Ice Field

Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster, edited by Kevin S. Sandler and Gaylyn Studlar. Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 288 pages. $20.

"Instant books" first appeared in the '70s: thin, hastily written paperbacks designed to hit drugstore and airport sales racks while public interest in a political event or celebrity scandal remains fresh. The '90s have given us the academic instant book, collections of essays that, because of the slow pace of scholarly publication, generally appear after public interest in whatever "hot" topic they explore has waned. Madonna, Princess Di, and the Tonya Harding/Nancy Kerrigan affair have been given the cultural studies treatment; now comes Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster. Like the film itself, Sandler and Studlar's collection is short on marquee stars; the twenty contributors include some scholars well known in the media studies world, but no household names. Titanic made up in special effects what it lacked in star power; Anatomy of a Blockbuster lures readers with the promise of a stern critical thumping for the box-office favorite, like those high-school movies in which the rich, arrogant kid gets a well-deserved comeuppance.

Titanic would seem to be an ideal target for cultural studies scholarship. Its combination of extraordinary popularity and monumental banality cries out for the sophisticated skepticism that the best practitioners of cultural criticism bring to mass-media texts. Revelations, however, are in short supply in the fourteen essays gathered here. On the question of the film's unprecedented box-office success, most of the essays fail to go much beyond director James Cameron's neat formulation: "Romeo and Juliet on the Titanic." In other words, mushy stuff for girls and action for beys. Jargon is often called in to dress up threadbare insights. A typical passage from this Anatomy proposes that "Titanic became so popular because it provides [sic] an additional context . . . for girls' ongoing articulation of their DiCaprio fantasies." Translation: Girls love Leo. The essays cast in the mode of ideological unmasking reach similarly unsurprising conclusions. We learn, for instance, that "far from inciting class rebellion in its millions of viewers . . . Titanic . . . distorts and obscures the realities of class." And there I was, ready to storm the barricades after that big opening weekend. Most of the contributors seem to imagine themselves in the role of the iceberg, sinking the bloated blockbuster with a critical thrust below the waterline. Alas, they are more plausibly cast as the passengers, forced to publish or perish in the icy waters of the job market now that the S.S. Academe, listing badly after its collision with economic reality, has been discovered to lack an adequate supply of lifeboats.

Mass-audience films have always mixed genres freely, the better to attract disparate audiences. But contemporary blockbusters are fundamentally incoherent; they consist of assemblages of fragments, each of which is designed to push the buttons of a particular demographic. Subjecting such films to ideological analysis is like trying to psychoanalyze one of the soulless pods from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But if these essayists spend much of their time answering the wrong questions, they on occasion point to fascinating subjects for future investigation. Consider this passage, from an essay that touches on the affiliations between Lady Chatterley's Lover and Titanic: "There is no logical reason to believe that less-educated, poorer men make better lovers than educated, economically successful men. indeed, sensitivity and erotic creativity may very well be qualities one would more likely find among educated, successful men." The authors' failure to subject this hypothesis to empirical testing may be the most disappointing of the volume's many missed opportunities.

Vernon Shetley teaches English and film at Wellesley College.

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