TO HAVE & HAVE NOT #3: THE TITANIC
"We are dressed in our best...and prepared to go down as gentlemen! But we would like a brandy."
To Have & Have Not is pretty much what it sounds like; an examination into the many differences between rich and poor. This one has a rather long digression on “The Spielberg Face.” Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Previous editions are of such vintage that they’re on my old Tumblr page, not here on Substack. Click this sentence to read TO HAVE & HAVE NOT #1. Click this one to read #2. #2 is really funny. How do you make money when you have no skills? You bullshit. Also, you ruin people lives. Ridiculous story.
Eventually I’ll migrate those posts over here, along with an ode to payphones I’m fond of. There are also two posts on R.E.M. that I like and will get on here soon too: Strange Currencies & Strange Currencies 2.
To Have & Have Not tries to illustrate the vast gulf between the rich and the poor, a gulf that manifests itself in ways far more sinister than silly golf pants. A gulf with a vested interested in not just maintaining itself, but widening itself. Of putting a canyon of such depth of danger between those who have and those who don’t, that it would be madness to try & cross it.
But every year million try anyway. A dead guy washes up on the shores of the Mediterranean after trying to swim across?
We shrug and move on.
An unscrupulous coyote (this is an unofficial term for people who help people cross the U.S. border. They charge exorbitant prices, make no guarantees of survival, tell you nothing in terms of how long the journey will take, which makes some people bring less food & water than they need to stay alive. Let’s say a coyote driving a truck with a bunch of those people spies a border patrol agent on the Mexican side, panics, drives down a sideroad, and runs off, leaving those 18 people in the back to die. It happens all the time, yet we shrug. There have been many attempts to dramatize such daily tragedy but The Jaguar's Children (2015) by John Valliant, a novel about an undocumented Mexican immigrant trapped with fifteen others inside the empty tank of a water truck that has been abandoned in the desert by human smugglers. He uses his nearly dead cellphone to communicate his final thoughts to the world. We have to do better. People are dying in the most harrowing conditions possible, and we still give a shit about a bunch of monied aristocrats whose boat sank on April 15th 1912, two years and four months before WWI broke out?
Apparently so.
But Titanic makes for a fascinating case study of what happens when money has no value. Chaos begins and ultimately reigns. Yes yes, the Bolsheviks will say that to create a new society, the old one must be torn down. Or bombed. Or bayoneted. Or sank. Either way, James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic proves beyond a doubt that systems of order and rank exist for a reason. Without them, chaos begins almost immediately.
Well then! Welcome, welcome to the third third instalment of the on-going series, To Have & Have Not.
The first two entries were the usual rich v. poor things. Binary stuff. But Titanic is not the same old story. When rich and poor alike are jammed into a situation where money can’t help either of them, what you get is total chaos and anarchy. Not everyone remembers that line: Your money can’t save you any more than it can save me. But it’s the truest statement in the film, isn’t it? I’d put it right up there with “Iceberg! Right ahead!”
Like Stephen King once said: “The good fabric of things sometimes has a way of unraveling with shocking suddenness.”
It’s actually unbelievable how fast things began to unravel on that boat. I don’t think Charles Lightoller woke up that day thinking: “Today I will shoot to kill any man who calls me a ‘limey bastard.’”
No. Things just got out of hand too quickly. If everyone had tried to get onto the lifeboats at the same time, the Titanic would have lost even those lifeboats, as the clawing and scratching of fingernails on the hull would pull the boat below the waterline, flooding it. Or, even worse, the ropes supporting lifeboats on both the port and starboard side would snap, flinging those who managed to bite, claw, and kick their way in to the limited number of lifeboats into the ocean. Those already in the water would have been killed instantly by the blunt force trauma of those wooden boats laden with people and luggage landing on them from that height. Those not instantly killed would attempt to claw their way onto any lifeboat possible as the skippers hacked at their hands to get them to stop. Bring on too many people and a lifeboat loses the aptness of its name.
In the movie, Charles Lightoller completely lost control of the situation, and saw nothing else to do but take himself out before the mob grabbed him to dispense a little mob justice. The real life Charles Lightoller did not shoot that man. He didn’t shoot anybody. It is not known who barked the words “Get back I say, or I’ll shoot you all like dogs! Keep order here! Keep order I say.” Since we cannot confirm who said it, neither should we attribute so readily the uttered threat to Charles Lightoller.
