The document discusses the author's personal connection to the film Titanic and how it has shaped her youth. It then discusses how the 100th anniversary of the Titanic sinking in 2012 has led to many memorials and cultural projects commemorating the ship. Specifically, it focuses on the Titanic Belfast memorial in Northern Ireland, which has transformed the city through tourism and jobs. While memorials to disasters can be controversial, the author argues the glamorization of Titanic through the film and memorials is appropriate given the luxurious nature of the ship and passengers aboard.

1. A Maiden Centennial
Inaugural piece for the forthcoming film journal FRAMEFEAST
By Kelsa Trom
4/13/12
Itʼs hard when I notice how my life becomes arranged according to the different ways I can
relate to Titanic. On my own, I can proudly admit that I love this film, I want it when I donʼt
have time for it, I came of age because of it. No one could convince me, or you, that itʼs the
greatest film of all. Itʼs like an addictive recourse because when you want to get off on its
sounds, its sensuality, or its neat effects, they wait for you without interference. Or, perhaps
more than waiting, they stretch themselves out in a luxuriated, excessive tableau. Which is
to say, every single shot is at least twice as long as it needs to be. Whatʼs more, steerage is
layered with first and second class in the same way that sex and delight are intertwined with
the conflicts of power, jealousy and disaster. For all its obvious flourishes, if not only for the
fact that Titanic leaves nothing to be figured out, itʼs a relentlessly claustrophobic film.
I was nine when Titanic was first released, so this 2012 re-release puts a delicious gilding
on one of the cornerstones of my youth. Titanic, the film, historicizes me. And yet, my being
historicized is only a gratuitous byproduct of the popular legacy of the RMS Titanic, whose
centennial is presently smacking me in the ego. Iʼm able to re-watch Titanic and
commemorate my first swell of fabulous cinematic emotion not because Titanic - neither the
RMS nor the 20th Century Fox production - gives a shit about me, but because itʼs mapped
onto a cultural cycle wherein 100 years is a big deal.
In 2012, this very year, the Titanic is being re-invited into cultural memory through
innumerable outlets, small and large. Julian Fellowes makes a mini-series about it after
giving the Titanic a narrative shout-out in Downton Abbey. A cruise-ship called the Balmoral
attempts to re-chart the Titanicʼs course over the Atlantic (and fails!). Various stage plays
and symphonies are performed in Titanicʼs honor. Southampton, the shipʼs launch site,
opens the SeaCity museum. The Titanic Belfast, perhaps largest of all, is a massive
memorial and museum that stands on the grounds of Harland and Wolff, the shipyard where
the Titanic was originally constructed. Plans have been in store for the opening of the grand
monument since 2001. As a result of this glittering erection commemorating the 1,503 lives
that were lost in 1912, the Belfast community has benefited from the creation of 20,000 jobs
since the projectʼs start, not to mention an undertaking that has transformed a downtrodden
shipyard, subject to the last 100 years of industrial ebbing and ebbing, into what is now
hailed as “Europeʼs Largest Urban Regeneration Scheme.” The monument itself is
bedecked with shimmery CGI representations and replicas, and is branding itself as
Northern Irelandʼs greatest tourist attraction. The building has a spectacular facade of
thousands of aluminum shards stacked into a complex geometry that resembles four tall
hulls. From an engineering perspective, Belfast has fully lived the Titanic lifecycle and now
has the power and heritage to brand and revive itself with the support of the Titanic story.
That there was a disaster in between these two wonders of construction is an implicit fact,
perhaps a support that imbues the monument with meaning and gravitas. The past is on
Belfastʼs heels in a way that pumps glory, finery and opulence to the forefront.

2. The irony calls to mind another attempt at redemptive space foregrounded on grim history,
Berlinʼs Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Here, visitors walk through a large
course of blockish black monoliths which emerge from an unpredictably rising and sloping
ground. The effect is confusing, anxious and monotonous. In an effort to prevent Berlinʼs
prevalent graffiti artists from meddling with this effect, Germanyʼs Degussa company
contributed a protective chemical substance to cover the blocks. As it turns out, Degussa
was also involved in producing the poison gases used during the Holocaust.
In the case of the Berlin memorial, this particular historical whiplash is only one of many
sources of controversy. Making a monument for a disastrous event is a delicate procedure
and, in this case, having the past on oneʼs heels compresses into prolonged panic. Yet for
Belfast to recapitulate the ill-fated shipʼs fanfare in commemorating the dead, it somehow
ensures an unflappable path to cultural recognition and pop sensibility. In Belfastʼs case, the
spectacle of the new reengages the spectacle of 1912 in a way that makes Titanic
excessively ready for consumption. It may well be that there is no irony in this at all; what is
being commemorated may indeed be a disaster, but itʼs a sumptuous, adventure-ridden
disaster. As the gold standard of sea vessels, Titanic hosted a preponderance of first-class
passengers, which has in turn imprinted a glitzy, elaborately melodramatic imagining of the
ship onto popular culture. Titanic was not a vessel of war, exploration or pilgrimage; it held a
slew of European upperclassfolk who had the opportunity to muse about moving to America
in a time of peace. A rigid class structure scarcely established in Titanicʼs New World
destination fused British and other western European elites with the very form of the ship,
social layer upon social layer.
According to economist David Savage, panic was averted in the sinking of the Titanic
because, unlike the Lusitania, which went down less than twenty minutes after being struck
by a missile in 1915, the Titanic took over two hours to be fully submerged. Two hours and a
lack of lifeboats create ample conditions for dramas of family, class and social order to play
out in a multitude of situations. Robert Ballard, who initially discovered the sunken wreck,
claims that those dramas can be attributed to a live cast of heroes and villains: the owner of
the ship sneaks away to save himself while the famous Strauss couple, owners of Macyʼs
Department store, refuse to separated by gender and will not board a lifeboat as a result. An
abundance of passengers given the time to decide how to die and staking their identities on
moral order in a time of innocence = the makings of a lavish story, to be followed by no less
than a decidedly lavish commemorative tradition.
Which is why itʼs fine with me that re-watching Titanic means re-watching it in 3D. Itʼs also
fine with me that while Belfastʼs elaborate monument is almost entirely an experience of
replicas and simulations, a great number of legit artifacts from the great ship, including
portions of its hull, can be found at the Luxor Resort & Casino in Las Vegas. I applaud the
Titanic museums of Branson, Missouri and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, which respectively
replicate the iceberg alongside the ship and the variation in temperatures between the hot
shipʼs bowels and the breezy deck. It is probably also important that there was immediate
speculation that the mummy of Priestess Amen-Ra cursed the Titanic. I welcome these

3. mythologizing footprints because I, too, am a passing visitor in the international fleet of
attractions that hum in the wake of the Titanic.
I was actually probably 7 or 8 when I first saw the Titanic - not the film, the ship itself. In my
youth a series of circumstances led me to spend an inordinate amount of weekends
wandering around rocky beaches and iceplanted slopes, throwing around tiny fireworks and
riding ponies in Rosarito, Baja California. An unlikely companion of mine was the full-sized
reconstruction of the Titanic used in James Cameronʼs film, since somehow, just on the
other side of Rosarito Bay, in plain view of my stomping grounds, a new shipyard went up -
this time belonging to 20th century Fox. Every weekend the ship would look a little bit
different. I watched it in its total construction, its initial collapse, its turning on its side, and its
disappearance. I probably knew that it was a film set, but it hardly mattered; it was so
exciting to see its calculated plunge slowed down, knowing where it would go but not when.
Three hours and fourteen minutes of engrossing melodrama is nothing in comparison.