3/15/2010

Cherry, Ann and Ivan: Class inequality portrayed in Titanic

Media content is supposed to reflect the reality of the world we live in or at least lead people to further think about their familiar or unfamiliar life. In the movie Titanic, James Cameron elaborately portrays the class difference between the first class passengers and the third class passengers represented by Rose and Jack respectively to send the public a message about the social class inequality in the 1910s in England.
Cameron labels Jack Dawson as the third class passenger at the very beginning. Inside a bar beside the departing Ship of Dreams, a group of four young men including Jack are seen playing poker and he finally wins the third class ticket for the Titanic. This scene quickly makes it clear enough to everyone that Jack is a man of no money because it’s obviously that he has neither a good family background nor a decent occupation.
Then comes the description of the leading actress, Rose. She is seen in her stateroom, looking at paintings and marveling at them as she makes to put them up. This scene is a sharp contrast with the setting that Jack is in. The first impression that the director wants to quickly and distinctly let us know by their showing is that Rose and Jack are from different social classes for common sense shows that only poor people play poker and only those who never worry about money and food can have a taste in art.
Cameron then makes fun of this social class inequality a lot of times. First, the France woman Molly whose wealth comes from her husband finding gold tells us the logic that, class is only related to wealth. Only if you are well-off, you can jump into the higher social class and enjoy all the prestige that only the first class passengers have. Second, when Molly puts the jacket of a tuxedo over Jack’s shoulders for attending the dinner provided for the first class passengers, he is dressed in very wealthy clothing and looks like he is to fit right in with the first class crowd. And when Rose shows Jack to Cal and her mother, Cal is very impressed, saying you could almost pass for a gentleman. This arrangement intends to tell us that there are some superficial things that are considered necessary for the first class passengers to strictly stick to in order to preserve their status such as dressing, red-tape and so on.
In addition to this, Cameron also portrays the rich generally bribing their way to freedom, the crew deliberately preventing the poor from reaching safety, and Titanic officers killing a third class passenger. These are all telling us the clear social class inequality on this unsinkable ship-Titanic. Although criticizing on the class inequality may not be the theme of this great movie. It does reflect some truth in the 1910s in the UK that social class inequality is obvious in the whole society. Since at last Jack, from the third class and Rose, from the first class do bridge the big class gap and choose to love each other bravely, Cameron maybe wants to give the audience some hope that class inequality cannot win over everything after all.

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