Lighttoller lived to be 78, dying in London in 1952. He got four more decades and a year than the people who died, & he used his time wisely. He raised a family. He assisted in the evacuation on British troops from Dunkirk. He did not receive the same public flogging that Stanley Lord. Finally, as a senior officer on White Star Line, he would be fully expected to go down with the ship, as Captain Edward Smith did, but he was not legally required to do so.
The Captain, an old-fashioned gentleman in the best sense, goes down with the ship (note that he grabs the wheel, an old mariners tradition). Legends exist telling of shipwrecked boats found with the skeletal remains of once living captains still clinging to the wheel. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula an actual crew of skeletons is found drifting aimlessly, with the captain, now a skeleton, tied to the wheel.
A world of haves & have nots is not a balanced or just world. I don’t think it’s fair that some poor mother of three who works 6 days a week putting together iPhones in China makes in a year what I make in a month. But on the sinking Titanic, you get to see what people are really made of. Some of the most cowardly are the richest, but not all. Many rich men gave up their seats of lifeboats, including the ships richest passenger, John Jacob Astor IV. Back on dry land, where the haves & have-nots still brush past each other instead of ramming them like a ship ramming an iceberg an foundering in water that caused hypothermia in less than 3 minutes, these people still thought the rich moe important, and most of the newspaper headlines went something like this:
J. J. Astor Lost On Titanic! Oh yeah, and 1500 to 1800 are also dead. Drag. But seriously! John Jacob Astor is dead everyone! Some rich asshole died! Let us bow our heads in prayerful mourning.
Even a filmmaker as blatantly commercialistic as James Cameron sought to give the poor who died on that boat their die, like the heartbreaking scene of the mother telling a story to her children as they drift off to sleep, or the man kissing his wife to the lilting melody of “Nearer, My God, To Thee” as water fills their cabin.1
I wish James Cameron had better taste in music though. I know it wouldn’t be period appropriate, but I think The Smashing Pumpkins dirty dirge-like industrial rock song “X.Y.U.” should have been the song that plays while Titanic sinks. I am speaking specifically about a part in the bridge of the song where Billy starts singing through his teeth. I time-stamped it a bit early so you can hear Billy call himself a "motherfuck.”
Personally, I don’t hear an “er” for “motherfucker” but hey, if you hear it, it would make more sense. Anyway, I used to listen to this song before jockey games, or when I knew some 6” dude was en route to my house to fight me. (True story. In the “old days,” by which I mean 2003, I had several disparate parties call me and tell me they were going to fuck me before doing so. How considerate. So I’d find my old copy of Mellon Collie, and bust out the blue disc, which was side 2 of the album, the pink one has more hits, like “Tonight Tonight,” “Bullet With Butterfly Wings,” and “Zero,” but I’ve always preferred the blue diss. From that opening gnarly riff of “Where Boys Fear To Tread,” to the lullaby-esque “Thirty-Three”.2 The blue disc also has “1979,” which is one of the greatest songs ever written, IMO. Easily in the top twenty songs of all-time, for me. Maybe even top ten. I love “We Only Come Out At Night,” “Farewell & Goodnight,” and “Tales of a Scorched Earth,” (especially that line “inside the future of a shattered past), but it’s "X.Y.U." that makes the blue disc special for me. Imagine those people hanging on to the Titanic as it begins its vertical descent and all you can hear is the screaming, the metallic “BANG!” of men smashing off propellor blades on their way to a watery grave, and all the while Billy is gritting his teeth, going:
I
Am
Made
of
Shamrocks
I
Am
Made
of
Stern stuff
it’s at 2:23:
Old men stomping on young women’s hands just to cling to the boat a few seconds longer…to cheat that terrifying The sinking scene is not just a marvel of cinematography and engineering, it’s also pretty close to being historically accurate. The two watchmen in the crow’s nest that night were distracted by two kissing lovers down below. So when Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are making out in the deck and one the watchers elbows the other, that actually happened.
In the film, the naval architect Thomas Andrews informs the Captain that the ship will “certainly” founder. When the Captain asks him how much time they have, he replies: “Two hours.”
