Titanic - Change is Inevitable

As you would expect, the movie "Titanic" is set around the luxury cruise ship called "Titanic", which sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in 1912, hit an iceberg in the middle of the night and sank, taking 1,517 people to their death.

The story involves a young, free-spirited woman, who is about to be married to "the rich jerk", in order to save her family from financial doom, and a young, street-smart man, who is sailing to try his luck in another country. They are attracted to each other, have a good time together, including several memorable romantic moments, and eventually he dies while saving her life.

Nevertheless, to me, although "Titanic" is a Hollywood epic for the general public, this movie is all about resisting change. Yes, yes, resisting change.

You see, the Titanic was designed as an "unsinkable" luxury ship for the "upper class", a group of people mainly distinguished by the amounts of money they had. The people who operated the ship were poor, yet when disaster hit, their behaviors did not change and the poor people kept giving way to the rich and helping them, even when it was clear they were in danger themselves.

The Titanic was built to be "unsinkable". As such, there was no need to put too many lifeboats on board. In the unlikely event these boats had to be used, surely the rest of the people could remain on the ship until help came. Unfortunately, the Titanic DID sink, and as soon as this was apparent, you would have expected everybody to do their best to occupy one of the lifeboats and the hell with everybody else, right?

Wrong!

Throughout the film, the young lovers got all sorts of strife from the people around them, who wanted them to conform, even if it meant giving up on what they wanted most and becoming miserable in the process, as long as those other people didn't have to accept something different.

The band, which was playing on deck at the time, kept on playing. The poor musicians, who had spent their lives in artistic expression, saw their life's purpose as bringing music for other people's enjoyment. Even as everybody else was scurrying to the boats, they continued to "be musicians" and play music, rather than change their thinking and save their lives.

The crewmembers, who knew better than everyone else about what was going to happen, directed traffic to the boats. Old women went first, then rich people and the "lower class" (coming from the same places as the crew) were locked in the lower decks to die. They did not stop to think how long the old ladies had to live, or that rich people had no more right to live than anybody else, even in the face of clear and present danger.

Our young couple seemed to be almost the only people on board the ship, who were accepting of differences and flowing in life, as long as what they did made them happy, but in the end, they were powerless to change their world. The forces of habit crushed everything around them and left one of them frozen and the other alone.

The Titanic is a great metaphor for staying on a collision course, despite an obvious need for change. Unfortunately, many people behave like large ships every day, too.