Like Kyle, Ripley has also crossed time, but hers isn't
     a jump from the future to the past but from the past to the
     future. She has been suspended in space and time for fifty years
     and comes out of hibernation to learn (in one version of the
     film) that her own daughter has aged and died. She goes back to
     the place of her original confrontation with the alien because
     what has to be confronted is the image of her own desire for
     self-destruction. The object of that desire doesn't become clear,
     however, until the final confrontation. First, Ripley's own
     socially-determined maternal drive requires her to go back into
     the aliens' nest in order to save the girl who has become the
     daughter she has lost; and, second, without taking anything away
     from the love she feels for the girl, this maternal drive, when
     she sees it embodied in the mother of the aliens as what Barbara
     Creed would call the "monstrous-feminine," is precisely the image
     of her own identity and sexual nature that must be destroyed if
     she is to be liberated from the alienation of her own body, if
     she is to sustain the hope of ever creating a new body beyond
     gender oppression, a new woman. Finally, in order to defeat the
     alien image of the maternal body, she must become a machine, a
     kind of cyborg, after she crawls inside the robotic fork lift. In
     this battle with the alien mother on the spacecraft, the real
     cyborg (Lance Henriksen) turns out to be an ally because in
     Cameron's simulacrum of the world everyone is already a
     simulacrum, or artificial person, who must confront the dark aim
     of the desire for death and what this desire signifies, the hope
     that there could be a different world, a different future.

  8. The second Terminator, which I will refer to as Judgment Day,
     comes after Cameron made the transition from the B-movie look in
     standard screen ratio (1.85:1) to the 70mm blow-up (2.2:1). He
     made this transition in The Abyss, which in some ways is a
     rehearsal for Titanic. While the scenes of the future war between
     men and machines in Judgment Day still have something of a
     B-movie look, the visual construction of this film is quite
     different. Though he is no Nicholas Ray or Stanley Kubrick,
     Cameron uses the widescreen effectively to enhance the
     apocalyptic tone of the film, particularly in the dream sequences
     in which Sara Connor stares through a cyclone fence into a
     playground full of children at the exact moment when a nuclear
     weapon goes off in downtown Los Angeles. The wider screen gives
     the images a greater depth and also, in my view, tends to create
     in the audience the feeling of being enveloped by the action that
     the film depicts. Although Cameron's movies depend on fast,
     rhythmic continuity editing, the dream sequences allow him to
     introduce more intellectual editing into his work. Thus, where
     the first Terminator is more about tearing apart the fabric of
     linear time through passionate desire, Judgment Day explores
     temporal disruption as the threat of catastrophe that ironically
     opens up the historical process to the possibility of revision
     and redirection through direct human intervention. The meaning of
     the human, however, is one of the aspects of history that
     undergoes serious revision. If the first Terminator embodied the
     death drive, his avatar (T800) in Judgment Day undergoes a
     process of humanization that suggests the historical nature of
     what we call the human. The death drive that brings humanity
     closer and closer to the Judgment Day of self-destruction can be
     revised and redirected because it is not ultimately even the
     desire for death but the desire for what Jacques Lacan calls the
     Thing, something that we can never name and can only articulate
     by positing a goal or end as its substitute or representation.
     The desire for the Thing enables us to transform the death drive
     into a creative act of social transformation. In Judgment Day, no
     one crosses time for love, as in the first Terminator; but love
     is nevertheless the final result of crossing time because in the
     characters of Sara Connor and her son, John, human beings finally
     learn how to love the machine, the terminator, which is to say,
     the drive that can be redeemed by social desire. The terminator's
     reappearance and the crisis of an approaching catastrophe bring
     about a temporal rupture that makes it possible to make up
     history as we go along, as Linda Hamilton's Sara comments in a
     voice-over at one point. According to Benjamin, "History is the
     subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time,
     but time filled by the presence of the now" (Illuminations 261).
     The presence of the now, or messianic time, is what the action
     movie has always explored as the real meaning of history, as the
     effect of the dialectical image it produces on the cinematic
     screen. In the time of the now, as the message of the future to
     the past suggests, "The future is not set; there is no fate but
     what we make for ourselves." By learning to love the machine, we
     learn to love ourselves and to make ourselves into the machine
     that can sacrifice its drive--that is to say, its life--in order
     to transform its history into a narrative of hope.

  9. Before Titanic, The Abyss is Cameron's most explicit love story
     in which intense action sequences and scenes that entail
     incredible alternations between life and death (i.e., characters
     die, either literally or figuratively, and then come back to
     life) are substituted for sex. It is also the movie whose history
     illustrates the problems a director like Cameron encounters in
     trying to produce his almost Blakean vision of the postmodern
     world in the framework of mass culture. There are two or more
     versions of Judgment Day; but I don't find the special editions
     to be significantly different from the originally released
     version. The second version of The Abyss, originally released on
     laserdisc and videotape, is almost a different movie. The first
     half of the movie develops much more slowly and offers a more
     complex view of the relationship between the central couple, Bud
     and Lindsey Brigman (Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio).
     They are in the process of getting a divorce largely for reasons
     of career or, if you will, a conflict between the different goals
     of their separate life histories. In other words, they embody the
     typical bourgeois couple of a postmodern patriarchy in which the
     authority of the male is gradually losing ground. Bud tries to
     assert his authority by reminding Lindsey that her last name is
     the same as his, but she quickly dispels any illusion he may have
     about that. Whereas the first version of The Abyss leaves it at
     that, the second version makes it clear that Lindsey has already
     had a relationship with another man, though it seems to have come
     to an end. Ironically, the second version is more male-centered,
     more focused on the crisis of masculinity; and at least one
     female member of the crew of the deep-sea rig expresses her
     loyalty to Bud and criticizes Lindsey. In a way that anticipates
     the structure of Titanic, these ordinary social relations are
     transformed by a series of catastrophes that rupture normal time.
     After a nuclear submarine encounters an anomalous submerged
     entity and crashes, a unit of Navy seals is sent to the deep-sea
     rig to use it as a stepping-off point for examining the damage to
     the submarine. Various miscalculations during a hurricane cause
     the deep-sea rig to lose its lifeline to the surface. The leader
     of the seals (Michael Biehn) develops symptoms of paranoia due to
     high-pressure syndrome after retrieving a nuclear warhead from
     the submarine. Meanwhile, Lindsey and another crew member witness
     an underwater entity that appears to be an intelligent alien
     life-form. The paranoid seal intends to destroy the aliens with
     the nuclear device, which leads to the most intense action
     sequences in the film. In the process, Lindsey drowns and is
     revived, and Bud employs a special breathing fluid to dive to the
     bottom of a three-mile abyss in order to dismantle the nuclear
     warhead. At one point, Lindsey and the crew think Bud is dead
     when in fact he has been carried into the submerged city of the
     aliens.

 10. When I first saw this movie, I was mesmerized by the underwater
     sequences, although I thought the plot and visual style resembled
     that of a comic-book. Nonetheless, as in all of Cameron's movies,
     the acting was energetic enough to make the unbelievable
     believable, or at least, in my case, to enable me to suspend
     disbelief. The one effect that really did not seem to work were
     the aliens, who look like humanoid jellyfish, and their angelic
     underwater machines. In the second version, however, the machines
     somehow make more sense to me because their allegorical functions
     within the plot are more obvious. Cameron employs the style of
     cinematic realism to develop the relationship between the central
     characters, but his disruption of space and time by locating the
     story under the sea during a catastrophe transforms reality into
     allegory that makes the aliens into the angelic machines who give
     the story its constructed meaning. In the second version, as the
     masters of some miraculous water technology, they produce a
     global tidal wave that reaches to the edge of every major city
     and then stops. Their purpose is to teach human beings a lesson
     about the appropriate use of technology before mankind destroys
     itself in a nuclear war and winter. In the context of Cameron's
     ongoing exploration of humanity as a machine that has to make
     itself human by directly intervening in the historical process,
     these angelic machines (for it is almost impossible to
     distinguish the aliens themselves from the machines they make)
     seem to allegorize the utopian possibility of what a human being
     could become. They manifest what Susan Buck-Morss, in a reading
     of Benjamin, sees as the "very essence of socialist culture":
     "the tendency... to fuse art and technology, fantasy and
     function, meaningful symbol and useful tool" (125-26). Such a
     socialism, in the present context, must be a utopian image; but
     the poetics of mass culture in Cameron's movies suggests this
     very fusion as the real possibility of the contemporary culture
     industry to emancipate, in Benjamin's own words, "the creative
     forms... from art, just as in the sixteenth century the sciences
     liberated themselves from philosophy" (qtd. in Buck-Morss 125).
     The Abyss concludes with a deus ex machina in which the aliens
     inexplicably succeed in doing what God or the gods have
     consistently failed to do: they save mankind not so much through
     the suspension of nature as through its recreation by technology
     that has been liberated from the domination of capital.

 11. The second version of the film begins with a quote from
     Nietzsche: "When you look long into an abyss, the abyss looks
     also into you." In these movies, the abyss is messianic time in
     which the real structure of history is revealed as the
     self-creation of the collective human subject. What looks back
     from the abyss is what humanity ought to be--not some ideal
     humanity but one that has learned the ethical imperative that
     says, according to Lacan, "the only thing of which one can be
     guilty is of having given ground relative to one's desire"
     (Lacan, Ethics, 319). This is the ethical imperative that opposes
     the morality of power, which says, "'As far as desires are
     concerned, come back later. Make them wait'" (315). The act of
     remaining faithful to, or living in conformity with, one's desire
     is not simply an act of selfishness or narcissism because, in the
     Lacanian system, desire is never strictly individual: it is
     always derived from a relation to the other, to the cultural
     unconscious, which finds expression in yet another formula:
     "'There is no satisfaction for the individual outside of the
     satisfaction of all'" (292). Though we can only know and
     articulate our desire as individuals, it is never simply for the
     individual that desire seeks satisfaction in the object but for
     the socius that determines the individual in his or her being.
     The first version of The Abyss belies this message because the
     alternative is between the mad soldier who would use technology
     to destroy all of humankind to satisfy the demands of his
     paranoia and the reasonable employees of corporate capital who
     merely want to save their individual lives and the lives of other
     individuals (including the aliens). In the second version, there
     is no middle road: either technology (as the embodiment of the
     death drive) will annihilate humanity as the answer to the demand
     for absolute satisfaction that it articulates, or it will
     transfigure the human condition through the realization of
     collective human desire that exists presently in the cultural
     unconscious. Desire, of course, is a process, a temporal
     postponement of ends, a promise of collective satisfaction that
     will never be realized in utopian perfection but will always be
     strived for as the condition of human life. In every Cameron
     movie, with the possible exception of True Lies, there is no
     escaping the alternatives between destruction and creation, death
     and life, formal closure and perpetual process.

