Is Titanic Good, Actually?

Thank You Buford well hello it is time for a hot to take and I think it is simply that Titanic is good actually James Cameron is a very specific type of genius that all nerds kind of wish they were and I imagine that is why so many people are so eager to hate this guy and not just because of his not-so-secret reputation of being a tremendous asshole and I'm going to demonstrate this particular brand of genius by drawing a comparison to of course what else Phantom of the Opera. No No please don't leave I swear, this isn't a bait-and-switch about phantom. I'll keep it short a good production of phantom of the opera' will have you responding to the actors as is the case with the 25th anniversary cast and the chemistry between the actors nearly sucking their souls out of each other's bodies from the sheer intensity of it more than the flashy set pieces this lies in contrast with the most recent and umpteenth time I saw a phantom on Broadway earlier this year from my podcast where the cast was so lacking in everything that the biggest reaction / applause from the audience were for the set pieces, not for the actors the audience applauded for the chandelier they applauded for some of the stunts and the badly aged pyrotechnics but for the actors it was a more of an applause of obligation if at all in fact there was hardly even a standing ovation and I never see begrudging standing ovations at Broadway shows anymore at least in the before time and if they enjoyed the spectacle that's fine that's whatever but if they didn't connect with the actors if they didn't connect with the performers then that's not going to make the thing stick with people which brings us to Titanic a film so wrapped up in spectacle it's kind of hard to imagine that James Cameron had any room in his brain for anything but spectacle but people came for the spectacle they did not stay for the spectacle they stayed for the story the characters that je ne sais quoi the iconic love story this requires skill and it is iconic the film still lives strong in our lexicon the means immortal Kate Winslet DiCaprio perfectly fine we have no choice but to stan. Compare Titanic to Avatar, which despite what the Walt Disney Company would have you believe now everyone including me who has ever dreamed of visiting this extraordinary world can explore its astonishing landscape usually solicits a lukewarm "meh" from people when you bring it up except for dads maybe they remember like the special effects or the 3D or Bill Wellington? Chris Cumberba-- you know that guy that was in the movies in 2010 but there's not much memorable about the story itself when people think about avatar they think of the technology upon which it was hyped and then they probably make a blue Pocahontas joke there are those who are kind of into the world building elements I think I can't tell how ironic this is and I actually know her but no one is terribly invested in the story of Jake Sully and Neytiri but with Cameron up until his slip really started to show with avatar he was very good at balancing spectacle with story but up until Titanic usually giving the edge to spectacle because that seemed to be more where his interests lie in the case of Titanic it was the biggest spectacle in cinematic history but at the end of the day the story is what remains it is what sticks with people Cameron has done this before by turning his love of deep-sea diving into the 1989 film The Abyss a lesser-known Cameron joint about deep-sea aliens but that fixation on deep sea diving leapfrogged eventually into a fixation on the newly rediscovered Titanic in the 1990s Cameron spent a ton of his own fortune on diving and Titanic stuff and you know I've always been interested in the ocean so there's a certain transition point where I realized I was heading toward making a film on on that subject and before long like so many youtubers after him he looked at his greatest interest and thought hey I could monetize this and so monetize it he did with one of the most expensive remarkable and memorable movies of all time Titanic but the remarkable thing about Titanic within the Cameron Canon the first thing that people think about is not the spectacle ala the alien queen and aliens or the t1000 and Terminator 2 but for better or worse it is the characters the story they think about draw me like one of your french girls they think about I'm flying they think about I'm the king of the world about it's been 84 years they think of putting the diamond in the coat and putting the coat on her. the story still trumps the spectacle in the cultural Canon which is why it's so odd to me that creeping up on a quarter century later there are so many people still insisting that Titanic is bad actually but I'm not just here to argue that Titanic is good actually oh no I am here to argue that Titanic is actually one of the greatest cinematic achievements in history that it did deserve all of the awards and acclaim and no it did not deserve that big dumb stupid giant backlash one of the biggest ever and one of the most influential a backlash so fierce that never again would the popular thing be allowed in the same paddock with the high art thing no Best Picture nomination for you Dark Knight a segregation of pop art and high arts so severe that the Academy eventually had to expand the Best Picture category back out to ten nominations because could we please get some popular stuff nominated again please so following in the footsteps of those intrepid divers alongside James Cameron who rediscovered the wreckage of the great ship I am here to dive down and rescue Titanic's reputation as a cinematic great before it gets eaten by the irony eating bacteria of this incredibly mixed metaphor Titanic is one of those movies that when I feel like people try to articulate what they don't like about it