ABSTRACT
The most successful movie in the history of the cinema, measured at least by international box office receipts and Oscar awards, is, of course, James Cameron’s 1997 epic romance Titanic. Part of its magic—indeed for those of us resistant to the adolescent soap opera at its core, all of its magic—derived from the opening sequences in which actual footage of the recent exploration of the wreck of the Titanic, discovered in 1985 by Robert Ballard and Jean-Louis Michel, was used to frame the flashback recreation of the events that produced it. Here the thrill of penetrating the secrets of the deep and rummaging around in the barnacle-encrusted remains of the greatest ship ever built reaches almost voyeuristic heights. A giddy feeling of transgression accompanies the submarine camera’s invasion of the noble wreck on the ocean floor, still the watery tomb of so many of its victims.
