History Headscratchers / Titanic1997

*** 'Necromantically adulterous obsession'? Really? There's nothing (outside of the ''extremely'' subtle possible-hint mentioned above) to suggest Rose didn't love her husband or wasn't a perfectly faithful and loyal wife to him, or that she spent the years pining over Jack to the point where it destroyed her relationships; just that a secret part of her always loved Jack. Which, granted, maybe sucks for the other guy, but that's love -- no one said it was simple.

** As for taking turns, that wouldn't have worked either--even if Jack had agreed to such a thing, by the time they deemed it time to switch he probably would have been too frozen/his limbs too weak for him to climb onto the door. Plus they both would have been worn out and numb from the cold so their movements would have been more sluggish, and repeatedly switching places would lead to repeated dunkings that would only make the cold and frozenness worse.

** He doesn't mean Cedar Rapids is literally dead. He means that the place is 'dead' in the sense that there's nothing fun or exciting to do there, not so much in the sense that it's a failed city. Having never been to Cedar Rapids personally, I can't comment on whether this is true or not, but presumably the person to whom Lewis spoke about Cedar Rapids about had an incredibly boring time there.

*** To be fair, Ismay isn't portrayed that badly. Sure he was business-minded, but when the reality of the situation hit, he seemed to be in state of shock and didn't get off the ship until one of the last boats.

** It wasn’t even the same officer: Cal tried and failed to bribe Murdoch, who committed suicide shortly before the Cal-and-kid scene.

** Of course most people don't know about the ''Titanic'' sinking. This happened in 1912. What happened two years after? WorldWarOne broke out. I guarantee that most of them will associate the 1910s to WorldWarOne, not the ''Titanic''.
*** Maybe people born after 1985 who missed the unavoidable massive hoopla over the discovery of the wreck by Dr. Robert Ballard. And if the above Troper thinks that anyone in that post-1985 category could have accurately told you when WorldWarOne happened before ''Series/DowntonAbbey'' made it trendy, they have a great deal more faith in the average American viewer than me, or most movie executives, and clearly has never seen JayLeno do his Jay Walking segments....

** Titanic was a real ship, with two sister ships, Olympic and Britannic. The specification of the watertight compartments in the movie is accurate to the blueprints the first two of these ships was built to (Britannic's watertight compartments were modified during construction in light of what happened to Titanic). They were built to specific specifications that protected the ship against the accidents that her builders were able to imagine. More precisely, the floodability specifications for Titanic were that she was able to remain afloat with any two compartments flooded (which protected the ship against being T-boned by another ship at the junction between compartments), or all of her first four compartments flooded (protecting the ship against a head-on collision). A glancing blow against an object that scraped against the hull for a third of its length was not an eventuality that the builders considered, because it seemed so far-fetched as to not require protecting against. And honestly? They were right. No ship prior or since Titanic has been sunk by a glancing blow from an iceberg, and floodability specifications for modern ships are in fact still pretty similar to the ones Titanic was built to. Why didn't the watertight bulkheads extend higher and why weren't they topped off with watertight decks? MoneyDearBoy. A highly compartmentalized hull has no room for grand staircases or extensive dining saloons or Turkish baths or squash courts, and the crew would be kept from moving easily from one compartment to the next, making shift changes a long, drawn-out procedure. There was a ship that was built with far more compartmentalization than Titanic, the SS Great Eastern. This ship was extremely robust, but the compartments heavily compromised the amount of usable space below decks and made it difficult to move around inside the hull. She ended up being a financial disaster for her builders. The bulkheads were intended to prevent a single hole from allowing water into the entire length of the hull, and in that goal they were watertight. The layout of watertight compartments was demonstrated as effective in 1911, when Olympic was T-boned by the HMS Hawke, puncturing her hull at the junction of two watertight compartments, resulting in two compartments flooding. She didn't sink, and was able to make it back to port for repairs. Olympic survived several more collisions during her career (the deliberate ramming and sinking of a U-boat during WorldWar1 and the unintentional ramming and sinking of the Nantucket lightship in the 30s).

