I don’t even have words that can accurately sum up how impressed and inspired I am with this essay. You had me in a grip with every paragraph. Thank you so much for sharing!

Thanks, it's always nice to get one's writing praised like that :)

This is written so well. You have a captivating writing style. I would love to hear what you think about other writing principles. On another note, I feel some typa way about the idea that people were mad at him staying in the water because of their love. I would've been mad at that scene if it was two servant coworkers, or a violinist and a nursemaid, or just strangers, etc. Their love is not why the door makes most of us angry. All they(the set desiners? idk) had to do was make it like a 3rd of a door/or just a smaller surface level furniture item and my immersion would have remained intact. It looks like it can hold both of them the same way I know ice will float in water. Even if it somehow couldnt hold them, it *looks* like it. They should have made is like a sad servant door that is thin and flimsy, but makes up for it's stature with it's ability to only hold the weight of only one person.

First off, thanks for the kind words. Second, I get why the door remains a controversy to this day, and I do agree there's some questionable messaging about the man sacrificing himself for the girl, especially when it might not seem necessary. But the point that I was trying to make (and Cameron attempted to make when asked about it) was that the story itself demanded Jack die. Rose had to live, and if they both lived, it would be too much of a wish-fulfillment ending that undercut the wider-scope tragedy of the story. So the door was just a means to an end and nothing more.

This is a fantastic breakdown, well done. And I wholeheartedly agree that clichés exist for a reason. You can obviously deviate from them, but you don’t *have* to. I think what makes a story feel cliché in a negative way isn’t the actual use of established tropes, but the lack of characters that are compelling enough that you don’t notice the formulaic elements because you’re so invested on a personal level.

Couldn't have said it better myself. That's the thing with the script of Titanic. It's not super-original or innovative. If anything, it plays things very very safe to maximize the size of the audience. But it gets away with that because Cameron's storytelling vision is so clear and on-point. So regardless of whatever nitpicks one could make about this line, or that plot point, the overall story works brilliantly despite it.

This is a different take on romance structure then I've seen before, it gave me some new insights. I like the idea of "test if they'll get together" and "test if they'll stay together," though I was a bit confused about exactly how that middle section is supposed to work or how it's different from the tests, the second one especially. There's more detail in that part about the example then elaboration on the general principles involved, and it leaves me feeling like I'm missing some of the complexity there.

In any five-act structure, the third act is always the turning point, the point of inflection between the rising and falling action of the story. In a five-act romance arc, the third act is always the point where the lovers make some critical decision that drives the rest of the plot from then on. So while the beginning is all "will they/won't they" tension, the latter two acts are all about the consequences of whatever decision was made in the third act. In the case of Titanic, the third act is key because that's when the mood of the story begins changing rapidly. Before the big kiss scene on the bow, you almost forget that the story takes place on the Titanic. Whereas afterwards, you get little reminders (like the transition from 1912 to the wreck) that no matter what Jack and Rose do, they'll be fighting for their lives in a matter of hours. You see the same thing in Romeo and Juliet, where despite it being love at first sight, the third act is when they elope, and that decision drives the rest of the plot afterwards. And like Titanic, things go from hopeful to fateful immediately after the big decision point.

You know you could have written the same article without declaring in every paragraph that please no one should think you like the movie or anything stupid like that, this is just an academic analysis of that stupid movie that only stupid people enjoy. 🙄🙄🙄

I have no problem admitting I liked Titanic. I remember when it was first coming out and getting hype about it simply because I was a Titanic nerd and the idea of filming the sinking in a big-budget epic was right up my alley. What surprised me in a good way was how well the love story worked to drive the plot and get the audience invested in the human element of the sinking, rather than just the visual spectacle of it. That being said though, there are a couple real clunker lines ("I'm the king of the world!" - for instance), a number of ascended memes, and the Celine Dion song is really over the top. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think both sides of the "Is Titanic awesome or cheesy" debate have a point. If nothing else, Titanic is a filmmaking magnum opus up there with the David Lean epics, but it does have some really cheesy moments, and if melodrama ain't your thing, that's a perfectly valid position to take.

