on telling stories about disasters
The Saturday before Easter, I saw a play. Specifically, I saw a musical about the sinking of the Titanic.
It was-well, let's not mince words. It was pretty bad. The acting was patchy, the music was unimpressive at its best moments, and the story was essentially nonexistent.
But it made me think, as you might expect, about the somewhat famous movie of the same event made a few years ago.
I've listened to and participated in a lot of conversations about the movie Titanic over the course of my life. People have called it amazing, waxed poetic about how much they love it and how many times they've watched it. People have also talked about the unimpressive special effects, the clichéd and somewhat trite love story, and the appropriation of a complex tragedy rife with issues of class to tell the love story of two young white people.
I don't disagree with the criticisms, because they're all valid points. But I saw the musical tonight with a lot of people who don't take the same outlook on popular culture that my (fandom) friends and I tend to do, and they successfully reminded me that a very great many people adore the film.
And when I first saw it-well after it came out, because Mom was afraid it would give me nightmares-I loved it too.
(It did give me nightmares; the night after I watched it, I had a very graphic dream of drowning.)
The movie Titanic works. Taking a step back, it's very easy for me to pick it apart and enumerate its many flaws, but it's an incredibly popular film and that didn't happen for no reason. The story is in a familiar mold-after all, forbidden love is a theme with mass appeal; if it weren't, we certainly wouldn't have as many productions of Romeo & Juliet as we do. And when you're watching the movie, it's very easy to be sucked in and care about the characters.
Does it bother me that the heroine of a film about a tragedy that killed overwhelmingly the poorest people on board is a wealthy young woman? Yes. Is it problematic that those people's deaths are restricted (find the right word here) to a couple of montages in favor of letting us watch Jack and Rose fight to stay together? Yes.
But after I saw the musical tonight, I'm not sure it was the worst way of handling the setting.
Because the story the movie Titanic tells-trite though it may be-makes the viewers care. And ultimately, making people care-reminding them that the people who die in horrible tragedies are, in fact, people-is what a good narrative of a tragedy does. Band of Brothers isn't an effective story because it shows me a lot of people getting blown up, though it does, or because it had a huge budget and could afford to make things look realistic, though it did. It's effective because I care about the people getting blown up, or watching their friends get blown up, or getting shell shock, or any of the other countless horrible things that happen.
Whatever else you may say about it (and seriously, those special effects have not stood the test of time), the story that Cameron's Titanic tells makes people care-and even if they only care about Rose and Jack, at least they care about someone. The tragedy is no longer just a series of names and numbers because it has taken the life of someone they valued.
(That said, if the only people you cared about were Rose and Jack, watch it again and pay attention to other people. Among others, Bernard Hill does a fantastic job as the captain.)
The musical we saw had a lot of characters, from all the backgrounds and walks of life likely to have been onboard the Titanic. (For the purposes of this essay, I'm going to ignore the stereotypical and obnoxious middle class American female social climber, but she really grated on me. Troubling foreign perceptions of Americans are another issue entirely.) Obviously, the upside of this was that the poor passengers weren't ignored in favor of the wealthy ones.
But here's the downside: it was a lot harder to care.
The other downside, which was probably due at least in part to shoddy writing, was that there was no story beyond "these people are on a ship and it's going to sink soon." The only conflict was in things like whether or not the captain was cave to the pressure to take the ship faster, which was a foregone conclusion for everyone with even basic knowledge of the Titanic's story.
In the end, the musical made me care. But there are two factors to consider. (1) I was actively trying to care because I am not going to be a person who snickers at a play about the deaths of 1,500 people and (2) I'm very susceptible to the particular type of emotional manipulation that stories about real tragedies use. (It's why war dramas are so bad/good for me.)
But most of the people I was with? They were giggling. And I can't blame them. The play erred too far on the other side-in trying to make us understand the scope of the tragedy (and at least making the class issues clearer), they sacrificed the human factor and then had to try and shoehorn it back in.
(Because it wasn’t a very good play, the shoehorning was awkward and, often, funny.)
Cameron's Titanic fails in a lot of ways-it doesn't address class nearly as much as a narrative about the ship's sinking needs to, among other things-but it accomplishes the one basic thing that any narrative about a tragedy needs to do: it makes the tragedy personal for people who weren't there.