they tend to be grasping at straws or declaring certain elements to be subpar when I'm like am I missing something did we watch the same movie this this is fine like Leonardo DiCaprio is acting for instance it's a perfectly fine use of your DiCaprio with all due respect miss I'm not the one hanging off the back of the ship here we know what bad DiCaprio looks like this is not bad DiCaprio the basis of most of the criticisms seems to be based on story is simple or characters are simple or Wow such melodrama but that said Titanic is about as complex as any other mass appeal blockbuster neither its characters nor its writing are remarkable in this regard compared to other movies same with the characters Are you of the Boston Dawsons? no the Chippewa Falls Dawson's actually Jack Dawson gets more backstory than generally agreed upon good characters like everyone in Jurassic Park what's your backstory Alan Grant we're going to find out why you don't like kids? Oh wait, who cares it doesn't matter and then there's the criticism that the film is melodramatic which I also find odd because the melodrama of the situation is why we remember the Titanic disaster at all it was the largest moving object in the world built by human hands at the time as well as the apex of Edwardian glamour it was to be the captain's last voyage before he retired and the ship sank on its maiden voyage. Any publisher would throw that concept out for being way too over-the-top if it had not actually happened it is a fundamentally melodramatic historical event so there's not really anything tonally off about having a big emotions romantic epic on board the ship right before it sinks simplicity likewise is a fine line to walk a storyline might feel simple after you've watched a movie 400 times but one must also consider how a story lands to a first-time audience as well as repeat viewers not to be that guy but now that but after I sold my first book available July 21st pre-order link in the description a huge component of the revisions or simplifying the mysteries what get revealed and clarifying world building and plot elements that I had thought were pretty clear but were reading as confusing to first-time readers like my editor and my literary agent so simplicity and clarity is harder to do than you might think and more complex does not equal more good in the case of Titanic the main love story star-crossed lovers of different class who meet fall in love and then one of them dies is fairly simple in the same way that Romeo and Juliet is fairly simple if you reduce it to its core components but it has to balance its bulk with a bunch of other subplots both with tying in the two Mains and with the fate of the ship itself so the film needs to walk a fine line spectacle versus emotional core melodrama versus absurdity sincerity versus irony and all the while appeal to as many people as possible Cameron himself described his script as intentionally incorporating universals of human experience and emotion that are timeless and familiar because they reflect our basic emotional fabric and all the while I feel I'm standing in the middle of a crowded room screaming at the top of my lungs and no one even looks up in response to the accusation that the film is cliche Cameron said LA Times critic Kenneth Turan mistakes archetypes for cliche I don't share his view that the best You dropped this, king. from my masterpiece Starscream it's the only crown I have and of course the mere audacity of that attempt is a strike against the movie's favor it's trying to be populist rash which leads us to another common criticism that the film is too base the swill of the common folk like that is a bug and not a feature there is a sort of classism inherent to criticisms like this in effect it's too many people like this which one sees reflected in the criticism that Cameron's Titanic valorizes the third class and demonizes the first class. my favorite bad Titanic take comes from historian Richard Davenport Hines who wrote: Wow but the thing about popular and low art is that given enough time history often reframes it as high art Shakespeare Puccini Dickens even the novel itself all started off as popular art that only got reframed as high art in retrospect so popular art that hits with a wide audience difficult to do but popular art that stands the test of time even harder there's truth but no logic what's the artist name? Something Picasso even Empire Magazine originally gave the film five stars then later revised it down to four after the backlash and then eventually revised it back up to five when they realized that they were basically peer pressured into giving it a bad review so I feel like the eagerness that some film people have to distance themselves from Titanic isn't really out of a desire to assess the quality or impact of the film but to tiptoe around the backlash that followed it and even if you're too young to remember the backlash you can still probably feel it in the atmosphere like saying that one of the most successful movies in history is good actually is a ding against your credibility are the masses really that stupid that if they like the thing it must be because the thing is bad actually well if one must descend into the trash pile in order to admit that we enjoy the thing then this is where we live now. Cause we're not going outside anytime soon Why this shipwreck? you know why not the Lusitania why not the Mauro castle why not the Atlantic I think you've got you know the biggest ship in the world it's on its maiden voyage you've got the president of the company on board that owns it you've got the Builder onboard and it hits an iceberg and it sinks so slowly that you've got all these hours for all this drama to be acted out but there's way more to it than the drama of it all the time period in which had happened is also of course