I hadn’t planned to take any special note of this weekend’s 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster. Nonetheless, I found myself watching “A Night to Remember” Saturday night on TCM. The movie, released in 1958, is based on Walter Lord’s 1955 book of the same title. It’s a good film, one I’d seen a couple of times before. It’s not so great that I set out to watch it again, but once I stumbled across it I stayed with it.
Then Sunday I found myself reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s “Unsinkable: Why We Can’t Let Go of the Titantic” in the April 16 issue of The New Yorker. Mendelsohn’s a fan of Lord’s book, calling it a detached but definitive account of the disaster that leaves “love stories, stolen diamonds, handcuffs, axes, and underwater lock-picking to others.” It’s a gentle knock of James Cameron’s “Titanic,” the 1997 blockbuster now back in theaters in a 3-D version, as well as many other movies and books that place doomed lovers within the doomed ship.
Ill-fated romance is not why we can’t let go of the Titanic, however. The sinking fascinates us, Mendelsohn writes, because “the Titanic seems to be about something” more than mere disaster: “But what? For some, it’s a parable about the scope, and limits, of technology For others, it’s a morality tale about class, or a foreshadowing of the First World War—the marker of the end of a more innocent era. Academic historians dismiss this notion as mere nostalgia; for them, the disaster is less a historical dividing line than a screen on which early-twentieth-century society projected its anxieties about race, gender, class, and immigration.”
All of these things contribute to the Titanic’s grip on the imagination, but they are given consequence, Mendelsohn says, by the ship’s premature death. “If the Titanic had sunk on her twenty-seventh voyage, it wouldn’t haunt us in the same way,” he writes. “It’s the incompleteness that never stops tantalizing us, tempting us to fill in the blanks with more narrative.”