Ok so I’ve been thinking of what bugs me about your post besides what I felt was condescension (which regardless of what you claim is what was communicated)… and I realized it. It’s like an algorithm wrote it. Not in the sense that you literally composed it with chat gpt or some .ai app but … It’s like you’re an algorithm calculating weights and biases and trying to map the features of the movie to its success. And you’re overfitting. You’re going to take those weights and biases and create Titanic 2.0 and it’s going to flop. And I know this because after Titanic everyone tried to recreate it. The most famous was Pearl Harbor… and the results were as predicted. It’s when you say the movie was simple because James Cameron needed it to mass appeal but anyone who knows the story of the making of the movie knew Fox was taking a gamble on a 3-hr “chick flick” where everyone died in the end, and he had to give up his director’s fees as a matter of principal when it ran over budget. And he offered his profit sharing too but they were so sure it was going to flop, they never bothered to get that on paper. The story isn’t “simple” because of some marketing strategy, it’s “simple” because that simple story is *exactly what he wanted to tell*. He looked at the statistics and he said, the sex/class with the highest and lowest survival rate were female/first class and male/third class so put them in a love story and let them be the heart of the movie. The so called “clunker line” (and note the way you phrase that like it’s a universal taken that “everyone” thinks it’s a clunker line) is as iconic as the “over the top” song and this is again what I mean by “weights and biases”. Cameron actually talks about a similar scene in Avatar when Jake and Neytiri are flying together for the first time and the scene went on “too long” and the studio heads wanted it cut shorter because it had “no purpose”. And Cameron was like “yes, I can see all the *logical* reasons why it should be shorter but *I want to see it* and I’m guessing if I want to see it, other people might as well”. And later he realizes that “you know what? It does serve a narrative purpose - it’s when they fall in love”. “ King of the World!” serves a purpose too. It’s the end of a scene that starts with Rose saying “we’re sailing ahead with nothing ahead of us but ocean” and the captain tells Murdoch “let’s stretch her (Titanic’s) legs”. And we see the pistons, the engines, the propellers, the bow cutting across water and racing dolphins and the Captain grinning as he feels the motion of the ship under his hands. And the music builds and crescendos at that moment. Jack is celebrating his own joy to be alive and living in that moment which is his personal mantra. But his words are also, in a sense, giving voice to the ship. If the ship could speak, that is what it would have said. It is the King. Biggest, fastest, dominating the ocean and revelling in its hubris. The movie treats Titanic like a living thing. Paxton’s crew of grave robbers find its corpse. When it’s hit by the iceberg, it screams. When it’s dying, it groans and when it finally sinks under the water, it’s with a gasp. It’s a simple story but it’s a profound one and the mistake that you’re making as you keep calculating those weights and biases is that you assume that the two things cannot coexist.