** He doesn't mean Cedar Rapids is literally dead. He means that the place is 'dead' in the sense that there's nothing fun or exciting to do there, not so much in the sense that it's a dying or failed city. Having never been to Cedar Rapids personally, I can't comment on whether this is true or not, but presumably the person whom Lewis spoke to about Cedar Rapids about had an incredibly boring time there.

** Also, this is apparently the first time that Rose has mentioned to anyone in her family that oh, by the way, I survived the sinking of the ''Titanic''. Given that that's a pretty big thing to leave out of a person's biography, one perhaps can forgive Granddaughter for being a little skeptical that this hasn't come up before at ''some'' point.

*** TVTropes will improve your life? Who knew?

** Suzy Amis, who played Rose's granddaughter, was 34 when the film was shot. Assuming the character is the same age, that would mean Rose was 67 when she was born. She could have given birth to her father in her thirties and then he fathered the granddaughter in his thirties, so the age is within realm of possibility.

*** We don't really know what their itinerary was. A "Grand Tour of Europe" was very popular with wealthy Americans (especially the nouveau-riche) during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Cal could've planned the Europe-bound trip aboard one of the French liners t, which catered to the American clientele even more than their British competition due to their very ostentatious interiors and such novelties as casinos and coffee shops. The ship would've docked at either Le Havre or Cherbourg, and Cal's party would've taken a train to Paris to begin their vacation. After several stops around such fashionable cities as Vienna, Amsterdam, Geneva, Venice, and maybe even St. Petersburg, they would've ended their trip in London and then taken a train to Southampton to board the brand new White Star Liner [i]Titanic[/i], which would take them to New York, and then home to Philadelphia by train. These types of trips were very common among the cream of East Coast high society. The first leg of the trip would begin in either England, France, or Germany (where major transatlantic hubs were located) and end back in New York via one of those ports as well.

** There's also the issue that you can't safely evacuate a ship when it's still moving. When Lusitania was torpedoed in 1915, she lost all steam pressure almost immediately so she lost her ability to stop herself by reversing her now dead engines, and she spend most of the rest of her life coasting to a gradual stop. Given how rapidly she was sunk, the crew couldn't wait for the ship to stop moving before launching lifeboats and were forced to do so while she still had significant headway. Many lifeboats were overturned, flooded or smashed to matchwood as they hit the water. In 1917, Britannic (The larger sister ship to Titanic, converted to a hospital ship) hit a mine and started flooding. The captain thought they were close enough to shore to beach the ship and attempted to do so, but when they tried launching lifeboats with the engines still turning, one was sucked into the propellers (which were starting to rise out of the water) and smashed to pieces, killing its occupants. You can't safely launch lifeboats from a moving ship.

*** Fair enough, if you're in the neighborhood you'd want to see both if possible. So why not do London first, then Paris? The big shopping spree mentioned in the movie was in Paris, and while the money involved in shipping all their purchases to the UK before putting them on a ship that's going past France again anyway is obviously not going to be an issue (including insurance for the trip, etc), it's still a big hassle from a logistics standpoint. A little planning ahead to minimize the distance you have to travel with all your paintings and diamonds and other stuff wouldn't have gone amiss. I know it's a minor point, but still.

** Or it's just the first "Stop" she made it Heaven, because she and Jack and the people of the Titanic have been waiting almost 90 years to see each other, where as the other people in her life she had seen not quite as long ago, and had spent siginificantly longer with each other. I mean say you have the ability to see whoever you want who's also dead in Heaven. Are you going to see your more recent deceased friends or people that died more than half your life ago first?

** Most people travelling in second class were either crew members or servants to first class passengers, of whom we see plenty. There were others, of course (the priest leading a mass as the ship sank was one such second class passenger) but there weren't that many compared to steerage passengers, to spent part of the movie showcasing them.

*** There's innumerable EdgarAllanPoe short stories and poems on that very theme (the inability of the living to get over the dead). See also: Poe's life.