By Ed West

The soppy 90s epic Titanic famously tells the story of star-crossed-lovers whose budding romance is thwarted by Anglo-Saxon class constraints and an enormous iceberg.

There is Rose, a frustrated young gentry woman destined for a life of pampered Edwardian luxury, and Jack, the happy-go-lucky starving artist who’s blagged a ticket across the Ocean. Well, I say happy-go-lucky, but he’s on the Titanic so not that lucky.

Rose is unfortunately destined for a loveless marriage with Monopoly Man-style robber baron capitalist bastard ‘Caledon Hockley’, played by Billy Zane, a character who represents all that’s wrong with the world before 1914.

In contrast to the stoical black-and-white tearjerker A Night to Remember, James Cameron’s Titanic does not paint the Anglo-American ruling class of the Belle Epoque in a very sympathetic light. They’re snobbish, hubristic and believe themselves ‘masters of the universe’, apparently a linguistic anachronism which didn’t exist before He-Man (although I’m sceptical of that claim). When the film states as a postscript that Billy Zane’s character is ruined by the Wall St Crash and kills himself, it may as well add ‘LOL’, or maybe just a 😂.

The film reflects late 20th century moral judgments about a previous age with sexual values wildly at odds with the present day. Young Rose, being a high-born late Victorian woman, has comfort and relative luxury but also hugely constricted life choices, treated as a sort of child. She is never going to be taken seriously for any intellectual achievements, or have a meaningful career; and, assuming she and Caledon don’t move to Wyoming, Washington or a couple of other western states, she can’t even vote (although plenty of women approved of that).

There was an upside to this sexism, of course, not drowning being one. You might not guess it from the film, but proportionally far more third-class women passengers survived the sinking Titanic than did first class men, so if you were one of the Irish colleens doing a jig downstairs you’d have a better chance than Billy Zane. Although newspapers at the time condemned the indecent number of first-class male passengers who survived, this reflected the exacting moral standards of the age. In fact, many masters of the universe died on the Titanic, and did so with great dignity and courage.

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