The 20th Century is almost over and, like most centuries, it has been filled with catastrophe and disaster. Two World Wars and several lesser conflicts have killed over a hundred million people and have wrought incalculable economic damage. Only recently have we begun to crawl out from under the threat of thermonuclear holocaust and, in the last decade, industrial accidents like Bhopal and Chernobyl have added to the litany of horrors. Not all of these catastrophes are man-made; nature does its part with a catalogue of hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. Nightly, on television news, we are exposed to car crashes, train wrecks, airplane disasters and even the occasional shipwreck. In 1990 a Philippine boat disaster involving the ferry Dõna Paz killed almost 5,000 people but it has almost been forgotten by those who weren't directly affected by it.

Yet, one disaster of this century remains etched in people's awareness and
imagination. The continuing public fascination with the events surrounding
the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912 is testimony to the enduring hold that
this disaster has on our collective cultural consciousness. Some claim that
the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War
and the Titanic disaster. It has also been said that Titanic is the third
most widely recognized proper noun in the English language, after God and
Coca-Cola. These claims was made prior to the release of James Cameron's
1997 epic film of the disaster. The reaction to the movie has amplified
this public awareness in a way that provides one of the most instructive
and teachable case studies in popular culture in the past decade.

As a high school teacher, I'm amazed at the universal recognition whenever
Titanic is brought up in class. The more motivated students are almost all
aware of the rudiments of the event that occurred in the North Atlantic on
April 14 & 15 some eighty-six years ago. Other students, who may be
oblivious of many of the most important historical events of the century,
are at least aware of Titanic. What is it about Titanic that continues to
capture people's imagination? What really happened 80 years ago and why
does it continue to fascinate us? The disaster was so incredible, so
horrific, that it still staggers the imagination.

Trained historians sometimes condescendingly refer to Titanic as "popular
history" in which complex processes are ignored in favour of collecting
facts and emotional vignettes. Academic historians generally believe the
Titanic disaster was relatively insignificant in the historical scheme of
things. They decry the attempts of amateur historians to invest social and
political significence in the disaster. School history textbooks covering
the era frequently don't even mention the event.

Interestingly, Titanic's pop culture history began 14 years before the
disaster itself. Morgan Robertson published a short novel, Futility, which
centred on a fictional ship called the Titan. Robertson's ship was
remarkably similar in dimensions to the real White Star liner. The
fictional liner sailed in April, struck an iceberg and sank with great loss
of life. Despite the remarkable coincidences, Robertson's story was widely
ignored at the time and it wasn't until after the real disaster that the
book attracted any attention.

The recent furor over the Cameron film isn't the first occasion that the
Titanic has dominated media attention. The first, of course, was
immediately after the sinking. The Titanic disaster was the biggest media
event of the 20th century up until that time. Titanic was front-page news
for months after the disaster. The event precipitated a series of responses
from many of the literary luminaries of the Edwardian era including Joseph
Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Bernard Shaw and Thomas Hardy.
Except for anniversaries honouring the occasion and the deaths of various
survivors, things were relatively quiet for the next four decades. The
publication of Walter Lord's seminal Titanic book A Night to Remember in
1955 and its subsequent television and movie adaptations encouraged another
round of media attention. The third time Titanic captured world notice was
Dr. Robert Ballard's discovery of the wreck in 1985. Then we have the
current worldwide media frenzy generated by James Cameron's movie, the
traveling exhibition of Titanic artifacts and the award-winning Broadway
musical. There's an unusual purity about the hype surrounding the Cameron
movie. Unlike many recent films, the initial excitement immediately after
the film's release was generated by the people themselves, rather than by
an opportunistic studio publicity machine.

Undoubtedly much of this continuing interest has to do with the
pervasiveness of the Titanic legend in our popular culture. Thousands of
ditties, poems, cautionary tales, campfire songs, religious tracts,
prayers, jokes, editorial cartoons, riddles and other cultural ephemera
have been written about Titanic. Each time we are exposed to these,
awareness of Titanic is imbedded further in our sub-conscious even if our
interest in the historical event is marginal at best. For example, a recent
best-selling chronicle of the spread and politics of the AIDS disease was
called And the Band Played On. Many who read the book
and saw the subsequent TV movie were unaware that the title was a
Titanic-inspired metaphor for institutional indifference in the face of
serious adversity.