It was-well, let's not mince words. It was pretty bad. The acting was patchy, the music was unimpressive at its best moments, and the story was essentially nonexistent.
But it made me think, as you might expect, about the somewhat famous movie of the same event made a few years ago.
I've listened to and participated in a lot of conversations about the movie Titanic over the course of my life. People have called it amazing, waxed poetic about how much they love it and how many times they've watched it. People have also talked about the unimpressive special effects, the clichéd and somewhat trite love story, and the appropriation of a complex tragedy rife with issues of class to tell the love story of two young white people.
I don't disagree with the criticisms, because they're all valid points. But I saw the musical tonight with a lot of people who don't take the same outlook on popular culture that my (fandom) friends and I tend to do, and they successfully reminded me that a very great many people adore the film.
And when I first saw it-well after it came out, because Mom was afraid it would give me nightmares-I loved it too.
(It did give me nightmares; the night after I watched it, I had a very graphic dream of drowning.)
The movie Titanic works. Taking a step back, it's very easy for me to pick it apart and enumerate its many flaws, but it's an incredibly popular film and that didn't happen for no reason. The story is in a familiar mold-after all, forbidden love is a theme with mass appeal; if it weren't, we certainly wouldn't have as many productions of Romeo & Juliet as we do. And when you're watching the movie, it's very easy to be sucked in and care about the characters.
Does it bother me that the heroine of a film about a tragedy that killed overwhelmingly the poorest people on board is a wealthy young woman? Yes. Is it problematic that those people's deaths are restricted (find the right word here) to a couple of montages in favor of letting us watch Jack and Rose fight to stay together? Yes.
But after I saw the musical tonight, I'm not sure it was the worst way of handling the setting.
Because the story the movie Titanic tells-trite though it may be-makes the viewers care. And ultimately, making people care-reminding them that the people who die in horrible tragedies are, in fact, people-is what a good narrative of a tragedy does. Band of Brothers isn't an effective story because it shows me a lot of people getting blown up, though it does, or because it had a huge budget and could afford to make things look realistic, though it did. It's effective because I care about the people getting blown up, or watching their friends get blown up, or getting shell shock, or any of the other countless horrible things that happen.
Whatever else you may say about it (and seriously, those special effects have not stood the test of time), the story that Cameron's Titanic tells makes people care-and even if they only care about Rose and Jack, at least they care about someone. The tragedy is no longer just a series of names and numbers because it has taken the life of someone they valued.
(That said, if the only people you cared about were Rose and Jack, watch it again and pay attention to other people. Among others, Bernard Hill does a fantastic job as the captain.)
The musical we saw had a lot of characters, from all the backgrounds and walks of life likely to have been onboard the Titanic. (For the purposes of this essay, I'm going to ignore the stereotypical and obnoxious middle class American female social climber, but she really grated on me. Troubling foreign perceptions of Americans are another issue entirely.) Obviously, the upside of this was that the poor passengers weren't ignored in favor of the wealthy ones.
But here's the downside: it was a lot harder to care.
The other downside, which was probably due at least in part to shoddy writing, was that there was no story beyond "these people are on a ship and it's going to sink soon." The only conflict was in things like whether or not the captain was cave to the pressure to take the ship faster, which was a foregone conclusion for everyone with even basic knowledge of the Titanic's story.
In the end, the musical made me care. But there are two factors to consider. (1) I was actively trying to care because I am not going to be a person who snickers at a play about the deaths of 1,500 people and (2) I'm very susceptible to the particular type of emotional manipulation that stories about real tragedies use. (It's why war dramas are so bad/good for me.)
But most of the people I was with? They were giggling. And I can't blame them. The play erred too far on the other side-in trying to make us understand the scope of the tragedy (and at least making the class issues clearer), they sacrificed the human factor and then had to try and shoehorn it back in.
(Because it wasn’t a very good play, the shoehorning was awkward and, often, funny.)
Cameron's Titanic fails in a lot of ways-it doesn't address class nearly as much as a narrative about the ship's sinking needs to, among other things-but it accomplishes the one basic thing that any narrative about a tragedy needs to do: it makes the tragedy personal for people who weren't there.