 12. True Lies could be the title of any Cameron movie, but it does
     seem to have a special significance for the movie that bears it.
     When I first saw True Lies, I was disappointed and even a little
     shocked. The movie is extremely misogynist at times; and its
     style has the gleam of commodified art without, as far as I could
     see, any redeeming allegorical significance. The gossip, at the
     time, was that the movie reflected the director's unstable
     marital history and suffered from the absence of Gale Ann Hurd,
     who may have been responsible for the feminist subtext of the
     earlier films. Though that may be true, the feminism in Cameron's
     movies, including Titanic, are primarily responses to social
     context and reflect the ambivalence of that context; already in
     The Abyss, there is a tension, if not outright contradiction,
     between misogynist representations (Lindsey is frequently labeled
     by others as, and even calls herself, "the cast-iron bitch") and
     feminist thematics (understood as theoretically unsophisticated).
     In retrospect, True Lies would appear to be both a
     politically-retrograde entertainment and a satirical critique of
     one of the dominant representations of the masculine subject and
     of gender relationships in popular movies. In television
     interviews, Cameron said that the movie takes its inspiration
     from the spy thriller, particularly the James Bond movies. To me,
     the movie suggests that while Bond is usually seen as a
     philandering loner without any domestic attachments, he is also
     the government man who defends the status quo and as such must
     ultimately embody the ideology of the normative bourgeois
     masculine subject. In other words, if one scratches beneath the
     surface of Bond's image, one finds Harry Tasker (Arnold
     Schwarzenegger), the secret agent who is also a family man. While
     Harry wages war against two-dimensional villains (in this case,
     utterly racist images of Near Eastern terrorists), the real
     battle is within the nuclear family between the bored wife (Jamie
     Lee Curtis) and the husband who lives only for his work. As a
     satire of the precursor of the action genre, the movie virtually
     deconstructs the Bond film to show that beneath its exotic
     surface it articulates the values of domesticity and patriarchal
     authority. Ultimately, Harry may not be that different from the
     sexually-inadequate used-car salesman (Bill Paxton) who pretends
     to be a secret agent in order to attract women: that is, the
     secret agent with a license to kill turns out to be the fantasy
     of the domestic masculine subject who cannot sexually satisfy his
     wife. The ending of the film, from this perspective, is doubly
     ironic. The condition of Harry's return to the family in order to
     assume his domestic responsibilities (including his sexual
     responsibilities) is that his wife enters into the fantasy world
     of the secret agent. In this case, the feminist subtext of the
     earlier movies is turned on its head. The family survives because
     the dominant masculine subject recognizes its dependence on
     domestic space for its true sexual identity, and the woman who
     has effectively been imprisoned in that space discovers her
     liberation by entering the world of masculine fantasy. In the
     last scene of the movie, now that both husband and wife are
     secret agents, they encounter the weakling Paxton character again
     and humiliate him in public. The wedding of the feminist subject
     and the masculinist hero constitutes the disavowal of sexual
     inadequacy and domestic boredom. Though the representations of
     the world that the film projects are all lies, they are also true
     insofar as they articulate the ideological fantasies that cover
     the contradictions of the nuclear family as the "natural" social
     unit. These lies say something true without ever ceasing to be
     true lies.

     II. Dream Ship

 13. With the release of Titanic, all of the movies of James Cameron
     and all of the movies from which that work derives and to which
     it relates are dragged into the present, into a new constellation
     of historical images. (I refer not only to the action movies but
     to other spectacle films like Spartacus [1960] and Doctor Zhivago
     [1965], which Cameron has occasionally mentioned as the type of
     movies he was trying to emulate.) Benjamin insisted that
     materialist historiography cannot be satisfied with a linear
     history that follows "the sequence of events like the beads of a
     rosary." "A historical materialist," he says, "approaches a
     historical subject only where he encounters it as monad." Such a
     monadic structure is a form that blasts "a specific era out of
     the homogeneous course of history"; but it can also blast "a
     specific work out of the lifework." The monad that produces this
     effect derives from the constellation that the individual work
     forms with a specific earlier work or works, including, as in the
     case of Titanic, the life of a genre. As a result, "the lifework
     [or, in this case, the genre] is preserved in this work and at
     the same time canceled" (Illuminations 263). The term translated
     as "canceled" here is a form of the Hegelian sublation or
     Aufhebung. In other words, if the movie Titanic has the effect
     that I am claiming for it, it sublates or virtually transforms
     the historical meaning of the works I have referred to or
     analyzed in the first section of this essay--to the extent of
     virtually cancelling or negating their conventional meanings as
     commodities or pure entertainments--and makes possible the
     readings I have already performed.

 14. The first image in Titanic may lead the spectator to expect a
     nostalgia film, which, as Fredric Jameson suggests, transforms
     the past into a commodity that becomes a simulacrum of historical
     understanding in a present that has lost the sense of history per
     se (Jameson, Postmodernism 1-51). I refer to the shots of the
     R.M.S. Titanic pulling away from the wharf while the passengers
     wave as the initial credits appear on the screen. These images
     are captured on slow-speed film and convey the hazy quality of
     old photographs to create the image of the "dream ship" that the
     central female character, Rose Dewitt Bukater (Kate Winslet),
     refers to later in the movie. This nostalgic image corresponds to
     what I will call, improvising on Benjamin, the historical image,
     i.e., an image of the pastness of the past that enters the
     present as a reification of time, something we can consume
     without disrupting the present, without disturbing our historical
     understanding, so to speak. Yet almost immediately, after the
     title appears on the screen over the image of a segment of ocean
     devoid of human forms, there is a cut to two small submarines
     (deep submersibles) on the way down to the bottom of the sea. In
     a few moments, the submarines flash their searchlights on the
     prow of the Titanic. Since Cameron filmed the actual wreckage of
     the Titanic with the help of his brother, who designed the mobile
     titanium housing for the 35-millimeter camera operated by remote
     control from another submarine, one can only assume that this
     first glimpse of the wreck is the actual Titanic. This
     documentary footage may not have been necessary to produce the
     effect of reality in this movie, but once the spectators know it
     is there it becomes a part of the experience. In effect, this
     piece of the real deflates or erases the initial dream image, the
     historical image, and substitutes for it an allegorical image.
     Again improvising on Benjamin, the allegorical image is an image
     of the ruins of time, an image of something that has been
     separated from its original context and meaning so that now we
     must attribute a meaning to it. It no longer signifies the
     pastness of the past as an object of consumption but the moral
     and ultimately transcendental significance of history, the moral
     truth that must be derived from decay and ruin. If the historical
     image turns the past into a commodity fetish that gives pleasure
     through consumption, the allegorical image moralizes history as
     an image of the vanity of time. It is a piece of the past that
     survives into the present as a message that cannot change
     anything but nonetheless reminds us of change itself. The whole
     movie pivots, so to speak, on the tension between the historical
     image and the allegorical image; but, though that tension is
     never resolved, it gives ground finally to the dialectical image
     as the disruptive embodiment of social contradiction that tears
     the fabric of time and makes possible the articulation of hope
     not as the resolution of contradiction or tension but as the
     manifestation of contradiction, its material articulation.

 15. At the most general level, Titanic as a dialectical image
     articulates the social contradiction between demand and desire in
     class society. I take these words from the work of Lacan, but I
     am going to give them specific meanings in the context of this
     discussion. In my view, since the terms "demand" and "desire" can
     both translate what Freud called a wish, the distinction between
     these two terms is a refinement of the Freudian theory of
     wish-fulfillment. Stated simply, demand arises out of the needs
     of the body that take the form of the drive in the symbolic realm
     of language and culture. Like the infant who has learned how to
     manipulate symbols in order to make the demand for food or
     comfort but who has not yet mastered the reality principle that
     requires the acceptance of postponement and partial
     satisfactions, the subject of demand seeks an absolute and final
     satisfaction, either through death, which extinguishes all needs,
     or through the construction of an illusion. Though for the infant
     and for most adults that illusion may take the form of a dream or
     a fantasy, on the broader social level of a class society it
     takes the form of value and can be associated with capital,
     property, the commodity, and class identity itself. In the movie,
     this illusion is the image of the Titanic as a dream ship, an
     enormous and socially totalizing commodity. This dream ship
     answers the social demand for a reality that works, that can
     fulfill all human needs, including the need for a social
     arrangement that allows each subject to coexist with others in
     such a way as to permit a life without terrible suffering and
     pain, and that can permit some limited free play to desire, a
     free play that constitutes hope. Unfortunately, such free play is
     also meant to coexist with the absolute satisfactions of power
     and privilege, which can only be realized through the
     accumulation of wealth and the exclusion and/or control of the
     other. The class system as a fantasy found one of its most
     beautiful expressions in the R.M.S. Titanic, the fantasy of an
     order in which everything and every person has their proper place
     and value without contradiction or conflict--in other words,
     without the unsolicited intrusions of desire.

 16. The ambivalent nature of the Titanic as the answer to demand
     discovers its limits in the two central male characters. The
     embodiment of desire's subversive play in the movie is Jack
     Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio), who defines his own allegorical
     significance in the first line he speaks, "When you got nothing,
     you've got nothing to lose." Jack is nothing but hope and desire,
     and ironically the Titanic answers his need for a reality that
     permits him the freedom to pursue desire's enigmatic goals. For
     Jack, desire is an end in itself, but an end that the dream ship
     seems to make possible. In accepting the illusion that the
     Titanic offers him, Jack evades the contradiction between his
     desire as a form of hope and the demand for social closure and
     control that animates the class system, though in evading this
     contradiction he also remains faithful to the ethics of desire by
     refusing to give ground. As he says, standing on the prow of the
     Titanic as it cuts through the ocean, "I'm the king of the
     world"; but he is not referring to his power over others or to
     his ability to make the world and its people conform to his
     fantasy but to the irrepressible force of his own desire. Jack is
     no revolutionary; but the desire he channels is dangerous and
     makes possible revolutions (including the long revolution that is
     cultural change itself). At the opposite extreme of the social
     world on the Titanic is Cal Hockley (Billy Zane), the almost
     comically arrogant manifestation of pure class privilege. For
     Cal, the answer to demand can only be possession and domination
     of the other. The phrase that Walter Lord attributed to a deck
     hand (42) goes to Cal in Cameron's screenplay: "God himself could
     not sink this ship!" Cal's bombastic behavior has offended many
     reviewers, even the ones who like the movie; but in my view he is
     an essential ingredient of the movie's constellatory structure,
     its melodrama. Nothing, not even God, can threaten the social
     order that Cal fantasizes as somehow the product of his own will.
     He constantly proclaims throughout the movie that a "real man
     makes his own luck," though it is rather obvious that this man's
     self-made character is the product of inherited wealth and
     privilege (which, in the end, is a commentary on the ideology of
     self-making itself). What Cal does make, though not in isolation
     as he imagines but as a member of the dominant class, is the
     fantasy of ownership and the natural rule of class. He treats not
     only his possessions but his fiancé as forms of private property
     and demands from Rose that she stay in her place and perform the
     functions for which, in his view, she has been designed and for
     which he has paid. I refer to this ownership and natural rule of
     class as a fantasy because Cal cannot see the contradictions that
     these social relations generate, contradictions that have the
     potential of destroying what seems natural and bringing about a
     social transformation.

