"The heart, it has to do stuff/ Like go on..."

( icon )

( new default icon )

Whoa. It is snowing.

This past week was pretty hellish. Hence the delay in update.

So. Here at Casa Erin for the past couple of weeks it has been All Titanic pretty much All the Time. I got the Special Edition DVDs for Christmas, mostly because the special features looked way too awesome to pass up. It is impossible to deny that the amount of research and detail that went into that movie, the historical recreations and everything, is pretty amazing. And this interested me because, really, I probably qualify as an amatuer Titanicologist. I will admit that it started with the movie in 1997, but the obsession went way beyond that. The real story behind the Hollywood one really got to me somehow, grabbed hold of me. (I understand that it has a pesky tendency to do this to geeks like me.) The obsession only waned because, well, I had learned pretty much everything there was to learn. There is a limited amount of information about this disaster available in the world, and I had gone through most of it. So, time went by, and I forgot things like the names of all the officers and the number of lifeboats. But still, every time I see a Titanic-related thing on TV or what have you, I have to stop and watch. It grabs me all over again. It is a powerful and tragic story, even more so because it is real. I could spend this whole entry listing off the tiny little things that, had they been otherwise, the whole thing could have been averted. But that's not the way it happened. The opening of the ROTS novel could just as well apply here: "It is a story of love and loss, brotherhood and betrayal, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. It is the story of the blurred line between our best and our worst. It is the story of the end of an age." (Which reminds me, if you ever get the chance to go to the Titanic museum exhibit thing in Orlando-- Go. They have reconstructed rooms, artifacts... basically, by the end, my mom and I were pretty much crying).

So, I got the DVDs because I wanted to hear the details of all of this historical and technological and awesome stuff they did. I actually watched most of the special features before I even saw the movie. But then I did watch the movie. And you know what I had completely forgotten? This movie does not suck. It was so overhyped and overplayed and overexposed that it sort of destroyed itself, burned in its own flame, as it were, but... It's actually pretty good. Yes, all right, the dialogue is pretty bad, but as a Star Wars afficionado I've come to terms with much worse. The acting is pretty excellent-- Kate Winslet, especially, really rocks. Her face is so expressive, it says so much. And the movie really does a pretty good job combining historical epic, romance, and action (OMG Disaster-Related Peril!). And, I will admit, seeing Titanic was a formative experience for my 12/13-year-old self. I didn't want to see it at first, because I'd heard there were frozen dead bodies, and I didn't want to see that. But the instant I did see it, well... Let's put it this way. It was the first historical epic-type movie I'd ever seen. It was possibly the first adult drama I'd seen and enjoyed. It was the first movie I'd seen with nudity and/or sex. It was the first movie I'd seen wherein one of the romantic leads dies. Is it really any wonder that I became obsessed with this movie? There was a time when I could probably have quoted the whole thing from beginning to end. And, having seen it a few times recently, it's amazing how fast that came rushing back. I suddenly cared about these characters and their stories again.

I'll admit, this time I was keeping track of the days that passed (I'm sure I must have always been aware of it, but never really thought about it) and found myself going, "What kind of proper Edwardian lady are you? You've known this guy two days and you're sexing him in the back of a car? TWO DAYS!" But still.

