I'll Never Let Go

On Loving the Cheesiest Love Story Ever

“It doesn't make any sense. That's why I trust it.”

The first time I watched Titanic, I must’ve been between five and six, and I probably shouldn’t have been there. It was too long, too sad, too boring. I’d been dragged along to a Sunday family outing along with other members of Patna’s Rotary Club. My younger brother, born just the previous year, was mewling in my parents’ arms. I guess that makes it his first ever movie-going experience: A fact that I now love, and he loves to hate.

This essay is not a critical exploration of Titanic (1997). The only thing it’ll try to explore is the space between those two feelings above. If for some reason you’re one of the ten people left on the planet that have never watched the movie, please pause here. Also, contact me, because I’d love to know how you avoided it thus far.

A cute scene in this little-known movie

As a moderately cynical 32-year-old today, I can’t quite call Titanic my favourite movie, because it’s not a perfect (or quick) watch. But with every passing decade, every new year, life experience, and heartbreak, it seems to have grown and occupied more space in my life. Let me just spit this out: It’s a meaningful artefact that has shaped parts of me. WELP.

As I write that line, I notice the social conditioning intensifying - something in me is still embarrassed to claim this movie as important. This, when in more private moments I still get a lump in my throat listening to the soundtrack, and may have considered getting a Titanic tattoo at some point in my life. How did it come to be that I’d be willing to put something permanently on my body and be hesitant to appreciate it in public?

There’s always the option of intellectualising it all, and I’ve tried that too. “It’s the history”, “it’s the tragedy”, “it’s got all those Oscars”, “it’s just childhood nostalgia” - all very true and perfectly reasonable, but don’t quite explain my continued affection for it fully. As a country, we didn’t grow up listening to Titanic lore; this film was our education. And English-language film releases remained largely out of reach for me and my family until we moved to Delhi. That’s when it all began.

Let’s jump ahead to 2023, last year. Following the OceanGate submarine incident, my billionaire-hating algorithm sucked me back into Titanic content (the ship, not the movie). The more I read about the shipwreck, the more I wanted to reconnect with the movie. My search led to a brilliant podcast, a scene-by-scene breakdown of Titanic by self-proclaimed superfan, Brittany Butler, and her open-minded friend, Ethan Brehm. Despite its erratic posting schedule, this podcast became my safe space for several months. It’s a long movie, and they’ve been recording since 2019. The final episode released just last weekend, in July 2024.

I couldn’t believe my ears. There were SO MANY people who felt as strongly about this sappy old movie as I did; who noticed the little details, tracked character development, heard the subtle shifts in the background score, paid attention to clues and resolutions, and wrote in every week to share beloved memories associated with Titanic. People who had also considered (or gone through with) a tattoo. I wasn’t the lone freak!

Their earnest and moving letters inspired me. I wanted to be brave, to express what this movie means to me, to admit that I’ve thought about it at least once every few days in over two decades. That I, too, have childhood memories around it. I remember watching it as a New Millenium’s Eve special on Star Movies when I was eight, and wondering why my parents changed the channel to Bollywood stars dancing at a staged event just when Rose asks Jack to draw a nice picture of her (I figured it out pretty quickly). Later, as a 13-year-old, I listened to “My Heart Will Go On” at least a million times on my CD player when I was in the throes of my very first crush.

Look, you need to understand why I’m going to all this trouble: it’s Titanic. It’s a box office behemoth, with big moments and a BIG Celine Dion song. Most people alive today tend to have big feelings about it. I’m not unique in loving it, and I’m also aware of the hate the movie gets.

As I’ve grown up and watched the film age alongside my other beloved films, shows, and icons (none as badly as the actual iceberg that sank the ship), I’ve heard plenty of criticism for its storytelling, its mawkish writing, that bloody pose, its monotone characterisations, the overused memes that have floated around on the internet, and even its inexplicable success. Some consider it one of James Cameron’s weakest works (they obviously aren’t aware of the existence of Piranha 2: The Spawning), and not more than a glorified paperback romance. In 2012, Vulture wrote that it has become fashionable to dislike “My Heart Will Go On” because it "encapsulates most everything that once-enthusiastic moviegoers now dislike about Titanic: it's outdated, cheesy, and overly dramatic". And yet, somehow, every time I’ve drunkenly chosen to sing the demanding ballad at a karaoke bar, every single soul in that room has joined in for the chorus.

