1

INTRODUCTION.

For several weeks before its release, James Cameron's long-delayed disaster film

'Titanic' (1997) was announced to be the biggest and most expensive film ever.

Stories circulated in the press about Cameron and his ambitious project, which

included the re-building of a ship, almost as big and luxurious as Titanic, his

expeditions under water with the help of the latest technology in order to study and

eventually include in his movie the actual footage of the Titanic today, as it lies at the

bottom of the ocean and his arguments with his crew, that never stopped accusing him

for being too demanding and putting their lives in danger.

Peter Kramer 1 in his article notes that critics, before the films release, focused on the

scale of technological innovation and money spend on the project as variables that

would determine its success in the box-office. The actual tragedy of the Titanic, was

predicted by critics to be, of the same scale for the movie that carried its name.

Instead, thirteen weeks after its release, Variety reported that on the 14 March Titanic

had overtaken Star Wars (1977) as the all-time top grossing film at the US box-

office 2. A week later, after wining 11 Oscars at the 23 March Academy Awards

Ceremony, Titanic' s sales, sailed past the $500 million mark, with no end to its box

office success.
3
Kramer argues, taking as an example the cover story by Newsweek magazine, that

what is so spectacular and majestic about Titanic is not the ship itself or the

sophisticated technology used to bring it, and its demise to the screen, but the love

that the film portrays in its story and generates in its audiences. The cover shows Kate

Winslet holding on to Leonard DiCaprio, with Titanic barely visible in the

1
See Peter Kramer, ''Women First: 'Titanic' (1997), action-adventure films and Hollywood's female
audience''. Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 18(1998)4:559-615.
2
Leonard Klady, ''Titanic wins domestic B.O. crown''. Variety, 23 March 1998, 4.
3
David Ansen, ''The Titanic Love Affair: Steaming Towards $1 Billion at the Box Office''.
Newsweek.23 February 1998, 44-50.
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background, which implies the real reason why this movie is so successful. The

author of the article points out that audiences' love affair with the movie started with

its romantic couple, rather than the amazing special effects or the fate of the actual

Titanic, and it is the love affair which will live long in people's memories. The article

compares Titanic with the success and context of Gone with the wind (1939), which

is also a great love epic movie, centring on one woman's emotional experience in

catastrophic historical circumstances. Apart from the sales of the movie, which make

Titanic the film event of the decade, Kramer notes that its success also could change

the course of US film history, simply by returning female characters and romantic

love to the centre of the industry's big releases, which in turn is allowing female

audiences back to the central place in Hollywood's thinking.

It is no secret that Titanic has attracted a predominantly female audience. Figures

show that 60% of the tickets were sold to women, many of whom, especially young

ones, had already seen the movie once and came back for more 4. As Kramer points

out in his article the spectacle and love story the film offers, is part of a long-gone

Hollywood tradition of epic love stories such as Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Gone

with the Wind (1939), which both became quickly box-office huge successes. My

aim is to investigate Titanic's context, in terms of genre conventions and also to look

into the aspect of female spectatorship and consumption from a feminist perspective,

in order to give an account of the possible reasons why the movie enjoyed such a

great success among female audiences.

Female spectatorship and the success of ‘Titanic’(1997)

Titanic is a generic mix. It has elements of a costume drama, and a disaster- action-

adventure movie. Generic mix is not a new thing, especially in the New Hollywood

4
See David Ansen, “Our Titanic love affair”. Newsweek (23 February 1998), pp. 46-47.
 3

era, but the consumption of such a genre from primarily female audiences, bridges the

dichotomy Hollywood has imposed between mainstream movies and melodrama in

various ways. Titanic’s plot revolves around the relationship between a boy and a girl

in a time of great change and tragedy. Set in the 1912, the two lovers are faced with

dramatic obstacles, since they come from very different class backgrounds, and they

are on board of the fateful ship, that its sinking was considered to be the greatest

tragedy of all times on the sea. To that respect, the movie’s melodramatic plot is very

similar to the ones made in the 40’s and 50’s for female spectators.