Considering this conversation did not take place immediately after Titanic struck the iceberg, given that both men had things to do, orders to give out, and matters to attend to. It is likely that they didn’t have time to speak until at least twenty minutes after the ship hit the iceberg at 11:40pm. The ship slipped silently into the water at precisely 2:20am, so Andrews estimate is impressively close, given the less precise measuring instruments available in 1912.
If the telegraph office on the Californian remained opened twenty-four hours a day, and was manned, then it is possible that the ship could have changed course and taken on almost all of Titanic’s passengers, if not their “things.” But the wireless was not turned back on until 530am. It was too late, but still they tried, finding only chairs, suitcases, clothes, lifejackets, and corpses floating in a fairly small debris field considering the size of the ship.
There was nothing left to happen but for a bitter and contentious public inquiry into who owed what to whom, and whose fault it was. The surviving naval officers
It’s my opinion that Jack Phillip’s stupid decision to be a sarcastic dick to the telegraph operator on the nearby Californian, who was merely trying warn an unusually large number of icebergs in the region they were both traversing, is what led to the downfall of the Titanic. I don’t know much, but I know that people hate being embarrassed, made fools of, or otherwise impugned. So, if Cameron’s film is correct in its guess that the telegraph officer of the Californian said “fuck it” and switched off for the night, Jack Phillip’s plays a large role in the loss of life that was to occur a mere three hours later.
But.
I don’t know maritime law but I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to keep communication system on, open, and fully functional at all times, in case life-or-death situations like these arise. If not, why have radio at all? So you can chat when you get board? This is ocean navigation, not MSN Messenger.3
It is generally agreed however, that someone working on the SS Californian had seen white flares, which meant distress, and that the light were askew, or as the man who took the photo called it, “queer.” Captain Stanley Lord was roundly vilified. His ship was practically empty and could have fit all Titanic survivors if he’d just headed for them. It’s also possible, however, that the Californian would hit an iceberg of their own (they were, after all, in Iceberg Alley). If that had happened, it would have been a tragedy. But to not even try? Conservative estimates place the Californian’s position at 20 miles away from where Titanic was foundering. Other estimates say just 5 miles but this is unlikely. Ships have no reason to travel that closely to each other at peacetime, therefore ships should be spread across the ocean as far as possible, so that they could relay vital information to each other about weather conditions, storms, and, of course, icebergs. Still, the public loves to blame people when things like this happen. We need a patsy. Someone to point our fingers at and shout “shame on you!”
The sinking of the HMS Titanic destroyed Lord Stanley reputation, and his Wiki bio states that “he was still viewed publicly as a pariah after the Titanic disaster. His attempts to fight for his exoneration gained him nothing, and the events of the night of 14–15 April 1912 would haunt him for the rest of his life.”
Below you can see a still from the James Cameron film. I’m astonished at how many people think this photograph was taken by some freelance photographer from Denmark or something, camped out on an iceberg and disturbed from his slumber by the Titanic's near-miss but conclusively definite hit (and shear). The famously unsinkable ship arise from the water before sinking while the Californian, a mere six miles north, continued it’s own route. It seems odd to me that a ship bound for New Orleans should be travelling north of a ship bound for New York, but I’m no seaman. (Edit: I just learned that the SS Californian was bound for a stopover in Boston, which is 215 miles north of New York City, so there go. Just rememba to drop your Rs and your Gs when ya get theyuh. Also, say it like Bawstin. Jesus. Writing a novel in phonetic low talk is so annoying. That’s why I never could get through the book Trainspotting.
“Sir, your life jacket.”
“No thank you!” Guggenheim replies as a porter approaches him with one of those hideous cork-lined life-jackets. Stylistic abominations. A possibly apocryphal tale from the film shows mega-successful American magnate Benjamin Guggenheim telling an over-worked waiter, “We are dressed in our best, and prepared to go down as gentleman! But we would like a brandy.”
Nobody, neither Belfast ship-builder ever said “God himself could not sink this ship.” That is a blatant lie. Probably to stir up resentment between the Catholics and the Protestants. They can argue all they like. You cannot prove the unprovable, just as you cannot prove a negative. “Well. I’ve never seen or spoken to God, so he must no exist, right?”
Sigh. Well, what about math? Math told the first officers that Titanic was bound to sink before the on-board priest did. Too many water-tight compartments filled with water, guaranteeing the unsinkable ship a one-way trip the the bottom of the frozen North Atlantic in Iceberg Alley.