relevant the Edwardian era and yes this counts was the last before the advent of modern warfare with world war one came all of this senseless death and carnage then World War two were a solid three percent of all of humanity died then the nuclear age and of course the sword of Damocles that hangs over us to this day climate change so it's almost like a simpler world went down with the boat a more civilized world a more glamorous world it's always oversimplifying to say it was a simpler time or a more innocent time but that is kind of what it felt like similar to Downton Abbey which basically captures the last gasps of aristocracy before World War one in England do we know anyone on board your mother knows the Astor's Alicia knows him Titanic does the same yes class stratification and inequality are still major things today but there's no glamour to the social lives of like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates you're saying you teach them that they have chores you kids have a responsibilities now flaunting your wealth is what the kids call a bad look Cameron was far from being the first or only person to wring the entertainment potential out of this tragedy of errors in fact it was only weeks after the ship sank that studios around the world began producing dramatized films. One notable being the silent short saved from the Titanic released a cool 29 days after the shipwreck and starring a survivor of the disaster Dorothy Gibson but the heyday for the Titanic dramatization came in the 1950s there was a 1953 Barbara Stanwyck film simply called Titanic which is a wildly inaccurate pencil piece of fanfiction but hey you know it made money and walked away with the Best Screenplay Oscar and it paved the road for a night to remember widely considered the more historically accurate of the bunch and easily the film with the greatest influence on Cameron's version it's kind of like how Disney's Hunchback of Notre Dom is really more of a remake of the 1939 Hunchback of Notre Dame than an adaptation of Victor Hugo's novel hell even the Nazis made their own propaganda version of Titanic and this version took the narrative of J Bruce Ismay wealthy coward who survived and turned him into an evil greedy Jew who was also a coward that survived because of course they did and as a side note perhaps the person done dirtiest by history and dramatized versions of Titanic as J Bruce Ismay who was the highest ranking official on board the Titanic who actually survived and he's the guy in the movie who's pushing the captain to make the boat go faster the press knows the size of Titanic now I want them to marvel at her speed in real life Ismay was not the living embodiment of hubris while he did get on the last lifeboat there is little evidence to support that he actually ordered the Titanic to go faster most of the people who saw him on the boat actually testified that he helped save people and only hopped in the boat because there were no women and children around to take the space and a lot of the Ismay hearsay was established by William Randolph Hearst who hated Ismay and Cameron knew this, so why include it? well because according to Cameron people expected to see it and so he's here in this role to play to people's expectations to give them what they want the 90s resurgence of Titanic interest most likely came about as a result of the wreckage being discovered there was a TV miniseries from 1996 starring Catherine Zeta-Jones in a role quite similar to Rose there was a musical from 1997 called Titanic a new musical written by Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit of nine Fame and this proto phantom and while this musical swept a very low energy Tony Award season winning five awards including Best Musical it ranks pretty high on my hunch the musical scale of musicals it wasn't that historical movies were or were not particularly big in the 90s for every brave heart and Dances with Wolves you had big disappointments like far and away and cutthroat island and history is increasingly unkind to the former two examples but the more relevant context for which the period in which Titanic was made wasn't period pieces it was there are different cycles for nostalgia and so far the ones we've discussed that are relevant to Titanic have been forty year cycles with a big resurgence of interest in the 1950s and then again in the 1990s but arguably the most consistently lucrative nostalgia cycle is the 20 year cycle because generally it applies to a demographic who are you know they're kind of getting settled in life getting married having kids buying houses that was the thing people our age did in the 90s and now they're you know feeling wistful about their lost youth and they want to go to the movies think of how Greece a huge hit released in the 70s was nostalgic for the 50s you have your Brady Bunch and all sorts of sitcom remakes that were released in the 90s nostalgic for the 70s Sure Jan but also in the 90s we had the stylistic nostalgia cycle for disaster movies in the 70s you had big hits like towering inferno and earthquake but in the 90s we had another resurgence not only with natural disaster movies like Dante's Peak and volcano deep impact Armageddon God there were so many but we also had like alien invasions we had Independence Day any manner of way we can almost wipe out human civilization we were so bored in the nineties and right now we're on the verge of a 20-year cycle for the 2000s as well which I intend on capitalizing shamelessly link in the description it's a period piece Titanic was pitched as Romeo and Juliet but on the Titanic but the danger there is then it looks like a movie for womens. look is it a boy movie or a girl movie? we have to choose. And I could go into the convoluted nightmare of the production of this movie and how all signs pointed to failure but