 17. Desire is something different from demand, though they are
     intimately related to one another. Desire involves postponement
     and compromise, the satisfaction of needs consistent with the
     existence of others. Desire has these qualities because it always
     responds to the reality principle, which means that it takes the
     other into account, even to the point of identifying the desire
     of the subject with the desire of the other. The true object of
     desire can never be owned and always remains just out of reach,
     even though it enables the subject to satisfy its needs without
     succumbing to the destructive force of the drive and its demands.
     Jack wants Rose not as the answer to his demand for pleasure and
     comfort but as the condition of his desire. At least one
     authority on the historical Titanic, whom I heard through the
     barrage of media commentaries on this movie, has observed that
     the romance between Jack and Rose is the most glaring historical
     anomaly in the film. Such a relationship would have been
     impossible because there could have been no contact between a
     person from first class and one from steerage. One should always
     be suspicious of such historical certainties, for there are
     always exceptions to every rule; there are no laws without the
     possibility of transgressions. Yet this challenge to historical
     verisimilitude foregrounds the dialectic of desire that generates
     the contradiction between the fantasies of demand, which take the
     ultimate form of the commodity itself, and the displacements of
     desire, which in a sense dissolve the fantasies that bring desire
     into being. As Lacan stressed, desire is what remains after you
     subtract need from demand. It is the real part that derives from
     the imaginary whole, the satisfaction that can only leave you
     unsatisfied and longing for the other who always remains internal
     to desire itself and just out of reach.

 18. Quite simply, the passionate relationship between Jack and Rose
     arises from the class system and the domination of capital that
     makes Rose into a commodity and Jack into something like the
     abjected other that I will call the flaneur. The latter position
     is one not without some transformative power that Jack channels,
     a power that derives from desire itself; but ironically the
     condition of that desire is social exclusion and repression. Old
     Rose, who narrates this tale in the present, expresses the
     extreme limit of that repression in describing her state of mind
     as she boarded the Titanic in 1912. To everyone else it was the
     "ship of dreams," but to her it was a "slave ship." She is going
     back to America "in chains" as the chattel property of Cal
     Hockley. Later in the movie, Jack aligns himself with this social
     position after he joins Cal Hockley's party for dinner in the
     first class section of the ship. As he leaves, he tells Rose that
     he needs to go back to rowing with the other slaves in steerage.
     Twice in the movie Jack is literally chained with handcuffs and
     even dies with the chains still dangling from his wrists. Rose
     has another kind of chain attached to her, one that is most fully
     revealed in the scene with Cal as she faces the mirror in her
     state room. Cal takes out the Heart of the Ocean diamond necklace
     and places it around her neck, seemingly as an expression of his
     love for her but more realistically as an estimation of how much
     he values her as a commodity. Earlier in the movie, Rose has
     demonstrated her taste for modern art (in the form of early
     Picasso); but in the present scene, Rose herself manifests Cal's
     taste in art. In the shots of her in the mirror, she takes on the
     appearance of a pre-Raphaelite woman, a sort of human jewel for
     which the mirror functions as a frame or setting, an object that
     can also be possessed by Cal's masculine gaze. If we carry this
     logic to its conclusion, we could say that Cal's taste in art is
     more conservative than Rose's. She prefers the modernist view
     that fragments and deconstructs the subject, whereas Cal
     identifies with an older aesthetic that reduces the subject to an
     object of pure beauty. While the modernist representation tries
     to subvert its own effect of transforming the real into an
     aesthetic commodity, the earlier aesthetic representation makes
     beauty into the ideal commodity, the pure fantasy, an art for
     art's sake that ironically answers Cal's demand for the ownership
     of the other. Rose is not the recipient of the diamond necklace
     but an extension of it, and she is enchained by her status as a
     commodity. Though Cal wants Rose to satisfy his sexual demand, he
     really wants her beauty for its own sake; that is to say, he
     wants those qualities of class and physical grace that mark her
     as an ideal trophy wife, a woman who resembles a work of art to
     the extent that she can be purchased and displayed as the
     signifier of a natural class distinction.

 19. As she ties her daughter's body into the corset that makes it a
     more perfect commodity, Rose's mother reminds her that the family
     money is gone and that the only thing that can save the two women
     from a descent into the working class is Rose's marriage. She
     also reminds her of what she (the mother) takes to be the natural
     cause of this situation: "We're women--our choices are never
     easy." Ironically, there can be no doubt that what initially
     draws Jack's gaze to Rose is precisely her "picture-perfect"
     beauty, corset and all. He sits on a lower deck staring up at the
     forbidden object of desire, the symbol of masculine class
     privilege, on the upper deck. Of course, Jack, the
     Irish-American, is immediately reminded by his Irish friend in
     steerage that he has no chance of achieving that object of desire
     and so might as well desist. His friend points out, in other
     words, that such desire violates the very system that calls it
     into being. The future trophy wife of Cal Hockley has been chosen
     precisely for her ability to capture and mesmerize the gaze of
     other men and thus to bring honor and social distinction on a man
     who considers himself to be, as Rose says, one of the "masters of
     the universe." She is there to be looked at not just because, as
     feminist film theorists have sometimes argued, this is a
     Hollywood movie and the women in such mass-cultural works
     function as spectacle, as something to be looked at and consumed
     by the masculine gaze. The movie certainly exploits this
     cinematic convention, but it also discloses the source of this
     convention in the social system of the Titanic, a class system
     that contradicts itself when it becomes the condition of a desire
     that has the potential to undermine the system itself. The power
     of Jack's gaze to consume the image of the woman as commodity
     derives from his marginalized status as the social vagabond or
     flaneur.

 20. Benjamin, in his reading of Baudelaire and the Paris arcades in
     the nineteenth century, identified the flaneur as a type of
     modern individual under capitalism, an individual who first
     appears in the nineteenth century but who anticipates figures of
     Benjamin's own time and, as I will argue, beyond that time.
     Within the class system of the Titanic, the flaneur is by no
     means a member of the proletariat, a class position given
     representation in the movie by the stokers and other men who work
     in the red light of the boiler rooms and who are the first to die
     after the collision with the iceberg. Though Jack is certainly a
     "poor guy," as he says to Rose, he must be distinguished, as
     Benjamin stressed about the flaneur, from the typical pedestrian
     who "would let himself be jostled by the crowd." On the contrary,
     like the flaneur, Jack requires "elbow room" and is "unwilling to
     forego the life of the gentleman of leisure" (Benjamin,
     Illuminations 172; Charles Baudelaire 54). When Cal sees Jack in
     a borrowed tuxedo and remarks that one could almost mistake him
     for a gentleman, he says more than he knows. Jack may not have
     Cal's social power or pedigree, but he has seized for himself
     some of the leisure time and the seemingly pointless existence
     that used to be the exclusive privilege of the aristocratic
     gentleman. Jack as flaneur parodies the gentleman but at the same
     time secretly identifies with what the gentleman has--the
     appearance of freedom. A figure "on the threshold... of the
     bourgeois class," the flaneur moves through the commodity world
     "ostensibly to look around, yet in reality to find a buyer"
     (Benjamin, Reflections 156). Jack, after all, is an artist; and
     though he has not yet found a buyer, he has chosen a way of life
     that places hope in the aesthetic marketplace. When Rose's mother
     crudely interrogates Jack about how he is able to find the means
     to travel, he explains that he works only as much as he needs to
     in order to maintain his vagabond existence. Ironically, the
     upper-classes who have inherited, stolen (in the ideological
     guise of free enterprise), or married into their wealth maintain
     the puritan ideal of the value of labor as the purpose of human
     existence. Most of the first-class passengers who meet Jack find
     him amusing and perhaps even enjoy the way he mirrors their own
     lifestyles. He shows that the image of wealth can be transformed
     into a commodity and then appropriated by someone who is not
     wealthy but who desires the image of freedom that wealth seems to
     make possible. Jack anticipates men like Henry Miller or, from a
     more socially marginalized location, Langston Hughes, who
     represent the survival of the flaneur in the first half of the
     twentieth century, men and sometimes women who could move between
     America and Europe and beyond, without sufficient funds or
     resources, and work as little as possible while enjoying an
     unprecedented freedom. In the second half of this century, such
     freedom becomes more and more difficult to achieve, perhaps
     because it is such a threat to the class system itself; but as
     the proletariat withers away as a class, a new group is emerging,
     perhaps something different from a class, that combines some of
     the qualities of the original proletariat and some of the
     qualities of the petty-bourgeois flaneur. I refer to the army of
     service workers and young people destined to be service workers,
     who labor in order to enjoy the pleasures of leisure time,
     however limited those pleasures may be. Though these people work
     more than they travel, they are able to function as flaneurs by
     continually visiting the three late twentieth-century versions of
     the Paris arcades: the cineplex movie theater, the television set
     with attached video player, and the computer. Today it is
     possible to travel and wander through the mazes of commodity
     culture while sitting still.