Without question, the most pervasive of these cultural manifestations are
the audio-visual media of movies and television, particularly among
children, teenagers and young adults. The inclusion of the Titanic tragedy
in a movie like Ghostbusters II might seem gratuitous and in bad taste to
serious students of Titanic lore, but if it serves to interest impressionable
minds in learning more about the actual event, then it serves a useful purpose.

From a filmmaker's point of view, the Titanic tragedy is an awesome visual
event. The actual sinking was not photographed by either still or motion
picture cameras so Hollywood needs to recreate the event with special
effects. The more successful of these recreations are among the most
powerful moments on film. In Cameron's Titanic, the intercutting of scenes
portraying increasingly frantic people and shots of the huge liner listing
further and further into the sea and finally upending, breaking in two and
disappearing from sight never fails to move even the most jaded audience.
And, unlike the special effects-laden film epics of the last decade, it is
so powerful and so poignant because it really happened and is recreated
with a historical authenticity.

No writer of fiction, no matter how talented, could spin a tale similar to
Titanic without it being dismissed as utterly fantastic and improbable.
Rarely does a story so completely combine the elements of tragedy, drama,
mythology, morality play, and social statement. No other historical event
has been subjected to so many revisionist interpretations in the quest to
find some individual or institution to shoulder the blame for the tragedy.

Several factors contribute to the allure of the event. Among them:

The supreme confidence in a faulty technology.

Big business' criminal priority of profit over safety.

The arrogant disregard of every possible warning of catastrophe.

The celebrity of Titanic's 1st class passengers.

The mathematical improbability of the Titanic's collision with the iceberg.

The breakdown of a rigidly stratified Edwardian society in which the fabulously wealthy find themselves in exactly the same predicament as the poor and destitute.

 

These are difficult concepts to portray in films. Movies and television are
visual, not intellectual media. Ultimately, successful productions must be
about people, not technology. This is why a movie such as A Night to
Remember is celebrated thirty-five years after it was made and the more
recent Raise the Titanic is almost forgotten a little more than a decade
later. The older movie was a testimony to the human condition; the newer
one ignored it.

The Titanic disaster provided a cinematic prototype for numerous films
which relied on a similar formula: take a group of disparate people,
representing a variety of ages, cultures, attitudes and socio-economic
backgrounds, thrust them all together into a strange and unfamiliar
environment and then test them in their ability to survive and adapt to
calamity. The audience already knows that something terrible is going to
happen. That's why they're there: to savor the vicarious thrills of being a
part of something they hope that they will never have to experience in real
life. The suspense comes in guessing who will live and who will die.

The formula enjoyed its greatest commercial success in the 1970's when it
culminated in its own genre, the disaster movie. Some of the decade's most
profitable films, including the Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake and Towering
Inferno inspired over a dozen less successful exploitations of the formula.
The best of these films managed to combine the vagaries of technology or
nature gone wrong with interesting and believable characters that the
audience cared about. Recent genre entries such as Deep Impact,
Independence Day and Dante's Peak have further mined the formula.
The disaster movie formula ran out of steam at the end of the 1970's and
ultimately mutated into the drivel of television's Love Boat, a show that
was ironically responsible for the virtual rebirth of the cruise ship
industry which is now stronger and more profitable than ever. With the
success of the Cameron movie, Love Boat was revived in early 1998.

With the public furor over the Cameron film, the Titanic disaster is as
deeply rooted in our consciousness as ever. This seems an appropriate time
to review and take stock of Titanic and its various representations in
media and popular culture.

The disaster was directly responsible for several seminal events in the
development of the mass media. It was the first time that a major news
event was reported to the public primarily through electronic means. From
the initial reports of the disaster on April 15 until the rescue ship's
docking in New York on April 18, all of the information about Titanic was
relayed through wireless telegraph.

