Titanic isn’t exactly about a ship sinking as much as it is about how much a narrative can convince a viewer to care about the trajectory of two people before the ship sinks. It was always going to be Jack and never Rose. It is a fascinating thing, to have a constructed romance that relies entirely on that which can be taken from a person. Perhaps you might even think that both will die, but that isn’t how to sell a love story in the movies. There are a lot of reasons why the film Titanic works, but the reason the love story is so instantly attractive is because you know from the very beginning that one of the lovers is going to die. They had to thaw out some of the dead bodies to unstick them from each other.” Expecting something romantic, I was surprised when she whispered in my ear, “You know, most of the people didn’t die from drowning. My date leaned over as the ship broke apart and bodies flailed from the ship’s freshly opened windows on the small TV screen in front of us. You would pay to rent that VHS, which you then had to get into a car and drive to return 24 hours later - just enough labor to make watching a movie on a couch all the way through worth it. You would, for example, have to find a Blockbuster Video and then scour the racks for several exhausting minutes, picking out a film with a person who may have vastly different tastes than your own. In the era before Netflix & Chill entered the cultural consciousness as a practice, having a movie night in with someone meant there was work involved. I had never seen Titanic before, as it came out in theaters when I was 13 and not extremely interested. To be in a place where a couch must be shared (often due to a lack of furniture), or a place where the living room and bedroom are combined, can create a type of intimacy, even if it is just the intimacy of showing a person the places you think about them when they aren’t around. While not placing any expectations on physical activity, it did raise the stakes. The third date, though, was when an apartment or dorm room could be introduced. And then, for a second date, you would do something free but beautiful, like walk through the topiary garden downtown. There was a loose trajectory of dating then, in the late-teen college years: too poor to do much of anything extravagant, but still interested in getting to know a person, one might first go out for ice cream. Once, while on a third date and watching the end of Titanic on the couch, my date leaned over and prepared to say something.
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