Titanic/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The Heart of the Ocean. Why does Rose drop it in the ocean? WHY!?!?
    • She's incredibly old and the money won't do her much good. Either that or she's senile. And it's called the Heart of the Ocean. What did you expect?
    • She knew that if she gave it away, the meaning would be lost. It was her one connection to Jack since he touched it and drew her wearing it but it was also a gift from Cal so she probably was torn in terms of meaning. Give Cal's gift away or keep Jack's symbol? It was, in a way, a symbol of everything she loved and hated about Titanic.
    • That she give it to her granddaughter maybe?
    • Start an Art School in Jack's memory?
      • Either that, or give it to the Chippewa Falls School Corporation. Jack Dawson High School has a nice ring to it.
    • Even though it's worth a lot of money she probably didn't want to be reminded of her Jerkass of a fiance Cal who had given her the necklace in the first place. It was just her way of saying "Screw you, you bastard." Or perhaps it was because Cal had basically been treating her like a possession rather than a person, and had given her the necklace to mark her as such. By getting rid of the thing it was also her way of saying "I'm not some porcelain doll that you own."
      • She can get rid of it just fine by selling it.
    • She didn't want to earn money from the best/worst time of her life. This is why Bill Paxton's character has the discussion with her granddaughter. "But I never got it". Rose knew he and his crew were only interested in earning money from their expeditions rather than realising the loss of life behind the tragedy. It's made rather clear about a million times throughout the film that Rose doesn't give a toss about money, status or wealth.
    • The symbolism of "her heart goes on", I think. It shows that her heart truly belonged to Jack her whole life, and giving the Heart of the Ocean back symbolized this. Of course, if you think about it, it means that she spent her whole life in true love with a boy she knew for a week, rather than the man she married. Kinda sad, and it doesn't excuse her throwing away a priceless artifact like that.
      • Of course! She didn't have time to learn Jack's faults. She had plenty of time to learn her husband's and she was to much of an idiot to figure that out.
    • She shouldn't be expected to live alone her entire life because her soulmate died when she was 17. Really. People remarry all the time after losing their initial partner.
      • But once she marries she has to assume her husband is now her soulmate; she promised. At least she should have told him about Jack. And while no one can be expected to keep their feelings under control all the time, making the theme song about emotional adultery with a dead man is a little creepy. Besides her heart is obviously not really "going on".
    • This troper always had the interpretation that Rose, before she passes away, throws the diamond into the ocean to return it to the Titanic (which is underneath the boat from which she does this); the place that she felt it truly belonged.
      • It might also have been her way of honoring the people who'd died on the ship, whose memory was arguably being insulted by the salvage team's profiteering quest for artifacts. In effect, by letting the diamond fall to rest with the wreckage, she was giving them back something precious to make up for all the other mementos that were being removed from what's essentially an underwater graveyard. And by dropping it in secret, she ensured that no one else would know to look for it again.
    • She kept that enormous diamond hidden away someplace through the Great Depression WHY, exactly?
      • Well, she didn't see it as an object with monetary value. It was a precious memory of a major point in her life, and she probably treasured it more than any wealth. Besides, maybe times weren't quite as hard for her during the Great Depression as they were for others- perhaps she struggled, but not so much that she had to beg for food or anything. And (assuming she married her husband before the Great Depresssion) she said that she never mentioned Jack to her husband, so it's more than likely that she was hiding it from him as well (if he had known about it, he would have eventually asked what the story was behind it and how she came to own it, which would almost certainly include her mentioning Jack- and he didn't know about Jack). So he wouldn't have known of the diamond's existence and thus couldn't have taken it and sold it.
    • More to the point, how could she afford the upper class lifestyle shown in her photographs WITHOUT selling the diamond?
      • The guy with the beard mentions at the beginning that she used to be an actress (which was partially why he thought she was a liar). She probably struggled for a while before hitting a streak of luck and launching her career as an actress, then married her husband who was probably rich.
