Patrick McGee

Department of English
Louisiana State University
pmcgee@gateway.net

 

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”

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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).

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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 Titanichas 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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).

 

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).

 

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).

 

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.”

 

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.

 

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 Titanicdisaster into an image of social desire in the present.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Works Cited

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