Protests that fly in the face of popular opinion cannot help but benefit from celebrity endorsement. And this week, one particular group of aggrieved voices attracted much-needed validation from Kate Winslet, who is currently in the US to drum up support for her best supporting actress Oscar nomination for the film Steve Jobs.
Admittedly, the group she got behind has been protesting in online chat rooms rather than in their local high streets or outside town halls. But don’t let that fool you into thinking that the issue in question is not of vital importance.
The contentious subject concerns the ending of James Cameron’s 1998 movie Titanic, in which Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) sinks to an icy death in the ocean while his sweetheart Rose (Winslet) clings to a door bobbing on the waves. Some fans have long claimed that there was room on that wooden raft for two. The charge is that Rose effectively sent him to his death – and turned him into a Jacksicle. With five simple words, Winslet has now confirmed those fears. “He could have actually fitted,” she told the talkshow host Jimmy Kimmel. The prosecution rests.
This is not the first time this has come up. Cameron was quizzed on the matter in 2012 by this newspaper. His response was withering: “Wait a minute, I’m going to call up William Shakespeare and ask why Romeo and Juliet had to die,” he snapped. My sympathies in this matter lie exclusively with Cameron. Like him or not, he is a creative force, while fans tend to be destructive in their pedantry. He is an artist; they are nit-pickers.
I’m no admirer of Titanic. The film’s use of a real-life tragedy as an eye-catching backdrop is exploitative at best. So the idea that Rose might have caused the death of a loved one simply to leave a little more elbow room in the hours before she is rescued makes this anodyne movie mildly interesting at last. But it’s unlikely to be the case. Jack had to die because the picture was constructed as a tear-jerker. Every fictional story needs its own internal logic on which real world plausibility cannot trespass. Objections will inevitably arise that could unravel this fictional fabric, and it is the filmmakers’ responsibility to keep those at bay for as long as possible.
Mightier talents than Cameron have seen off challenges to their supremacy. The accusation is still sometimes heard that Orson Welles slipped up by making the whole of Citizen Kane pivot on the dying word (“Rosebud”) of an old man, without putting anyone in the same room to overhear him say it. Not so. Watch the whole movie and you’ll realise that the butler did it – or rather, heard it.
Alfred Hitchcock had a term for niggling problems that are left unresolved in a movie: he called them “icebox” questions. Opaqueness is fine (Vertigo is suffused with it) but if you skimp explicitly on vital information, the audience will be unforgiving. Asked why the psychiatrist unpicks every inch of the plot at the end of Psycho, Hitchcock said that not doing so would have upset “the icebox trade”. That is, “the people who get home after seeing a movie, go to the icebox, and take out the cold chicken. While they’re chewing on it, they discuss the picture. In the morning, the wife meets the neighbour next door. She says to her, ‘How was the picture?’, and the wife says, ‘It was all right but we discovered a number of flaws in it.’ Bang goes your word of mouth!”
The director Jonathan Demme modified both the term and its meaning. Working with the screenwriter Ted Tally on The Silence of the Lambs, he advised him not to worry unduly over “refrigerator questions”. Demme explained: “You know. You’ve just come home from a movie, you had a great time, you go to the refrigerator to get a beer, you open the door, and you say, ‘Wait a minute …’” If a film has got the audience until they open the fridge, maintains Demme, then that’s all that matters.
Given that it has taken almost 20 years for the clamour about the Titanic question to rise above the negligible, it’s fair to say that the movie easily passes the refrigerator test. An entire generation has been sired since it was first released. Political regimes have fallen and risen. I think Cameron can rest easy over his reputation as a storyteller.