    • More the point, since she mentions Cal's father collected on the insurance, she can't sell it because it's STOLEN PROPERTY. Highly identifiable stolen property. The minute they paid out if it reappeared it belongs to the Hockley's insurance company. She'd have to find a diamond cutter/fence willing to cut it down into small diamonds (which is basically how what was the French Blue became the Hope Diamond. Cutting apparently doesn't cure curses.) Not to mention a diamond like that suddenly appearing on the open market would have been a great big honking signal to Cal and his father that either Rose or Jack had survived.
    • How about this: It's hers and she can do whatever the frell she wants with it, okay?
  • Since someone put an all encompassing answer under What Happened to the Mouse? ("Read the script"), I wonder what happened to the little girl that Cal used to get on a lifeboat? Did he keep her, and raise her as his own daughter? Or did he drop her off at the first orphanage he could find?
    • Once in the lifeboat Cal hands the little girl to a black-haired woman and almost immediately loses any interest in her. If you pay attention to the boat when the deck sinks and the boat nearly capsizes, throwing many passengers into the water, both the woman and the girl manage to stay in it by grabbing the opposite side. The girl appears again in the original longer cut of the Carpathia scene accompanied by the same woman, but Cal doesn't accompany them. It's presumed the woman adopts her afterwards.
    • Pay close attention to the original longer cut of the Carpathia scene. You'll see an unidentified set of male hands gesture for the woman to give him the girl, possibly meaning that he is her father.
    • She most likely has other relatives who weren't on board the ship. Assuming she's old enough to know her own name, she'd presumably be sent to live with her grandparents or aunt and uncle.
  • How the hell did that drawing hold up all those decades? Even if you disregard the fact that the paper itself should have disintegrated in that waterlogged safe, please consider that materials like charcoal and graphite can smudge very easily, and this was well before artists had spray fixative to keep this from happening. 85 years underwater should not have kept that drawing in near-pristine condition.
    • Except letters and such things HAVE been found at the wreck of the Titanic (found in similar places to the pictue, like in a leather wallet or the like), and are still pretty legible and in decent condition. Sure, the picture was an exaggerated case, but it's not completely impossible.
      • Wouldn't those letters have been written in ink? Or at least a relatively hard pencil? Both are reasonably permanent. Jack appears to be drawing with either a piece of vine charcoal or a very soft graphite stick. Both of those smudge like crazy. Just blowing on a vine charcoal drawing can smudge it. I can buy that, safely inside a leather portfolio, the drawing could be preserved for decades... but then they show someone using something like a Water Pik to to wash the mud off of it... and it's not even slightly smudged.
  • Putting speculation aside, let's say that Rose died and went to Titanic heaven at the end where she spends eternity with Jack. That's sweet and all, but what about Rose's husband? We assume she loves him, too, so do the two guys just share her? Or does she ditch her husband for Jack?
      • Jesus was actually asked that question in The Bible(about a hypothetical widow with the Cartwright Curse). He said that marriage(and presumably romance) was an earthly thing and presumably that love works a different way in heaven.
    • Just because they went to heaven doesn't mean her husband did. Maybe he's in the other place.
    • Ever heard of settling? Jack was her soulmate.
    • Who's to say that her husband didn't have memories of his own, from another shipwreck?
    • It wasn't really heaven, it was just a dream she had so she could die peacefully.
      • James Cameron said that he won't say whether the ending was her dying or dreaming since he prefers to leave it to the audience's interpretation, so it's still up for speculation.
    • There's no reason why her husband couldn't have been a fellow Titanic survivor. She just refuses to talk about it.
    • Do we even know for sure her husband is dead? For all we know, she robbed the cradle and her husband is a hale-and-hardy septuagenarian.
      • "Now Calvert's dead and from what I hear Cedar Rapids is dead." Her husband is dead.
    • Maybe time works differently in heaven. Her seventeen-year-old self is on the Titanic with Jack and her older self is off somewhere reuniting with her husband.
    • Maybe she got divorced sometime in last eighty years.
  • Why did Rose hide from Cal at the end of the movie, instead of giving him back his jacket and the priceless diamond that was his to begin with? If he'd had it, he could have sold it during the Great Depression and wouldn't have killed himself.
    • Why would she go back with an abusive, controlling, condescending man who treats her like a possession? Especially when she's free of her mother's control and can now make her own decisions. Also remember, she's only 17. Cal would be pretty terrifying to her.