As Jose Arroyo5 notes Cameron went out of his way to reproduce the feeling and

dialogues that existed in movies in the 40’s, in Titanic. He notes Rose’s entrance,

which resembled the one of old-fashioned movie stars- as she gets out of her carriage,

we see first her legs and hat, before her face is revealed to us. Moreover, Jack in the

gambling scene, recalls one of the Dead End Kids in a typical Warner Brothers

movie, and Cal is similar to Ballin in Gilda: treating his woman as an object that can

be controlled. Moreover, even though the film was branded as a costume drama, the

dialogues do not resemble the ones in movies of that genre. Phrases such as "These

are rather good; very good actually” could have been something that Joan Crawford

said to John Garfield. The film also, looks to have been filmed in accordance with old

studio practices, particularly MGM’ s, when the first two hours look gorgeously

glamorous and rich, highlighting the ship’s sumptuousness and elegance of its

passengers.

Titanic however, deviates from what you often expect from a Hollywood mainstream

film, simply by placing the woman as the core character, having her as the main

narrator, but also as the main action heroine during the action adventure sequence. A

film by James Cameron, who through the years has proved to be a master in action-
5
Jose Arroyo, “Titanic; Massive Attack”. Sight and Sound, 2, February 1998, 16-19.
 4

adventure and technological advancements, as well as the creation of strong female

characters, hides a mixture of conventions and innovations, which are vital for our

understanding of the reasons why it appealed to women.

Peter Kramer 1 notes in his article that in contemporary Hollywood, action-adventure

movies have consistently received the biggest budgets and the widest releases of all

Hollywood films. They have generated the highest star salaries and accounted for

approximately half of the top ten films listed in the annual box office charts during

the last twenty years. Audience research in particular has confirmed the common-

sense view that action-adventure films primarily appeal to young males, looking for

physical action on the screen and excitement in the auditorium and women largely

dislike them.

In trying to attract female audiences into action adventure movies, Hollywood

created the family-adventure films, hoping that it would indirectly appeal to women

through their children, who will often be accompanied to the cinema by their mothers.

These films aimed to address women through a highly emotional concern with

familial relationships on screen. As Kramer notes, however, the films’ stories were

still almost exclusively focused on young males, as being the core of their plots.

Thus, this exclusive focus on male characters contrasted sharply with the strategy for

attracting women to action adventure movies, by failing to promote female characters

to the status of main protagonists.

In the 50’s, the Hollywood studios believed that women made up the highest portion

of cinema audiences, and surveys were conducted to find out what female spectators

wanted to see. Maria LaPlace 4 notes that the Woman’ s film was the embodiment of

many criteria found to be particularly desirable by female spectators. It was

concluded by these surveys that women favoured female stars over male, and
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preferred, in order of preference, serious dramas, love stories, and musicals.

Furthermore, women said to want ‘good character development’ and ‘stories with

human interest’.

Titanic’s maker Cameron seems to have taken those preferences seriously, when

scripting the love story between Jack and Rose, the role of Rose, and when deciding

on the poster of the movie. Female spectators were faced with a poster that shows a

young couple, the woman looking down thoughtfully with half closed eyes, the man

standing behind her, nestling his head on her shoulder and neck, eyes closed and lost

in his embrace of her body. Their disembodied heads float above the bow of a giant

ship, which seems both to support their union, and to push through between them,

cutting them apart. ‘Nothing on Earth Could Come Between Them’ reads the tag line,

a statement with different meanings and a sense of irony, since, we as viewers, know

that Titanic did sink taking lots of people to its watery grave. The poster prepares us

for a love story, but also a great disaster, which is followed by a struggle by the

couple to stay with each other

Titanic is, with no doubt, a mainstream movie, due to its production cost, marketing

strategies and the action-adventure element. However, the incorporation of

melodrama and romance, not just as a sub-plot, but as the main focus of the film, as

well as, the role of the main character given to a woman, is what makes Titanic a

break from the normal strategies employed by Hollywood, when it comes to action

adventure. Peter Kramer1 notes that Contemporary Hollywood has generally

marginalised traditional female orientated movies, such as melodrama and romance,

by limiting their production and marketing budgets and by giving these films a

comparatively narrow release outside main cinema-going seasons. Titanic, even

though, it is first and foremost a love story, belongs to the big blockbusters’ category
 6

of Hollywood films, which makes its investigation framework somewhat different

than the ones employed by feminists for the woman’s film.