 21. According to Benjamin, the flaneur is "someone abandoned in the
     crowd." For this reason,

          he shares the situation of the commodity. He is not aware of
          this special situation, but this does not diminish its
          effect on him and it permeates him blissfully like a
          narcotic that can compensate him for many humiliations. The
          intoxication to which the flaneur surrenders is the
          intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream
          of customers. (Charles Baudelaire 55)

     As the flaneur, Jack is the character in the movie who embodies
     or represents the spectator. Like Jack, the spectator is also
     abandoned in the crowd and shares the situation of the commodity
     in his or her longing for a buyer, that is to say, for the social
     capital that would make it possible to translate the wish-demand
     for pleasure and happiness into a reality that would function as
     the fantasy of absolute satisfaction. The pleasure Jack takes
     from the Titanic, as he stands on the prow with his arms spread
     out as if he were flying, is pleasure not only in the dream ship
     as commodity fetish but in his own identification with the dream
     ship; and the spectator enjoys a similar identification with the
     movie Titanic as the intoxicating experience of the commodity
     (something that cost over 200 million dollars). This
     identification with the commodity gives Jack the freedom to want
     what the system implicitly and explicitly tells him he cannot
     have. In other words, the wealth of capital has created the
     Titanic in which it is possible for a "poor guy" like Jack to
     look at and long for the freedoms and pleasures of dominant
     culture, including the freedom and pleasure of loving someone
     like Rose; but capital has also created the movie Titanic, which
     makes it possible for the spectator to desire what Jack desires.
     As a dialectical image, the Titanic has been torn from its
     original context in which it was a wish image of early
     twentieth-century culture and dragged into the present in which
     it makes visible a dialectical transformation of the original
     Marxist concept of the class struggle. In the present context, it
     is no longer the proletariat as a class which constitutes the
     exclusive site of capitalism's internal contradiction and, as
     such, the possibility of a social revolution that would destroy
     capitalism itself. Today there is no single class formation that
     occupies such a critical relation to the mode of production, but
     there is a configuration of desiring subjects which embraces
     people from different locations in the social system. In addition
     to declining numbers of industrial workers, there are underpaid
     service workers who include, among their ranks, many women, young
     people, and minorities; and there are the unemployed, the
     underemployed, the homeless, and so forth. Like Jack, these
     people are not just victims of commodity culture (though many of
     them are victims and experience brutal and unjustifiable economic
     oppression); they also find in commodity culture the support of
     their desires, the very thing that keeps their hopes alive. Jack
     sees in Rose as a commodity the very support his desire needs in
     order to reproduce itself; yet, even though the first image he
     takes from Rose derives as much from her status as a commodity as
     does the image Cal takes from her, Jack's desire exceeds the
     demand that brings it into being and dissolves the illusion of
     the commodity so that Rose becomes for him something real,
     something he cannot know or control absolutely.

 22. The passion between Jack and Rose transforms the Titanic from a
     commodity, the dream ship as metaphor that articulates the
     fantasy of a closed class system without contradiction, into the
     collective body of social desire. Benjamin remarked at the end of
     his essay on surrealism that "The collective is a body, too"; but
     he probably did not mean to suggest that such a body can be
     hailed into existence by propaganda or transformed through the
     act of dreaming. He spoke of a "profane illumination" in the
     "image sphere" that makes possible the liberation of the
     collective body through the mediation of "the physis that is
     being organized for it through technology." The nature (physis)
     produced by humans is the technology in which "body and image so
     interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily
     collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the
     collective become revolutionary discharge" (Reflections 192). In
     other words, in the realm of the image, the collective body, the
     sensorium or bodily ground of human perceptions, is restructured;
     through the transference of nerve-forces or collective desires to
     the sleeping parts of the social body, a new body begins to
     awaken; and something emerges similar to what Raymond Williams
     called a "structure of feeling," a bodily mode of understanding
     that precedes conceptual understanding, "not feeling against
     thought but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical
     consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating
     continuity" (132). Through the passion of Jack and Rose,
     transfers of feeling take place that break through or explode the
     Titanic as a metaphor of social harmony through natural
     hierarchy. The condition of this explosion, however, is the
     pessimism that underlies all of the movie's representations from
     the first images of the dream ship leaving its dock with the
     promise of a fulfilled social totality. As reviewers love to
     remind potential spectators, we know how the movie will end from
     the beginning; and we know that this ending is more than a tragic
     representation of the universal human condition. The Titanic
     wreck that we see at the bottom of the sea is real, even though
     it is nothing but an image, a representation made possible by
     technology. The fate of the Titanic is real because it has
     already happened; the wreckage is real, but the images of it
     become a commentary on the very technologies that bring them to
     the spectator, on the future of technology itself and the
     prospects of the culture that is based on it.

 23. Unlike most mass-cultural movies that entice us with the promise
     of critique and then hand us over to the dream world of capital
     (movies like Jerry Maguire or even a classic like Preston
     Sturges's Sullivan's Travels), Titanic becomes the object of its
     own critique (though not necessarily of the director's critique),
     an image of the real that discloses its own technology as a piece
     of the real it imagines. Benjamin criticized the program of
     bourgeois parties for being a "bad poem on springtime, filled to
     bursting with metaphors," like Ronald Reagan's "Morning in
     America" speech. He criticized a false socialist imagination that
     glorifies "a condition in which all act 'as if they were angels,'
     and everyone has as much 'as if he were rich,' and everyone lives
     'as if he were free.'" Ironically, this could be the world of
     American television sitcoms. To such optimism, he opposes the
     "communist answer" of surrealism: "And that means pessimism all
     along the line.... Mistrust in the fate of literature, mistrust
     in the fate of freedom, mistrust in the fate of European
     humanity, but three times mistrust in all reconciliation: between
     classes, between nations, between individuals" (Reflections
     190-91). Cameron's Titanic is a surrealist work of art to this
     extent: it gives us an image of the real as impossible. As
     spectators see the image of the Titanic sweep across the
     widescreen in a high-angle shot, they know that the image is too
     real to be real even if they do not know that the characters on
     the deck or the water curling against the sides of the hull are
     animated. My point is that the movie displays a reality and a
     sense of history as the uncanny, as a constructed image that
     discloses its own conditions of production not because we see the
     limitations of representation but because we recognize the
     incredible powers of technology to reinvent the past. Some of the
     first reviewers of the movie expressed their awe at the sheer
     power of cinematic technology itself. Can they really do this? Is
     it possible? But if the Titanic embodies within the movie the
     fate of the technology that the movie itself exploits in order to
     bring us this image, it also manifests the death drive that
     animates technology and that can only be redeemed by desire.
     Cameron has not left the terminator behind because in this movie
     the R.M.S. Titanic is the terminator: not a machine that looks
     human but a machine that frames and makes possible what we call
     the human. Through their passion, Jack and Rose redeem this
     machine by making it into the instrument and support of desire;
     but they cannot prevent the collision between the machine as the
     embodiment of the death drive and the real that it seeks to
     master and possess. Death--even the death of a
     civilization--cannot be avoided; but it can be redeemed as the
     support of desire.

 24. In Cameron's script, the love story is not very original; but the
     movie transforms it into the poetry of the flesh and, if it works
     for anyone, it works for that reason. As early film theorist
     Rudolph Arnheim and Benjamin both understood, in movies the actor
     is a prop (see Benjamin, Illuminations 230). This is especially
     true of Cameron's Titanic in which casting is more critical to
     the movie's production of the dialectical image than the script
     itself. I would even argue that some of what the movie cannot say
     escapes the censor through the physical mediation of the actors.
     Kate Winslet has commented that it was a challenge for her to
     play the lover of a man more beautiful that she is; and this
     remark seems to refer to something more than conventional
     masculine good looks. Whether one agrees with her assessment or
     not, the compulsory heterosexuality that the movie does not
     disturb creates its own sort of self-subversion in the
     representation of a heterosexual love affair in which the man
     could not be said to symbolize the masculine heterosexual norm.
     I'm not suggesting that we have a covert "lesbian" romance here
     but that, in this movie, there is no escaping the
     interimplication of normative heterosexuality, patriarchy, and
     capitalism that find their embodiment in Cal and a point of
     resistance in Jack. The latter's sexual ambivalence, or
     multivalence, suggests that his desire trangresses not only class
     but gender and sexual boundaries as well.

 25. Initially, Rose resists the appeal of Jack's desire to her
     desire; but when she watches a little girl being trained, as she
     was trained, to be a lady, she abruptly surrenders to her own
     desire. Eventually, she says to Cal on the deck of the sinking
     Titanic, "I'd rather be his whore than your wife." In this
     context, the term "whore" is a complex signifier. Benjamin saw
     the prostitute as a dialectical image in her own right: she is
     "saleswoman and wares in one" (Reflections 157). Rose doesn't
     proclaim herself to be a whore so much as she deconstructs the
     relationship between whore and wife. She would rather be Jack's
     whore because she realizes that, in this social context, the
     whore is only the mirror image of the wife; by inverting the
     relation between whore and wife, she takes possession of her own
     body and subverts its commodity status by giving it up to the
     general or unrestricted economy of desire, by which I mean an
     economy that cannot be reduced to a master code or system of
     values. Rose subverts her status as the commodity by giving
     herself to Jack in an act of symbolic exchange that cannot be
     translated into capital or any other finalized value. Before the
     collision, she asks Jack to draw her in the nude wearing only the
     Heart of the Ocean. In this scene, she virtually transforms the
     relationship between her body and the jewel that signifies its
     commodity status: she gives the term "priceless" a literal
     meaning by transforming the jewel into the symbol of the desiring
     body. She says that she doesn't want another picture of herself
     as a "porcelain doll" (an uncanny remark since, at the beginning
     of the movie, the spectator sees the present-day image of the
     doll's face in the wreckage of the Titanic). Instead, she gives
     her body to Jack's gaze not only as an object to be enjoyed but
     as the sublime of object of desire, which, as Slavoj Zizek
     insists, is the "embodiment of Nothing" (Sublime Object 206). Her
     body becomes a sublime object not because, in drawing her, Jack's
     gaze is disinterested in the Kantian sense but because her body
     fills his eye with the desire of the other that he tries to
     express in the drawing. Her body is not the symptom of his lack
     or need--the answer to his demand for pleasure or
     fulfillment--but the embodiment of desire itself; and desire is
     not a thing in itself but the Nothing, the desire for desire,
     that every thing, every commodity, tries to substitute itself
     for. The shots in this scene intercut between extreme closeups of
     Jack's gaze, his hand drawing, and Rose's body; then an extreme
     closeup of Rose's eye slowly dissolves into an extreme closeup of
     Old Rose's eye on the salvage ship in present time. And this is
     done as if to suggest that while the body may dissolve into age
     the desire that it supports continues as the absolute condition
     of life.

