A trip back in time... on the Titanic

A trip back in time... on the Titanic

Monday 16 April 2012

Doesn't this take you back? Such a nice young man.

I know I was bleating on the other day about the Titanic, and how people were getting a little carried away. I also mentioned how my friend was horrified at my excitement about watching the movie in 3D. But, in the end, I couldn't help myself. I had to watch it.

The movie that was being shown in the Model didn't look exciting (much as I love their Sunday brunch) so it seemed that Titanic would be the perfect choice, particularly on the 100th anniversary of the disaster.

I had my reservations. This is a film I adored when I was 12, but I adored lots of shitty things when I was 12. I have different tastes now. I no longer wear scrunchies, for one. My favourite outfit doesn't involve a pink parrot jumper. The Leonardo DiCaprio posters have been removed from my walls.

It's not fashionable to love the Titanic movie. But dammit, I do. It has stood the test of time, in my eyes. Oh, I really felt like I was 12 again. I thought that I would step out of the cinema and be in Uckfield, ready to dry my eyes and hit Maximum Diner. Or, you know, go home. I was 12.

I'd forgotten so much. Yet it all came flooding back to me. God, did I love Leonardo DiCaprio. He was the ideal crush for a young girl. Delicate enough to be non-threatening, lovely curtains, and he knew what to do in a crisis.

I remember watching the ship go down when I was younger, and being impressed that he knew what was going on, and what they had to do. I remember thinking that was the kind of man I needed. One who can tell me to take a deep breath and swim up. Who knows where I would have ended up if left to my own imaginary devices. I doubt I'd have copped that it was sinking. I would have probably tried to take a nap with the spooning old couple.

I recently saw James Cameron talking about the conversion into 3D...




I thought it was interesting, hearing him talk about the difference in viwers' lives from 1997 to now. People who had seen it then may have children now, may be married...

Maybe they're going to look at love and life and what has meaning differently now than they did then. Maybe it will be less about the glow of romantic love, which is a teenage idea, and more about that sense of duty and what we're here on this planet for and what we mean to each other, and all those things, which older audience members get out of it.

I liked that idea. That you could be watching it with completely different eyes.

Me? Well, I'm pretty much the same. No marriage, no kids. Pretty much still a teenage brain. It's still about the glow of romantic love for me. The only insight that age gave me came when Billy Zane tells Rose that there's nothing he couldn't give her. Bugger it, he shot himself a few years later. Maybe she should have sucked it up and gotten a damn good life insurance policy. Then she could have looked Jack up, reunited and had a big sexy bath in Zane's riches.

But it was an interesting thought. I wouldn't have known, watching it as a girl, that I would end up living in Ireland, living it up in steerage. I saw certain things differently, certain characters in a different light. But I still loved the same ones. Molly, Mr Andrews (oh, Mr Andrews) and Tommy.

I had the weirdest sense throughout the film that I knew Tommy in real life. I kept asking my friend if we knew him from somewhere. Is he friends with Donagh? Do we know him from Sligo? Shit, where have I seen him before...

Turns out I remembered him from Titanic.