Cine-psychoanalysis6 has been one of the central frameworks feminists used to

explain and analyse the context of Hollywood movies. According to this framework,

classical narrative cinema reproduces patriarchal linguistic and ideological structures,

offering the surface illusion of unity, plenitude and identity as compensation for the

underlying realities of separation and difference. The subject of mainstream narrative

is the patriarchal, bourgeois individual: that unified, centre point from which the

world is organised and given meaning. Narrative organisation hierarchizes the

different aesthetic and ideological discourses, which intersect in the text, to produce a

unifying, authoritative voice or viewpoint. Since in this argument narrative

organisation is patriarchal, the spectator constructed by the text is masculine. Pleasure

is largely organised to flatter or console the patriarchal ego and its Unconscious.

Women have been defined in a masculine culture as ‘lack’ and as ‘Other’. Woman is

not a subject in her own right but the object by which patriarchal subjects can define

themselves. Mainstream cinema represents women as either idealised objects of desire

or as threatening forces to be ‘tamed’7.

8
Rob Lapsley and Michel Westlake in their article about romance films employ a

similar framework, in order to explain people’s fascinations with romance and

especially female one. They claim that our culture does want romance and the

promise of happiness it brings. Romantic films with their basic structure of boy meets

girl, boy looses girl, boy gets the girl point to people’s need for fantasy in order to fill

6
The psychoanalytic underpinnings of classical narrative cinema were first signalled in a special
issue of Screen, vol. 14, no. ½ (Spring/Summer 1973). Also see Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasures and
Narrative Cinema”. Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (1975): 6-18.
7
See E. Deidre Pribram (edt.), Female Spectators Looking at Film and Television ( London: Verso,
1988), 1-3.
8
Rob Lapsley and Michael Westlake, “From Casablanca to Pretty Woman: the Politics of Romance”.
In Contemporary Film Theory, edited by
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the absence of the sexual relation. Taking aboard the theories by Lacan, they claim

that romance plays with the notion of ‘lack’ and ‘other’ in order to trigger desire. All

human beings are experiencing the ‘lack’, which only through the process of

idealisation they pretend to find it in another person. Lacan claims that the gap can

only be bridged in fantasy and not in reality, and that is why romantic movies work.

By idealising situations and creating obstacles between the lovers, they do not bridge

the gap, but ‘make it good’.

In that sense, Titanic’s love story, set on the legendary ship, between two characters

that appear to have too many things in common, creates the perfect set for fantasy to

work and ‘make good’ the ‘lack’. Lapsley and Westlake however, base their theory

about romance on the idealisation of the female characters in the movies they analyse.

They point out that the character more unwilling to realise the ‘lack’ is the male one,

which usually results on delays of the union or violence against the female characters

in such movies. Women are the ones masking the ‘lack’ in the Other and ‘make good’

in male characters’ lives.

On this basis they interpret female fascination with romance as representative of their

position in a patriarchal society. Since romance is all about ‘bridging the gap’ with

the employment of fantasy and masquerade, it can be seen as a way of making more

endurable for women, not only unsatisfactory relations with men but also a whole

panoply of subordinated social relations. Titanic however, reverses the convention of

idealisation. Rose is the one that delays the romance, while Jack, through his persona

as an artist and desire to get into her thoughts tries to point out to her the ‘lack’ that

his presence can ‘make good’. Cameron has sifted the roles, by making Jack the

idealised character of the love story. He strives to save Rose from her oppressive

lifestyle, recognise her strength and live the life she wants to live.
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Rose records through her eyes the story of Titanic and the story of its passengers.

Cameron chose to film an epic tale through the eyes of a woman, challenging this

way the ‘male gaze’ of the camera. That innovation seems to go hand-in-hand with
9
feminist struggles. Christine Gledhill notes the changes in Hollywood movie’s

context and roles for women, and the changing roles of women in society, and urges

feminists to take into account both elements and conceive their relationship.