The New York Times coverage of the Titanic disaster helped transform a
local newspaper into a global voice. In 1912, there were almost two dozen
daily newspapers in the New York area. In that climate of fierce
competition, there was much inaccurate and misleading information in the
days immediately following the disaster. The Times stood clear above the
rest of the dailies in terms of the integrity and accuracy of its coverage.
Eventually, the paper would become, in effect, the U.S. national newspaper
and the paper still acknowledges that its coverage of the Titanic disaster
was responsible for this.

The Titanic disaster also had a profound influence on the rise to
prominence of the medium of radio. It was the first occasion that news of
catastrophe reached the public through over airwaves. Guglielmo Marconi,
the Italian inventor who had developed wireless and who had bought a ticket
for the Titanic's April 20th return voyage to England, was able to
dramatically exploit the usefulness of the medium. Within a few years,
radio would become the most powerful mass medium in the world, eventually
supplanting film as the most pervasive of all media, a position usurped by
television some 25 years later.

One of Marconi's employees, a Russian immigrant living in New York was able
to relay the wireless messages being sent from the Carpathia. David Sarnoff
would greatly exaggerate the role that he had played in the rescue efforts
but later, after he became the president of the National Broadcasting
Company, and one of the pioneers of television, he would claim that the
Titanic disaster had made his reputation.

Canadian connections with the Titanic disaster abound. About fifty of the
liner's passengers were Canadian residents or were immigrating to Canada. A
member of the Molson brewing family was a victim, as was the president of a
railway company that later became Canadian National. The initial wireless
messages from the sinking liner were picked up in Montreal and then relayed
to the rest of the world. Immediately following the disaster, the White
Star Line commissioned two ships to search for the bodies of victims.
Several hundred were returned to Halifax, Nova Scotia and buried in local
cemeteries which can still be visited.

Canadian poet EJ Pratt published an epic poem about the disaster in 1935.
Pratt (whose initials are hauntingly similar to Titanic's Captain EJ Smith)
was born and raised in a Newfoundland fishing village and was steeped in
maritime lore. Pratt's Titanic chronicles the ship from her launching on
May 31, 1911 to her destruction on April 15, 1912.

Ironically, the Titanic disaster would overshadow the greatest Maritime
disaster in Canadian history. In 1914, two years after Titanic, the
Canadian Pacific liner Empress of Ireland sank in the Gulf of St. Lawrence
near Rimouski, Quebec and over a thousand people perished. Most of the
victims were Canadian; many were from Toronto. Yet, few Canadians today are
even aware of the disaster or the name of the ship.

Within a few years of 1912, the Titanic loss of life was overshadowed by
the far more cataclysmic events of World War I. The Titanic disaster was
all but forgotten except during the April anniversaries or whenever a local
survivor passed on or was featured in a newspaper article. Titanic had
become a minor but interesting footnote of history.

In 1938, German author Robert Prechtl published Titanic. The novel was the
first attempt at a sustained fictional narrative of the disaster where
fictional and real chracters are interweaved in a generally accurate
account of the disaster.

By far the most important of pop culture events was the publication in 1955
of Walter Lord's A Night to Remember. Lord's writing adapted a then fresh
approach which has since become a formula. The book has a "you are there"
quality and a breezy writing style compared to other historical tomes.
Short paragraphs, reconstructed conversations and personalized anecdotes
give the book a cinematic feel. Lord's book is still considered the best
among the several hundred books written about the Titanic disaster and it
works well in classrooms from grade 7 and up.

In the 1950's the new medium of television proved equally adept at
exploiting the Titanic and the event stayed alive in the public conscience.
Kraft Television Theatre, You Are There, Telephone Time, Rheingold Theatre,
The Time Tunnel, Night Gallery, Upstairs, Downstairs, The Captains and the
Kings, Voyagers, a half dozen made for TV movies and most recently, News
Radio were among television's efforts to keep the Titanic legend in front
of the public.

There were many Titanic legends that developed over the years and they were
often confused with fact. Among the myths were: the Titanic was trying to
break a speed record; there was an Egyptian mummy on board the ship; there
were millions of dollars in gold in the ship's hold; several men got into
lifeboats because they were dressed in women's clothing. None of these were
true, except for the cross-dressing, but they continue to be reported as
fact in contemporary news accounts of the disaster.

