James Cameron's Titanic as a "Body-Guy" Film

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Today marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the RMS Titanic. Earlier this year, James Cameron marked the occasion by releasing a 3-D version of his 1997 film Titanic.

In their book Lady Chatterley's Legacy in the Movies: Sex, Brains, and Body Guys, Peter Lehman and Susan Hunt note that Titanic is the most well-known film within what they call the "body-guy" genre – a genre that has "flourished virtually unnoticed for the past twenty years." Other films in this genre include Two Moon Junction (1988), The Piano (1993), Legends of the Fall (1994), The Bridges of Madison County (1995), Lawn Dogs (1997), Fight Club (1999), Enemy at the Gates (2001), The Notebook (2004), and Australia (2008). Lehman and Hunt trace the genre's manifestation in the modern era to the 1928 publication of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, a novel that "pits an intellectual, paraplegic, impotent upper-class landowner against his virile gamekeeper for his wife's affections, with the latter winning out in all ways."

In the following excerpt from Lady Chatterley's Legacy, Lehman and Hunt define the "body-guy" genre and discuss the ways in which it is exemplified in James Cameron's Titanic.

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For his epic [Titanic], writer-producer-director James Cameron masterfully intertwines a broad array of genres: romance, action, adventure, and historical drama. The film belongs to yet another category, which has flourished virtually unnoticed for the past twenty years: the "body-guy" genre, as we call it. In the genre's classic form, a beautiful, intelligent, but discontented woman is engaged or married to a cultured, intellectual, upper-class male. The woman's discontent is quelled when a working-class man, often tied closely to the land, awakens her sexuality and energizes her life. The body guy's masculinity and sexuality are so compelling that he rescues the woman from the stultifying world of the successful "mind guy," who is boring, controlling, and, significantly, a poorer lover who fails to recognize, let alone fulfill, her sexual needs.

Titanic contains many of the genre's key conventions. From the ship's lower tier, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), a penniless itinerant worker, sights the beautiful, well-dressed Rose (Kate Winslet), above him on a deck reserved for the far-from-penniless. He knows in an instant that her beauty is tinged with melancholy. With equal immediacy he knows that he has the right stuff to fix whatever is haunting her. The two meet when Jask prevents Rose from committing suicide. Soon, he is whisking her away from the upper-deck dining room and her cultured but arrogant fiance, Cal (Billy Zane), to show her a good time at a "real party" in steerage. Cal quietly sips his cognac over conversation about politics and business while inarticulate men in steerage happily fall down drunk. The fun continues for Jack and Rose when they have first-time sex in the back of a car in the ship's frigid cargo hold. Even though they have just fled from Cal's assistant, who pursued them with a gun, Jack's sexual performance is perfect. In a graphic image, we see Rose's hand slap against the rear window and trace a pattern in the steamy condensation, the PG-13 signal of intense orgasm from vigorous penetration sex. To confirm our imagination, the next shot shows Jack and Rose in afterglow, their bodies glistening with sweat. At this point, there's no going back for Rose. She risks her own death to be with Jack, who, as she says, "saved her in every way a person could be saved."

. . . Typical of body guys in the pattern, Jack is a manual laborer, but he is somewhat unusual in that he's also an aspiring artist. He is, however, far from intellectual. Jack lived in Paris at the height of the modernist movement, a time when artistic style and political action coalesced, but he seems untouched by the innovative milieu, sketching instead in a highly conventional, realist style against which the philosophical artists rebelled. Perhaps most key to his body-guy status. Jack sketches female nudes and body parts, and his models are prostitutes. His art is that of the sexed body and the working-class street. In one of the film's integral scenes, he sketches Rose nude in what becomes a type of foreplay. His art, his sexuality, and body-guy persona are fused.

Jack's masculinity is dramatically privileged over Cal's, so emotion reigns over intellect. In establishing the mind/body opposition in this manner, Cameron plugs firmly into an anti-intellectual ideology so familiar to American culture. He reinforces the popular myth that the mind is a boring place – a site that could never be stimulating, erotic, or even fun. Those qualities are attached instead to the party in steerage. When Jack urges Rose to dance, she says, "I don't know the steps," to which he replies, "Neither do I. Go with it. Don't think." When Rose tells Jack that she will go with him when the ship docks, he says, "That's crazy," to which Rose responds, "I know. It doesn't make sense. That's why I trust it."

The world of the mind represented by Cal and other "real-life" men on the Titanic such as Benjamin Guggenheim and John Jacob Astor is dismissed as the "snake pit" by the loveable nouveau-riche but social pariah, Molly Brown (Kathy Bates). Obviously, the first-class world of cigars, cognac, and conversation could be presented as one of pleasurable vitality rather than deadly boredom, and just as obviously, Rose could find erotic fulfillment with a man from that world. And, indeed, the film potentially contains such a man in the character of Thomas Andrews (Victor Garber), the designer of the Titanic.

. . . Perhaps the most compelling similarity between Andrews and Jack is that they both "see something" in Rose. Although Andrews may seem to be a type of father figure, he appears barely middle-aged, and his place within the narrative structure makes it clear that Cameron could just as easily have made him a potential lover for Rose – one who attractively represents the world of the mind. Although Jack and Andrews are linked, the relationship between Rose and Andrews functions ultimately to emphasize the impotence of the educated, upper-class man as compared to working-class potency. Jack is able to motivate Rose and effect her survival in a way that Andrews cannot. As the ship is sinking, Andrews' parting words to Rose are, "I'm sorry that I didn't build you a stronger ship." Not surprisingly, the most iconic image from the film celebrates the liberating bodily experience Jack provides as and Rose stand on the ship's prow, sensuously feeling the rush of the wind; the "king of the world" moment.

– Peter Lehman and Susan Hunt
Lady Chatterley's Legacy in the Movies: Sex, Brains, and Body Guys
pp. 1-4

Related Off-site Links:
Prayers and Silence Mark Titanic Centenary – Jill Lawless and Lefteris Pitarkis (Associated Press, April 15, 2012).
Titanic Anniversary: Ship's Gay Passengers Revealed in New Research – The Huffington Post (April 13, 2012).