Melodramas context and style is considered by Hollywood to be far from realistic. In

Hollywood, realism came to be associated with the masculine sphere of action and

violence. Melodrama, seen as a genre that deals with fictional situations and

emotions, was soon reduced to ‘sentimentality’ and exaggeration. Melodramatic

utopianism was seen as escapist fantasy and this total complex was devalued by its

association with a ‘feminised’ popular culture. Jane Tompkins notes that twentieth

century critics have taught generations of students to equate popularity with

debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness, domesticity with triviality, and all of

these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority. Melodrama, incorporating all these

elements could only be seen as a woman’s genre, and therefore, as something

representative of women’ s mode of pleasure, surrounded by negative connotations.

First, the psychoanalytic theories, and later the ones about popular and high culture,

create a very negative framework about female spectatorship. Regarding the text as

too powerful and the female subject as determined, through family relations, and

language acquisition, film theorists ignored other considerations, including race,

class, personal background or historical moment when dealing with the responses of

spectators. However, the recent notion of ‘negotiation’10 proposes alternative ways of

9
Christine Gledhill. Home Is Where The Heart Is: Studies In Melodrama and the Woman’s Film
(London: British Film Institute, 1987).
10
For example see Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding”. In Culture, Media, Language, edited by Hall et
al., (London: Hutchinson, 1980).
 9

bringing together opposite sides. For Gledhill11, as a model of meaning production,

negotiation conceives cultural exchange as the intersection of processes of production

and reception, in which overlapping but non-matching determinations operate.

Meaning is neither imposed, nor passively imbibed, but rises out of struggle or

negotiation between competing frames of reference, motivation and experience.

Gledhill argues that, melodramatic narratives can be understood as both

foregrounding and testing the contradictions between desire and duty in mainstream

definitions of femininity. She claims that contemporary melodrama enacts moral

dilemmas in different ways than their progenitors. They are nonetheless linked to

their need to identify the good and evil in their scenarios of persecuted innocence.

However, Gledhill suggests that modern melodrama draw on contemporary

discourses for the apportioning of responsibility, guilt and innocence, such as

psychoanalysis, gender roles, politics, and feminism. Melodramatic rhetoric must be

seen as evolving, operating in terms of key debates within contemporary society

which themselves evolve.

Titanic, may be a costume drama, set in a long gone era, but makes use of current
12
issues and debates. The very theme story of Titanic enhances that. Steven Biel in

his book notes how the physical tragedy of Titanic was turned into a cultural tragedy

by the media and institutions, in 1912. Titanic’s sinking came to signify the end of an

old world and the beginning of a new one. Biel notes that Titanic was a masterpiece

of technology in the 1912. Its luxury was a sign of the division of classes and the

enormous wealth of the upper classes. The fact that both immigrants and first class

passengers died the same way that fateful night made people realise that no man was

noble or powerful enough when faced with natural disasters. Moreover, the sinking of

11
See Christine Gledhill, “ Pleasurable Negotiations”. In Female Spectator Looking at Film and
Television, edited by E. Deidre Pribram, (London: Verso, 1988), 64-89.
 10

an unsinkable ship, challenged the sacred American belief in progress. Statements

circulated in the press claiming that humanity in the twentieth century would fall prey

to technologies it lacked the wisdom to control. Biel saw the sinking of Titanic as

neither a catalyst nor cause, but as an event that has exposed and came to represent

anxieties about modernity –about deeper changes that were occurring regardless of

whether an ocean liner struck an iceberg and sank in the spring of 1912. It was a

highly dramatic moment- a kind of ‘social drama’ in which conflicts were played out

and American culture in effect thought out loud about itself.

The fears and concerns that occupied the minds of people then seem to occupy our

minds today. At the verge of a new century, the recent technological innovations,

both in computers and networks as well as in medicine challenge our belief in

progress. There are countless debates about the power and utility of the internet, as

well as the danger of cloning in today’s societies. Feminists have argued against the

male orientation of technology and the female body in the new medical discourse.

Moreover, women’s position has changed considerably the coming years after the

tragedy. The circulation of stories, about male passengers dressed up as women in

order to save themselves (since it was ‘women first’) challenged the myth of the male

hero and gentleman. Cameron chooses to focus on three aspects, which are present,

today, as much as they were in 1912: technology, class and ethnicity differences and

gender roles.

