Post-Traumatic Culture
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This is a sketch for a longer argument about modernism, technology, and
fantasies of autonomy embodied in the Titanic. It leads to an analysis of
business behaviors and the changing roles of servants and employees
in an era when an enormous paramilitary "security industry" has
been developed to police class boundaries and economic triage.
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Titanic Utopia and Millennial Catastrophe
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Like H. G. Wells's Time Machine in the 1890s, James
Cameron's film Titanic (1997) projects a radically ambivalent
fantasy about modernism that combines utopian and millennial
themes. In the film the ship represents a utopian dream of gilded
age opulence, expansive executive autonomy, and naturalized social
hierarchy, but this vision depends on hypocrisy, police control,
and Faustian technology.
With its mythic, end-of-history gigantism, the Titanic was
designed to epitomize expansive modernist visions. The 1990s
counterpart of this technology is the seemingly transcendent
"virtual reality" illusionism of the computer age self-consciously
invoked in recreating the ship. As the impoverished heroine Rose
steams toward a wish-fulfilling elite marriage, the ship seems to
embody the romantic utopia of consumer capitalism, whose imagery
resonates widely in the 1990s in "princess" fantasies such as the
Disney Beauty and the Beast (1991), the media cult of Princess
Diana, and the imagery promoted by the bridal/wedding industry.
At the same time the hero's artistic temperament and gambler's
daring models fantasies of an entrepreneurial paradise as he stands
at the prow of the ship, on a ticket won at poker, anticipating
boundless opportunity ahead, crowing "I'm the king of the world."
_Titanic_ is radically ambivalent about this utopian potential.
In imagery that suggests Fritz Lang's _Metropolis_ (1926). the
film shows the ship's executive elite fatally dissociated from the
dehumanized engine room, infernal-looking boilers, and the
working class ghetto in steerage. The security force and the
locked gates between decks come to stand for the prison-
mentality of a caste system. Although the Titanic is "the ship
of dreams," to Rose "it was a slave ship taking me back to
America in chains. Outwardly I was everything a well-brought
up young girl should be. Inside I was screaming." The social
world of the ship is radically divided between aristocratic
autonomy above-deck and expendable masses in steerage.
In its conventional critique of this caste system--like the
Disney Beauty and the Beast, the film insists that an elite
utopia entails psychic death, as dramatized by Rose's rebellion
against the sterility and deceitfulness of her husband and
parvenue mother, her suicidal impulses, and her subsequent
discovery of emotional renewal in her romance with Jack
and the carnival spirit in steerage.
In its deeper symbolic logic, however, the film is more
disturbingly conflicted. Utopian fulfillment for Rose and her
lover Jack turns out to mean not community or solidarity, but
a private version of narcissistic aristocracy. Rose's fulfillment
is epitomized in Jack's worshipful nude sketches of her, while
Jack ("I'm the king of the world") cheerfully plays chauffeur/
servant to Rose's princess/grand dame as they make love hiding
in a luxury car in the hold of the ship. The film cannot imagine
how power could be shared between such demanding individualists
in a marriage. The roles of painter and chauffeur euphemize the
role of servant. They require abject self-effacement not only to
extend the will of an executive master, but also to support the
master's elite identity and illusions of autonomy. In effect, the
servant exists to paint or substantiate the master.
This is one reason why the film's screenplay has to
sacrifice Jack, enabling Rose to enjoy him in lifelong, tamed
retrospect. The lovers' childlike, rebellious evasion of "parental"
authority throughout the voyage serves to euphemize the dog-
eat-dog economic competition that would ensnare them were
they to make a lower class, "below decks" marriage and start
life with no resources. The film criticizes elite greed for life
above decks and among the treasure hunters in the frame
story, but it also protects from criticism the self-aggrandizing
("titanic") fantasies at the heart of the paradise the lovers seek.
The conflicted ground of its fantasies makes Titanic's
use of millennial catastrophe revealing. There is a sadistic
quality to the film's dramatization of the ship's doom. In its
imagery (foe example, the Louis XV diamond sealing Rose's
marriage contract), the screenplay associates the ship's fatal
collision with the social upheaval of the French revolution
(cf. the insurrectionary mob Disney invents in its Beauty
and the Beast). But the film also implies a cosmic,
eschatalogical vision of punishment. The wreck is now on
the ocean bottom "where she lies after her long fall from
the world above," as if in hell or the pagan underworld.
Rose barely survives in an ocean of ghostly bodies evocative
of Renaissance paintings of Noah's flood.
As in the biblical accounts of the expulsion from Eden,
the tower of Babel, and Sodom and Gomorrah, the dream of
utopia in Cameron's film supports vindictive, exterminatory
fantasies. As Otto Rank observed, the sacrifice of others
affords the survivor a conviction of righteousness and
symbolic immortality--in effect, a sense of survival ecstasy.
At the same time, when frustrated, the drive toward utopian
perfectionism has historically generated subversive, sadistic
fantasies of punishment such as the obsession with Satan
which Norman Cohn has identified with periods of
hysterical self-idealization in European history.
In a maneuver characteristic of the post-Cold-War
1990s, the film closes not with any unsettling new insights
into the deep systemic sources of the violence that destroys
utopia, but rather with the sentimental narcissism of the
now elderly Rose as she contemplates the nude sketch that
she had Jack make of her. To sketch her Jack had to be her
lover as voyeur, even as the treasure-hunters in the 1990s
are awed voyeurs to Rose's recovery of the images. The
treasure-hunters are seeking the fabulous Louis XV diamond
lost in the wreck, even as Rose is supposed to possess its
spiritual equivalent in her remembered love. But the
forbidden truth is that "at bottom"--in the psychic equivalent
of the ocean depths--the culminating fantasy is of ecstastic,
solitary survival, an imperilled tenuousness of subjectivity
validated by the applause of audiences onstage and off: a
fantasy closer to the competitive, self-aggrandizing spirit
of the Titanic than to the self-transcending love the
screenplay appears to celebrate.
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