really that would deserve its own video by virtue of the fact that Cameron was a proven hit maker studios gave him a lot more money and freedom than they would have to other directors which is partially why Titanic is allowed to so completely inhabit both worlds both shamelessly romantic and a textbook nineties disaster movie but because the studio is capping costs Titanic didn't have anything like the marketing push we see in big movies today so a lot of its success really did kind of come by word-of-mouth and the fact that for the most part Hollywood failed to repeat the success of Titanic and we'll get to that tells me that they never really understood why it was a success in the first place I mean attempts were made and I'll get to that in a minute but first I would like to talk about a lot of people joked at the time about who would want to see a Titanic movie because you know we all know how it ends right so within the text of the film the audience needs an incentive to engage with the story outside of simply knowing how it ends the previous Titanic movies or musicals just told the story as a period piece but Cameron's film uses the modern day and a self-insert character named Bill Paxton as James Cameron's if you'll excuse the term avatar meet Bill Paxton played by Brock Lovett our James Cameron insert who only cares about the money not the science he's in it for the glory but doesn't really understand the heart of the tragedy you know he doesn't get it and that's where Rose comes in she's gonna tell her story and then he's gonna get it part of the reason Titanic was such a hit was because audiences were really starving for deeply sincere emotional content but if you're gonna go that route you can't just bust in with the high melodrama look it's the 90s kidz we are all irony poisoned the president is being impeached over blowy politics are for suckers and nothing matters but we are all deeply lonely. The success of Titanic kind of reminds me of Star Wars 20 years earlier the 70s weren't as irony poisoned as the 90s but the trend definitely rejected old Hollywood simplicity or this epic tone that Star Wars was going for the assumption was that audiences would be turned off by that approach when in reality they were apparently starving for it a cowboy movie set in space that's Star Wars it's old-fashioned escapist entertainment pure and simple with no moral no message and it appears this is what just about everybody in the country is in the mood for so Titanic's framing device is important in the next up a 90s movie in particular because by allowing for all of this eye rollin and yeah we know it's schmaltzy but just roll with it it's easier for the audience to suspend their disbelief or their irony in the case of 90s and accept the story it takes about 25 minutes to get through the framing device at the beginning and not only does it leave no doubt as to the how the story ends we know the ship sinks before the story proper even starts it also tells us the science of what is happening so when the ship does sink some two hours later you don't have the audience being like what the hell when it breaks in half or sinks vertically the stern rises up slow at first and faster and faster until finally she's got our whole ass just sticking up in the air but moreover the thing about a Titanic movie is I mean the fact that we know how it ends means you have to have a new main tension rather than will the boat sink or not. instead of will the ship sink the narrative hooks are character based we know Rose survives but how and why has she kept her identity a secret what happened to Jack and where is that necklace anyway in the context of the framing device the necklace is what we call a MacGuffin is it a diamond yes in simple terms a MacGuffin is a thing that drives the plot but it doesn't actually matter to the story everybody wants the necklace because of course they do it's a thing we can fight over it's the reason Rose and Bill Paxton meet in the first place but it doesn't actually matter to the story because the story is about Jack and Rose not the diamond hence she throws it into the ocean at the end but now you know there was a man named Jack Dawson and that he saved me in every way that a person can be saved and it's stuff like this that leads to a lot of really lame criticism because all we have to do now that it's the end times is logic the thing like in the making of this video every time I tweeted about Titanic I got like 400 @s about the door headboard or whatever that thing is like Jack could have fit on there too they both could have fit on the head like way to miss the point assholes like there's even a really lame deleted scene where they address this Just enough for this lady. You'll push it under. Just let me try at least or I'll die soon. You'll die sooner if you come any closer. you see we the audience need to feel the weight of the loss here not just the 1500 randos that died but the character that we've come to know and care about for the last three hours so Jack sacrificing himself is a micro version of what makes the story so remarkable women and children first wasn't an official policy by any stretch it was not maritime law it was more like the Pirates code in Pirates of the Caribbean more of a guideline so while in theory in a disaster situation the menfolk would try to save the women and children first the reality is that women and children were way less likely to survive shipwrecks and in practice it was usually every man for himself the White Star Line's previous worst maritime disaster the sinking of the SS Atlantic lost more than half of its passengers when it sank and every single woman on board and all but one of the children died so the fact that the majority of Titanic survivors were women and children is actually an extreme outlier so Jack giving up his spot for Rose