Taking Gledhill’ s 11 points about melodrama into mind we can investigate the context

of Cameron’ s movie in depth. Gledhill argues that melodrama’s plot is always about

the struggle between good and evil. In Titanic, Rose is struggling against her

oppressive class and gender position. When her romance with Jack stars to flourish,

then both of them are placed first against her mother, her fiancée Cal and his
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bodyguard. Then against the fast sinking ship, which is the creation of a male

irrational culture, obsessed with progress and profit, which threatens their lives and

union.

Rose, as the main character of the movie, is the heroine of the melodrama, and thus

faced with a feminine position which has long served as a powerful and ambivalent

patriarchal symbol. But also, through feminist cultural history, as a figure that can not
11
be fixed in her function as a patriarchal value. Gledhill notes that usually the

heroines of melodramas combine aspects of the typically ‘feminine’ with an equally

recognisable ‘new’ independence. Rose has both sides in her. At the begging of the

movie, we see her in elegant clothing, appropriate of the era, with an air of

femininity, which then, could only be perfectly made up and strapped around, tightly,

into corsets. Later feminists noted that the dresses of that period were representative

of the women’s position in society and their freedom. Rose’s clothes are

representative of her position. She is dragged around into endless parties and social

gatherings, existing only as Cal’s future wife, and having to behave in a feminine

manner, which dictates her habits, speech and gesture.

Her role is so clear, and no variations are allowed. Her mother reminds her that she is

a woman and their choices are never easy, when she orders her to stop seeing Jack.

For a moment there, feeling the burden of responsibility on her solders to reassure the

survival of her family, we see her trying to abandon Jack. Her despair and sadness

makes us, as viewers to sympathise with her. Not just because she is there, on screen

as the main heroine of the movie, but also because, the struggle by women to escape

their gender roles, as defined by patriarchy, is a familiar one for female audiences

today. Faithful to the current debates within feminist discourse, the gendered position
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of Rose in the movie is one of submission, but at the same time of negotiation and

resistance.

From an early point in the movie, with the help of voice-over narration, we can see

that Rose is not a victim, and not willing to accept the fate of her gender and class

position. Size or luxury does not easily impress her; she is highly critical of her social

circle and not afraid to talk back to them, when they try to control her. Rose ‘s

desperate attempt to escape her fate by committing suicide, brings out the

melodramatic side of her female character but also her determined and free nature,

which prefers death over enslavement. Suspense builds up, as Jack tries to convince

her not to jump. That is the begging of the love affair that will constitute the core of

the film, and stage the drama, when the two lovers will try to escape certain death,

due to the sinking of Titanic. Cameron12 focuses deliberately the drama around Rose

and Jack The against-the-odds love affair between them, is the element he uses to

draw audiences’ sympathy towards the fate of Titanic, which otherwise seems all-too

familiar and worn out.

The scenes that capture their meeting and long walks and talks on board of Titanic

have the air of 40’s romance movies. Jack captures her attention, teaches her to be

herself and how to have fun. For the rest of the movie, he seems to be there to take

care of her and protect her from the patriarchal forces that try to put her back to her

place, as the well-brought up wife-to-be of a rich man. He seems to be the reason

Rose transforms herself from a victim of her class and gender to this strong, both

physically and emotionally, woman. Phyllis Crème13 notes in her article that an image

of a woman transformed by the look of a man continue to be an emblem of romantic

12
See Titanic’s Official Web Sight, “ The Ship of Dreams: The Making of Titanic”[www page] (The
Titanic Official Web Sight) [cited 23 November 1999]; available from
http://www.Titanicmovie.com/present/mi_proanote_2.html
13
Phyllis Crème, “Love Transforms: Variations on a Theme in Film and Soap”. In Fatal Attractions:
Rescripting Romance in Contemporary Literature and Film, edited by Lynne Pearce and Gina
Wisker, (London: Pluto Press, 1998), 128.
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film. She argues that such scenes retain their appeal for viewers because it summons

up the trace of what we have lost and continue to long for: an experience of total,

unconditional love that in real life is no longer attainable, but has its origins in the

mother-baby relationship.

Close up shots of the two lovers emphasises the idealisation of their love affair and

explains the highly emotional address the love story of Titanic stirs in its audiences.