The special features on the DVD are awesome. The cast interviews are good, and the tech stuff is pretty interesting. I watched all the commentaries, and they are each uniquely cool. The cast/crew commentary is pretty funny because you can tell that about two of the people are in a room together watching the movie, and the other people are not together and are probably not even watching the movie. Because they'll talk about a scene and describe it-- "In the scene where Leo is at the bottom of the staircase when they're about to go to dinner and he's leaning against a wooden column..." as it's happening. If you were actually watching the movie, you would just say, "That column Leo's leaning against? It's made of oak." And they all refer to each other as though they're not there. Like, "Gloria Stuart said to me..." or "Jonathon Hyde always said that the scene where they're having lunch..." But there were some pretty good stories and character insights there. Like "You're seeing them for the first and last time" and a sort of crash course on When Kate Winslet is Acting and When She is Not, featuring The Story of How I Almost Died, by Kate Winslet. The Historian commentary by Don Lynch and Ken Marshall is pretty awesome, too. Their commentary is the one that sounds sort of like how I would comment. You have Don, the historian and renowned Titanicologist, and Ken, the historical artist and self-professed rivet-counter who admits that it took him several viewings to get the whole plot because he was looking at the pretty set. A typical exchange between them goes, "Wow. Kate is so good. She should have gotten the Oscar, I think. This is a funny line. I love that line. Don't you?" "What? Oh, sorry, I was looking at the set. It's so pretty. They had to scale it up a little to accomodate the bigger people." "Yeah. Don't you think Victor Garber looks like Thomas Andrews?" "Well... close, maybe. Hey, there's Astor." "Tell that one story about him, Don." And they prompted me to get out their book and match the illustrations to certain shots in the movie. And when Don Lynch said the little girl in the dining room is, in his mind, Lorraine Allison, I went "YAY! I WIN!" because that's what I'd always thought. Then I watched the James Cameron one, even though I don't particularly like James Cameron, because by that time a lot of questions had popped up, some of which the commentary answered, some of which it did not. It was pretty interesting, like when he says Cal is "Pretty psychotic. We didn't necessarily intend that, but..." and "She's just defied every authority figure in her life. I think she can go outside without a hat." He says he refuses to say whether Rose at the end is dead or just sleeping, but I'm thinking dead since on the Crew Video (hilarious!) they refer to that scene as "Rose rendezvous with Heaven Titanic."

The main unanswered question, which is STILL not answered because Cameron insists on being so damn VAGUE about it, is the ambiguous sexual relationship of Rose and Cal. DID THEY DO IT OR NOT, CAMERON? I just don't know. I even made a list, look: Okay, first off it would be WAY improper for the time for them to do it premaritally, but on the other hand the DeWitt Bukaters' money situation is so precarious that Rose may have been prompted to just close her eyes and think of Philadelphia. Then, in one of the deleted scenes, Cal makes some snide comment about how when he climbs between the sheets tonight, he'll be the first, but he says "I'll still be the first." But then she just sort of awkwardly pecks him on the cheek. After the suicide attempt he comes into her room while she's half undressed and he's half undressed like it's no big deal. But then he's all, "There is nothing I would deny you if you would not deny me." The morning after she goes cavorting belowdecks, he says, "I had hoped you would come to me last night," like it's a regular occurrence. And then he says that she is his "wife in practice if not yet by law." But then he's all, "You will honor me! You will honor me the way a wife is required to honor a husband!" and throws things around in a sexually frustrated manner. And then she leaves him the Naked Picture of Taunting, like, "Ha ha, you'll never see this in real life, asshole." But then her... reaction to the... escapade in the Carters' automobile does not quite match up with that of someone who has never done it before. So, taken all together, it is a freaking TIE. For some reason the still gallery contains the original scriptment (which is funny because Cameron obviously knew a lot about the sinking itself but not a lot about what came before-- such a boy), so I had hoped that would clear it up, but NO. It says something like, 'They are practically living together and, one assumes, sleeping together." What do you assume, Jim? You're the one making these people up. GIVE US A STRAIGHT ANSWER, DAMMIT! The scriptment is a tricky thing because the characters were obviously in their infancy and not completely formed in it, and many things about them were going to change. But in the scriptment Rose does say that she thought she loved Cal when she accepted his proposal, but later realized that she mostly realized she just wanted to get rid of her mother. So I have two possible explanations. The first is that she went to Cal's bed to be defiant and shocking. The second is that Cal expected her to come to his bed and she kept putting it off and putting it off because she doesn't wanna.