serves as synecdoche for the greater sacrifice he knowingly gives up his spot for her just as hundreds of others did Cameron could have contrived any number of ways for Jack to give up his chance at life for Rose but to get so obsessed with the logistics of the door and the buoyancy and the square footage which is explained in the text so to focus on that instead of the simple plot element of Jack sacrifices his life for Rose is to completely miss the point if you want to contrive some other way for Cameron to have gotten this across leave me a comment boost my algorithm rating I promise I'll read each one thank you for that fine forensic analysis mr. Bodine Titanic is functionally two movies in the first half the Romeo and Juliet love story and the second half the action movie which again should not work and is really difficult to pull off but in practice the first half serves to make the audience care about the thing the ship the people on it the love story and then the second half takes it all away the two halves have completely different tensions the first half being the will they won't they get together the second half being who will survive and how to again quote Cameron you have to care about the ship in order to care about the sinking I have built you a good ship strong and true the best case for what works about Titanic can be made by comparing it to its most blatant ripoff Pearl Harbor Pearl Harbor is a love story set against the backdrop of a major historical tragedy in this case a surprise attack that led to the u.s. entering World War two there are more obvious ripoff elements the score it has a fun dance scene both involved ships sinking also where Titanic has Fabrizio Pearl Harbor has like seven Fabrizios here's a Fabrizio there's a Fabrizio Fabrizio black Fabrizio lady Fabrizio but it's not what the movie takes from Titanic that makes Pearl Harbor such a failure it's what it lacks Pearl Harbor approaches its love story with the same logic as the clowns from the original animated Dumbo approach laughing If you were rooting for these two crazy kids how about these three crazy kids yeah so love triangles are generally pretty frustrating narrative devices especially if the narrative isn't serialized like in a TV show or a book series you've got to be kidding right and when they do work incorporated something short like a movie it's where the choice is obvious it's not who will Rose choose it's will Rose get away from the bad one again the choice is simple and in this case simple is not bad in a movie you just don't really have enough time to develop two relationships well enough to the point where it's like oh wow I wonder who she'll choose Team Jacob but the real difference between the romance and Titanic and the romance in Pearl Harbor goes back to the simple screenwriting question of want versus need a motivating want that drives the plot and a character arc defining need again for another example of simple is not bad Michael Jordan wants to be a baseball player and this is what serves as is character motivation in the first act of the film but when because of some space monsters the only thing that can save the world is someone with mad basketball skills he realizes that he needs to go back to basketball and that his true place is on the court Leave the baseball player alone now you know he doesn't play basketball anymore. Michael do you hear that? they don't think you can play the game anymore there's only one way to find out but at the beginning of Pearl Harbor none of the main characters want for anything before they meet and fall in love except for Ben Affleck's dyslexia maybe getting in the way of him becoming a hey you don't dogfight with manuals which is immediately resolved anyway in Titanic Rose is our point of view character and she's the one who's really missing something in her life when the narrative begins she is repressed she is lonely she is desperate to break free and feels like there's no way out until she meets Jack and Manic Pixie dream Jack helps her complete her character arc but in Pearl Harbor no one really wants for anything let alone needs it kate beckinsale has her girlfriends Affleck and Hartnett have each other and they're terrible southern accents I don't want to teach loops and barrel rolls I want to be a combat fighter so no one is lonely or unsupported no one is missing something critical in their lives that might be improved by having a soul mate they're just attractive people who are attracted to whoever I guess I suppose the argument could be made for Beckinsale's character needing something after she thinks Affleck is dead and she falls head over ass into bed with Josh Hartnett but it's like personally if I see someone filling the gap of their dead lover with his best friend I mean it's not that that can't be compelling content it would make for some great real housewives drama but I'm not watching this and going oh man I hope these crazy kids make it through the war like as an audience member I'm not sure what I'm supposed to feel here but I just wanna know why so throughout Pearl Harbor the love story feels incredibly Hollow nothing is at stake if they go back to their old lives and for Beckinsale it basically reads like well at least now I've got a spare for when one gets killed in action which of course unlike Rose and Jack where there is real stakes to their relationship outside of you know young love for both of them but particularly for Rose sooner or later that fire that I love about you rose that fire is gonna burn out but upon rewatche the most remarkable thing to me about Pearl Harbor is that it completely drops the ball at the thing Titanic nails we the audience don't really care about the ships it was a symbolic strike yes but the Japanese at Pearl Harbor weren't attacking civilians sailors or soldiers they were attacking the