But math is the master of the universe. It cannot, will not be negotiated with.
The Titanic foundered in the North Atlantic, at least 350 km from land. The farthest it could have struggled on was 70 km in its hobbled state. It was doomed no matter what. If only Jack Phillips, the Titanic’s telegraph officer had not told the officer on the Californian to “KEEP OUT” and SHUT UP!” because he had work to do, the latter would not have turned in for the night. His reason for communicating with Phillips? To warn him that there were more icebergs than usual!
If the Titanic maybe they would have had sooner help. Word to the wise: Don’t alienate the ship closest to you when you’re in he middle of nowhere. I don’t care if your ship is said to be unsinkable.
Therefore, on either chivalrous or fatalistic grounds, Guggenheim gave his lifeboat seat up to a young man with a family. He saw them off, then retreated to the main hall of the boat where the scene of him refusing his life jacket begins. Guggenheim seems strong, confident & even a little cocky. It doesn’t seem to the viewer that this man knows he is going to die that night. Is this a face of a man who inspires confidence?
I saw this scene in theatres in 1997.4And it immediately reminded me of the Simpsons episode where Homer joins the Junior Campers rafting trip and, of course, leads them into a massive body of water.5
As you can see, Guggenheim underestimated the enormity of the cataclysm he’d gotten himself into. Gentleman, my ass. When survival is key, gentlemanly behaviour must take a back seat. Being a gentleman doesn’t mean you have to stand there and wait to die because running, jogging, climbing, & breaking windows is unbecoming of a man of Guggenheim’s stature. An article from the April 20 1920 edition of the New York Times “relates a description from an assistant steward of Guggenheim's last hours, including donning formalwear instead of a life preserver, helping other passengers to board lifeboats, and how he said he and his secretary were “prepared to go down like gentlemen.”
Rose: Mr. Andrews... I saw the iceberg and I see it in your eyes... please, tell me the truth.
Thomas Andrews : The ship will sink.
Rose: You're certain?
Thomas Andrews: Yes. In an hour or so, all of this will be at the bottom of the Atlantic.
I would certainly expect such stoicism from a British man, like Thomas Andrews, who perished during Titanic’s voyage. He’d designed the ship and was shocked at its seeming fragility, His final hour were spent wondering just where the hell he’d gone wrong with the ships plans and blueprints. Guggenheim was an American businessman,
Even if the Titanic had attempted to switch southbound into a more populous shipping lane where rescue would have been more likely with lower loss of life figures, though this alternate-scenario is not guaranteed, Titanic's lights were off due to electrical failure from flooding off he boiler and electrical rooms. This would have made the ship as difficult to spot in the dark Atlantic water as the iceberg that sunk that Titanic.
When the Titanic sideswiped said massive iceberg, it sank in less than four hours, damaging nearly 300 feet of the ship's hull. The collision allowed water to flood six of her sixteen major watertight compartments [Gannon, 1995]. The ship could have stayed afloat with 4 compartments breached but not 5. And only 5 had been breached.
“Titanic will founder.”
RANDOM MAN WITH MUSTACHE: But this ship can’t sink!
THOMAS ANDREWS (NAVAL ARCHITECT): She is made of iron, sir. I assure you, she can. And she will. Tis a mathematical certainty.
CAPTAIN EDWARD SMITH: How much time?
THOMAS ANDREWS (NAVAL ARCHITECT): An hour. Two at most.
Unfortunately, or perhaps ironically, the wireless operator on the SS California had shut down for the night having received a rude and caustic message from the Titanic's operator. So distress signals were being sent to an empty room. Crew members of the SS Californian assumed the flares were fireworks to celebrate the maiden voyage of the world’s largest, “unsinkable” ship. A ship that was rapidly sinking.
They should teach kinds about this exchange in Church. Sunday school. Treat others as you wish to be treated.
Survivors described seeing John Jacob Astor and with Benjamin Guggenheim roughly four mins before the boat sank. Both men perished, Astor's body was recovered (he carried $11000 in CAS, back in 1991, if you can believe it. He also has identifying notes on his suits, probably in case it was stolen, but in fact it helped to identify his body. The death of Astor was bigger news than the death of a bunch of nobodies from nowhere. Not much has changed in the intervening years. Ryan Dunn, of Jackass fame, plowed his car into an embankment, killing himself and his passenger. Does anybody know the passenger's name?
