The Titanic....
Wednesday, 2 April 2003 00:15![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
apollaOK.... Have a rant to get off my chest and as my dad's heard it too many times to be healthy, I thought I'd release it into the wild here. You have been warned.
When I was a little girl, one of the films I liked most was A Night To Remember. Might seem odd viewing for kids, but my dad had these two books by a bloke called Ballard. One was about the discovery of the Bismarck (2nd World War Nazi warship) and the other was about a ship that sank in 1912. Since then I've also acquired his book about the Lusitania (currently resting just off the Southern tip of Ireland).
If you look at the books, you notice that one has a ratty dust cover and fingerprints all over it. The other one is barely touched. That Titanic book enraptured me when I was just a child. I understood the tragedy even then, discounting the argument that children don't really understand death and loss. A Night To Remember was one of the first videos my family owned in the early years of owning videos (odd to think now in these early days of DVD) and I watched it quite a few times if I recall.
I haven't seen it for a long time, however, until today. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that I did a 6000 word personal study for my History A-Level in 1999-2000 and since then haven't read any of my books or watched any of my videos. It wasn't an easy thing to write and I got heartily sick of it. Remains to be seen if the same will happen with Jim Morrison...
The second reason is this little picture called Titanic made a few years ago by a bloke called Jim Cameron. You may have heard of it. At first I was completely head over heels in love with that picture. There was my beloved Titanic in glorious technicolor, surround sound and it breaks into two at the end. I watched it four times at the cinema and pre-ordered the video months in advance.
Then I got it home and on a little screen I realised it was an absolute piece of shit. Badly written, badly acted (Billy Zane is in it, say no more) and historically inaccurate in some important places. This realisation kind of broke my heart because I'd been waiting for so long to see the definitive Titanic movie. I read an article just the other day in the Times or Empire in which the writer said he imagined that the next (ie, mine) generation would probably end up making the definitive Titanic movie which would combine the best elements of all that has come before. Looks like it's up to me then... Frankly, I'd love nothing more than to make a good picture about my ship.
Anyway, I'm getting off the point. After so long away from it, I have realised fully the greatness that is A Night To Remember. Sure, it may be in black and white, it may have the Titanic (and it is 'the Titanic' not just 'Titanic'. That's always bugged me) sinking whole. But in many other ways it is more historically accurate than the new film. I won't go into boring details (partly because three years have eroded some of them from my memory). First Officer Murdoch did not shoot himself. The band play the version of 'Nearer My God, To Thee' that they would have played, not the American version that the alleged King of the World chose because it was more artistically viable or whatever. A small note to Cameron and to the tosser that made the Doors movie: in stories about real people and things, facts are more important than what you fools think more artistic. Neither of you are artists. Get the hell over it.
I also realised that there is more emotion in one small moment in A Night To Remember than there is in all of Titanic. When Honor Blackman's screen husband says goodbye to the son asleep in his arms, you just try and stay stony-faced. Or.... there's a thousand such moments in a film that runs just over two hours. No fake love story is needed for this one. If a love story is what you want, get any version of Romeo & Juliet (I do like Baz Luhrmann's version). But this isn't meant to be a Titanic bash so much as it is a A Night To Remember lovefest. I really had forgotten what a wonderful film it is, even with StereotypicalEnglishGent!Kenneth More in it. There's one amusing moment: he's just fallen into the icy N. Atlantic, nearly been crushed by Collapsible B, but there he is, swimming back to the ship shouting to his men to keep going. I found it funny.
I have been reconnected with the ship I love, even though I've never understood fully why I do. Have you ever heard the phrase that we don't really choose good books, they choose us, or whatever it is? I feel as if the Titanic chose me because I really don't get why it would be otherwise. I don't really like ships (I do like the Lusitania though, because of that other book...) and I don't get a kick out of mass death. Perhaps really I just like beauty, and that was the most beautiful ship... ever. There is a part of me that watched A Night To Remember and Titanic and that godawful Catherine Zeta-Jones/Peter Gallagher tv movie and cried not for the people (although for them too) but for the loss of such beauty. Am I terribly vacuous and mean? All I want is for the world to be beautiful. Perhaps that's why there's pictures of Errol Flynn and Ava Gardner on my walls... I don't know.