 26. Rose's gaze has answered Jack's gaze since in giving him her body
     as the sublime object she only returns his gift to her on the
     prow of the Titanic when, in effect, he teaches her to fly by
     transforming the ship itself into the support of desire. Jack
     originally saved Rose from suicide at the ship's stern; but in
     this scene, with a red sunset in the background, he teaches her
     to transform her own death drive into a life force, and the
     Titanic, as the embodiment of the death drive, into the
     embodiment of Nothing, the sublime object that materializes, in
     the words of Lacan, "the fact that desire is nothing more than
     the metonymy of the discourse of demand. It is change as such."
     To the extent that sublimation refers to "satisfaction without
     repression," it articulates itself not through the negation of
     demand and the death drive that animates it but through the
     metonymic displacement of demand that we call desire, which seeks
     "not a new object or a previous object, but the change of object
     in itself" (Ethics 293). The sublime object is the embodiment of
     Nothing because it represents change in itself, change or the
     desire for desire as the end or purpose of life. Jack teaches
     Rose to see the Titanic as such a sublime object, what I have
     already called the collective body of social desire. Together
     they displace its function as commodity or the slave ship and
     make it into the materialization of social change. At that
     moment, starting from an angled side shot of Rose and Jack
     standing above the ship's prow, there is another spectacular
     dissolve from the past to the present as the prow of the Titanic
     comes to rest as the wreckage at the bottom of the sea with the
     fading image of the lovers still visible.

 27. After this, as Old Rose continues her story, the lovers retreat
     to Rose's stateroom where Jack draws her. Old Rose calls this
     scene "the most erotic moment of my life," but then adds, "at
     least up to that time." This last statement is important because
     Jack as the sublime object of Rose's desire cannot be the end of
     desire but only a beginning. Rose takes the drawing and puts it
     in Cal's safe with a note, addressed to Cal, commenting that now
     he can keep the diamond and the woman locked up together. Then
     the policeman-turned-valet Spicer Lovejoy (David Warner), whose
     job is to enforce the rule of class, comes into the room to
     prevent transgressive pleasures. Rose and Jack escape through the
     back; and though for a moment Jack wants his drawing, he leaves
     it behind. The drawing as the expression of desire is not allowed
     to become a commodified work of art. In these scenes, Jack and
     Rose embody a transgressive desire that cuts through and
     denaturalizes the class system. By ignoring these social
     divisions, they end up in the boiler room where the stokers, so
     to speak, feed the heart of the beast. Their presence in these
     locations is both absurd and subversive and culminates in their
     love-making inside what I take to be the Renault in the cargo
     hold. Once again escaping disciplinary agents, they emerge from
     the depths of the ship onto the forward well deck just minutes
     before the collision. At that moment, Rose tells Jack that she
     intends to disembark with him; and when he remarks that she's
     crazy, she says, "It doesn't make any sense, that's why I trust
     it." The Titanic has become the ship of desire.

     III. Sublime Terror

 28. As the articulation of a structure of feeling, the Titanic
     disaster in the movie takes place at the moment when desire has
     momentarily disrupted the order of class society. Even the
     lookouts and First-Officer Murdoch are appreciatively watching
     Rose and Jack just before they look up and see the iceberg. The
     latter is what Lacan would call the answer of the real to the
     impulses of desire. It does not invalidate desire, but it reminds
     us that desire does not find the end to its quest in a utopia or
     in a narrative of the usual Hollywood sort. It reminds the
     spectator that if there is to be any hope, which is the real goal
     of desire, it can only come from the most pessimistic vision as
     to the direction in which the current social order is heading. As
     a dialectical image, the collision and sinking of the Titanic
     articulates the fate of class society and thus embodies what
     Fredric Jameson would call the "absent cause" of contemporary
     culture. It is not the Titanic disaster as an actual historical
     event that is the absent cause but the image of its destruction
     as the embodiment of a social process. This process is history in
     the specific way that Jameson speaks of it as the "experience of
     necessity"--necessity itself understood not as a type of content
     but as the "inexorable form of events," the formal limits of our
     ability to imagine and understand the meaning of the world in
     which we live. In Cameron's movie, the Titanic's collision tears
     open the process of time so that we see the event not as
     something that took place long ago, an event in relation to which
     we are now in a convenient position to mourn and regret the loss
     of life; on the contrary, the collision takes place now and
     reveals the forms of temporal change from which we cannot escape.
     The movie shows that, in Jameson's words, "History is what hurts,
     it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to
     individual as well as collective praxis, which its 'ruses' turn
     into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention" (102).
     Yet history is also what makes desire possible in the first place
     as the metonymy or displacement of demand. It wasn't desire that
     drove the Titanic toward its collision with the iceberg that
     shattered the dream and the fantasy of the unsinkable ship; it
     was the demand of class society for a reality that would justify
     its own existence, of a configuration of power and knowledge that
     would express the natural authority of the ruling classes and
     legitimate their claim to be the masters of the universe. Desire
     tries to break through this fantasy; but if it is not simply to
     construct another fantasy and to succumb to the same drive that
     creates the demand for a closed and oppressive reality, it must
     confront the real, the absent cause as the horror that social
     change will necessarily entail.

 29. In other words, the Titanic cannot be stopped from meeting its
     fate because, as every spectator knows, it has already happened.
     The real question is not how do we prevent the Titanic from
     sinking? but how do we take hope from the violence of history? As
     I said before, the action movie is about hope and the desire for
     social change; and from the instant the iceberg is sighted by the
     lookouts in the crow's nest, Cameron's Titanic becomes an action
     movie. Even before the message of the lookouts reaches him,
     Murdoch sees the iceberg and flies into action. The music, the
     sound-effects, the fast editing--everything at this point
     contributes to the feeling that time itself has been torn open in
     such a way as to reveal its inner structure as the signifier of
     desire; and the spectators are drawn into this temporal structure
     and enveloped by it. I have already suggested that in the action
     movie the plot remains relatively unmotivated. In Titanic, the
     plot, though based on actual history, becomes the occasion for
     action sequences that are not essential to its development,
     though they are essential to the structure of feeling that the
     movie produces.

 30. When Rose and Jack come to warn Cal and Rose's mother about the
     imminent danger, Lovejoy slips the Heart of the Ocean into Jack's
     pocket, which leads to his arrest and detainment in the hold of
     the ship. For the second time Jack is in chains (the first time
     being when he saved Rose's life at the stern of the ship). Now it
     is up to Rose to save him, a task which she undertakes after she
     witnesses the ethical bankruptcy of her mother and fiancé in a
     crisis. The mother wonders if the lifeboats will be boarded by
     class and worries that they may be uncomfortably crowded. Rose
     angrily explains that there aren't enough boats and half of the
     people on the ship are going to die. Cal remarks, "Not the better
     half." Revolted, and proclaiming that she would rather be Jack's
     whore than Cal's wife, Rose is off to save Jack. This action
     sequence hardly contributes to the documentary representation of
     what happened on the Titanic when it sank; but it does create
     another kind of effect. Rose runs through the ship, finds the
     ship's designer Thomas Andrews and learns where Jack would be
     held, reaches him but can't find the key to the handcuffs, runs
     around looking for help, almost gives up and then finds an ax,
     runs back to Jack and, while closing her eyes, breaks the
     handcuff chains with the ax. Then the two of them rush back
     toward the boat deck but find that the passages out of steerage
     have been blocked. Eventually, with the help of other steerage
     passengers, they break through and finally reach the boat deck.
     Cal finds them as Jack is trying to persuade Rose to get on a
     boat. Cal suggests that he and Jack will escape on another boat,
     though he has no intention of helping Jack. Rose gets on the
     lifeboat; but as it is lowered, she suddenly leaps from the boat
     and grabs hold of one of the lower decks. She joins Jack at the
     foot of the Grand Staircase, but Cal suddenly grabs Lovejoy's
     revolver and starts firing at them. In an action sequence that
     momentarily recalls the Terminator movies, they must rush back
     into the hold of the ship where they have more adventures and
     overcome another barrier before they find their way back to the
     boat deck. Now obviously this is all rather contrived, but it
     nonetheless creates the intense feeling of temporal disruption.
     It resembles the sort of dream in which you rush to escape
     something but no matter how fast and furiously you move you get
     nowhere. Though the body discharges an enormous amount of energy
     in motion, it can't fill the time that seems to move at a snail's
     pace. Jack and Rose embody the intensity of life, the intensity
     of desire, in the face of a reality that hurts, that cannot be
     avoided or displaced but only lived through.

 31. All of these movements aim at drawing the spectators into the
     event and not at keeping them at a safe distance from the
     documented past. Cameron's movie has been called a "quasi-Marxist
     epic," while Cameron himself said, during the making of Titanic,
     "We're holding just short of Marxist dogma" (Brown and Ansen 64;
     Maslin E18). Cameron has also said that he is uncomfortable with
     great wealth or great poverty and attributes "the evils of the
     world... to the concentration of wealth and power with a few"
     (Brown and Ansen 66). Cameron's intention, however, cannot
     explain the global popularity of the movie, which in my view
     derives primarily from the formal properties of the supergenre.
     In effect, the form of the action movie transforms the historical
     disaster into a politically-charged image of violence that
     expresses a desire and produces an ambivalent pleasure, an image
     of violence that solicits and gives expression to the
     fundamentally ambiguous attitude of the Western and non-Western
     subject toward the dominant social system of the late
     twentieth-century global community. One could almost call it an
     act of cultural terrorism, though the word "terrorism" may seem
     inappropriate to describe the representation of an event that has
     no agent, of a disaster that, if it was not a pure accident, was
     at worst the outcome of bad judgment and bad luck. Yet one has
     only to compare Cameron's movie with the more classical and, in
     the view of one cultural historian, modernist book, A Night to
     Remember, to see that Cameron has done something quite different.
     As Steven Biel argues, "A Night to Remember embeds a modernist
     event in a modernist form: fragmented, uncertain, open-ended"
     (Biel 152-54). Another cultural historian has identified the
     movie version of A Night to Remember as "postmodernist" (Heyer
     130), but that term applies more properly to Cameron's movie.
     However, in order to demonstrate why this is so, I will have to
     make a detour into the field of literary criticism.

