Like children replaying a trauma, we are drawn to the perfect drama of the loss of the great 20th-century cruise liner
How many times does the Titanic have to sink before we've had enough? In the latest iteration of the drowning of 1,503 passengers at sea, Julian Fellowes ends each of four TV episodes with the ship going down. It's like children replaying a trauma: "Tell me the story of when I was scared of the circus clown again, mummy." But this trauma was played out in 1912. You'd think we would have had plenty of time to adjust to it, yet continue to want more. Apparently, we even want it in 3D, to give us an even more personal sense of shipwreck. Despite the murderous course of the 20th century, we're still trying to cope with the loss of a cruise ship one hundred years ago. It clearly has some great imaginative and cultural hold on us.
While Lord Fellowes's new version keeps the classes and romances in their place in an All Things Bright and Beautiful sort of way, James Cameron, on the side of the Atlantic that thinks of itself as more socially equitable, has a cross-class love affair to titivate the cold, wet and dismal event. In 1958, not knowing there was a subtext, A Night to Remember gave it to you plain: black and white, documentary style. It seemed to think that the event was enough already, and lingered on individual losses without the need to invent love interest.
Though it was made two years before Harold Macmillan's winds of change speech, it had no idea about the 60s to come, and maintained a stiff upper lip for almost everyone in all classes in their dying. Was the unsinkable Titanic the ship of empire going down, just before the world war that was to change the nature of social relations and attitudes to authority? Less than a month before the sinking of the Titanic, Scott, Wilson, Oates and Bowers died after being beaten to the South Pole by the Norwegian Amundsen. Their story, too, is told over and over again, and the tragedy, or foolishness, taken as a sign of a time before something or other was utterly lost.
Still, those interrelated dramas haven't caught the imagination in the same way or been made into movie blockbusters. A strange longed-for romance seems to remain on the odd subject of an unfortunate accident in the north Atlantic. There are the frocks, of course. It was a stylish period. And the guilt-free wealthy drifted elegantly around. A "real time" Twitter feed of the Titanic journey has only just set sail, but on receiving the certificate of seaworthiness, the narrator tweeted: "Now we can focus on fitting her out with all the finest luxuries." I wonder which deck this narrator will be on come the night of 15 April.
As well as relishing the style, I wonder if there isn't some gratification in watching all that beautiful couture, the art works, the jewelled Rubaiyat, the 1598 copy of Bacon's Essays, go down, along with the rich and famous people who owned them. As with Princess Diana, we get a double sense that death happens to everyone, no matter how rich and celebrated – but also that if those Olympians can die, so assuredly will we. We watch, both gratified and peeking with fear through our fingers. It makes for a perfect drama, and if you add Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, it's like sprinkling sugar on the medicine.
"It was so emotional," someone explained to me when I asked why they liked Cameron's Titanic so much. And so unreal. Picasso-owning Kate and desperate immigrant Leo holding hands through the night in the water, only one of them alive. But given the temperature of the water, both would have died of hypothermia in about 40 minutes. To say so spoils the story, because although we need to keep being told about those 1,503 people drowning and dying of cold, we also need a veneer of the sentimental and of style to soften the awful thoughts we are trying and always failing to come to terms with as the ship keeps sinking and all the passengers remain at risk.
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