fleet which is another thing I hate the bombers going after civilians and the hospital okay okay we're not gonna go there so surely there must have been some way for the audience to really appreciate the grandeur of these boats before they get destroyed you know make us care about the fleet before you sink it Pearl Harbor rips off Titanic just enough to be frustrating but it misses what makes those elements in Titanic work that it succeeds in making you care about the ship itself and it makes you care about the love story in no small part because they are intertwined when the ship docks, I'm getting off with you. so in light of the fact that Broadway is shuttered and will remain so for a long time I saw Hadestown again recently for my podcast and at the time seeing it yet again I felt kind of gratuitous like I was being really extravagant I don't need to do this and I don't think I would have felt that way if I had known that there was about to be no more theater but the thing I love of the most about Hadestown is it's a story that you know is brave enough to have a tragic ending but also takes the time to really explore the appeal of stories with tragic endings the musical Hadestown is a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and if you aren't familiar with the myth of Orpheus it ends tragically but the remarkable thing about this musical is as you're watching it it invests far more in the love story than the original myth ever could and by the end it makes you believe that like Jack and Rose those crazy kids might actually make it out this time and if you know the myth but this is your first time seeing the musical it genuinely draws you in and makes you wonder are they actually gonna change the ending? because that's kind of where it feels like it's going they don't but there is more to Hadestown than the tragic ending it uses that ending to demonstrate the narrative appeal of tragedy and why certain stories get told and retold over and over again a well-told tragedy appeals to the human desire to hope and every time you watch Titanic or hell every time I watch one of those Titanic sinks in real-time simulations on YouTube of which I have watched all of them there's a part of you that sees the ship approaching the iceberg and goes like like even 23 odd years later there's still tension there because you still kind of hope that this time they might get out of it but even upon rewatch you still feel that story tension and you don't leave feeling upset because the tragic ending is a satisfying one when Rose either goes to sleep or dies at the end debate that not the stupid door and she is spiritually reunited with everyone who died on the ship gets me every time we chose this topic as we were developing a different topic that was more topical but also more heavy and a little too heavy considering the circumstances and when we found ourselves much more drawn to wallowing in nostalgia than examining the current state of things we thought hey maybe that's what the people need right now instead the trash pile is where we live and that's fine but even still this episode was difficult to write because writing about how a thing is good actually especially one that nerds don't universally agree on it's surprisingly hard to articulate and I think because especially on YouTube it puts you in a defensive position and that in and of itself is harder to write but more importantly it's also what YouTube's algorithm recommends and what people want to watch thing bad content tends to get way more views but moreover you're also opening yourself up to vulnerability and points of attack as one example and this is not even something I said on YouTube I said a nice thing about someone else's book a very popular and award-winning book at that in an interview for Newsweek and I saw in a reddit thread saying that said book that I said the nice thing about was not good actually and if I say that the thing is good when in fact the thing is not good then we can extrapolate that my book is probably also bad and some of you will think it is that's just how it works and that's beside the point it's amazing how like in criticism your likes can be a bigger strike against your credibility than your dislikes especially here on youtube.com, where liking thing is for stupids and of course we do have to write with a mind towards the algorithm negativity just gets more views so for those of you who like to leave don't you like anything comments I refer you to Jim Sterling's video on the same topic it is surprisingly difficult to create content that will hit with a wide audience while not also being thing bad which is partially why in my old age I am more and more appreciative of films like Titanic widely popular while also being sincere and generally hopeful who are you arrogant man don't call yourself the king of the world I'm the king of world I think you're not man remember when James Cameron got cancelled for that? James Cameron got cancelled for quoting his own movie at the Academy Awards and Kate Winslet got fat shamed man fuck the nineties so I'm not saying that I'm not doing thing bad style content anymore because frankly it is often fun to write but it is an interesting challenge to do more exploratory topics or in this case thing good content and who better to emulate in that regard than James Cameron in many ways the work of a critic is easy we risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgement we thrive on negative criticism which is fun to write and read and is that in the grand scheme of things the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. so you remember like six months ago when I said this is going to be the shameless self-promotion section of the channel well guess what month it is oh this was supposed to be a lot more fun this is all your fault that's it that's all she wrote