 32. In a significant reading of James Joyce's Ulysses, the literary
     critic Enda Duffy has explored the response of "subaltern"
     subjects (i.e., colonized or otherwise socio-economically
     exploited subjects) to images of violence, particularly as they
     seem to bear on the positions of women in situations of social
     conflict. As Duffy demonstrates, postcolonial literature from
     Irish writers like Joyce to the "third-world" authors of the
     second half of the twentieth century is replete with images of
     terrorist violence and the ambivalent response to it of those
     subjects who are either members of or identify with oppressed
     groups. In particular, Duffy focuses on the poem by Seamus
     Heaney, "Punishment," in which the author records his witnessing
     of the public punishment of Catholic women in Northern Ireland
     for fraternizing with the British army: he "stood dumb" and
     "would connive/ in civilized outrage/ yet understand the exact/
     and tribal, intimate revenge" (qtd. in Duffy 131). The two
     emotions that Heaney experiences in this context combine the
     official attitude toward terrorism ("civilized outrage"), which
     one associates with the dominant state formations, and the
     subaltern's feeling of complicity with such violence ("tribal,
     intimate revenge"), which crosses the space between public and
     private life and reveals the complicity of individual desires
     with social domination and social resistance. In the Heaney poem,
     women become both the objects of social revenge and the source of
     guilt because, as Duffy notes, they occupy a unique position in
     colonial or subaltern culture: they "represent both the
     subaltern's fear of colonial power as the imposition of consumer
     culture, a culture where women's bodies are commodities, and at
     the same time the site of utter abjection, where oppression seems
     to legitimize kinds of resistance suggestive of terrorist
     actions" (Duffy 139).

 33. Though the Titanic is not a postcolonial work of art, it
     nevertheless addresses the subalternity of gender and class
     identity in capitalist culture. For example, Rose represents,
     first, the commodified female body that is offered by her mother
     as a sacrifice to the class system and as the ticket of admission
     for herself and her daughter to the comforts and privileges of
     upper-class society; and, second, she represents the abject body
     that seeks escape from social oppression on the "slave ship"
     through death. As I have argued, Jack is both attracted and
     intimidated by the culture of the commodity that Rose embodies as
     she stands above him on the first-class deck. At the same time,
     on the stern of the ship when she tries to kill herself, there
     can be little doubt that Jack, even as he rescues her, takes a
     certain pleasure from this "intimate revenge" on the "rich girl."
     As she hangs over the side of the ship in his grasp, she's the
     one looking up and he's the one looking down. Later, however,
     Jack identifies with Rose as another subaltern subject; and when
     she tries to break away from the social order into which she was
     born, she inspires Jack to take risks and engage in acts that are
     subversive of the class system. In this way, the movie constructs
     a position for the spectator that requires a certain
     identification with something like a subaltern subject--or, in
     this case, a class subject. As I said before, Jack Dawson is
     probably Irish-American; and he aligns himself with an Irish
     national, Tommy Ryan, and an Italian, Fabrizio de Rossi. In the
     movie, Tommy, after fighting his way up from steerage quarters,
     is eventually shot in ambiguous circumstances by the ship's First
     Officer Murdoch who then kills himself, while Fabrizio heroically
     struggles to cut the ropes on one of the lifeboats before he is
     crushed by a collapsing smokestack. Dominant press reports of the
     sinking sometimes demonized the Italian steerage passengers,
     suggesting that they tried to save themselves by storming a
     lifeboat full of women and children, even though there is no
     evidence that such an event had taken place. By the early
     twentieth century, the Irish were leaving behind their subaltern
     status in American society, while the Italians and other "new"
     immigrants from Europe were among the new subalterns (see Biel
     18-21).

 34. In other words, Cameron's Titanic constructs an ambivalent
     "subaltern" view of the great ship's destruction, one that
     solicits both our "civilized outrage" and sorrow at the horrific
     disaster and our "intimate" complicity with the "revenge" of
     nature or God or fate or history (depending on your viewpoint) on
     the brutality of class society. The agent of the terrorism that
     constitutes the sinking of the Titanic in this movie is the
     spectator. The movie's portrayal of the class system and its
     inherent injustice invites the spectator's desire to align him-
     or herself with the desire of Jack and Rose and to experience the
     disaster as simultaneously a horrific event and a condition of
     hope. Unlike the neutral, disinterested representations in the
     movie version of A Night to Remember, the destruction of the
     Titanic in Cameron's movie is not an accident but a judgment.
     Cameron does not vilify every member of the upper-classes: Molly
     Brown becomes a sort of hero, and men like Astor and Guggenheim
     are given some dignity in death. But there is absolutely no
     idealization of the wealthy: though the rule of the sea that
     women and children be saved first is acted out, it seems not to
     express the heroic impulses of the rich but rather the almost
     mechanical operations of ideology and social habit in a context
     of sheer confusion and shock. The spectator, however, is not in a
     state of shock and can take in and comprehend the representations
     in the movie as spectacle. The meaning of this spectacle can be
     clarified by mapping onto the movie the "three modes of
     representing terrorism" that Duffy identifies in his historical
     reading of Joyce. These modes are conveniently the "realist," the
     "modernist," and the "postmodern"; and each one has particular
     bearing on the representation of women that I can apply to
     Cameron's Titanic (with my comments in brackets): "the first
     erases the woman as character [the story about heroic
     masculinity], the second uses the figure of woman as ambivalent
     image [Rose as both wife and whore, symbol of upper-class
     privilege and embodiment of transgressive desire], and the
     third... provides a space in which a potential
     subject-after-subalternity can be imagined as woman [Rose as the
     survivor, the ethical subject who refuses to give ground relative
     to her own desire]" (133).

 35. The realist representation of the Titanic disaster (and
     ironically this is the most ideological view of all) is the story
     told in all the major newspapers in the United States after the
     event: it is the story of the heroic upper-class men who went
     down with the ship after the women had been evacuated. In this
     version of the events, the men had to fight a class war to save
     the women. According to one newspaper account, "Manhood met
     brutehood undaunted, however, and honest fists faced iron bars,
     winning at last the battle for death with honor" (qtd. in Biel
     49). As Biel observes, this was social Darwinism with a twist,
     since, instead of the survival of the fittest, it was "'a battle
     for death' in which chivalric sacrifice for the weaker sex proved
     the superiority of Anglo-Saxon ruling class men" (49). This
     representation of the Titanic disaster is virtually subverted by
     Cameron's movie-making. Yet ironically this act of subversion is
     brought about through the orchestration of facts, through the
     production of a reality on the screen that no previous movie or
     book could have produced. For the first time, the sheer magnitude
     of the Titanic itself and the horror of its sinking, including
     the fact that it broke in two before it plunged into the sea,
     gives the lie to the "realist" myth. Cameron creates an
     atmosphere of shock and desperate confusion that makes impossible
     any pretension to class heroics. If the steerage passengers were
     desperate, they were also the last to reach the boat deck and the
     first to die. Benjamin Guggenheim's nobility is reduced to the
     shocked gaze of a man who cannot really grasp what is happening.
     Only Ida and Isidor Straus survive this demystification as they
     are depicted in a high angle shot clinging to each other in their
     stateroom bed while water rushes beneath them to the music of
     "Nearer, My God, to Thee."

 36. The modernist representation, which achieved its purest form in
     the documentary style of A Night to Remember, survives here in
     the ambivalent image of the Titanic itself as the supreme
     commodity and in the self-reflexive mode of Cameron's
     storytelling. The multiple viewpoints of the earlier movie can be
     identified with "These fragments I have shored against my ruins,"
     as Eliot wrote in The Waste Land, that is to say, with those
     neutral, disinterested images that belie the ravages of time
     through the construction of absolute beauty. According to Hayden
     White, the dominant view of historical representation that arose
     in the nineteenth century privileged the Kantian category of the
     beautiful as leading to a disinterested narrative that enters
     "sympathetically into the minds or consciousnesses of human
     agents long dead" in a way that privileges understanding over
     judgment (67). Similarly, the purely modernist representation of
     the disaster makes no judgment and merely recreates the image for
     its own sake, as a memorable event that documents and
     contemplates the fundamental truth of human nature. Cameron's
     movie incorporates the modernist mode but at the same time
     ironizes it. The movie's frame story, for example, gives us the
     illusion of going back in time in order to enter the lives of
     those who are long dead through the testimony of a living
     witness. Old Rose's storytelling not only takes us into the past
     but makes the Titanic itself a living memory, an image of the
     absolute beauty of the commodity form. Even the modernist work of
     art becomes a crucial figure in the film as Rose unpacks the
     paintings she has purchased in Europe, including one with many
     faces by someone named Picasso. As she contemplates it, she
     remarks that "there's truth but no logic." Rose herself comes to
     embody this truth when she surrenders to her passion for Jack and
     decides to follow him with the remark: "it doesn't make any
     sense, that's why I trust it." This beauty is ironized, however,
     by the fact that Old Rose tells her story to men who ultimately
     seek profit, not truth or beauty. The modernist works of art,
     like Titanic itself as an object of disinterested beauty, become
     ironic signifiers of the violence of history. As the ship sinks
     further into the sea, there is the image of a Degas painting
     floating under the water. Rose herself undergoes a transformation
     from the beautiful to the sublime, a process that is
     metonymically signified by the butterfly hair comb that she finds
     on the salvage ship more than eighty years after the sinking of
     the Titanic. Though she never says anything about it to the
     salvage team, she falls into contemplation every time she looks
     at it. Eventually, we realize that she was wearing the comb on
     the day of the Titanic disaster and took it out when she posed
     for Jack's drawing. She took it out and let her hair down, so to
     speak, and never put it back up again. Like the Heart of the
     Ocean, the comb recalls her own status as a beautiful commodity
     and the process of her self-transformation.