1962 saw the formation of the Titanic Enthusiasts of America (THS). The
organization struggled for a few years, was later judiciously retitled the
Titanic Historical Society and received a major boost in interest with the
discovery of the wreck in 1985. The Cameron movie created another
membership boost and the THS remains the pre-eminent Titanic organization
in the world, despite the formation of a rival splinter group in the
1980's. The organization sponsors yearly conferences and publishes an
impressive and glossy newsletter the Commutator devoted to the Titanic and
its two sister ships. In the 1990's they began sponsoring 'heritage tours'
to Titanic related sights in England, Ireland, the United States and
Canada. Many teachers belong to the THS and they value the pedagogical
value of the disaster recognizing that students can understand social
change and history more readily when they are encapsulated in a single
dramatic event.

On a lighter note, the tabloid press is particularly obsessed with the
Titanic . The Weekly World News reported in 1991 that Captain Smith was
found in a lifeboat, "He thinks it's...1912- and his pipe is still lit!".
Smith would have been 133 years old. The same tabloid reported another
survivor a year earlier, "She thinks it's...1912- and her dress is still
wet!"

In 1976, the novel Raise the Titanic appeared in print and in 1980 was made
into an expensive Hollywood movie. The science fiction scenario has the
U.S. Navy raising the liner in order to obtain a rare mineral stowed in its
hold. The substance is deemed to be necessary for a new nuclear defense
system. The film was a colossal flop that, in filmmaking annals, was
considered a disaster in itself, though without loss of life. The film cost
$40 million and its special effects budget alone was more than it cost to
build the original Titanic in 1911.

Various preposterous schemes to refloat the Titanic were earnestly reported
by the news media though no one was exactly sure where the wreck lay. One
theory held that an earthquake in 1929 had completely buried the wreck. A
Texas millionaire, Jack Grimm, financed three expeditions to locate it in
the early 1980's but he was unsuccessful.

Finally, in 1985, a combined American-French expedition under the
leadership of oceanographer Robert D. Ballard located the Titanic and
photographed it using deep sea technology being developed for the U.S.
Navy. Ballard returned in 1986 to take better pictures but vowed to leave
the wreck undisturbed out of respect for those who had perished.

In January 1986, the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after
liftoff. Several parallels with the Titanic disaster were striking: a
fatally optimistic faith in a new technology; the deaths of an identifiable
cross-section of humanity, a plunge into the North Atlantic; the
possibility that ice was a factor in the failure of the Challenger's O
rings and the list of "what ifs" surrounding each tragedy. The Argo, an
underwater search vehicle was used to locate both wrecks.

In 1987, A French expedition brought hundreds of Titanic items to the
surface. On October 28 of that year, a live TV broadcast from Paris hosted
by actor Telly Savalas displayed a safe claiming that it would be opened
live on television and valuable artifacts would be recovered from the
interior. There's evidence that the safe was empty and stuffed with items
prior to the dramatic opening. The retrieval and display of personal
artifacts belonging to Titanic victims ignited a storm of controversy that
continues to this day. Ten years later, the artifacts were publicly
displayed in the United States for the first time in Memphis, Tennessee.
The fascination with Titanic also cuts across all literary genres. Arthur
C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, published a major science
fiction novel, The Ghost From the Grand Banks, another futuristic tale
about an attempt to raise the doomed liner. Romance novelist Danielle Steel
set the beginning of her novel, No Greater Love on the decks of the Titanic
.
In the summer of 1991, a fourth Titanic expedition photographed the wreck
in the Canadian IMAX film process for showing in the Cinesphere at Ontario
Place and other IMAX theaters around the world in 1993. Dr Joe MacInnis, a
Canadian underwater specialist, who was also on the 1987 expedition,
claimed that the IMAX film would give viewers the sense of diving down to
the shipwreck themselves. While the underwater footage was spectacular, an
interesting 45 minute documentary was bloated into a 90-minute feature and
much of the padding consisted of interviews with various members of the
Titanic lunatic fringe.

In late 1996, CBS Television, eager to cash in on the anticipation over the
Cameron film, released the tawdry four hour miniseries Titanic, filmed in
Vancouver. The movie was mostly ignored in its first broadcast but received
much higher ratings in its post-Cameron rerun in May of 1998.

