Titanic and The Odyssey

I think one of the worst atrocities of Hollywood movies is how they handle love stories. Far from being stories of passion, loss, and bond, they’re cynical and exploitative.

Take Titanic for example. It’s a story of a young woman stifled into a conforming role by her privilege until she meets a charming, working class Leonardo DiCaprio who shows her a more liberating life. They fall in love and he sacrifices himself so she can live. With newfound freedom, she lives an adventurous life, always remembering him fondly.

               I want to take a step back to explain why I don’t like this modern American classic.

               It’s a given fact of life that everyone, no matter how privileged, thinks they’re always missing something. People don’t know how to be settled and content so we assume that someone or some philosophy out there will provide that missing piece. It’s often why very privileged people turn to religion or radicalization.

               For wealthy people, that missing element is often a sort of unrestrained zest for life without malaise or restraint. Many fantasies revolve around the notion that this love of life is carried by the poor (see Leo Tolstoy’s short story, The King and the Shirt) or the colonized (see Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s Noble Savage trope). Thus, the underlying fantasies of many Hollywood movies center on how supposedly content and joyful the poor are while emphasizing the discontent of the rich. Disney movies are often the most overt about this dynamic.

               This serves two functions. One: it paints a narrative of a sort of cosmic justice to the universe. Those who are not rich are at least happy, which would negate the need for reform. Second: it creates a fantasy where the wealthy or a colonizer can appropriate or claim the contentment of the underprivileged. This is the plot of James Cameron’s Avatar where a colonizing soldier finds peace and joy by adopting the native Naïve culture, complete with a romance, without compromising his privilege. In fact, he becomes an anointed savior. It is a fantasy for the exploiter disguised as respect for the underprivileged.  

               In Titanic, Rose, the protagonist, is deeply unhappy from a missing sense of freedom and spontaneous adventure in her life. A spontaneity she ultimately achieves by following the example of the poor and working class under the guidance of her less privileged romantic interest, Jack. Once she has achieved this capacity for adventure, Jack, rather than holding Rose back in monogamy and poverty, conveniently dies. A source of whimsical nostalgia whenever life is ever less than she desires.

The audiences is right to be suspicious of Jack’s supposed inability to fit on the floating debris with Rose, but Rose didn’t kill Jack. She’s merely the beneficiary of a fantasy designed by a vampire. A fantasy that makes her a victim too; as Oscar Wilde put it, “the two horrors in life are never getting what you want and getting exactly what you want.”

I don’t think all modern love stories are this cynical, just that far too many of them are and it doesn’t have to be that way. In The Odyssey, Odysseus, like Rose, is on a seafaring voyage centered on a lost romantic partner and a deep sense of discontent. Like Rose, he is given the chance to achieve bliss with a romantic partner when Calypso offers him immortality and godhood if he stays on the island as her lover.

               Unlike Rose, he refuses to copulate in fantasy. He rejects Calypso because he understands that eternal bliss is only an illusion and a path to eternal discontent. The path of all achieved fantasies. A truly meaningful life would be one he shares with those he loves, even if that means sharing in their mortality. Thus, he chooses instead to unite with Penelope, who will age just like him, because however temporary that life would be, it is one worth living. Now that’s a love story.

               Love stories are always centered on a relationship with fantasy. The promise of fantasy is often bliss, but bliss, at best, leads to malaise. Hence all love stories end in tragedy or right at the moment the relationship is sealed: this fantasy can’t be sustained. That seems to be fine with some people. Reliving that fantasy again and again is what makes the best-selling Romance genre. But, to me, the best love stories are the ones that see past the fantasy.