As I said, it’s Titanic. Its pervasiveness demands that one develop some kind of opinion about it, even it’s if around something as trivial as whether Jack could’ve fit on the door. OK FINE, I’ll get it out of the way right now. Maybe he could, maybe he couldn’t — the story needed him to die. The director is fed up. “It’s called art,” he said, probably through gritted teeth. Let’s move on.

I believe it speaks to the film’s writing and the enduring emotional impact of a young, hot, and loveable Leonardo DiCaprio that people found it hard to digest Jack’s death. For once, I’m sorry to the 25-year-old supermodels who had to endure him in the following decades, but Leo is fantastic in this film. But also, his death makes the experience much richer for me. After all, it’s Rose’s story. Kate Winslet is obviously breathtaking in every second she spends onscreen, but Titanic was probably one of the first few films I watched that had a woman’s journey at its core. A woman - also our narrator - leaves behind an abusive fiancé and oppressive societal expectations to live the life she truly wants, and a doomed man aids this character development. I promise this isn’t going to be a film studies essay, but I’ve always enjoyed this charming reversal of the fridging trope. Let the woman live, FFS. Of course there have been plenty of attempts thereafter to “defrost” Jack, as evidenced by the hundreds of cleverly edited fan-made trailers for “Titanic 2: The Return of Jack” that I spent countless hours consuming as a kid (now getting incredibly realistic with AI), but Jack has remained firmly dead and Cameron has moved on to other sequels.

Also, blockbusters are simply different now. They’re either part of the Marvel machinery or attempting to replicate it, or, simply too scared of the internet to wear their metaphorical hearts on their sleeves. Titanic is a strange film by any measure, because it’s proudly melodramatic and standalone in its success. I’m willing to fight anyone who disagrees, but younger audiences simply cannot understand the context of this lightning-in-a-bottle moment. The lead couple, the backstory, Cameron’s technical and cinematographic excellence, the sheer timing of it all - just near the dawn of the new millennium. How ubiquitous the Celine Dion song was, before social media had anything to do with anything. No sequels. Even Barbenheimer doesn’t come close.

Many of the narrative choices are problematic to my 2024 sensibilities, and my trust issues surrounding art created by White Men are now bigger than this ship. It doesn’t help that the film ignores any mental health issues that the female protagonist may be living with (I mean - she tried to jump off), and instead uses the moment as a weird meet-cute/catalyst in their love story. I also do understand why people fault Jack’s death over Rose’s; a rich girl-poor boy romance with working-class Jack getting the short end of the stick is a harder sell today than it was in 1998 (and thank goodness for that). But it’s also statistically accurate. Third class male passengers on the Titanic were most likely to perish because of the ship’s “women and children first” rescue policy, coupled with the deep class divide existing in 1912. Nearly 62% of first class passengers survived, while only about 43% of second and 25% of third class passengers survived. Plus, we also know that women had a much higher chance of survival, regardless of class.

I can’t make any excuses for some of the dialogues (like that weird little one, “I’m the king of the world!”), especially if you consider scenes that were mercifully deleted. What is already pretty out there as a screenplay could have easily sunken into unbearable cringe if the film’s emotional core hadn’t kept it afloat.

Honestly, my personal journey with this love story hasn’t been smooth sailing (all wordplay so far has been intentional). I firmly believe my cool quotient would have fared much better had this essay been about Celine Song’s Past Lives or Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers: both poetic and moving explorations of love and loss that also happen to be a lot more recent than a 1997 release. These to me represent ‘grown-up’ stories, written with complex characters and subtleties that reflect the bittersweet experience of love in contemporary times. Love, in these stories, is barely a whisper of understanding between two people. Incidentally, my partner’s favourite romance is Before Sunset, because it’s “real”. After watching Titanic with me upon my dogged insistence, I’m sure a part of him was slightly bemused by my tastes (he enjoyed it, but he prefers his love stories quiet and understated - I can live with it).

Titanic on the other hand is a loud, chest-thumping declaration of passion. Here we have two hormone-crazed teenagers who know each other for all of three days, and end up dying (or living) for each other. It’s massy, and so… over-the-top. What is it about this film?

This brings me to the allegation I most disagree with, that Titanic somehow doesn’t deserve its place in the hearts of the people. One of my theories is that because most people couldn’t understand the phenomenon, they painted over it in derogatory ‘chick-flick’ colours. You will never catch me talking shit about any movie genre (especially if it relates to Legally Blonde, Bridesmaids or 13 Going on 30), and there is absolutely nothing embarrassing for a film to focus on women. But Titanic is decidedly not that. In fact, a tender love story co-existing with an action-packed disaster, moving people to tears regardless of background or age, is probably one of the best things this film achieves.

