Paying for Beauty - motion picture 'Titanic' misrepresents the social codes of the wealthy

No doubt about it: In the year and a half since the release of James Cameron's Titanic, it's become clear that the film will go down in cultural history as a major event. It is a movie flawed in some respects, like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, but also like them permanently evocative of its moment. In the wake of Titanic, so to speak, I have been discussing the movie on university campuses. Everyone wants to talk about it, and fortunately Titanic is good enough to bear much discussion. In the course of these conversations an intriguing tension in Cameron's vision has emerged.

Cameron did his homework on history. At the same time, he omits a great deal which would have made his film more powerful. For instance, in his depiction, the ship's decor and architecture are splendid, as they were in reality. But this leaves unexplained why the Titanic was constructed this way-as, in Cameron's phrase, "the ship of dreams."

Well, the White Star Line faced a problem. The great German transatlantic liners, with the latest engines, could on the basis of speed be equaled but not defeated. White Star thus decided to beat them on commodiousness and beauty. No expense was spared. A piece of the grand staircase on display in the museum at Halifax has been compared by experts to the carving of the 17th-century master Grinling Gibbons. The second-class accommodations on the Titanic were superior to the first class on the German ships. Had a ship less grand than the Titanic sunk in those North Atlantic waters on April 14-15, there would have been no story-at least no story of equal power-to tell.

But this oversight is hardly worth mentioning when set alongside another. After all, Cameron's interests lie elsewhere than in the history of shipbuilding. One focus of the film is social class, and here his treatment is seriously problematic.

In short, he omits entirely the often noble behavior of the people in first class. His chief villain, Cal Hockley, scowls at the center of the movie's social-class scheme. He is the son of a Pittsburgh steel magnate and engaged to our heroine, Rose. Of all the first-class passengers, he is the only male we see much of and may fairly be taken as the movie's representative of that class.

Yet he is so purely villainous as to challenge credibility. Against the strict code of his class, he hits, actually hits, Rose. He breaks crockery. He has a permanent 5 o'clock shadow. He tries to bribe his way into a lifeboat. He even has a sadistic bodyguard, an ex-cop. Thus the dark capitalists control the thug- like forces of order.

Yet Cameron-who, as I say, did his homework-knows that there were many true gentlemen in first and second class who indeed, according to their code of behavior, "did the right thing." For example, we see in a cameo shot Isidor Strauss and his wife. They are lying together on a bed in their stateroom, waiting for death. Cameron knows that their real story is more complicated and much more poignant.

Isidor Strauss created the great department store Macy's. In his late 60s, rich and retired, he toured Europe with his wife. They were now heading home on the Titanic. As the ship sank, Mrs. Strauss was allowed to board a lifeboat. She pleaded that her elderly husband be allowed to board too. This was allowed. But Mr. Strauss refused to board. He said, "I will not go before the other men." That was that. She said that she had spent her life with him and would not leave him now. She stepped out of the boat, and they sat on deck chairs to watch others load.

The point here is that the upper-class gentleman's code of that era was deeply felt and sternly enforced. It involved "setting an example" for the rest of society. When things went wrong, one bore it with stoicism, or irony, or humor. Perhaps above all, one was deferential to women.

Col. John Jacob Astor, whose ancestors first earned their money in fur trading, also makes a cameo appearance in Titanic. He was traveling with his second wife, young and pregnant. She pleaded that he be let into a lifeboat with her. Second Officer Lightoller refused: "Women only." Without complaint, Astor withdrew. Apparently while swimming in the ocean he was crushed by tons of steel as one of the funnels tilted and crashed. Benjamin Guggenheim, of the great steel fortune, met a similar fate and asked a departing passenger to tell his wife he had died "like a gentleman."

It is possible that Cameron intuited that a modern audience would scarcely believe that any such code of honor existed. Yet I think he never considered for a moment trying for genuine complexity here, because he had a very different, more up-to-date ideal in mind: that of Jack Dawson.

Jack, beloved of Rose, appears to be classless, a westerner from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. Though in a borrowed tuxedo he can "almost pass for a gentleman" (Cal Hockley's words), he can fully assimilate to the seemingly happy and spontaneous immigrants in steerage, dancing and cavorting with the most energetic of them. He is also an artist, or at least a talented sketcher, and he has been to . . . Paris! Jack represents freedom, unfettered by the contingency of the material world.