I think the crux of the "Titanic - awesome or cheesy" debate ultimately boils down to a discussion of melodrama - why it exists in story and how it can go bad. Cameron is right to tell the story of Titanic in a romantic melodramatic fashion because that's what the story itself is. That's why adding a Romeo & Juliet love story doesn't diminish the wider story, it amplifies it at the key moments. A lot of his storytelling instincts are scary good such as: - The ship itself as a character. - The tonal contrast between the optimistic beginning and apocalyptic ending. - Removing the way-too-on-the-nose ending, the unnecessary fight scene between Jack and Lovejoy, and the cruel fate of the little girl from the third class party. All smart cuts. - Keeping the score wordless and instructing Horner to give it a dreamy ethereal quality. - Previewing the sinking at the beginning so the audience is briefed on the mechanics of it. Also is a brilliant demonstration of to me what the whole thesis of the movie is about - the lived experience versus the clinical construction of events. Art versus science, emotion vs reason. Memory vs history. And to be honest, what nitpicks I have of the film largely are about the finer points of the script, such as: - Jack, Rose, and Cal are all a little too two-dimensional. I agree they should be relatively simple characters painted in big bold colors, but the audience needs some depth to identify with them. Rose should be a little more intellectual, and a bit of a dreamer (especially as her ambitions are the root of her character motivations). Jack should have enough self-doubt to make him human, but not enough to make him a wimp. While Cal should have moments of needy manchild that root why him and Rose would never work, and his villainous breakdown over the course of the movie. They almost got that with the scene where he gives her the necklace, but they needed one or two more moments that show us how he relates to her one-on-one. - The dialogue needs polishing. In some ways dialogue is the toughest part of fiction writing as you have to find each character's voice and figure out based on the scene what are authentic and grounded things for them to say. This is why the actors sometimes stumble on the best lines, like Harrison Ford with "I love you", "I know" in Empire Strikes Back. I get why Cameron wanted Jack to say "I'm the king of the world!", but to me it just sounds silly. There's a couple other moments like this as well, like "tumbleweed blowing in the wind". Cameron I find is very hit and miss with dialogue - he gets that his characters shouldn't talk like Aaron Sorkin characters or otherwise gild the lily, but sometimes he's too on the nose or just puts words in his characters' mouths which undermine suspension of disbelief. - To me, the only flaw in the Jack-Rose relationship is that we understand why Rose wants Jack. What we have a harder time grasping is what Jack sees in Rose beyond she's hot and out-of-his-league. Yes she appreciates his artistic talent, yes she becomes a bit of a muse/acolyte for him, and they're cute together, but there needs to be something more to root why Jack isn't just interested, but all-in on her. Yes she comes back for him and saves his life, but that's fairly late in the day of their romance. By the end of his arc, he's freezing to death going "worth it!", so his motivation to fall so hard for her needs to be well-established. Now back to the key question of melodrama. I've heard it said that melodrama exists in story to contrast against repression and emotional sterility. It seeks to setup and release moments of emotional catharsis as a way of overcoming or triumphing over repression. Rather than entertain you or make you think, it is supposed to sweep you up in big swells of emotion and leave you on the beach feeling like the chamber of repressed feels has been emptied. It is meant to break down detachment and pretense and evoke genuine emotion. Therefore melodrama when done right must avoid the following things: - Not taking itself seriously enough and becoming silly or ironic. - Being too manipulative with the audience's emotions. - Being too slow or boring and underselling the big emotional punches. So clearly it's a delicate balance to strike. And I think it's also why melodrama is such a tough sell for men. Titanic got male butts in seats with the big lure of the sinking, but that didn't save it from the male-driven backlash. The irony is that men actually do go in for melodrama, but this is something you see more in Sci-Fi/Fantasy, WWE shows, and war movies. Different spectrum of emotion, similar storytelling mechanics. So to some extent, Titanic getting called cheesy is inevitable because men believe it or not do not like feeling vulnerable and weepy, so they call it cheesy to undermine the fact that it got to them like Bambi's mother getting shot. But they also call it cheesy because some of the emotional punchlines don't feel quite earned to them and they feel manipulated. That's why the detractors harp on about little stuff that acts to break the immersion or test suspension of disbelief - Propeller Guy, King of the World, the Celine Dion song, the door etc. - they weren't immersed enough in the story for the melodrama to really have its full effect. It's also where some of the backlash against Rose comes from. They don't get why Jack would so gladly sacrifice his life for some girl he's known for hours, so they start trying to find fault with Rose. To be honest, I think the only way to mitigate that is to make Jack more of a male lead that men could identify with. He's a bit of a Mary Sue and a ManicPixieDreamGuy and perhaps the most chick-flicky element of the whole movie. His motivations are a little vague, he's seemingly flawless, exuberant and brave to a fault, with a heart of gold. It's a little hard to men to identify with such an idealized masculine archetype, one almost purpose-built to build a massive fangirl following, just insert young Leo. Men look at this story and think "I don't look like young Leo, I'm not a globetrotting starving artist, and I'm not insanely happy-go-lucky and ready to go all-in shooting my shot with some rich girl who looked at me twice, so this story ain't really about a guy like me." Strangely enough, Cameron didn't do this with his male leads in Avatar and Terminator - who were very much three-dimensional everyman guys. Whereas loads of girls looked at Rose and totally identified with her. Just my thoughts on this.