I think I'm confusing myself now, so I'm going to stop there.
When I was a little girl, one of the films I liked most was A Night To Remember. Might seem odd viewing for kids, but my dad had these two books by a bloke called Ballard. One was about the discovery of the Bismarck (2nd World War Nazi warship) and the other was about a ship that sank in 1912. Since then I've also acquired his book about the Lusitania (currently resting just off the Southern tip of Ireland).
If you look at the books, you notice that one has a ratty dust cover and fingerprints all over it. The other one is barely touched. That Titanic book enraptured me when I was just a child. I understood the tragedy even then, discounting the argument that children don't really understand death and loss. A Night To Remember was one of the first videos my family owned in the early years of owning videos (odd to think now in these early days of DVD) and I watched it quite a few times if I recall.
I haven't seen it for a long time, however, until today. There are a few reasons for this. The first is that I did a 6000 word personal study for my History A-Level in 1999-2000 and since then haven't read any of my books or watched any of my videos. It wasn't an easy thing to write and I got heartily sick of it. Remains to be seen if the same will happen with Jim Morrison...
The second reason is this little picture called Titanic made a few years ago by a bloke called Jim Cameron. You may have heard of it. At first I was completely head over heels in love with that picture. There was my beloved Titanic in glorious technicolor, surround sound and it breaks into two at the end. I watched it four times at the cinema and pre-ordered the video months in advance.
Then I got it home and on a little screen I realised it was an absolute piece of shit. Badly written, badly acted (Billy Zane is in it, say no more) and historically inaccurate in some important places. This realisation kind of broke my heart because I'd been waiting for so long to see the definitive Titanic movie. I read an article just the other day in the Times or Empire in which the writer said he imagined that the next (ie, mine) generation would probably end up making the definitive Titanic movie which would combine the best elements of all that has come before. Looks like it's up to me then... Frankly, I'd love nothing more than to make a good picture about my ship.
Anyway, I'm getting off the point. After so long away from it, I have realised fully the greatness that is A Night To Remember. Sure, it may be in black and white, it may have the Titanic (and it is 'the Titanic' not just 'Titanic'. That's always bugged me) sinking whole. But in many other ways it is more historically accurate than the new film. I won't go into boring details (partly because three years have eroded some of them from my memory). First Officer Murdoch did not shoot himself. The band play the version of 'Nearer My God, To Thee' that they would have played, not the American version that the alleged King of the World chose because it was more artistically viable or whatever. A small note to Cameron and to the tosser that made the Doors movie: in stories about real people and things, facts are more important than what you fools think more artistic. Neither of you are artists. Get the hell over it.
I also realised that there is more emotion in one small moment in A Night To Remember than there is in all of Titanic. When Honor Blackman's screen husband says goodbye to the son asleep in his arms, you just try and stay stony-faced. Or.... there's a thousand such moments in a film that runs just over two hours. No fake love story is needed for this one. If a love story is what you want, get any version of Romeo & Juliet (I do like Baz Luhrmann's version). But this isn't meant to be a Titanic bash so much as it is a A Night To Remember lovefest. I really had forgotten what a wonderful film it is, even with StereotypicalEnglishGent!Kenneth More in it. There's one amusing moment: he's just fallen into the icy N. Atlantic, nearly been crushed by Collapsible B, but there he is, swimming back to the ship shouting to his men to keep going. I found it funny.
I have been reconnected with the ship I love, even though I've never understood fully why I do. Have you ever heard the phrase that we don't really choose good books, they choose us, or whatever it is? I feel as if the Titanic chose me because I really don't get why it would be otherwise. I don't really like ships (I do like the Lusitania though, because of that other book...) and I don't get a kick out of mass death. Perhaps really I just like beauty, and that was the most beautiful ship... ever. There is a part of me that watched A Night To Remember and Titanic and that godawful Catherine Zeta-Jones/Peter Gallagher tv movie and cried not for the people (although for them too) but for the loss of such beauty. Am I terribly vacuous and mean? All I want is for the world to be beautiful. Perhaps that's why there's pictures of Errol Flynn and Ava Gardner on my walls... I don't know.
I think I'm confusing myself now, so I'm going to stop there.