Titanic, the Timeless Love - Let it GET You!

When the Titanic came back to the theatres in 3D, I had to make a value-judgement whether to spend 210 minutes watching Titanic it was worth the time, after all I knew the story pretty well. My pragmatic side said 210 minutes would be better spent trying to do something useful instead. My sentimental side felt that Titanic was too special to miss. Of course, the sentimental side prevailed. What is life and time worth if it isn't spent cherishing something special? And Titanic IS special!

Even after I had rationalized the worthiness of seeing Titanic again, I had a nagging sense of guilt when I walking into the movie theater. But then the movie started and Titanic got me!

Titanic is a movie that more than anything else depicts the sense of self-transcendence that sometimes seems innate to man. Self-transcendence is man's ability to raise up above and outside of himself and look at himself as an object in the bigger picture. This self-transcendence is what helps man align himself to the context around them and be selfless for the greater good of the bigger cause, whether the cause be to fight for his country or save people in a sinking ship. This self-transcendence is what makes man truly noble. Titanic has many noble souls of his kind, the music troupe leader who stands by himself and plays 'Abide with me', is an oft quoted example.

This self-transcendence is not just about giving up ones life for the greater good. Its scope is very broad. One good example is the ship's Chief Engineer who is alone in the ball room zombie-like realizing that the ship would sink in the next few minutes and he'll go down with it. He stands by the mantle piece, pensive wondering how it all came to this... how the unsinkable was sinking! Just then he looks at his pocket watch and then at the clock in the mantle piece. The clock in the mantle piece is off by a few minutes. He opens it and sets it right. wow... He is about to die, but he still has this deep need to set things right. That is a class example of self-transcendence. Try having Darwin or Marx or Freud explain the self-transcended act of the dying man (without trying to do magic with words).

The idea of self-transcendence is very appealing to the human psyche. Most romantic heroes who fight for  losing causes exhibit this self-transcendence. It is this self-transcendence that makes romance between Rose and Jack special. When Jack first sees Rose on the Deck, he is transfixed in admiration. When Rose is attempting a suicide Jack comes up with the killer punch-line, "you jump, I jump"... Expedient as it was, it really is a powerful statement of self-transcendence. In the novel 'Franny and Zooey', J.D.Salinger writes that 'a man whose throat is cut, and is about to die, when he sees a woman walking over a hill (delicately) balancing the pot of water in her head, will raise up on his elbow to catch a glimpse of her'. It takes a level of self-transcendence to be able to admire objective beauty so selflessly. The statement, "you jump, I jump" has a similar feel to it. Rose is so spectacularly beautiful that it is worth sharing with her, even if it is for the briefest of moments, death. Of course, not all self-transcendce is prudent, but it is romantic nevertheless. It captivates our hearts.

The love between Jack and Rose reaches spectacular heights of self-transcendence... The statement 'You jump, I jump', so defines Rose's life that when she could easily have escaped the sinking ship she decides not to. She wants to be able to share, even if for a few moments, more time with Jack. Yielding to the tug to be with Jack, she jumps off the life boat back into the sinking ship. She and Jack meet again by the ball room stairs and Jack asks her why she did not save herself. She says, "remember... you jump, I jump". They both laugh, in a sinking ship - self-transcendence again. They do not see themselves as people who are about to die. Rather they are objects in the bigger picture of love. Even at the end, when the Titanic breaks and is going down, Jack and Rose are hanging by the rails, Rose turns to him and says, "Do you remember this is where we first met?". They both laugh, the deathly cold waters is just a few yards away and they are smiling in each others arms - self-transcendence. They don't care if they die. They find themselves getting lost in the big picture of being together - love is stronger than death.

Of course, the self-transcendence of their love does not stop there. Rose is floating on some wood. Jack is hanging by her in the water. He knows he wont last long. He wants Rose to live and in 20 seconds his says something so beautiful that those few seconds are worth seeing 210 minutes of the movie. Jack realizes that 'you jump, I jump' had become the lens through which Rose looked at her life. If he died, she would follow too. Before he died, he had to change her life-view lens from, 'you jump, I jump' to something else... something that would make her live. In 20 seconds being the deft artist he is, he brilliantly changes her script from 'you jump, I jump' to 'never let go'.

In shivering cold he tells her, in the last of his breaths... "winning this ticket was the best thing that happened to me... it brought me to you. I am thankful.... DO ME THIS HONOR. Promise me you'll survive... PROMISE me you'll NEVER LET GO". By appealing to the indecipherable power and appeal of self-transcended love, Jack changes Rose's vocabulary of love from 'you jump, i jump' to a promise to 'never let go'. That  is the height of self-transcendence, even though he knows he is about to die and his mind is shutting down, he knows that Rose has to survive with a few words he totally changes the way Rose lives the rest of her life.

When the old Rose recounts her story, she ends saying "Jack saved my life, in more ways than one". He saved her from the attempt on suicide. He saved her from joining him in death. He saves her by appealing to a sense of self-transcendence. This works, because at our core, we are beings that are self-transcended, we aren't just enzymes and hormones. We are not darwinian creations that are driven by what goes on between or ears in terms of survival of the fittest, neither are we Freudian beings driven by the urges of the body orifices, in terms of sexual appetites. We are driven by the spark of the divine put into us in. We are drawn towards seeing the big picture and doing the right thing, even when it is probably not the best thing in terms of our self-interest. But there are times we act selifishly too, Titanic has many an example of that too - reason? Man has dual nature!

The source of this self-transcendence is that we are made in the Image of a Transcended God. Self-transcendence is essential for love. God made us in His Image with the ability to self-transcend so that we'll be truly loving people. The reason why we don't always live up to that self-transcended standard is because we lost the perfect image of God in us during the fall. In our post-fall lost-ness, we still grapple at what should have been our true Image. Even our modern fixation over romance is a symptom of that search for the lost sense of self-transcended love. God not wanting to leave us in the lostness, came down to show us what true self-transcended love looks like on the Cross and thereby to restore in us the Image of Himself. God's saving act is in a sense like Jack's act of saving Rose. Like Jack, God dies in the act of saving us. He sets up the model for self-transcendence and want us to honor it by 'never letting go' of the principle of self-transcendence. He changes the lens through which we look at life from 'Get rich or die trying' or 'Eat drink for tomorrow we die' to a self-transcendence restoring life-lens 'Love God and Love the Neighbor as yourself'.

At the end of Titanic, when everyone has heard Rose's story, the sense of self-transcendence affects the guy who has been hunting the Titanic for the elusive diamond. He looks at Rose's grand daughter and says, "for 3 years Titanic has been my life, but now I realize that never understood the Titanic. Until tonight, I NEVER let it GET me." This rather true of Christian lives, most of the time. We think we know the Cross, we think we know Christ, we think we know what He wants us to do. We know the facts! We make snobbish often subconscious value-judgement that there is nothing to be gained from reading/studying/meditating the Bible. The reason for this nonchalance towards the scriptures is, we look for what we can get from the Scriptures, we NEVER let the Words of Christ GET us. We never let His Cross get us. In fact, that is because of this get-you ability of the Cross that Paul calls the Gospel the 'power of God' and the Cross, a mystery. Even Christ says that when he is raised up, He will draw people to Himself. In our self-absorbed abstinence we sometimes do not allow the Crucified Lord to GET us. We can know the fact of things, but until we allow the Truths to 'GET US', we'll remain indifferent to its mysterious depths and live superficial lives trying to 'get rich or die trying' instead of 'Loving God and Loving our Neighbors as ourselves'.