Here is a reconstructed timeline of events from owlcation.com:
The Californian radioed Titanic at approximately 19:00 hours to warn of an ice field of which the Californian nearly collided with herself.
Captain Stanley Lord ordered the Californian to stop for the night, concluding it was too dangerous to proceed. As he was going off duty, he spotted the Titanic's lights on the horizon about 5 miles away.
Californian radioed Titanic again, warning that they had stopped and were surrounded by ice. The radio signal was so strong, it interrupted Titanic's regular communication and her reply was "Shut Up. Shut Up. I am Busy." Californian shut down its wireless at 23:30, Titanic struck the iceberg ten minutes later.
Californian was spotted from Titanic's bridge 25 minutes later and distress rockets were fired.
Officers aboard Californian observed several rockets and called down to Captain Lord, who had since gone to bed.
Lord suggested the Californian contact the vessel via morse lamp. No effort was ever made to wake the wireless operator. He suggested that the rockets were company signals of some kind. Testimony given during the British Inquiry suggests mix ideas about the rockets they saw. Some of Californian's officers believed there was a more serious nature behind the rockets.
At 0200, Titanic appeared to "be leaving the area" after firing a total of eight white rockets. This was reported to Captain Lord who did nothing. Titanic sank at 0220 hours.
At 0300, officers of the Californian sited rockets coming from the south. These were from RMS Carpathia who had traveled all night towards Titanic.
At 0416, A shift change resulted in Californian's wireless operator to inquire about why a ship had fired rockets earlier. Radio chatter regarding Titanic's SOS signal overwhelmed the airwaves. The news was sent to Captain Lord.
At 0530, Captain Lord, now awake, ordered the Californian to Titanic's position but instead of a direct route, Lord ordered a twisted, longer route that he would later claim, in the inquiry, was to Titanic's last broadcasted position.
Californian arrives alongside Carpathia who just finished collecting all survivors. After Carpathia departs for New York, Californian stays behind to continue the search only to find wreckage.
Californian continues to Boston.
Now, Benjamin Guggenheim was said to have kept his composure til the very end, but the look on his face here says it all. Did he just sit there and let the freezing Nirth Atlantic engulf him, or did he try to make a break for it? He looks terrified. He is moments away from joining the Great Graveyard of the Atlantic.
The Ataris’ album The Graveyard of the Atlantic is the Chinese Democracy of emo-rock. Kris Roe has been threatening to release this album for over a decade. Dr/ Pepper needs to get in on this. Force Ro e too release the album. Here’s the title rack. I love it. Chasing sunsets. Nostalgia. Don’t surrender.
Tonight…echoes of our loves are calling out “don’t surrender.”
One can’t help but wonder at the fairness of the man insisting his much younger cohort join him in certain death. The look on the gentleman’s face to the left of Benjamin Guggenheim is not the fatalistic, nihilistic “fuck it’ face of a man who wants to die. In the spirit of gentlemanly behaviour, Guggenheim should have let the young man try to make a break for it, and try to survive. Guggenheim’s remains were never found, nor were those of his companion. (In fact, the name of his companion was not even on the ship’s manifest, suggesting an affair between the two men. This was how men frequently hid relationships back in the day, by delisting or not-listing their lovers. However, if I were Guggenheim’s companion the moment I saw this look on face, I’d start to get a little more than worried.
I wonder if Guggenheim’s partner had artistic talent. Most men from Paris has some kind of creative skill, be it writing, “I want you to draw me like one of your French men.” If only Ben were 25 years younger, when he looked like this:
But instead, this is the first image that sprang to mind.
Speaking of the dance of romance, the dating scene, remember that scene in Before Sunrise where Ethan Hake and Kim Krizan buy a poem from a starving artist/poet, who must use the world “milkshake” in the poem they have bought.
“I’ll carry you. You’ll carry me. That’s how it could be. Don’t you know me by now?”
There was room for Jack on the broken piece of furniture Rose and he were clinging too.
Is it me or does the sinking boat look so much more lonely and dangerous once the lights go out? Technology can’t help you now. It’s just the cold North Atlantic, furniture thrown overboard, & severely understocked lifeboats.
Expressive close-ups if faces reacting to events offscreen was not a technique invented by Spielberg, but his film did help to re-popularize the technique. Moreover, in each Spielberg film , the close-up is meant to mimic the reaction of the audience.