 37. The postmodern representation of the disaster is what this whole
     essay has documented in some detail. It is the fabricated story
     of passionate desire that transgresses the class system, a story
     that subverts the multiple perspectives of the modernist
     viewpoint by transforming the image of reality, which is really
     nothing but the commodification of the real itself, into a
     dialectical image that congeals the contradiction between the
     allegorical meaning constructed in the present context and the
     historical meaning that articulates the past as a form of
     wish-fulfillment. The dialectical image is the object or goal of
     what Hayden White would call the historical sublime. If history
     is ever to be anything more than what Benjamin called the history
     of the victors, it must move beyond the principle of
     disinterested contemplation that claims to represent all
     perspectives in a fair and non-contradictory formal narrative. As
     White argues,

          One can never move with any politically effective confidence
          from an apprehension of "the way things actually are or have
          been" to the kind of moral insistence that they "should be
          otherwise" without passing through a feeling of repugnance
          for and negative judgment of the condition that is to be
          superseded. And precisely insofar as historical reflection
          is disciplined to understand history in such a way that it
          can forgive everything or at best to practice a kind of
          "disinterested interest" of the sort that Kant imagined to
          inform every properly aesthetic perception, it is removed
          from any connection with a visionary politics and consigned
          to a service that will always be antiutopian in nature.
          (72-73)

     The historical image of the Titanic is the object of seemingly
     disinterested contemplation, though in truth the beauty that
     makes this contemplation disinterested is the effect of the
     commodity form that erases the historical truth of the class
     system or the social relations that made the production of the
     "dream ship" possible. It is the image that answers the social
     demand for a monological reality that is not split by
     contradictory social interests. Such an image is historical in
     the traditional aesthetic sense that White describes: it views
     the Titanic disaster as a tragedy that nonetheless articulates
     the beauty of civilization as the expression of a timeless human
     nature. It attempts to reimagine the Titanic as the object of a
     collective wish, the dream of a harmonious class society in which
     everyone happily occupies or at least accepts their own social
     position. The allegorical image is, to some extent, the other
     side of the same coin. In the movie, this image emerges in the
     frame story of the deep sea salvage crew that is exploring the
     Titanic in search of the Heart of the Ocean diamond, which is now
     worth more than the Hope diamond. They see the wreckage of the
     Titanic two and a half miles beneath the sea, and the spectator
     sees it along with them. As an allegorical image, the wrecked
     ship embodies history as a destructive process that can only be
     redeemed by the meanings that are attributed to it in the present
     context. By inviting moralization as a way of making sense out of
     the traces of the past, the image comments on the hubris of the
     technological civilization that thought it could build an
     unsinkable ship. In this way, the allegorical image virtually
     domesticates the past and puts it at a distance: it articulates a
     memory that forgets the past as a present full of contradictory
     social desires. The allegorical and historical images, taken
     together and in isolation from the present socio-historical
     context, constitute such a forgetful memory that separates "'the
     way things actually are or have been'" from the utopian social
     desire that they "'should be otherwise.'" The dialectical image
     emerges as the revelation of the social contradiction between the
     allegorical image as moral truth and the historical image as
     wish-fulfillment. The moral truth of history as destructive
     process contradicts the belief that the past can be understood or
     explained without any reference to the present social context,
     without any form of political commitment. However, this
     contradiction remains invisible until the dialectical image makes
     the past present through, in the phrase of Hayden White, "the
     recovery of the historical sublime." White finds plausible the
     notion that such a recovery is "a necessary precondition for the
     production of a historiography of the sort that Chateaubriand
     conceived to be desirable in times of 'abjection'," which is "a
     historiography 'charged with avenging the people'" (81). I am
     arguing that, in a movie like Titanic, mass culture has
     ironically produced just such a historical representation, a
     dialectical image that avenges the people by transforming the
     Titanic disaster into an image of social desire in the present.

 38. Such an image is postmodern because it rejects every master
     narrative (be it the capitalist myth of progress, the Marxist
     myth of scientific socialism, the Christian myth of otherworldly
     salvation, or the Hegelian myth of absolute knowledge) as a form
     of forgetful memory that reduces the past to the fully
     understandable or explainable and makes the present world an
     inevitable phase in a fully determinate historical process. The
     dialectical image is not an image of moral or historical truth
     that transcends time and posits an inevitable future but a
     transitory image that articulates the relation of a particular
     past to a particular present. The dialectical image weds the
     dream image of the past, which harbored the unconscious desire
     for classless society, with the unconscious social desire of the
     present that can only conceive of the future by drawing on images
     of the past that can be made to signify the possibility of social
     transformation. In Cameron's Titanic, the intense passion between
     Rose and Jack embodies the desire for a classless society, a
     desire that drags the Titanic disaster into the present where it
     signifies the social obstacles in late capitalist culture that
     would prevent the realization of such a desire. Yet the image of
     the Titanic itself and its terrifying destruction offers a
     strange ground of hope. In the contemporary global economy,
     wealth inequality continues to increase; and while the middle
     classes of the so-called "first world" stagnate in their relative
     comfort, the lower classes of the first world and their
     counterparts on the other side of the international division of
     labor experience vicious socio-economic displacements. Yet, at
     the same time, the dominant ideology of the first world continues
     to reduce all socio-economic realities to questions of personal
     responsibility and refuses to recognize any form of class
     determination. In the culture of the United States and,
     increasingly, of Western Europe, class has become more and more
     the unsayable and the unrepresentable. Even when it is
     represented, the potential resentment of the victims of
     multinational capitalism is carefully contained by the
     implication that the system always has a place for those it
     displaces if they have the imagination to invent new ways of
     making themselves into commodities. (For example, in a recent
     independent movie from Great Britain, The Full Monty, the
     unemployed steel workers learn that if they can't sell their
     physical labor, they can sell their bodies by taking off their
     clothes, a rather ironic way of resolving the crisis of
     working-class masculinity in the post-industrial age). So it is
     not difficult to see why the spectators of mass culture would
     find in the historical image of the Titanic a revelation of the
     structural truth of their own social situation. The wealthy may
     not be as visible as they once were; but their invisibility only
     speaks to their thorough domination of the current social system.
     From this perspective, the unambiguous articulation of the class
     system from the upper decks to the boiler rooms of the Titanic
     becomes a utopian wish image for a clarity of social vision that
     is anything but unambiguous in everyday life.

 39. The image of the Titanic disaster in Cameron's movie is
     apocalyptic in a way that exceeds anything that one finds in the
     movie version of A Night to Remember. The earlier movie is
     obviously a source of inspiration for Cameron; and he draws a lot
     of material from it, especially images pertaining to the fate of
     the steerage passengers. More than the book on which it is based,
     the movie A Night to Remember shows the situation of the steerage
     passengers rather dramatically as they struggle to find their way
     to the boat deck and encounter blocked passageways defended by
     stewards. In one case, some of these passengers break through a
     barrier with an axe; but when they reach the boat deck, most of
     the boats are gone. In many ways, the movie A Night to Remember
     is far less generous in its representation of the upper-classes
     than is Lord's book. The heroes of the movie are the crew
     members, most especially the Second Officer Charles Lightoller
     (Kenneth Moore), not the upper-classes. Nonetheless, while the
     movie A Night to Remember leans more toward the realist mode of
     representation than does the book, its minimalist cinematic style
     in black and white with very little music also embodies a
     disinterested modernist viewpoint that finally gives way to a
     rationalization of the event at the end. As Lightoller gazes out
     from the deck of the Carpathia at the sea into which the Titanic
     sank, words appear on the screen that explain how the Titanic
     disaster led to maritime reforms that would prevent such an
     accident in the future. In effect, though this movie reveals a
     social system that could be subject to criticism, it glorifies
     the technocrats of the future who will see the event as the
     meaningful occasion for reform. In addition to the idealization
     of Lightoller and, to some extent, Captain Smith, the other
     idealized figure in the movie is the architect Thomas Andrews
     who, in front of the passengers, never shows the least
     apprehension concerning his own fate. He is virtually the
     embodiment of technical reason that ultimately justifies the
     disaster as a means to an end, the improvement of the human
     condition through infinite social progress. Curiously, the movie
     A Night to Remember makes the Titanic disaster into a purely
     British representation. You would never guess from the accent of
     Thomas Andrews in this movie that he was from the North of
     Ireland or that the Titanic was built by Irish workers. In
     Cameron's movie, on the other hand, Tommy, an obviously
     lower-class Irish character who is probably Catholic, tells Jack
     that the Titanic was built by 15,000 Irishmen, though he does not
     mention the fact that few of these Irishmen would have been
     Catholic in a Catholic-majority country that had not yet
     undergone partition. Tommy is probably emigrating because he
     can't find good-paying job in Ireland. Furthermore, the musical
     score to Cameron's movie uses Irish instruments and motifs that
     signify "Ireland" in stark contrast to the purely "British" score
     in A Night to Remember, including the British version of "Nearer,
     My God, to Thee." While the latter song may be more historically
     accurate, it helps to disguise the true material forces and
     conditions that made the Titanic possible and also made it into
     another symbol of the British empire.

 40. In Cameron's movie, the spectacular use of special effects to
     represent the destruction of the Titanic produces an image of
     sublime terror that cannot be rationalized as the ground of
     social progress. It represents, rather, the end of the world as
     we know it. It is not a justification of but a judgment on
     technical reason and the theory of social progress that
     privileges it. Though Titanic reproduces the reality of the event
     in far greater detail than any other movie, it is nonetheless a
     "surreal" image, as I suggested earlier, because it gives us a
     reality that exceeds the system of social representations through
     which "we"--the collective subject of contemporary
     history--bestow meaning on "our" historical experience. For this
     reason, despite its technical limitations and flaws, A Night to
     Remember still seems the more realistic representation, while
     Titanic offers a glimpse of historical experience as something
     meaningless, an image of sublime terror that virtually shatters
     the neutral, disinterested historical viewpoint. It is
     meaningless not because we cannot give it a meaning but because
     we can only give it a meaning that comes from the outside of the
     event itself, that is not intrinsic to its representation. As a
     matter of historical fact, there were a few witnesses who claimed
     that the ship broke apart before it sank; but the dominant
     representation until the rediscovery of the Titanic in the
     mid-eighties was that the ship sank as a whole (Lynch and
     Marschall 195). This representation was consistent with the myth
     of the calm nobility of the upper-classes who went down with the
     ship, while the historical truth is so horrifying that it is
     impossible to imagine "calmness" and "nobility" as really being
     the issue. In A Night to Remember, the spectator sees the Titanic
     slide into the sea from a distance. In Cameron's movie, the
     camera creates the illusion that the spectator is on the stern of
     the ship's aft when it is perpendicular to the sea. The spectator
     is there as the remnant of the Titanic slowly descends; and then,
     in a medium long shot from the rear (not the extreme long shot of
     A Night), we watch the stern go under with Jack, Rose, and a few
     other passengers standing on it. Just before the ship sinks, a
     priest on the ship's poop deck emphasizes the apocalyptic nature
     of these images by reading from Revelation about "a new heaven
     and a new earth," an end to death, mourning, and all sadness, for
     "the former world has passed away." This is a utopian image but
     not an image that rationalizes or justifies the horror of the
     event itself. On the contrary, it articulates the irrationality
     of history, its utter lack of meaning unless it is transformed
     and redeemed by the revolutionary force of social desire.

