Social Class
Click to viewA tribute to the RMS Titanic and her passengers, who perished on 15 April 1912, the movie Titanic has remained till this day one of my most favourite movies of all time.
History aside, I cried so much for the senseless loss of human lives that were callously flung aside in the name of social class. I wept for the lives that were lost in the name of social hierarchy. I shed tears of rage over the ridiculous notion of human pride, and most importantly of all, I cried because I know this is not just a fictional love story that Hollywood had crafted out of the thin air; there were many couples and families on board the RMS Titanic. Couples with their full lives ahead of them, families with their futures ahead of them... most but lost underneath the frigid Atlantic waves simply because a variety of human reasons.
Even though more than 15 years have passed since the movie, its haunting music still stirs at my hidden psyche. I remembered watching this with my first crush, when I was just a lad in NS, and him already a young working adult. I remembered bawling my eyes out so much in the theatre that it took us 10 minutes before we could leave; my face was red and eyes & nose swollen from crying. I remembered him giving me all his tissue packets, and wiping away at my tears. I remembered him holding onto me tightly as we left, gently asking if I need a cup of hot tea.
Oh yes I remembered all those details. It was at Cineleisure, and he was in black tee-shirt and blue jeans. I had only came out officially not too long ago, and he was 1 of the first few gay people that I got to know. Perhaps it is also because of him that the movie was etched even deeper in my memory. True history + first crush is quite a potent combination.
It has been more than a hundred years since the Titanic sunk and perhaps none in the modern age would have even remembered that tragedy if not for James Cameron. The story of the Titanic also reinforced to me the dreadful evils of social class that unfortunately seems unavoidable. Maybe social class is what it is like to be sentient and sapien. I mean look at lions, hyenas, elephants, the great apes, and even honey bees for example. Can living beings do without this class system? Can we truly live without a social class or will we degenerate to utter chaos?