Every single Spielberg film has one of these shots, even Duel (1971, his very first film - made-for-TV of course, because Hollywood can’t recognize young talent…the young and talented must brashly announce their arrival. Duel is a film about a manic, possibly driverless truck chasing a man across a deserted landscape, intent on pushing him off a cliff.
Dennis Weaver playing David Mann, “a business commuter driving his car through California while on his way to meet a client.” I personally think the film would have been stronger if the man had no name, and the credits just said
Man - Dennis Weaver
Truck - Unknown
Spielberg did it again in Jaws, spawning both the idea of the summer blockbuster and a new American catchphrase.
Roy Scheider, who has just caught a glimpse of the enormous shark, flinches and backs off and his expression mirrors that of the audiences. They need to either get a bigger boat, or just get the fuck out of the water with that thing down there.
Too bad Quint didn’t listen. He sets off the find Jaws in his own boat, and this happens:
Jaws made $472 million dollars on a $9 million budget and ushered in an era that, some say, gave studios too much power an directors too little. Unknowingly, Spielberg was pushing the auteurs out of Hollywood. I would argue that Michael Cimino did it too himself with Heaven’s Gate and William Friedkin did it to himself with Sorceror (1977). I do think it’s unfair that Spielberg got to return to Hollywood after the early career disaster that was 1941, while Cimino was basically put into movie jail (they let him out in the mid 1980s to made Year of the Dragon) and Freidkin was allowed back to L.A. to make the perhaps too aptly titled to To Live and Die in L.A. Both films performed below expectations, and Cimino never made a high profile movie again, while Freidkin went on to film a number of strange, off-beat and highly divisive genre films. Here’s Richard Dreyfus’ Spielberg Face in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
And who could forget this one? Poor Sam Neill and Laura Dern had to spend a whole week filming it, and they had nothing to react to. The dinosaurs were added post-production by effects behemoth Industrial Light & Magic. They were no actor dinosaurs available, or if their were, their agents couldn’t come to an agreement with Universal Pictures.
Imagine that. No real dinosaurs. No key grips holding up posters of T-Rex. Imagine how difficult that would have been. To looked shocked and mesmerized is one thing, but to look shocked and mesmerized at the same time as another actor, and for your shock to have to same quality of awe, is one hell of an achievement.
This video does a much better job of explaining it than I can. It even shows you that, hilariously, Spielberg has one of the aliens do a Spielberg face in Close Encounters.
But in Titanic clip below, the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown gets her Spielberg face at the ten second mark. Again, Spielberg uses her as a surrogate spokesperson for the audience, verbalizing our reaction to seeing such a luxurious and huge ship (with it’s lights still on! Though not for long) plunging peacefully into the freezing North Atlantic Ocean, where it will remain for decades upon decades until finally being discovered on September 1 1985 about 370 miles (600 km) south-southeast off the coast of Newfoundland.
Many think this was a homage to Cameron’s friend and, in a very real way, competitor. Both men dominated the 1990s with bigger and bigger movies until one day a film like The Drop (2014) or In Bruges (2008) or Duck Season (2004) or Pieces of April couldn’t get made anymore. For all their dazzling spectacle - movies like Teriminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and Titanic (1997), which are still great & endlessly re-watchable, I still like slice-of-life, kitchen sink realism. It’s cool to see movie like Get Out ( )Sorry To Bother You (2018). Uncut Gems (2019), and Moonlight (2016). I don’t hate superhero movies but they’re nowhere near as fun as they used to be.
Now, there are more than a few armchair captains on Reddit who say that Titanic should have rammed the iceberg head on. This is wrong on so many levels and don’t even know where to begin, but let’s start with kinetic energy.
If the Titanic hit the iceberg dead on a the speed it was travelling, it would have folded inward like an accordion. People sleeping in their berths would have been slung from their beds, or into bedposts, possibly paralyzing them. Men in the boiler rooms would have been either scalded to death or drowned (which is what happened anyway) as the automated doors shut in order to keep the water compartmentalized into as few compartments as possible.
Furthermore, we have no way of knowing the physical dimensions of the iceberg, or what lay beneath the surface of the ocean. There may have been a nasty surprise waiting for the ship ten or fifteen feet away from the portion of the iceberg visible above the waterline. All icebergs either tuck back into themselves, like diamonds, or they jut outward.
