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Obsession:
Titanic has gripped the imagination for a century, spawning literature, movies, songs, poems, and artifact exhibits. Objects recovered from the wreckage drew huge crowds at traveling galleries and permanent Titanic museums in Missouri and Tennessee. Hundreds of books have included Walter Lord's 1955 classic A Night to Remember, based on extensive interviews with survivors. Motion picture accounts appeared shortly after the sinking. In 1912, actress Dorothy Gibson, a Titanic passenger, starred in a ten-minute fictionalized movie. For her costume, she used the dress she wore into the lifeboat that saved her. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels oversaw creation of a 1943 movie blaming the sinking on British corruption and ineptitude.
Spoofs included Ghostbusters II in 1989, depicting a spectral version of the ship dropping its passengers in modern New York ("Well, better later than never," says a dockworker) and 1981's Time Bandits, in which a time traveler on Titanic's deck orders champagne "with plenty of ice." Serious versions included a 1958 filming of Lord's book and James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster, Titanic. For exteriors set in 1912, he ordered construction of a replica off Baja California. Cameron's version won 11 Academy Awards and ranked as history's highest-grossing movie for 12 years. Titanic's cultural memes, or messages imitated and passed to new audiences, include variations of two young lovers from Cameron's movie standing at the prow with arms outstretched, and the ship's band playing as it sank -- the latter parodied in 2007's The Simpsons Movie.
Disaster experts say widespread knowledge of Titanic's story has influenced perceptions of other major tragedies. For example, some ferryboat operators repeated Captain Smith's order, "Women and children first," when taking desperate passengers across the Hudson River to New Jersey during the attacks of September 11, 2001. |