    • She didn't remember she had the diamond then. Plus she didn't want to show herself 'cause she hates the guy.
    • Besides, even assuming he could find a buyer after the Crash, he couldn't possibly have regained his entire fortune just from selling one diamond. He'd still be ruined, just slightly less ruined than he might've been.
    • To be fair, he did in fact give it to her. Even the excavators comment it was bought as a gift to her. If you think about it, Cal killed Jack by framing him for stealing that diamond. If he hadn't been handcuffed below deck, he might have made it out alive. As such, why give it back to Cal? Why does he deserve it? She also risks him taking possession of her again and forcing marriage if she reveals her identity.
      • Wouldn't the right thing to do then be to at least return the diamond to Cal's family after his suicide? Also, if you dump your fiancee aren't you supposed to give back your expensive engagement ring/giant ass blue diamond?
        • 1) No. 2) It's optional. Gifts become the other person's property once they receive them. Cal bought it for her and gave it to her. It's hers. He was an asshole, so he doesn't get it back, and why should his family, who are both complete strangers and arguably responsible for him being an asshole?
    • Actually it seems like she doesn't know she has the necklace until several hours later. The scene where she hides from Cal is in the daytime, we then see her finding the necklace at night while the ship is passing the Statue of Liberty.
      • Try "days". The scene with Cal searching the Carpathia's boat deck (and presumably everywhere else in their third-class section that survivors were housed) appears to be daytime on the 15th, they day they were rescued. Carpathia arrived in New York on the evening of April 18th, in the accurately-depicted rainstorm. (Now, why Rose STILL has the coat on at that point, and hasn't taken advantage of the fresh clothes given up by Carpathia's passengers and crew, who knows. Maybe she deliberately kept more or less hidden until they arrived, hence them having missed her for three days while getting names of survivors...)
  • Jack's death never broke my heart, even as a kid, because neither he nor Rose made more than one measely attempt to get on the piece of driftwood. It was well big enough for both of them. It's a particularly maddening example of You Fail Physics Forever when both of them pull on it from one side and tip it over. Derrr, there's no possible way it'd work if we both climbed on at the same time from opposite sides, pull each other up, and balance the weight by sitting indian-style in the middle. Or take turns if you absolutely must sit on it one at a time.
    • I think that Jack, after the initial attempt to get onto the driftwood, got scared of making another attempt. If he tries to get on it, even in a logically sound way, and it sinks or flips or whatever, someone else might grab it, it might break or sink, Rose could fall into the water and drown...he decided it wasn't worth the risk and only cared that Rose survived.
    • Yeah, in that situation they're not likely to be thinking clearly. They're in a lot of pain, their muscles are seizing up from the cold making it difficult to swim and they know that every second they spend in the water is less time for them to live. If they'd tried to plan it out like 'ok, you swim around that side, then on the count of three we both try to get on etc' it would have, as mentioned above, made it more likely that someone else would take the door or that Rose would die. Remember, she was a sheltered high society girl. She wasn't used to strenuous physicial activity. And she was wearing heavier clothes. And being female, she's just physicaly weaker to begin with. She wouldn't have lasted nearly so long in the water as Jack did, so he wasn't going to take any chances with her safety. Also, it may not be so much that the door would flip, it could also be that their combined weight would make it sink. What bugs me, is that there is no argument about who gets the door. She doesn't even try to convince him to take it instead of her.
      • Probably because she knew he would not have it and order her onto the driftwood. Besides, like you said, every second in the freezing water equals a lesser chance of them surviving.
      • When Rose was on the piece of driftwood, the driftwood almost tipped over because it was so imbalanced. Jack had to hold onto that part of the driftwood to keep Rose's part from tipping over. It was a combination of a stupid sacrifice and a Heroic One.
        • Next time you're in the shower, put the water temperature to freezing and see how coherent and sensible your decision making is. Chances are the only thing you'll be thinking is "GETOUTGETOUTGETOUT" as you rush to turn the tap off. Times that by about a thousand, add in 1500 other people freezing to death around you and a decent amount of shock mixed with exhaustion, not to mention Rose's almost drowning just seconds before. I went to a Titanic exhibition and they had a real iceberg set up and was kept at the temperature it would've been back then. You could touch it and let me tell you, it hurt. Bad. I can only imagine swimming in it in a flimsy dress.