If the iceberg that Titanic tried to steer around did jut outward, the ship could have experienced total structural collapse which would have lead to it sinking faster. Hitting the berg dead on would have done irreversible damage to the ship’s stern while the kinetic energy generated by the collision would pop the weldings, leading the freezing cold waters of the North Atlantic gushing into the boiler rooms, sweeping men off their feet. Scramble though they may have, they were already within the rooms they would die in. Their own watery graves. Dark as the grave wherein my friend is laid.
Anyway, it is a testament to how good a filmmaker James Cameron is that every single time I’ve seen this scene, which is over twenty, I always go “c’mon, c’mon!” just like Lightoller at 2:13 of the scene below, urging the ship to miss the berg even though I know it hits. History has told us so. The movie even tells us so. Oh, by the way, there is. deleted scene in which The Unsinkable Molly Brown asks “Hey sonny! How about a little ice?” If she looked behind her and out the windows she’d she more ice than she could consume with Scotch or Vodka in 3 lifetimes.
Here’s what happened when the lookouts spotted the iceberg. Frederick Fleet was the one to see it first and call it in. Both men who served watch that night survived the sinking, though Reginald Lee died, according to Wikipedia, “aboard the Kenilworth Castle, before dying from pneumonia-related complications in Southampton on 6 August 1913.”
Frederick Fleet, the man who first spotted the berg an called in the now infamous line “Iceberg! Right ahead!” lived to be 77 before killing himself in January 1965. He suffered from depression for most of his life after the Titanic disaster, because he knew that if he’d had binoculars, which were not onboard at he time, he would have seen the iceberg in time to void a collision, and therefore prevent the deaths.6
You know what’s interesting about this scene? It’s exciting even though we know what happens! When that man slips his leg under the automated door, I was sure he’d have it crushed. But he didn’t. When Charles Lightoller whispers “c’mon, c’mon, c’mon…” urging the ship to turn in time, he is the surrogate audience. We are him.
I do the same thing, watching that scene. “C’MON! TURN! TURN!”
One last thing. Did you have to follow your boss into death back in the time before unions had idiots like Jimmy Hoffa running them? Benjamin Guggenheim was forty-six years old when he died.
A dashing forty-six, but nearing fifty nonetheless. Was it fair of him to request that his secretary remain at his side until they drowned?7 I’m thinking those two men had a much different and less diffident connection between them than boss and secretary.
Take it to a pawn shop lady! You could feed hundreds of good-sized Ecuadorian villages with the price that thing would fetch. But no-oh-oh!
You just had to have that poetic fuckin’ line.
Time-stamped at 1:09:
ROSE: “I don’t even have a picture of him.
He exists now only in my memory.”
I literally had to google “what’s a room called on a boat?” to make that sentence accurate.
A lot of people don’t know that this was the album’s final single. The media and public were Pumpkined out by then. We’d had enough.
Yes, this references ages me. No, I don’t care.
I took my Grade 8 girlfriend to see this movie! I was in Grade 7. Do you have ANY idea how rare an accomplishment was? Friendship-wise, dating-wise, you stayed in your grade. Now, this girl was nice & friendly & pretty )& s friend of my sister, which made it a little weird, but all these could be worked around. What couldn’t be worked around, was that she was a low talker. I was once spent an hour nodding & looking concerned because of some family problem she was experiencing and I didn’t catch a word of it. One last detail to illustrate how stupid guys are: My friend Ryan, who is now a pro boxer, for the entire week previous had been cajoling and telling me, over & over, “ya gotta dump her man. You can’t even talk to her.” You know the first thing Ryan said to me after IU broke up with Mel?
“You shouldn’t have done that.”
I was livid. “I shouldn’t have done that? You told me to do it.”
”Yeah but I didn’t mean like that.”
Simpsons fanatics, who in the 1990s were still struggling to figure out what state the family dwelt in, used this episode as proof that they lived in a state with a seacoast. There aren’t many lakes in the United States, save for the American half of Lake Superior and the American half of Lake Michigan. But the Americans also have half of Lake Erie, Lake Ontario, and Lake Huron. All Five of the Great Lakes are split roughly evenly between the two nations of Canada and the United States.