 41. With these images and with the image of the band playing the
     Protestant hymn "Nearer, My God, to Thee" (American version), the
     movie Titanic seems almost to endorse the Christian
     interpretation of the Titanic disaster as the judgment of God on
     materialist civilization (see Chapter 3 of Biel). Some may see it
     that way, but I think the movie deploys apocalyptic imagery in
     order to support a materialist vision. I would put it this way in
     the context of the themes that I have already highlighted in this
     reading of the movie: when theology is not the illusion of
     demand, it is desire of and for the other. Simply put, when
     theology is not the institution that formulates the demand for
     happiness and answers that demand with the illusion of another
     world, it is the ethical drive that refuses to give ground
     relative to one's desire, a desire that comes from the other (in
     the sense that desire responds to the reality principle and takes
     into account in its internal structure the being of others) and a
     desire that seeks the other (the sublime object that represents
     and channels desire as the quest for a meaningful life through
     the postponement of death). Cameron's movie implicitly
     understands what Benjamin suggested in the first of his "Theses
     on the Philosophy of History" when he linked the success of
     historical materialism with theology (Illuminations 253). The
     force that drives historical materialism as a form of social
     critique--a critique that, to echo Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach,"
     attempts not only to interpret the world but to change it--is
     desire, the same force that reveals itself in religion through
     the apocalyptic imagery that foregrounds not the content of the
     afterlife but the terrorizing violence of the end of the world as
     the necessary condition of human redemption. Such violence is
     what Jameson means by defining history as "the experience of
     necessity" or "the inexorable form of events." The price of a
     historical vision that does not rely on a master narrative, which
     would guarantee the outcome of our ethical actions in the
     present, is the sublime terror of social change, of a
     transformative event that does not have a predetermined form that
     can rationalize its violence. In the movie, the social desire
     that is allegorically unleashed by the romance between Jack and
     Rose must confront the horror of the social change that will have
     to come about if they are not to give ground relative to their
     desire. Insofar as that desire is constituted in opposition to
     the class system, it cannot avoid in some form the experience of
     the destruction of that system, the destruction of capitalism
     itself,or at least capitalism as we currently know it. In
     Cameron's Titanic, the destruction of the dream ship is,
     symbolically though not logically, the outcome of ethical desire
     that refuses to give ground and accept the social system or the
     illusion of demand.

 42. Finally, I need to explain how this violence becomes the ground
     of hope and makes possible the formation of the
     "subject-after-subalternity... imagined as woman." Rose is the
     subject as survivor in Titanic, and in the symbolics of this
     movie this can hardly be an accident. Jack's death, like the
     sinking of the Titanic itself, is symbolically necessary to this
     story about the meaning of survival as the historical condition
     of the liberated subject in the postmodern world. Just as the
     sublime terror of the Titanic's destruction in the movie can be a
     pleasurable experience for the spectator who unconsciously wishes
     for the end of the world that the great ship embodies, Jack's
     death is the necessary condition for the movie's message of hope;
     and though this movie can easily be dismissed as a "tear-jerker,"
     there is a political significance to the pleasure-in-pain that
     these images evoke. Jack can die because he has lived, because,
     as Freud put it in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, "the aim of all
     life is death," with the crucial qualification that each
     "organism wishes to die only in its own fashion" (38-39). The
     qualification, however, is critical in this case; for Jack's
     desire, though it incorporates and transforms his own death
     drive, has to be distinguished from the death drive of the
     Titanic and the social system it represents. The creators of the
     Titanic as the sign of the class system--Bruce Ismay, who, as
     Rose points out early in the movie, has invested not only his
     money but his phallic fantasies in the Titanic, and Cal Hockley,
     who melodramatically represents the venality of the ruling class
     that requires the dream ship as the self-expression of its
     identity, a closed reality that they are able to own as if it
     were property--manage to survive by becoming the living dead, by
     submitting to a death drive that can never lead to any sort of
     hope because it mistakes the possession of power over others as
     the true goal of life. Historically, the real Bruce Ismay spent
     his life after the disaster in shame for having saved himself; in
     the fiction of the movie, Cal Hockley, as Rose learns, will
     eventually shoot himself after the stock market crash of 1929.
     The architect of the Titanic, Thomas Andrews, at least chooses a
     tragic end by going down with the ship he created in the process
     of saving as many people as he can. Andrews transforms the death
     drive that he has served into the wish for a death with dignity;
     but Jack is the hero of desire who brings his life to an end with
     something more than tragic nobility as his legacy. "Desire,"
     writes Peter Brooks, "is the wish for the end, for fulfillment,
     but fulfillment delayed so that we can understand it in relation
     to origin, and to desire itself" (111). Jack's legacy is Rose's
     desire--a desire that he helps to liberate from the enslavement
     of social demand and that constitutes an end that makes sense out
     of his own life and death. As he slowly freezes in the north
     Atlantic, Jack compels from Rose the promise that she will never
     let go; but, of course, the irony is that in order to keep her
     promise she has to let go of Jack, to accept his death, and fight
     for her life. According to Lacan, a subject's desire is always
     "the desire of the Other" ("Écrits"312), which is to say that
     desire as the displacement of demand, as the quest for what
     Brooks calls "the right death, the correct end" (103), is never
     simply the possession of the individual subject but the desire of
     the collective subject of history. For every individual, desire
     takes the form of the life story; but no story, no matter how
     unique, is ever completely personal. Narrative is a socially
     symbolic act; and the stories we tell about ourselves are shaped
     by the stories we have read or heard or even told about others.
     Jack does not give Rose her desire, for desire is neither Jack's
     to give nor Rose's to receive. Jack's death is the realization of
     the "correct end" of social desire in its self-reproduction, in
     the transformation of Rose from the sexual commodity that answers
     the demand of Hockley and his class into the surviving subject
     who "never lets go" of the desire for the right death.

 43. Ironically, the thing that comes to embody for Rose the structure
     of desire that shapes and determines the story of her life is the
     Heart of the Ocean. This diamond represents the contradiction
     between desire and demand, for Rose has the choice (at least,
     after the death of Hockley and the others who had a claim on it)
     to use the diamond as the immediate answer to the demand for
     wealth and privilege or to keep the diamond as the expression of
     the desire for something more, something beyond value. If I may
     resort to anecdote, I have been fascinated by the number of
     spectators I've talked to who were offended by Rose's selfishness
     in throwing the Heart of the Ocean into the sea. In particular,
     my professional friends, who perhaps have greater than usual
     expectations of wealth and privilege, find it preposterous that
     anyone would pass up such an opportunity. "Why not pass it on to
     her granddaughter?" they say. Certainly, there is a conflict of
     desires here that goes to the heart of contemporary culture,
     which seems to posit money as the measure of all things. Rose's
     story, however, is the story of a desire that never lets go; and
     within the frame of that story the diamond has undergone a
     transformation from a commodity with a specific socio-economic
     value to a symbolic thing that remains incommensurable. In a
     sense, the meaning of Rose's life has become identical with the
     Heart of the Ocean. In telling the story of the Titanic that she
     has never told before, she explains that a woman's heart is a
     deep ocean of secrets; and the diamond is the signifier of her
     secret. At the beginning of the movie, she asks Brock Lovett
     (Bill Paxton), the head of the salvage team, if he has found the
     Heart of the Ocean, even though she still has it. The question,
     if you will, is not addressed to Brock Lovett the person but to
     the Other as the embodiment of a social demand that mistakes
     capital value for the meaning of life. The Heart of the Ocean is
     the incommensurable that is the true goal of life, the true
     desire of the Other, the right death, the correct end. Rose never
     cedes her desire but transforms her life into the incommensurable
     sublime object of desire by giving the Heart of the Ocean back to
     the sea, back to its symbolic origin. Rose discovered the diamond
     in the pocket of her coat (the coat Cal had put around her when
     the Titanic was sinking) just as the Carpathia passes by the
     Statue of Liberty in New York harbor. It becomes the symbol of
     the liberation of her own desire; and in giving it back to the
     ocean, the final act of her social defiance, she translates her
     desire to infinity. The diamond is more valuable than the Hope
     diamond because it represents true hope or the interminable
     reproduction of desire.

 44. Does Rose die in her bed after throwing the Heart of the Ocean
     into the sea? This interpretation gives meaning to the images of
     her life in the photographs on the table next to her bed (that
     the camera tracks across) and then to the final dream image of
     her return to the wrecked Titanic. In a sudden dissolve, the ship
     regains its form before the disaster, and Old Rose becomes a
     young woman again as she mounts the Grand Staircase to embrace
     Jack while they are surrounded by the spirits of the dead who
     applaud their lifelong romance. I don't think it's important
     whether Rose lives or dies in the last scene of the movie, and I
     don't think the meaning of her life can be summed up by her
     reunion with Jack's spirit. The meaning of her life is the
     sublime object of desire that Jack has come to symbolize, but for
     that very reason he is not the object of desire as a thing in
     itself. As Old Rose suggested earlier in the movie, she did not
     stop loving after the death of Jack; and if he facilitated her
     most erotic experience up to the day the Titanic sank, he was not
     around to perform that function for the next eighty years. The
     meaning of Rose's life lies in the photographs that document her
     decision to pursue her desires wherever they may lead and in the
     passionate loves that still haunt her imagination like the
     spirits on the allegorical ghost ship. Rose is the
     "subject-after-subalternity" not because she can transform the
     world or her position in it by a simple act of the will that need
     not take into account the desire of the others. She transforms
     the world by transforming her own desire into something sublime,
     something that will never be satisfied by the objects of the
     marketplace, be they economic, cultural, or intellectual.

 45. After seeing the movie a number of times, I continue to see an
     image in my mind, which signifies, perhaps, those things that
     have been left unresolved. Rose clings with Jack to the outside
     of the railing at the Titanic's stern, which has broken away from
     the rest of the ship and is perpendicular to the sea. She gazes
     into the face of a woman hanging onto the railing from the
     opposite side, a woman with whom she has exchanged glances
     earlier. As she looks, the other woman can no longer hold on and
     falls to some kind of horrifying and meaningless death. That
     woman has no voice and we will never know what she desires. In
     all probability, she is a steerage passenger. She now lies
     somewhere in the heart of the ocean, one of those secrets
     awaiting social redemption that will come, if it comes, through
     the temporal disruptions of messianic time. As Benjamin writes,
     "Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of
     hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will
     not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And the enemy has not
     ceased to be victorious" (Illuminations 255). Of course, the
     enemy is often ourselves; and it is not only the historian but
     every cultural producer who must protect the dead from the
     forgetful memories and narratives that would bury them. In this
     process of recovering the historical sublime, we should not
     automatically eliminate any producer of cultural images,
     including the impresarios of Hollywood when they manage to
     transgress their own censorship and turn the profit motive
     against itself. Mass culture is not just loss but a revolutionary
     opportunity for those who make visible the cultural unconscious
     that harbors the true subject of social desire.

                                                 Department of English
                                           Louisiana State University
                                                   pmcgee@gateway.net

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