          • But, person above me, Rose was completely fine the LOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNGGGGGG time she was splashing around in the bowels of the ship in that same "freezing" water. Didn't faze her in the slightest. I mean from the evidence presented in those scenes, it's clear that the ocean water was only about the temperature of a lukewarm bathtub. When Jack says "it hits you like a thousand knives stabbing you all over your body. You can't breathe. You can't think. At least, not about anything but the pain," he's just exaggerating to keep her from jumping. All that agonizing screaming from the other passengers in the water was just people beings drama queens. Splish splash, I was taking a bath. Long about a Saturday night...
        • Also, Rose was very close to death just before the lifeboat came around. She was beginning to freeze over. If the boat hadn't come at that exact time (remember she had to wake herself up and her hearing was off, too) they both would've died even if they had managed to float on the door somehow. The air itself was freezing. They both essentially had no hope.
        • A deleted scene shows that Jack did in fact try to get on to the piece of wood, only to have it nearly tip over. Jack decides not to make another attempt in order to keep Rose safe and in that moment, is seen realizing that he will likely die, staying in the frigid water.
        • Time and time again people make this assumption that it was the size of the wood that was important. The reason they couldn't both get on it is because the wood was simply not buoyant enough to support the weight of two adults, hence the tipping and sinking the way it did.
        • Interestingly, although the prevailing thought at the time was that women are weaker, it's a proven fact these days that women have a higher resistance to exposure to cold water than men do, because of their thicker layers of body fat. (The female divers of East Asia and Polynesia have exploited this advantage for centuries.) Rose very possibly would have outlasted Jack, although given the amount of time they were left unrescued, she would still have been doomed without the door.
          • I think the very fact that this thought was the "prevailing" thought at the time explains it even more.
          • It must be said though that Rose is built like a twig. A beefier woman may or may not outlast a man but I doubt that applies to her and Jack.
    • I assume Jack was already losing sensation in his legs and didn't want to live life as a cripple.
    • It's probably actually more likely that both would have survived if they both had gotten on the wood. Huddled together, their shared body heat, however little of it there was, would have been able to keep both of them warmer.
  • Why did they portray Bruce Ismay as some kind of selfish, greedy man who only cared about getting to NYC on time rather than the ship is potentially sinking?
    • Because that's the way the urban legend goes, and James Cameron wasn't interested in looking past his preconceived stereotypes.
    • And because Ismay is, to be fair, a rather controversial figure. There are conflicting accounts about him, some more favourable, others less.
  • This is a BIG Headscratcher. How in the nine levels of hell did the Titanic sinking be a spoiler!? We saw the wreck in the ABSOLUTE BEGINNING OF THE FILM, had the guys say things like "...her long fall from the world above", hell, even had one give a blow by blow account to Old Rose as to how the ship sank (which I thought was a bit pointless as she would have known it sank...She was on it). All of this basically says "Ship sank." So WHY were folks going "I didn't know the ship sank!"
    • That always bugged the hell out of this troper too. When the film first came out not only were some common moviegoers actually surprised by the ship sinking; there was even one newspaper critic who stated in his review that having the opening scenes take place in the present "gave away the ending". The only explanation this troper can come up with is that people are stupid and don't pay attention to history.
      • Having not read the review, is it possible the critic meant it gave away the ending that Rose survives?
    • This troper thought the computer simulation at the beginning was sort of a theorization of how the ship sank (maybe to chart the debris or something), and they showed it to Rose so she could confirm whether their model of the sinking was correct.
    • It's highly likely that at least some of these comments were jokes. Although, to be perhaps a bit more generous to those who genuinely didn't know about it, the Titanic -- although a famous shipwreck even before the movie -- was a comparatively minor event in world history, so it's possible that these people simply didn't have a strong grasp of maritime history.