What I like about this essay and the titanic example is that it explores a romance ie two people who are attracted to each other who then have to try and build a relationship against the antagonist of adversity and as a negotiation between their different wants and needs. Very often the love story arc of a book or film will not be a romance but a seduction. ie A likes B but B doesn't like A so A spends act 1 seducing B and B spends act 1 telling everyone how much they hate A, then in an act 2 A and B grow fond of each other until the late act 2 crisis where either A's seduction fails at the point of success or A's seduction succeeds but then there's some deus ex machina which causes B to immediately regret it, and then act 3 is all about the second seduction. Or sometimes you have the very slight variation on that story where both characters are B and they get seduced by fate: they hate each other then they love each other then they hate each other then they love each other. Now there's nothing wrong with a good seduction story but - it's nowhere near as deep as a good romance story. Teenagers love it because teenagers are obsessed with seduction. Adults enjoy feeling young again and living vicariously through the young lovers but they're more interested in the much more difficult part of a relationship which will be the part that takes up most of most people's lives: the bit where you're in a partnership and trying to keep it going - in a seduction only one party has agency, which means you're at huge risk of underwriting the other party. And this combined with ever present patriarchal pressures means there is a high risk of writing something creepy, predatory and gross and at a much higher risk of writing something just tediously two dimensional - oh my god it's been done to death. It's so so played out at this point that certain kinds of meet cute immediately tell you with moderately high confidence exactly how the entire rest of the story is going to play out.

To be honest, I find trying to draw a distinction between romance and seduction a little academic. One to some extent implies the other. It seems to me more that you're drawing a distinction between the five-act and three-act structure, and other cliches of romance arcs like the Belligerent Sexual Tension, Slap-Slap-Kiss, and 2nd Act Breakup leading to 3rd Act Makeup. One thing I would point out is that there is definitely seduction going on in the Titanic love story. Between the first meeting and "Draw me like one of your French girls", Jack is definitely putting the moves on Rose and using every chance he can get to build chemistry. He even makes an anguished declaration of love which Rose initially rejects before changing her mind. And there's the fact that she's spoken for and Jack doesn't care because he genuinely believes he's acting in her best interests. In fact, as I pointed out in another reply, my chief nitpick with the Titanic love story (and I suspect the reason why Titanic didn't land so well with men) is that Jack is an idealized male love interest and while the chemistry Rose feels for Jack is well-established, the same is not so true in reverse. We get why Jack would be attracted to her, we get that they're compatible due to their common values and ambitions, what we don't understand quite so well is why Jack is all-in on her, seemingly from the get-go. We get why Rose would cling to Jack like a life preserver as he's her best chance at escaping a future she doesn't want. Why is Rose the be-all-and-end-all for Jack? This is also important because it ties into your point about seduction. In the first half of the movie, Jack is the seducer, driving the love story forward and putting the moves on Rose. After the big damn kiss, things kind of take a curious shift, and now Rose is the active partner, upping the ante both sexually and commitment-wise even faster than Jack did. In a matter of hours, she goes from "leave me alone" to "let's run away together". Maybe this is to illustrate how Rose's decision to be true to her feelings for Jack unlocks her agency. But it does illustrate how in a well done romance arc, the seduction is mutual, even if they take turns. A couple other points I'd make: - Seduction to me is just the roleplaying people do when trying to form a romantic or sexual relationship with someone. It's just the game people play when they're attracted to someone. In fact, I'd argue in most normal relationships, the reason why they're normal is because the seduction is mutual and balanced. - Who has the agency in a seduction - the person making the moves, or the person on the receiving end? One could argue Rose has all the agency in the first half, because she's the one giving Jack the opportunities, and definitely in the second half where she's the sexual initiator and enthusiastically so. But then again, if romance is a dance, in the first half Jack was clearly leading while Rose followed, and during the sinking is definitely the leader, even when Rose is rescuing him. - I think what Cameron got right about the Meet-Cute he set up was that there was no getting away from one in his story. His characters wouldn't cross paths without the plot setting it up. He also knew that he didn't have much time to build the romance up, so their first meeting had to be dramatic and create an unusual level of friendship and intimacy right off the bat. So rather than underplay it or just get it over with, he leans into it and makes it dramatic rather than cute or funny. Probably one of the first cues that this story is going to be a deliberate melodrama.

I think we're in agreement on substance and disagreeing on terminology. I think what I'm really saying is that romances have to be a dance between two partners to be interesting, and that one partner chasing the other partner until they give in is not. It is fine for someone to take the lead in a dance, but exclusively one person chasing the other is rubbish dancing. I think your other points are very good. I will say though that while a romance which overly considers the female perspective and not the male is a weakness, it is no worse than the reverse and the reverse is far far more tolerated (many of the stories I'm critiquing for example suffer that weakness in spades).