Lessons from the Starboard Side

Lessons from the Starboard Side

It was my very first movie memory. Now, the only things I remember about that first time was the haunting voice that opened the film, as though lamenting the thousands whose life was then shown in the screen, waving goodbye to their families as the ship left port, for the last time. I could remember the band, gallantly playing to the death, as the waters rushed to the glass walls of the captain’s cabin and engulfed him in its arms. I could remember the old woman throwing the necklace into the water, and the downward spiral of the necklace as it was buoyed down by the gem. But I have the goose bumps, until now.

            There certainly were a lot of reasons for Titanic to take hold of my young imagination. There were the splendid clothes, the band, the ship itself, the sheer adventure, and the tragedy. I caught the fascination for epics, for ships, for places and times lost and gone with this movie based on the most famous maritime disaster in history.

            Surely there were a lot of Titanic stories that surfaced even before this 1997 blockbuster movie. A stage play was written about Titanic; a TV show was staged; but none of these took as much hold of our fancy as James Cameron’s movie did. Perhaps it was because unlike others who came before him, unlike his character Brock Lovett who remarks that he never really understood Titanic, James Cameron did let Titanic in.  It was "not because I particularly wanted to make the movie," Cameron said. "I wanted to dive to the shipwreck." And when they actually did, he and the crew wanted "to live up to that level of reality.... But there was another level of reaction coming away from the real wreck, which was that it wasn't just a story, it wasn't just a drama," he said. "It was an event that happened to real people who really died. Working around the wreck for so much time, you get such a strong sense of the profound sadness and injustice of it, and the message of it."

            To me, Titanic’s message is not just about human and folly. Titanic is much more than the error that led to the iceberg grazing the ship on the starboard side. It’s about the lessons I learned from that very first screen exposure that to me, makes the ship’s sinking not without reason.

Titanic was my first concrete lesson on social equality. I remember the night Jack joined Rose for a dinner in the first class section of the ship, and Rose told him some first-class gossip about the people they met. I could clearly see that the wealthiest man on the ship, JJ Astor, suffered from the same controversies as the people on the third class section down below. And if they had a luxurious dinner upstairs, then the downstairs people also knew how to hold a party, and a more exciting one, if I might add. That even though Cal’s ominous comment to Jack, “I always win, Jack, one way or another” underscored the fact that there were still such things as ‘first class seats’ in such a lifeboat and that the rich, by virtue of their wealth, can still profit from their little business propositions – in the same ship, in the same tragedy, all were on an equal footing.

Unwittingly also, Titanic was my very first lesson on gender equality. I remember feeling relieved that when Captain EJ Smith decided who were to go on the boats, he chose women and children first. It seemed only logical to me, then. After all, they were the more vulnerable of the species, and perhaps something of the little lady in me thought it only proper for the boys and the men, if they were indeed gentle, to give way and secure the women and children first. But as the unsinkable Molly Brown said to the women with nervous anger, “I don’t understand a one of you! What’s the matter with you? It’s your men out there!!” Really, with this ‘women and children first policy’, what happened to the men? Weren’t they important too?

Above all, Titanic gave me my first lesson on humanity. Until 2010 it was the movie in terms of box office gains, and to me, this is not just because of ‘the love story [that] stole the world’s hearts’. Yes, the love story helped me digest the three-hour film a lot, and personally, in more romantic moments, it is what appeals to me more than the tragedy. But I believe that Titanic wouldn’t have achieved its top perch as the planet’s favourite film if it was just about love, however powerful this emotion is. The sinking of the ‘unsinkable’ ship is no secret, but in Titanic, you get to see how it was like, how grand the ship, how equally devastating the tragedy. Titanic struck a chord, in me, in every one, and I’d like to believe it is because we are as close to equal as we can ever be when we face tragedy; the love story just helped.

            Maybe it wasn’t too much of a coincidence that at half-past eleven of April 14, 2012 I was scanning my computer for movies to watch and my eyes alighted on Titanic, without being intentionally aware of the date. Maybe it wasn’t just timing that at 2:30 am of the next day I was still awake. Maybe we ought to go back in times like this, and remember what others have lived through or died of, even those dating exactly a century ago, and what we can still learn from it, even now.

            And this is what I call, a movie experience.