The Titanic's Enduring Grip On the Public’s Imagination

Since I was a child I have been a huge fan of classic transatlantic ocean liners, something sparked perhaps by seeing the old movie "Titanic" starring Barbara Stanwyck, Clifton Webb and a very young and gorgeous Robert Wagner, my mother's travel by ships in her youth from Central America, and one of my maternal aunts and her husband who regularly went on cruises.  In fact, in August the husband and I and two friends are doing a westbound transatlantic cruise on Cunard's Queen Mary 2 from Southampton, England, to New York City, following in the steps of our ancestors who sailed from Europe to America for a better life and/or fortune, not to mention the ancestors of so many Americans.  The Titanic was the largest and arguably most luxurious liner when launched but it was not the largest or most elegant of all the classic liners - this title, in my view belongs to the French liner Normandie, an art deco palace  - and it was half the tonnage of today's Queen Mary 2, the last true liner.  Similarly, Titanic's sister ship and near twin, the Olympic was in service until 1935, yet is unknown to most people.  Indeed, the public remembers the Titanic while other magnificent liners that were larger, equally luxurious and faster are unknown outside of ocean liner enthusiast circles and history buffs.  Part of this may be due to James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster movie "Titanic", but also I think due to the fact that the sinking of the Titanic ended some of the confidence of the Edwardian era and was a slap-down of man's hubris that deemed the ship "unsinkable."  Now, with the missing OceanGate Expeditions submersible and the desperate search to save its passengers, the enduring lure of the Titanic is again brought to mind. A piece in the Washington Post looks at Titanic's continuing allure.  Here are excepts:

More than two miles under the sea, off the remote coast of Newfoundland, sits the skeleton of a ship that has captured the public’s imagination for more than a century — rusting, decaying, but still emitting a siren call that draws historians, explorers and regular people alike to study its tragic history.

The Titanic has inspired books, films, video games and musicals and has afforded researchers decades of exploration and debate. It is immortalized in at least seven museums, and artifacts circle the globe as part of traveling exhibits. One hundred and eleven years after sinking to the depths of the Atlantic, the ill-fated luxury ocean liner still regularly makes news: new images of the wreck are released, replicas are built, salvage missions are launched.

On Sunday, a submersible vessel carrying five people bound for the Titanic’s wreckage went missing, prompting a desperate search that was continuing Wednesday. They were part of a $250,000-a-person trip run by OceanGate Expeditions, a private company that began taking paying customers on the voyage in 2021.

The passengers’ decision to embark on the deep-sea journey — and the international attention the vessel’s disappearance has received — reflects the enduring grip the Titanic has on the public’s imagination.

The Titanic has occupied a special place in human history and lore for over a century, taking on “a great metaphorical and mythical value in the human consciousness,” as director James Cameron — whose 1997 blockbuster about the sinking remains the fourth-highest-grossing film ever — said in a 2005 interview with the Independent. The fascination, researchers say, is a result of a human interest in the passengers’ stories and the unique circumstances surrounding the shipwreck.

“It’s the implausible story: The biggest ship in the world on its maiden voyage, it’s supposed to be unsinkable and it’s full of rich and famous people, and then it hits an iceberg and it sinks,” said Titanic historian Don Lynch, “and it goes down so slowly that there’s all this drama to be acted out.”

The Titanic sank on April 15, 1912, in the Atlantic Ocean after hitting an iceberg in the dead of night. Around 1,500 passengers died while about 700 were rescued. Despite numerous efforts, it was another 73 years before the wreckage was discovered in 1985, about 370 miles off the coast of Newfoundland and 12,500 feet underwater.

Other shipwrecks that were as deadly — or more deadly — have been lost to history. But the Titanic endures. The way the tragedy unfolded, the use of radio and photography, and the array of people on board all created a deep well of history that has afforded people decades of study and analysis, researchers said: how and why the ship sank, where and when it broke in two, what stories survived and what were lost to sea.

“It’s one of the few disasters that had time to develop the full drama of human choices,” said Stephen Cox, a retired professor of literature at the University of California at San Diego and author of “The Titanic Story: Hard Choices, Dangerous Decisions.” “Usually if a ship is going to sink, it sinks pretty quickly. Titanic lasted for two hours and 40 minutes . . .

The number of people aboard, from all classes, created scores of stories. And specific details about the circumstances have long captured the public imagination: the rescue of women and children first; the band continuing to play; the survivors leaving the ship with only the items in their pockets.

Those elements have factored into a century’s worth of pop culture touchstones that all but sealed the disaster as a household name. The first film came out 29 days after calamity struck; the most recent is a Chinese documentary, “The Six,” released in 2020. An entire online reference guide, Encyclopedia Titanica, is dedicated to the topic. People swap stories on clubs and fan pages, and share information on podcasts.

“It’s a never-ending story,” said Paul Burns, vice president and curator for Titanic Museum Attraction, two museums in Branson, Mo., and Pigeon Forge, Tenn. “Titanic is never-ending. You take the 2,208 or so that were on board, you take the ones that survived, you take the ones that perished, and there’s so many stories.”

Some are fascinated with the wreck itself, and the boat’s slow sinking “gives them the opportunity to study how and why it sank.” Others “just love the human drama, and they want to know what exactly did the band play, and who was this person, and who was that person,” said Lynch, the historian for the Titanic Historical Society, who has written books about the shipwreck and dove to the site twice for the Cameron documentary “Ghosts of the Abyss.”

It also occurred in a time modern enough that people today can relate closely to it, Lynch said — and news about it was able to be documented and disseminated in new ways.

“Suddenly, by sending out the SOS and the distress signals, the world was aware that this was unfolding even before it had ended,” Lynch said. “And … it was one of the first, except for the San Francisco earthquake, to be documented in photographs. … You never had photos involving a shipwreck; that was unheard of.”

The ship also represented the pinnacle of luxury at the height of the industrial revolution, Avila noted, and its downing by a force of nature represented “a slap in the face to the hubris that humanity was feeling at the time,” perhaps even marking a turning point in history.

For some, the site of the wreck holds as much fascination as the story itself. Cameron, who has journeyed there multiple times, said wrecks are “human stories” that “teach us something about ourselves.”

“There are people who aren’t even born yet who are going to grow up and be fascinated by the Titanic,” Lynch said. “There’s something about it.”

What is most heart wrenching to me is the youth of so many of those lost when the Titanic sank.  Peruse the list of those lost and it underscores the tragedy and lost potential of so many lives.