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WSWS : Correspondence : Art & Culture

Filmmaker commends David Walsh's review of Titanic

4 March 1998

To the Editor:

I'd like to commend you on printing Mr. Walsh's candid review of James Cameron's cartoon and the follow-up on the lackluster performance of the so-called elite of film criticism.

In an age where corporate interests control what films get made and reach the screens of the mall cinema complexes, it's doubly frightening that so few so-called arbiters of public taste have called this film for what it is and instead have blown it up to be what it isn't. It's one thing to muse nostalgic over a bygone era when a different kind of Hollywood system--with its own set of problems and a different set of economic considerations--created period piece blockbusters, it's another to fawn over a picture whose sole intention is to fill the coffers of its corporate parents and as a result end up with a piece of celluloid--a very long piece in this case--to run through a projector.

The film is inane in its portrayal of class differences. Nowhere is this more so than in the film's depiction of a bacchanal in steerage which Jack Dawson introduces to Rose. The scenes of drunken splendor below deck--because we all know that poor people really know how to have fun--is not only ludicrous and historically incorrect (passengers riding steerage may have had their fun, but it was a trip filled with abject misery), it is naive. Why in the world ought those poor folks forced to ride in steerage embrace the poor little rich girl and serve as vehicles for her redemption?

The film glosses over real issues and displays a totally juvenile worldview which emphasizes and values self-esteem over all things. Rose's problem is that her world won't let her realize her true potential and live the life she wants to live. What that life is, it never even pretends to say. All it states is that it's not the life of her milieu, of the establishment, of the exasperating upper-class...

It's one thing to criticize--it's a rather mild criticism in the film--the aristocracy of a much earlier era, it's another completely different matter to suggest a comparison to Marxist dogma. The film does not warrant such a comparison. Far from it. If anything, it serves more to rekindle a nostalgia for a period in history marked by so-called elegance, preciousness, and charm. The elaborate costumes and set-pieces in the film will attest to and fuel this phenomenon. What makes this ever more irritating is the continued emphasis on the part of Cameron, the film's studio, and the publicity machine, that an attention to detail to insure historical truth was fully in operation throughout the filming because the filmmaker and its producers wanted to preserve the sanctity of the film's historical subject matter. What rubbish! In an age where oligarchs and virtual monopolies have control of movies, one of the world's single largest communication tools, and when films play a increasingly greater role in determining and dictating the "truth" and "lessons" of history, politics, and even music--people don't and are indeed, not encouraged to make decisions about such matters anymore, why should they when they can get their history lessons from the film and their music selections prefabricated in a glossy soundtrack?--it is ever more frightening that people, especially the young, will and already have turned to this disingenuous and inane spectacle for drama and affirmation.

As for the critics who've jumped on the Titanic bandwagon, heralding the film as a landmark epic, shame on them! It's one thing for a prepubescent schoolboy or schoolgirl to be hoodwinked by Hollywood publicists, it's another thing entirely for supposedly intelligent adults versed in film history, current events, art and all those things that make up a critical consciousness, to be hoodwinked to the point where they cease to be critics writing about the film, and become just another corporate mouthpiece unabashedly extolling the virtues of the emperor's new robe when it's clear the emperor is buck naked and more importantly, not very well-endowed.

Yongsoo Park
Independent Filmmaker
NYC
26 Feb 1998