for reasons i can't get into, i watched Titanic last night for the first time in 20 years, and i'm pleased to report that it is a grand, barbaric, pagan celebration of human sacrifice

altho the frame story is superficially Abyss-like, the films from Cameron's oeuvre to which Titanic bears most resemblance is Aliens and the Terminator films

the portrayal of this ship is positively animist; it's a towering work of modern fetishism that would horrify adorno & horkheimer and yet make michael taussig proud.

in the 90-minute long climax, every rope, lifeboat, table comes alive, transformed by cinematic movement and "fateful" collisions into snakes, crushing behemoths, wild animals slurping up victims. jean epstein would lose his shit.

the flooding of the ship is portrayed less often as a slow burning suspense & more often as a chase sequence, with walls of water pursuing the protagonists in a manner that defies physics but is perfectly recognizable as swarming of Aliens

this "water as bad guy" motif retroactively clarifies, if there were any doubt, the colonial imaginary of Aliens, where the Viet Cong-coded creatures are both the native horde & the embodiment of the humid jungle, threatening the white settlers with psychic & physical dissolution

Titanic, in a sense, recovers and makes explicit the fear of liquid modernity that is beneath the colonial liquifaction anxiety of Aliens, fear of the other always actually being fear of the misrecognized self, the return of the repressed.

(speaking of colonialism, btw, holy shit, the Irish characters in this film are like racist caricatures torn straight out of the 19th Century Anglo-American imaginary. these beshawled, fire-haired, dirt-faced wretches put Emily Blunt in 'Wild Mountain Thyme' to shame)

the ship's gargantuan propellers are the final boss, but as a whole the ship begs comparison to T-1000's incarnation of protean modernity.

the flickering lights as the power fails during the hallway flood/chase sequences are so clearly modeled on the light show of cinematic gun fire (Aliens), it really brings to consciousness that the stupifying trance of flickering lights is of course all gunfights—or cinema—is.

in addition to flashes of Epstein, I saw Vertov (the engine room) & Renoir (The Woman on the Beach). Winslet was on another plane channeling the performance style of early talkies, not just being a contemporary actor in a period drama.

the point's been made (Pervert's Guide...) that Titanic's form undermines its content in classic Cameron fashion: aspiring to criticize the ruling class, it ends up being a story about a rich woman spiritual renewed by vampirically sucking the vitality out of proles.

what i have to add to this point is that, on rewatching, Leo's devotion to saving Winslet is truly fanatical, pathological. their is not the slightest trace of him being an actual human w/ a suffering body of his own. Jack is a pure, psychotic exteriorization of Rose's drives.

Jack is truly trapped in the dream of the other, and therefore fucked—as Deleuze would say. But then again, idk, this absolute derangement, total subversion of self-preservation by death drive, might be the film's most touching homage to the Golden Age of Hollywood.