No, I don't know why I care about this so much. Except that I always feel this compulsion to really understand characters. The deleted scenes were a big help in this. I found that I liked Jack and Rose's relationship a lot better after I saw them, actually. There are a lot of hilarious scenes of them goofing off. (I don't remember the real names of most of the deleted scenes, so I renamed them according to what they say to me: Rose Pitches a Hissy, 101 Things A Rich Girl Can't Do, Slightly Drunk and Highly Improper, Damn Horny Teenagers (In the BOILER ROOM?), and Flirting with Irony.) The best one may be in Slightly Drunk and Highly Improper when they're coming back from the third class party singing "Come Josephine in my Flying Machine" (my new official cold weather song, an excellent reminder that although it may be cold, it could be colder). "Something... about a... bird on a beam, in the air she goes! Where?! There! She goes! Up, up, a little bit higher! Ooooh, MY! The moon is on fire!" Wonderful. I also found through the deleted scenes and scriptment what a truly wonderful character Rose DeWitt Bukater (Dawson Calvert) is. In 101 Things a Rich Girl Can't Do, she goes into this big, completely naive rant about how she wants to be an artist living in a garret, "poor but free": "You see these hands? They were made for work!" She says that she wants to be an artist or a sculptor or a dancer (I'm going to start saying "I want to be a dancer like Isadora Duncan!" when people ask me what I want to do with my English major.) or a moving picture actress. As she speaks, she twirls around and poses and it's adorable-- her enthusiasm and innocence, I guess. And it's just particularly amazing because that's not all there is to her, because she goes out and actually does all those things. She completely stops being this perfect Edwardian princess and becomes an unusually strong person. With the kind of sense of humor that lets her laugh about the irony of trying to kill herself by jumping off the back of the Titanic.

The alternate ending is... well, thank God they didn't use it. It's cheese to the nth degree and completely anvilicious. ("THIS! IS! THE! MEANING! OF! OUR! MOVIE!") The only thing I liked was that it cleared up why Rose never sold the Heart of the Ocean. She wanted to know that she could get by without Cal's help. I was like, "Ohhhh! That makes perfect sense, then!" The sinking-centric deleted scenes were mostly based off of real events and people, and were therefore heartwrenching. There was one with the wireless operators wherein Harold Bride tells Jack Phillips to send the new SOS signal and jokes that "it may be your only chance to use it." And that really happened, and I'd read about it and everything, but... seeing it just made me go, "Ohhh, man. It is. Jack Phillips is going to die." It made it more real.

As I was saying earlier, seeing this movie again made me look at a lot of the characters again and see them in different ways. I'd always sort of felt sorry for Ruth, because she thinks her daughter dies. But now I feel even more sorry for her because I know that she thought she was doing the right thing with the whole forcing-Rose-to-marry-Cal thing. She wasn't evil, like I thought when I was 12. She was just a woman of her time. Same with Cal, sort of, except Cal really does just suck. That's something about the way I was when I was 12 and 13. I saw everything in black and white. There were good people, and there were bad people. I think it took Star Wars, actually, to show me that there is a huge gray area and that pretty much everybody is in it, and it took Pratchett to teach me that people are just people, wherever you go. I'm working on a Ruth vignette right now, actually. It's called "Never an Absolution," which is the most obvious title ever, but it fit too well not to use.

Being re-grabbed by the whole story prompted me to tentatively look into Titanic fanfiction. No big surprise there- I found about two that don't suck. Most of them were probably written by 13-year-old girls who have the same writing and characterization issues I had when I was 13, and Lord knows I was one of those Titanic-ficcing girls at that age, too. I actually started a couple back then, may they never see the light of day again. But I feel that if I were to follow this story now, it would be completely different, because I understand the darker side of things now. Not that I have any real intention of serious Titanic-ficcing. Of course, I think about things and make things up, I do that for everything. I have done it for Pride and Prejudice, for instance, and Star Wars, and countless other things. I know, for example, that if I were to do a lengthy Rose Dawson story, it would be called "The Butterfly," after a deleted metaphor in the movie. But most of it will remain in my head. I will do a short piece or two-- this Ruth one and a drabble I have in my head (I've never tried a drabble before, and I want to see if I can do one).

Okay, I think that's about all I wanted to say about that. Sorry to inflict it upon everyone. See you next time with icons galore.