      • But still...context clues!!! You don't have to have a firm grasp on British maritime history to know that once upon a time there was a big ship that sank within the first few minutes of the movie. I mean, A) The movie is called Titanic and B) The movie opened up to a ship that's clearly underwater and rusting away. Case in point: I was eight when this movie came out, I knew nothing about Great Britain other then it was an island off the coast of France, yet my little mind was able to piece togeher that the big rusting ship was Titanic and scenes after the gloomy intro told me that it was from Great Britain circa 1912. It was this movie that got me into history.
      • To again be fair, it's a fairly long movie, and most of those scenes take place in the first ten minutes or so. It's possible it slipped their minds with everything else that was going on. Or they could just not have been paying attention, or could have taken their seats late having missed the opening or something.
    • You think that's bad? You should have seen the reactions to 300.
    • Of course most people don't know about the Titanic sinking. This happened in 1912. What happened two years after? World War I broke out. I gaurantee that most of them will associate the 1910s to World War I, not the Titanic.
  • Yes, Jack froze to death in the water at the end, but don't you think that going into and getting out of the water several times before the ship sank, and running around the freezing air in those soaking wet clothes should have hampered their movement a little?
    • You'll be surprised at how long adrenaline can keep you going.
  • So Rose survives the sinking, and then gives a fake name to one of the crew members of the Carpathia. She says she never sees Cal again, but what about her mother? I know they had a terse relationship, but Ruth went the rest of her life thinking her daughter died AND feeling guilty for not having a great relationship with her?
    • Or better yet: How the hell did Rose avoid eye contact with her mummy on the Carpathia? She calls herself "Rose Dawson" while her mother thinks her girl "Rose Whateverthehell" died. You'd think Mumsie wouldn't be just a tad suspicious that there's a Rose Dawson walking around after she just lost her girl named "Rose"? Oh, and that Cal had apparently decided to not chase her down anymore?
      • Survivors on the Carpathia were separated by class, and her mother had already demonstrated how reluctant she was to mingle with the lower classes. It also took several days to compile a complete list of the names of the survivors, which is why Rose didn't even give her name as "Rose Dawson" until they had already arrived in New York.
      • Additionally, you're attributing Agatha Christie sleuthing to a couple of high society idiots. Rose's mother is implied as presuming Rose was lost in the sinking of the ship. Cal looks for Rose amongst the survivors, but since he doesn't see her, he, too, presumes she was lost at sea.
      • In fairness to Cal that's a pretty fair assumption, given the last he saw the idiots were running DOWN into a sinking ship in freezing waters, and as he doesn't see her anywhere (he at least bothers to go look; charitable assumption is her mother's still in shock) even among the steerage passengers, his choices are 1. she's dead or 2. she's on another boat. Once they get back and it's clear there were no survivors picked up by other ships, the reasonable assumption is she died. No reason to keep reading survivor lists if he already looked on Carpathia and didn't find her. Really morbid question would be if Cal or her mother went to see the bodies brought to Canada by the search vessels to see if Rose was among them. There were many who were never found, and others who were idenfied but unclaimed and buried in the cemetery there.
      • Even if her mother did see the name on a list of survivors later on, and put two and two together, she'd surely also have realized that Rose must've been deliberately avoiding her on the Carpathia. If so, she probably wouldn't have chosen to make contact with her possible daughter, whether for reasons of anger or guilt. As for Cal, he'd already written off their relationship because she ran off with Jack, so would have no reason to look for Rose once she'd had a chance to sell the diamond (or so he'd assume she did).
      • "You'd think Mumsie wouldn't be just a tad suspicious that there's a Rose Dawson walking around after she just lost her girl named "Rose"?" There were over three-thousand people on the Titanic, and the name "Rose" was a fairly common one for ladies at the time. It's hardly entering the realm of the impossible that there be at least two women called 'Rose' on the ship.
        • Actually, there were about 2,200 people on board. The Titanic could have held more than 3,000, but it did not set sail full to capacity. I think the ship could have held about 3,500 people total.
        • Fair enough, you've got me dead to rights there, but the overall point still stands; give or take 800 people, that's still plenty of room for there to be more than one female passenger called 'Rose' on the ship.
