If you have room for a new hobby, may I suggest collecting James Cameron’s increasingly irate responses to fans who insist that Rose could have saved Jack at the end of Titanic, because the board she was floating on could have taken the weight of both of them? This is a theory that has gathered so much pace that there is even a Mythbusters segment about it, meaning that the self-effacing director is frequently forced to explain how movies work to people who seem to be missing that lobe.
Back in January, it was the Daily Beast putting it to the director. “Look, it’s very, very simple,” came Cameron’s reply. “You read page 147 of the script and it says: ‘Jack gets off the board and gives his place to her so that she can survive.’ It’s that simple. You can do all the post-analysis you want.”
And people are. Latest to ask the question is Vanity Fair, in the course of an interview to mark the 20th anniversary of the film’s release. “Had he lived,” runs James’s response to the magazine, “the ending of the film would have been meaningless … The film is about death and separation; he had to die. So whether it was that, or whether a smoke stack fell on him, he was going down. It’s called art,” he concludes, gamely managing to just keep a lid on it. “Things happen for artistic reasons, not for physics reasons.”
Ooh! At the current rate of seethe acceleration, Cameron is THIS CLOSE to answering the next inquiry along these lines with a rant akin to Jack Nicholson’s in A Few Good Men. “You can’t handle the movies! Because that’s how it effing works, you effing imbeciles! That’s how stories work! Of course they don’t both survive! Did you even watch the three hours of motion picture beforehand? Did you honestly think they were both getting out of there? CHRIST! I bet you think they should have got together at the end of Casablanca, too. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain my seminal boat movie to you or anyone like you! YOU’RE GODDAMNED RIGHT I ORDERED HIS DEATH!”
Needless to say, the best comment on this kind of to-and-fro remains Robert Altman’s The Player, where Richard E Grant originally pitches his impossibly profound and idealistic movie and insists it must have absolutely no stars in it, much less resolve itself. He is adamant that the falsely accused heroine must be executed at the end “because … That. Happens.” By the time this thing makes it to the big screen, of course, we see Julia Roberts being rescued from the gas chamber just in the nick of time. As she looks into his eyes and asks: “What took you so long?”, Bruce Willis smiles back: “The traffic was a bitch …”
So maybe fans should hold out for James giving in to pressure and substituting the alternative ending by the time we get to Titanic’s 30th anniversary reissue. Picture it: Rose hauls Jack back on to the floating door, and tells him how really quite cold she is now. “That’s OK,” he smiles, like he’s literally Roger Moore at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me. “I know a way we can warm up”. Yay! Yay for “up” endings! They can blow their rescue whistles later. I have a feeling the Carpathia will wait.