Some Simpsons fans said that body of water appear far too large to be a mere “Great Lake” (now THAT is an oxymoron…a “mere Great Lake,” but the enormity and volume of freshwater in these lakes should not be underestimated. While reading it’s Wikipedia page, one statistic jumped out and slapped ,e across the face: “There is enough water in Lake Superior to cover the entire land mass of North and South America to a depth of 30 centimetres (12 in).” Holt shit that is a staggering stat. I mean, 12 inches isn’t that much, but if you close your eyes for moment and picture everywhere you’ve ever been in North America and/or South America covered in twelve inches of warm, shallow water…it’s mind-boggling.
Simpsons aficionados point out, not incorrectly, however, that the Simpsons’ & Flanders’ family are saved by finding, at the last minute, and unmanned oil rig. According to everycrsreport.com. “No offshore oil and gas drilling in the Great Lakes has occurred in U.S. waters. Several states have attempted to drill onshore for oil and gas under the Great Lakes, but operating wells exist only in Michigan.”
ANYWAY, Season 11, Episode 22 put an end to all this horseshit & guessing with an episode called Behind the Laughter that poorly parodied Behind the Music but also, like the Armin Tamzarian/Principal Skinner episode, completely disregarded canon (this Ian Maxtone-Graham guy was a real piece of shit. He took the greatest show (not just animated show but show, period) & yanked all of the heart and soul out of it in order to make it a surreal social satire, or a “Homer Gets Yet Another New Job” episode. When interest waned even more, they killed Maud, who no one really gave a shit about anyway. Anyway, Episode 22, Season 11 the narrator clearly states the following: “the Simpson’s bitter past was forgotten, and now the future looks brighter than ever for this Northern Kentucky family.”
Hang on a sec, said fans. If The Simpsons is a show consisting of actors, then it’s probably filmed on a set in Los Angeles. Meaning The Simpsons don’t live in North Kentucky. This is hard to argue with. Which is why Ian Maxton-Graham is such an idiot. They live nowhere. Untethered to the real world, they float through Television Land. I did watch the crossover Family Guy episode called “The Simpsons Guy” which, it’s important to note, is a Family Guy episode, not a Simpsons one.
I actually watched it the night it aired, something I hadn’t done since September 29, 2013. “The Simpsons Guy” aired on September 28, 2014. Weird. A year less one day from that Breaking Bad finale, which I fuckin loved. Still love.
I was truly surprised at some of the lines that made it into the show. Like this exchange that sums up most people’s feelings of the show:
PETER: You know, when I first met you, I thought, "Hey, I love this guy!" "This is the funniest guy I've ever met!" "I'm gonna quote this guy to all my friends! I love his town, I love his family!" But now, I think I speak for all of us when I say, I am over the Simpsons! (HOMER gasps) What are you saying?
PETER: I'm saying the Simpsons suck!
HOMER: Why, you...!
(He pounces and grabs him and they roll. When they get up, he punches him. Peter's nose bleeds. He growls at him.)
HOMER: Huh?
(Peter starts punching Homer and he punches back. They continue punching each others' face, then Homer tackles him and Peter punches him down, making him pull down his pants. He pulls them back up and trips, then kicks Homer in the face. They again punch each other, then Homer strangles Peter. Peter smacks Homer and he pushes him away to let go. He coughs.)
PETER: Ow! What the hell? That really hurts!
|HOMER: No, it doesn't! I do it to my son all the time.
PETER: You strangle your son? That's insane! No wonder he's fat and stupid and masturbates all the time.
HOMER: That's your son!
This was only part of the 44-minute long episode that made me laugh. That’s it. And yet, as I write these words on Nov 11 2021, both episodes are still on the air somehow. Who is watching them?
https://www.titanicinquiry.org/USInq2/AmInq04Fleet02.php
As stated elsewhere in this article, Guggenheim’s secretary is not thrilled to be dying such a young death. Nowadays we’d be able yo lodge an HR complaint.
Guggenheim’s secretary: I didn’t sign up for this!
HR: For what?
Guggenheim’s secretary: Dying! Drowning, no less! One of the worst ways to go, not to mention the hypothermia.
HR: I’m sorry sir. You signed the contract. And I do recall you being pretty buoyant at the danger pay.
Guggenheim’s secretary: But I only collect the danger pay if I live.
HR: You were born in the wrong century, sir. You’d have done very well on Ice Road Truckers.