    • Pretty much, yeah. It's clear that Rose, for several reasons, wants to create a new life for herself and wants nothing more to do with her mother or that particular circle, and if ever there's an opportunity to fake your death and start again, it's the sinking of the Titanic. Harsh, maybe, but there you are.
    • Theory: Mummy had a life insurance policy on Rose, and actually didn't want to find her daughter since that way she could be declared dead.
  • Towards the end when Cal is shooting at Rose and Jack. Why do they keep going down after they stopped hearing shots? Jack, at least, should know how many bullets that gun could hold, and keep count of how many were shot. The two of them probably could have gotten past Cal by force to get back up on deck.
    • Um, how would Jack possibly know how many bullets that gun could hold? Also, I think he was too busy trying to get himself and Rose somewhere away from the gun-toting lunatic to count the shots. As to why they kept running down? Simple. They were scared and thought Cal was still chasing them, loading his gun up again. As for them being able to fight Cal? Somehow I doubt it because Cal still has the gun and could pistolwhip them if they charged him.
    • A deleted scene reveals that once Cal remembers Rose has the diamond with her he then tells Lovejoy he can keep the diamond for himself if he can get it back from Rose; Lovejoy follows them into the flooding dining room where he fights it out with Jack before Jack and Rose escape into the galley and run down the flight of stairs while they wait for Lovejoy to go up the adjacent flight of stairs. This is why Jack's hair is wet all of a sudden and why he signals for Rose to be quiet. (Lovejoy's fight with Jack also explains why his head is suddenly bloody in his death scene when the ship breaks apart.) They're certainly not going to follow Lovejoy up the stairs and they're not going to try to go back through the dining room because at this point it is now mostly flooded with the main entrance to the dining room underwater. In any event, they then hear the little boy screaming.
  • There were three classes of passengers, Cameron. Four if you count the crew. Who were the single most likely group to have died (you had better odds, in percentage terms, of living if you were a third-class woman than a member of the crew or a second-class man.) Way to forget one group of victims entirely and nearly completely demonize the other (the crew, made more horrible by most of those stewards Rose and Jack were punching and verbally abusing having surely realized early on that they were almost certainly going to die.)
    • Hollywood drama over historical accuracy. Cameron thought it would be more dramatic if the stewards were holding the two back from salvation than actively trying to get them off the ship.
    • This is also to a degree Truth in Television; it's documented that the stewards in many cases tried to prevent steerage passengers from getting to lifeboats on the top decks, usually under the misapprehension that they were supposed to do the top decks first or that the steerage section had it's own emergency procedures and lifeboats (or, less favourably simply out of good old-fashioned class snobbery). Granted, I don't believe they were actually locked down in steerage, and Cameron places more of a 'class-warfare' spin on it (where it was mainly due to the fact that safety procedures hadn't been adequately prepared for, but it's not made up out of whole cloth.
    • As for the 'second-class man' thing, that's simply not the story Cameron's interested in telling; he's telling a love-story that crosses class boundaries, and it's more dramatic if it crosses from the highest echelons of Edwardian society to it's lowest (where the crossover is in most people's eyes scandalous and near-insurmountable) than if it goes from the highest/lowest to somewhere around the middle (which is, but this logic at least, less of scandal or an insurmountable divide, and thus less of a drama). Plus, there were like three-thousand odd people on the ship at the time, he can't reasonably be expected to address everyone.
      • There were only about 2,200 people on board. It is stated in the film. How do people keep missing this?
        • Because it's easy to slip up when discussing amounts like 'two thousand' and 'three thousand'? Because not everyone has a perfect recollection of the exact amount of people on the Titanic? Because sometimes people make mistakes and not everyone is as amazing as you? Chill, friend.
  • This is something that's bugged me for a while, and I know there must be a logical reason but: Why didn't they keep moving? The ship was stopped and had to wait 4 hours for another ship to catch them, wouldn't that time have been cut down if they'd kept moving? Water was leaking in anyway so why stop? did the stopping stop more water from getting in?