In addition to that, scenes of the couple looking in each other’s eyes, as the highly

romantic music, composed by James Horner, play on the background, manages to

create an atmosphere that engage the audiences with the two lovers. Mary Ann

Doane 6 notes that music is the register of the sign, which bears the greatest burden in

this type of text-its function is no less than that of representing that which is

unrepresentable: the ineffable. Desire, emotion, the very content of the love story, is

not accessible to a visual discourse but demand the supplementary expenditure of a

musical score. Cameron 14, speaking of the music in his movie and the style of the

love story he scripted, verify both Doane and Crème’ s explanations of the highly

emotive responses of audiences to the movie. He states that Horner’ s music “has

made us one with Jack and Rose, feeling the beating of their hearts as they experience

the kind of love we all dream about, but seldom find”.

However, Rose’s transformation within the plot does not seem to be totally due to the

fact that Jack loves her. Kate Winslet 12 says about the character of Rose and the love

affair between her character and Jack, that “ Jack is the first person, the first man

certainly, who has shown interest in her desires and her dreams. They share so many

of the same passions for life, which he’s already attained and to which she’s

aspiring”. We see her willing to jump off the ship, because she sees no way out from

14

James Cameron as quoted in the cover pages of James Horner, Music From the Motion Picture
TITANIC ( Sony Entertainment Inc.: 1997)
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her gendered and classed position, and in Jack she finds a way out, a change to do all

the things she is not allowed to with Cal. Moreover, her decision to go against her

mother’s wish never to see Jack again, and Cal’s wish to treat her as an object to be

spoilt and controlled, has an element of irrationality, bearing in mind the era the

movie is set on, which could be attributed to love. However, the movie so far portraits

her as an intelligent woman, who from the time she boards Titanic knows for sure

that she can not live the life she lived so far. Thus, her decision to stay with Jack,

against everybody’s wish, is not just because of love, but also because it is her ticket

out of a world she suffocates in.

The interaction between the two lovers, especially during the scene when Rose and

Jack sneak into Rose’s room and she asks him to draw her naked, can be seen as

highly voyeuristic. The constant close-up scenes on Jack’s eyes as he views Rose

naked and draws her into paper, sketching out each bit of her body, brings to mind the

‘male gaze’ of the director, the editor and finally the spectator. Titanic’ s context, in

some instances might reinforce the notion of voyeurism, as for instance when Jack

firsts sees Rose on the deck or when upper class male passengers congratulate Cal on

his choice of wife, but it manages to challenge it in others.

In the first scenes of the movie, audiences see Rose wearing Edwardian dresses, that

hide out her body, and squeeze it in tight corsets. Her hair is always made up, and

tighten up. Before the naked scene, we she her untighting them in a slow motion and

looking herself in the mirror. Later, as she walks into the room tells to Jack, who

looks at her stunt, that ‘the last thing she wants is another picture of her looking as a

porcelain doll’. Therefore, Rose’s naked body does not signify so much voyeurism,

but rather her sense of freedom and her birth right to reclaim her body. Close up shots

of her gaze as she lies naked, signifies her control of the ‘male gaze’.
 15

After that scene, her appearance and physical gesture changes dramatically. A long

sequence of physical threatening situations takes place, which builds our suspense and

sympathy for the fate of the couple, since we know that Titanic went down that night,

killing 1.500 people. The fragile, feminised, upper class Rose, is transformed into a

physically and emotionally strong heroine. Rose becomes a part of the long tradition

of female heroines in Cameron’s movies, who refuse the violence and irrationality of

men. Rose, like Linda Hamilton and Sigrouney Weaver, in Terminator2 and Aliens, is

transformed into an action heroine 15. The first two fight against men’s greed to rule

the world through science and machines, and Rose trapped in the ‘grander ship in the

world’, the result of men’s arrogance and ambition for technological progress, tries to

escape their patriarchal views and death, when their ‘masterpiece’ sinks.

