(#582: 14 February 1998, 1 week; 28 February 1998, 2 weeks)
Track listing: Never An Absolution/Distant Memories/Southampton/Rose/Leaving Port/"Take Her To Sea, Mr Murdoch"/Hard To Starboard/Unable To Stay, Unwilling To Leave/The Sinking/Death Of Titanic/A Promise Kept/A Life So Changed/An Ocean Of Memories/My Heart Will Go On (performed by Céline Dion)/Hymn To The Sea
Throughout James Cameron’s Titanic are dotted traces of his wanting to make an Immense Work Of Art, even though immensity had by that time come to equal scale of spectacle rather than depth of emotion. Equally, if we look at Aliens, The Abyss, True Lies or Terminators 1 or 2 in addition to Titanic, there is a case for arguing that James Cameron really wants to write about the role of one-on-one male/female relationships in a world whose technology seems perpetually ready to deny and negate such things.
Yet,
was there ever any indication that the largest-grossing motion picture at that time would, in the end, prove such a small, careless affair? It is
admittedly hard to access glimpses of humanity in Titanic, so
vast are its sets, so visually encyclopaedic its setpieces (but are
these photocopies of an encyclopaedia to excuse one from ever reading
the thing?), and all that can fairly be said is that di Caprio and
Winslet do their best not to be drowned out by the scenery or suffocated
by the asinine script, with its solidly black and white portraits of
rich versus poor, evil versus noble – if only Leonardo had been given
both Con and Jack to play, although swapping roles with Billy Zane may admittedly
have made the film look a little too much like a big budget remake of Dead Calm
– its terribly patronising treatment of the ship's Irish passengers, stowed
away in the hold, and its final gesture in the direction of Schindler’s List
which transgresses onto the field of the offensive. Not to mention the
waste of 87-year-old Gloria Stuart portraying the 100-year-old Winslet;
if this film made Cameron “king of the world,” then Stuart, the former
Busby Berkeley chorus girl, sometimes looked more than ready to close
the book on movies once and for all (as it turned out, Stuart lived on well into her hundredth year, still on course to outlive cinema).
But the film itself proved secondary to its audience. Titanic was a spectacle to be seen on a huge screen – a computer screen or non-wall mounted television viewed in isolation will make you wonder what all the fuss was about – in the company of many, many people. It didn’t matter that its effects were overwhelmingly computer-generated and digitalised, and that models were used instead of actual ships; indeed the film’s framing device of Bill Paxton diving to investigate the wreck directly refers to a “computer simulation” of the disaster, so what we are watching isn’t “real.” Nor did it concern the billions of people who cheered, screamed and wept at the movie – many times over in a lot of cases – that Cameron played hard and fast with the facts, particularly in the film’s second half, although there is historical substance behind the poor and indigent being placed in steerage and in many cases actively prevented from escaping the hold – all for bureaucratically valid health and safety reasons, not that such a thing existed in 1912. But there isn’t a second of Titanic’s three-and-a-quarter hours that makes you think we are immersed or involved in that year. Nor was the ship’s failure to avoid the iceberg down to some crazy manly scheme to break any speed records; company policy on North Atlantic liners regarded timekeeping and sticking to the timetable a priority to ensure rigid adherence to getting passengers from A to B at the precise time scheduled, hence ice was viewed as an occupational hazard.
As I say, however, none of this mattered when cinema audiences viewed the horrified, frozen faces of the crew as they saw the iceberg looming up ahead and could do nothing to avoid even scraping it – which was enough to flood, split and wreck the ship – and began yelling “STOP! STOP!” at the screen. Nor when the ship split, with de Caprio’s Jack Ryan and Winslet’s Rose desperately clinging to each other as other passengers leapt to certain death, and the audience started to scream and even weep openly.
Cynics have commented that the movie needed that wreckage to remain interesting, since beforehand it had been a rather dull on-board romcom spiced with spoken and unspoken class resentments – Gosford Park At Sea (minus the snappy dialogue and subtly stark insights that Altman’s film offered. Where was the murder victim? Statistically there were about 1500 of them). But watching Titanic was nothing if it was not a communal experience – something to be shared, and in 1997-8, those immediate pre-internet days, plenty of people still craved that.
Even though everybody who watched the film knew what was coming, that didn’t quench the shock, surprise and thrill that its motions generated in its audiences, nor did it dissuade millions from coming back to see the film again, and again…because of its length, the average cinema could only screen Titanic three times a day, but those included early morning screenings, which were usually sold out. Those who watched the film, in some cases dozens of times over, felt that it had connected with them in some shallow yet profound manner. It breached something very intimate in the souls of its audiences.
And I feel that many of the people who watched Titanic at the time of its release were still dealing with unresolved third-hand grief. How could they have not? The passing of Diana, which at the time was still emotionally raw, affected pretty much the entire planet – don’t be a wise guy; it did - and I therefore think there was a residual reservoir to receive the outpouring of spontaneous emotion which Titanic filled perfectly. A mourning tempered by the knowledge that one of the two main characters had survived to a very old age – and much like Len Shelby and the incident in Bernie Clifton’s dressing room, the aged Rose – whom we see near the film’s beginning, contemplating and attempting suicide - had never forgotten the Heart of the Ocean necklace at all. Far from it.
Does any of this explain the spectacular success of James Horner’s score for the movie, which, at the time of writing, remains the only (mainly) instrumental film score to make number one? Indeed its sales surpassed a million in Britain, while in the U.S.A. it was 1998’s biggest-selling album, on top of the Billboard 200 for sixteen weeks. These are remarkable statistics for what might initially and ostensibly be seen as a fairly standard late nineties movie soundtrack – but note that pair of adverbs.