In Halifax, one Titanic victim's gravesite, a crewman named J. Dawson, has
become a local shrine for young fans of Leonardo DiCaprio, whose character
in the Cameron movie has the same name. The modern shipboard sequences of
the Cameron movie were photographed near Halifax harbour. A large piece of
the Titanic's internal wood panelling, retrieved from the Atlantic following the
disaster, was used as a mold for a similar piece used in the film by the Kate
Winslet character. This piece is on display at the Maritime Museum of the
Atlantic. In fact, the last three Titanic movies have been filmed partly or
wholly in Canada. I visited Halifax in 1983 looking for evidence of that city's
Titanic connection and could find no one who was aware of it. This summer,
the city expects a flood of tourists who will be visiting the city as a result of
the hype created by the movie.

The Cameron film has been compared to great romantic epics of the past like
Gone With the Wind and Dr. Zhivago. The movie has certainly reignited
Hollywood's interest in the romance genre. Despite the monumental hype
generated by and for the movie, the official license holders have refrained
from the more excessive attempts to cash in on a successful film. There are
no Titanic action figures, lunch pails or plastic icebergs. Official
merchandising has generally been tasteful and limited to books about the
real ship, the movie's special effects and posters. Others have not been so
scrupulous and prices for even marginally interesting artifacts connected
with the disaster have gone through the roof. The only moment of bad taste
connected with the film was Cameron's Oscar acceptance speeches when
Titanic won eleven awards including best film. "I'm king of the world...a
moment of silence for the dead please...let's party all night!"

As usual, the enormous hype encouraged by Cameron's movie has generated a
backlash. Critics have commented that the Titanic hyteria is the result of
the contagion phenomena, similar to the public outpouring of grief after
the death of Diana last summer. The phenomenon is seen as the expression of
emotion by people who vicariously look to the media and popular culture as
a way of emotionally connecting with larger-than-life situations that are
lacking in their own lives.

Die-hard fans of the Cameron film have been referred to as 'Titaniacs' and,
like 'Deadheads', they kept on trucking back to the theatre to relive the
experience. Some people have seen the movie almost every day since it was
released, a remarkable feat given the length of the film and the
difficulties in buying tickets through to the end of March. Fans have been
reported in theatres yelling at other filmgoers who were not crying during
the film's emotional scenes. Some have taken cold showers so they can
appreciate how Jack and Rose must have felt after the Titanic sank. Young
females have been reported visiting the Halifax gravesite of the
aforementioned Titanic victim J. Dawson and leaving floral bouquets, movie
ticket stubs and, in one case, a pair of panties on his headstone. Other
fans have been holding crying parties, where the listen to the soundtrack
CD and sob together while they listen.

On the Internet, fans debate endlessly about tiny plot points that most
filmgoers wouldn't even notice. These 'rivet counters' obsess over minute
details in the sets, re-examine sub-plots, plead for information about a
video release date, spread rumours about the actors' personal lives,
hypothesize about the film's ambiguities and lend each other moral support
since their friends and families think that they're crazy. Sometimes these
debates become emotionally charged flame wars. A Titanic Internet mailing
list that I have subscribed to for several years was almost destroyed after
the film's release by emotionally unstable and confrontational individuals
who were obsessed with the film. At one point, the list manager had to ban
debate on the film after a particularly rancourous exchange over whether or
not 'Old Rose' died at the end of the movie.

As usual, conspiracy theories about the Titanic abound. As with JFK's
assassination and Elvis's death, people refuse to accept simple
explanations for the disaster. These theories include the use of defective
steel to construct the ship. One of the most fanciful conspiracies,
promoted by the 1995 book Riddle of the Titanic, suggested that the Titanic
did not sink at all. Instead, the authors claim, it was really Titanic's
sister ship that was substituted at the last minute in an insurance scheme
gone awry.

Anyone interested in Titanic, whether seeing the movie or reading a book
about the disaster is faced with the same question. How would one have
reacted under a similar set of circumstances? The sinking of the Titanic
took 2 hours and 40 minutes and people had to make moral choices. It's the
ability to relate to that situation and those choices that make the Titanic
story so compelling.