In all his three movies, Cameron reverses the traditional conception of masculine

associated with rationality and feminine with irrationality. The owners decision to

push the engines of Titanic in order to ‘make the headlines’, ignoring the iceberg

warnings and men’s amazement and preoccupation with size, strength and speed on

board the Titanic, are similar to the logic of endless profit present in the male

characters of his two previous movies. Rose, like Hamilton and Weaver, is there to

mock and point out the dangers of this irrationality, and carry hope. Rose’s narration

of what happened on Titanic restores its human dimension to both viewers and Lovett

and his crew’s mind who see Titanic as a goldmine.

Set in a futuristic time, Cameron’s two previous movies portray the female body as

tamed and muscular. This new musculature of Hamilton and Weaver’s bodies is the

verifiable sign of their mastery over their fate and their bodies, which is seen as

15
See Hilary Randner, “New Hollywood’s new women: Murder mind-Sarah and Margie”. In
Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, edited by Steve Neale and Murray Smith, ( London: Routledge,
1998). 247.
 16

16
empowering for women. Susan Bordo notes that in contemporary culture of glossy

fashion magazines for women, muscles become the symbol of correct attitude. It

means that one ‘cares’ about oneself, suggesting willpower, energy and control. For

Bordo, however, muscles express managed sexuality that is not about to erupt in

unwanted and embarrassing display. She believes that women’s desires are by their

very nature excessive, irrational, threatening to erupt and challenge the patriarchal

order, and that is why the body, in contemporary culture has to be controlled through

its slender image. Hollywood seems to follow that logic, promoting model like

actresses to major roles. Jackie Stacey17 notes that female spectators in her research

regard ‘image’ as central in the definition of ‘successful’ femininity in patriarchal

culture. Given the extend to which female stars function in Hollywood cinema

through their status as objects of visual pleasure; female spectators use them to

connect the self to the ideal.

Kate Winslet’ s body, which is closer to the average woman’s bodyweight, and her

promotion to one of the leading roles of the decade, bridges the gap between the self

and the ideal and enhances to a bigger extend identification. Even though magazines

attacked her for her bodyweight, she would, in interviews attack the male-dominated

Hollywood logic back, by talking about her endless efforts to lose weight and her

realisation that success has noting to do with it:

“…as soon as I’m allowed out of the corset, they decided to criticise me physically.

And I thought, Right, I’ve been nominated for two Academy Awards; I just played the

lead in the highest grossing film ever in the world. And guess what- I am not

Skinny.”18

16
See Susan Bordo. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture and The Body, ( London:
University Of California Press, 1993).
17
See Jackie Stacey, “Hollywood Memories”. Screen, Vol. 35, No. 4 (Winter 1994): 317-335.
18
See Holly Millea, “As Kate Would Have It”. Premier, November 1999, 104.
 17

Winslet can be seen as talking for a majority of women, who fight with diets and end

up feeling useless. Having a big star like her attacking the body politics created by

Western culture that connects slenderness to success is not usual practice of

Hollywood film stars and allows lots of women to identify with her.

CONCLUSION

Through my research for the movie, I have noticed a considerable trend. Most

critiques about the movie, written by male critics, point out to the great box-office

success of Titanic, and focus exclusively on the amazing visual effects it provides for

the viewers. On the contrary, women critics, focus more on the emotional respond it

brings, through its intimate story about the two lovers, the use of pretty pictures and

costumes and finally the recording of the full scale of the human tragedy on board the

Titanic after it hit the iceberg. Peter Kramer 1 notes in his article that the reason for

this may be male prejudice and dislike of love stories, which is another common-

sense view held by Hollywood executives and confirmed by audience research. It is

against this trend that the success of Titanic is so remarkable, yet this trend in

Hollywood thinking also helps to explain the film’s success.

Hollywood’ s constant neglect of female audiences, even though in the 1990’s, they

were the reason for the creation of two of the biggest hits of all times, Pretty Woman

and Ghost, meant that a ready-made audience of women for a major new women’ s

film came into existence. Taking on board both the traditional theory about cine-

psychoanalysis and the recent theory of ‘negotiation’, I have tried to offer a

contextual analysis of the possible reasons why, Titanic attracted such a big female

audience. Its mainstream realise, limits the films potential for in depth exploration of

relationships, situations and characters, but its humanistic theme and female
 18

protagonist creates a field for the portrayal of female subjectivity, which is rare in

mainstream films, and long-missed by female audiences.

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