It commences with a lugubrious melody for Eric Rigler’s uilleann pipes and, to a lesser extent, Anthony Hinnigan’s tin whistle – picture postcard Celtic wistfulness in the manner of a scrubbed Barry Lyndon score. This stands as Jack’s “theme,” just as we are introduced to Rose’s theme shortly thereafter, and the two motifs swim around each other for much of the rest of the record. One can also dimly hear a slightly sinister descending four whole tone note figure in the far background – this will recur with greater volume later and come to represent “Iceberg Alley.”
Things continue conventionally enough for a time; there’s the big ship, docked at Southampton, ready to cast off, and Horner’s music – which seems equally divided between orchestra and electronic keyboards and samplers (the “choir” as such is synthesised, and this was apparently Horner’s preference; he was trying to prevent the music from becoming too “church-like”) – reflects the fact that Enya was originally approached, but declined, to compose the film’s music; her “Book Of Days” was used in Ron Howard’s 1992 Tom Cruise/Nicole Kidman film Far And Away, and much of the early parts of Horner’s score are reminiscent of John Williams’ soundtrack to the latter. The music does what it says on the tin; on “Southampton” you can smell the ship as it sets sail. The Norwegian soprano Sissel Kyrkjebø fills the Enya vocal role, although unlike Enya her voice remains word-free.
It is only when we get to “Hard To Starboard” that things begin to turn slightly sinister. There be the Rose and Jack motifs twirling around each other like a pair of reluctant waltzing partners, but harshness and a degree of discordancy make themselves known, and the melodies become harder to sustain. In “Unable To Stay, Unwilling To Leave,” the hold calmly awaits swift and mercy-free obliteration. In “The Sinking” the tension rises and the intervals between string leaps narrow. The two main melodies are now finding it extremely difficult to remain afloat.
“Death Of Titanic” is the most remarkable piece of its ilk to be connected to a number one album since “The Small House Of Uncle Thomas” in The King And I. The slightest soupçon of sentimentality is swiftly swept away by open dissonance – that crashing piano is intended to be onomatopoeia for an actual piano crashing into pieces; Titanic’s microscopic fascination with the ritual destruction of expensive and elaborate things renders it an unlikely companion piece to Zabriskie Point. The climax – akin to “O Fortuna” from Carmina Burana gone very wrong – sees all pleasantries and decorum utterly and irretrievably submerged by a Ligeti-like atonal synthesised choral howl as though the world were turning into fuzzy static.
The remainder of the soundtrack is perhaps the reverse of straightforward, as titles like “A Life So Changed” and “An Ocean Of Memories” might suggest. Yes, the elements of the score’s first half are still present, but also absent – they play at a subtly distorted distance, sound like ghosts of music. We can no longer reach them; the icy fog will not, cannot, be cleared. Memories of music, of better times, and how better these times seem when pickled in the past, thus permitting veneration. This music is as irrevocably drowned as any of the brass band or Eva Hart motifs in Gavin Bryars’ The Sinking Of The Titanic; nearer, our God, to what?
Eventually, and once again, we encounter “My Heart Will Go On,” where Rose and Jack’s themes now, and finally, combine. Some say that the Titanic soundtrack sold so well because of the inclusion of this song alone – but hadn’t it already appeared on Let’s Talk About Love? Well, not quite – this is a different and markedly less melodramatic reading of the song (so much for Dion having recorded it in one take) as though the singer had realised that tragedy only resonated if it were pared down as opposed to being blown up. It is as if she’s had time to think – “Think Twice” if you must – and is maybe singing the song primarily to herself, her own whirlpool of calmed memory.
“Hymn To The Sea” somewhat morosely sums up all that has come before; this…huge ship, at the time deemed the biggest thing mankind had ever created…but Nature (specifically its icy Canadian subdivision) was entertaining none of the pretence to Godhood. It was destroyed and fell, as had Alasdair Gray’s Axletree tower. Humans and their manifestations come and go, or are sent violently packing, but the sea, the world, will roll on forever. The piece acts as both elegy and unexpected happy ending (or, at any rate, Rose ends up happy).
If you can find it, there’s a four-CD 20th Anniversary edition of the soundtrack which usefully adds the music from Back To Titanic (including Gaelic Storm’s “An Irish Party In Third Class”), a collection of light classical and popular music as would have been performed by the musicians on the upper decks (Gentlemen, It Has Been A Privilege Playing With You Tonight) and, most intriguingly, a fourth disc of near-contemporaneous recordings, Popular Music Of The Titanic Era, by the likes of Count John McCormack, Guy Lombardo, Ellington, John Kirby, Mildred Bailey and, offering a lachrymose “Nearer My God To Thee,” Nelson Eddy.
But the main reasons I can find for the otherwise quite astoundingly huge popularity of the Titanic soundtrack include…filmgoers who treated the record as what would today be termed an “immersive” experience; they would listen to the music and be reminded of what happened in the film (in the days when you had to wait months for films to become available on video), relive the movie in their minds. Not to mention those too young to know of Herrmann or Morricone (and there is a lot of Bernard Herrmann scattered throughout “The Sinking” and “Death Of Titanic”) who simply viewed this as a fantastic and aurally representative soundtrack.
So there was quite a lot of at-one-remove semi-passive listening going on in ways which have not really troubled Then Play Long since the first heyday of Mike Oldfield – music you had on in the background, rather than actively being listened to. Horner’s Titanic soundtrack reminds the unwary “expert” that the way people use and respond to music frequently isn’t the way the “expert” wants and expects them so to do. It did not sell thirty million copies across the world because it was “hip” or “cool” – it was because the record was, or came to represent, what an awful lot of people needed, as the millennium ticked ever downwards towards a presumed iceberg of its own.
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