James Cameron’s Titanic smashed and set box office records worldwide after it came out the week before Christmas in 1997. A romance with a historic backdrop, Titanic appears to be a departure from sci-fi action movies that made James Cameron a household name, but it doesn’t take much to look beyond the characters and dialogue and see Titanic as another special-effects heavy, larger-than-life action movie like Aliens or Terminator 2: Judgement Day. It also gives us a window into James Cameron’s interests outside of filmmaking: deep-sea exploration, specifically of the Titanic’s wreckage, with modern-day submersible investigations of the sunken liner being the reason for fictional passenger Rose Dawson’s (Kate Winslet) story to be told.

All of this speaks to the high-tech revolution ongoing in the 1990s. Computers made the dry dock fake Titanic set look like it was actually leaving port, sailing and sinking in 1912. Composer James Horner incorporated electronics to make the movie’s award-winning score. Viewers could look up showtimes and potentially buy movie tickets using the Internet. In fact, one of the themes of Titanic is man’s ongoing relationship with technology. Does it define a society? Help it do things never done before or improve everyday life? Can it solve problems or create them? From the start of the film and then routinely brought up throughout, the boasts of “unsinkable ship” are countered with skepticism that may or may not have actually existed in the Edwardian Atlantic World. These ideas were paralleled throughout the early years of the Information Age as creators of technology (as seen above at the 1997 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas) routinely touted their products as solving all of mankind’s problems, but ignoring criticism about flaws or problems they might create.

Titanic, the film, also brings up class and (to a lesser extent) race. The ship was rigidly divided, as were all ocean liners of the era, by socio-economic status. And while that practice still exists on cruise ships in that the more money one is willing to spend, the nicer the accommodations are, people of all ticket prices are welcome to be on any deck they please at any time. This was not true in 1912, and Cameron makes sure we understand how that segregation was translated throughout the fateful saga. Yes, classism is a major component to Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Rose’s unlikely romance, but it is highlighted throughout the film as a way, perhaps, to ask audiences to reflect on such ideas outside the theater. Was there anything segregating people in the late 20th century comparable to the early part? How was technology like the World Wide Web and cellular phones breaking or building barriers between people?

Whenever a film about history is made, especially such a specific, recognizable event like the sinking of the Titanic, one should ask, “Why now?” Audiences going back to the theaters over and over again to see Titanic prove that the late 1990s was absolutely the time when they wanted to learn about this story.

Eric Salmonsen, EPS