Another realisation is that considering that this is cinema of the 90s, an era that loved its pastiche and postmodernism, Titanic clings strikingly to its truths - especially the idea of true love. There is sincere passion, and a kind of brave naïveté in Jack-Rose’s relationship. They have banter, but they don’t waste too much time trying to protect themselves with sarcasm or self-sabotage: something I’ve never quite learnt how to do in my own life. Despite (or due to?) the absurd circumstances in which they meet and fall for each other, their interactions (and some rather cringe dialogues) manage to retain a genuinely stirring quality. Kate and Leo are just so damn charming, it all works. I may never quite understand Leomania, but I think that’s just because I was born about five years too late.

Every time Jack dies, I grieve more than just this sweet, handsome, struggling artiste who charmed our heroine’s skirt off and died too young. I think it’s also a strange reminder, making me relive the fact that this kind of sincere sentimentality has felt largely missing from my own life. Now that’s something to mourn.

With every passing anniversary of the film’s release, I’ve wondered how this film holds up in my life now. I feel like the impact it left on me goes beyond that most commonplace desire to meet a beautiful stranger on a voyage. It reinforces nostalgia for life as we live it, and I’d say that’s very different from watching the film nostalgically. Perhaps that’s why it got through the emotional defences of so many people.

Let me give an example. The one scene I can never get through without straight up bawling is the beautiful, and frankly, manipulative final scene. There have been times when I’ve needed an emotional release after a few difficult weeks at work or home or whatever, and have resorted to watching this clip for a really good cry. It packs a wallop: the ship is gone, Jack is gone, the necklace is gone, and Rose is probably departing too. Then we get pictorial proof of the promises she made to Jack, and her long, full life. Next, we’re flying through the decaying shipwreck just as it begins to be filled by a bright light. The music swells. We’re back on the Ship of Dreams! We enter the magnificent Grand Staircase, which we’ve just watched sink to bottom of the Atlantic over a long, harrowing hour. Everyone that went down with the ship is there; the brave Mr Andrews (played to perfection by Victor Garber) is chatting with dear Fabrizio because classes don’t matter here. Everyone beams at us, but we have eyes only for Jack, waiting near the clock just like we planned. And suddenly, we’re Rose, in an ethereal white dress. Our hearts did go on, damn it, and love waited for us.

Somewhere, I decided mine would as well. This is how I would meet life and love: bravely, wholeheartedly, ready to be consumed. Life is short; make it count! I can confirm that in my 32 years, I’ve made some very important decisions based on this promise to myself. Titanic showed me I could live for an idea bigger than me, live for love, even if I didn’t quite live with it. I became exceptional at constructing the perfect fantasy of love in my head - a person, a relationship, a friendship, my work - and deriving most of my fulfilment from it. This is where, as you can imagine, the trouble started.

I’m sure I’ve had several other patterns and unhealthy behaviours, but perhaps the most mystifying has been this one. My fantasy of love eclipsed my lived reality, detached me from how often I was unhappy or unable to ask for uncomfortable things. Things stopped going to according to the plan in my head, and it didn’t feel so lovely anymore. How was I, the Greatest Lover of All-Time, fucking love up?

It took years of, well, real life to understand that I needed to take ownership; that not everyone would be willing to partake in my fantasy, and that I’d to learn to give people that option. That I may never get to make a gesture out of my life for someone, but I could let them love me the way they know how. That it’s not scary or strange to actually be writing out things like this for hundreds of eyes (OK, like 50, if I’m lucky), and be sincere, because that’s the quality I admire in this outsized love story.

This film is not perfect by any measure, but it’s already doing a lot in its 194-minute runtime. It’s giving us a long, full emotional experience, much like Rose’s life. I think we can cut it some slack for not being esoteric or experimental in its storytelling - because it has the goods to back it up. I, for one, resolved a long time ago to not dismiss any work of art that speaks to as many people as it possibly can. It helps that I grew up watching Hindi cinema.

Titanic’s legacy is imperfect and lasting in my life too. I took away some pretty impossible standards to chase, and had myself convinced for a while that I could - and should - love people eternally. I’m (un)learning now that I don’t have to, because love shouldn’t be a matter of life and death. At the same time, I will continue to hold on to the nostalgia and deep emotion that this film elicits in me, because I’d like to experience the bold, crazy, and unabashed moments as much as the quiet ones. I’m tired of fighting it, and frankly, I’ve learnt that with a love like Titanic, it’s sometimes best to just give in.

Try telling this girl that the movie sucks.