Channel: undefined

Views: 1,156,706

Rating: 4.9477797 out of 5

Keywords: lindsay ellis videos, lindsay ellis video essay, lindsay ellis review, lindsay ellis titanic, titanic film review

Id: hW4U_lfgPac

Length: 40min 37sec (2437 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 03 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/AJBIsHere]

Watched this this morning. 100% agree. Titantic has always been really really fun and doesn't deserve half the heat it gets.

[u/sylinmino]

I really love Lindsay's content for reasons like this.

She'll put something she hates on full blast and will even dive into the context of why it's like that and contemporary parallels and such, but she's also not afraid to dive head-first into the whirlwind of petty internet hate for something and be like, "There is way more merit here than you're giving credit for."

It's why her videos on Beauty and the Beast's nonexistent Stockholm Syndrome, Hunchback of Notre Dame's Disney adaptation that's not as unfaithful as people say, this video on Titanic, and her apology video to Stephanie Meyer and how Twilight is way overhated are all some of my favorites.

And I do agree with her on Titanic. Yes it's sappy and cheesy and relatively simple in its plot skeleton. But that's part of the experience--like Star Wars, it's the delivery that sells it, and there's a reason why decades later so many of its best moments still feel fresh in one's mind.

[u/happysadnihilist]

I love Lindsay Ellis but I’m always nervous watching her videos because she tends to rip apart movies I enjoy. Glad she’s on the same side as me on this one.

[u/thefablemuncher]

Love the end credits montage of this.

[u/Syfte_]

A couple of nits about to get the tweezers:

Lindsay's comment about a weak marketing campaign is, at the least, unbalanced as the movie was the subject of increasingly intense media coverage a full year before release. There was an endless feeding frenzy as outlets covered the growing costs, growing number of entangled studios, the creation of a new studio in Mexico and the bottomless speculation about the film's prospects with most less-than-subtly rooting for its failure. There's a great analogy to be made with the 2016 Trump presidential campaign and I'm shocked that she didn't seize on it.

While the 90s was a strong rehash of the 70s, the 80s was much more nostalgic for the 50s with its neon, leather & letterman jackets and non-mullet men's hairstyles. There was no fond recollection of hippies, free love, psychedelics, bell bottoms nor the music of the decade.

I agree that retroactive movie backlash is dumb.
Remember that thing that I absolutely loved 4 months ago? I hate it now.
Why? What happened?
I talked to someone who wasn't impressed that I loved it.

I loved her epilogue and the book promo reel and just how ironically playful she always is. Also, James Cameron pops up regularly in her work and I'm still holding out hope that she'll drop a video on The Abyss. She tried to dig into his brain on True Lies and The Abyss is a much larger and clearer window into the man's arrogance, ambition and skill.

[u/lanternsinthesky]

I am really excited to watch this, because Lindsay always make good arguments, even when I disagree with her, and from the title I know I will.

[u/clandohoome]

She makes a very good point when comparing Titanic to James Cameron's other mega-blockbuster Avatar. There are so many scenes in Titanic that are cemented into popular culture. "Paint me like one of your French girls", "I'm king of the world!", "I'll never let go Jack", "I'm flying!", "It's been an honour playing with you tonight", the sweaty car sex, that bit where the guy falls off the back of the boat and bounces off the propeller... Compare that to Avatar, which was seen by millions of people like Titanic was, but made nowhere near the cultural impact. You could quote any one of those Titanic scenes in a conversation, and everyone would get it, but no one would get an Avatar reference unless you painted yourself blue first.

I know that everyone says that popular =/= good, but I think if you have made a movie that can ingrain itself into the minds of so many people, you must have done something right.

[u/Somnif]

I feel odd about this one. I agree with a lot of her statements about why folks saying the flick is "bad" are wrong, but I don't really agree with her reasoning for why it is "good".

Like, her statement that "we" focus on the acting rather than the scenery, with the "King of the World" shot as an example. I, personally, totally think more of the location/setting (bow of the ship) rather than the act being performed.

I suppose I, now and always, have just thought of the movie as "Meh". A pretty "Meh" but that's the lot of it. The acting is ok. The story is ok. The sets and production are amazing. And overall it's... fine, I guess?

[u/lisawithans]

Such a phenomenal take on talking about liking things instead of hating things on youtube. I’m so here for more content, from creators like Lindsay, about stuff we enjoy and WHY it’s popular.

Love this video.