    • Um...yeah, to keep more water from getting in. Also, the procedure was, once they realized they'd hit something, to stop and figure out what was damaged and where. By the time they'd established how extensive the damage was, which took maybe fifteen minutes, water was already flooding the forward compartments. Plus, even if they'd been able to move at all (and the nearest potential help was, even at the most charitable estimate, only 17 miles away, if only Californian's captain had reacted to Titanic's rockets with something other than "Huh. Well, let me know if anything happens") they were still in the middle of an ice field and would have to be able to navigate. The movie ignores the Californian completely, necessary because of the POV, and doesn't make clear that this wasn't a random rogue iceberg in the middle of an empty ocean.
      • thank you magical tvtroper! Years of what I thought was a huge plot hole now I can watch it once again without irritation!
  • Bearded Guy says at the end of Old Rose's story "We never found anything on Jack. It's like he never existed at all." Um...found anything when? Jack pretty clearly signed the drawing with his initials, and until however long ago Old Rose started telling this story, they had no idea Jack Dawson existed. They flat-out say that, and until they heard Old Rose's story they had no reason to look for him. And this is 1997--what, did they make an expensive satelite phone call to the mainland while Old Rose was talking and dispatch researchers to (mostly non-digitalized) archives, and have them jump on Alta Vista and Yahoo to run a search?
    • Rose didn't tell the story in a single sitting. This is not too clear in the final film but the uncut version has at least one scene where she stops to be taken to sleep and continue the next day (it's easy to see why it was cut). It's not that far-fetched that they would try to check her story in the meantime, or at least had some book aboard with a list of Titanic passengers (they were investigating the Titanic - obviously they would have done some research on the ship before).
    • Actually, Jack and Fabrizio were travelling with Sven and Olaf's tickets, therefore travelling under their names. That's how they would have shown up on both the passenger list.
  • Why didn't Rose just stay on the lifeboat once she'd been forced onto it? I know, the whole 'true love' thing, but Jack told her he's a survivor. We see from the following scenes that he has a pretty good instinct for what to do. If she'd just stayed on the lifeboat, he wouldn't have had to look after her, and there's a better chance that he would have been able to survive. Plus, when he found the door floating in the water, he wouldn't have had to put her on it and stay in the water. And even if he didn't survive, the end result would still be the same, except with less hypothermia.
    • Rule of Drama. She wanted to be with the one she loved and ride it out with him. There is some reported Truth in Television to this if you listen to the Historian's commentaries of the film where they cite studies of women who would do the same thing.
  • Why did the ship's crew (including Thomas Andrews) make such a big deal of the fact that five watertight compartments are flooded, instead of only four? The explanation given is that with five compartments flooded, Titanic's bow would be pulled downwards, allowing water to pour into the rest of the ship. But if water could flood the rest of the ship, that means that the bulkheads weren't watertight. And if they weren't watertight, then the ship would have sunk no matter how few compartments were flooded. Any thoughts?
    • The watertight bulkheads only extended up to a certain point. If the first four flooded, it would weigh the front of the ship down, but not to the point that the water could get over the watertight bulkheads. Flooding the first five compartments dragged the front of the ship down far enough that the water could leak over the tops of the watertight compartments, dooming the ship.
      • That was the problem with the bulkheads. If the bulkheads had reached all the way up then water would have been unable to keep pouring in, because of that design oversight water kept on rushing in
        • Thanks, but that doesn't answer my question. Since the ship's watertight compartments weren't sealed at the top, they were essentially useless. So why did Thomas Andrews think that the ship would have survived if only four compartments had been breached?
          • It does answer the question. With any four compartments flooded, the water level could not rise above the level of the watertight doors (that is, the top of the watertight doors would still be above the waterline). Five compartments, especially the five forward compartments, flooded with water would drag the bow down far enough for the tops of the watertight doors to dip below the waterline allowing water to spill over causing a chain reaction (the more water spills over the more the ship goes down by the bow, the more watertight doors end up below the waterline, and so on). Ironically, this means the Titanic would have likely survived a head-on collision with the iceberg; she sank because the crew tried to avoid it.
            • But you said it yourself: the watertight compartments were not sealed at the top. They were like an ice-cube tray. Therefore, it doesn't matter how many bulkheads were breached-water would have filled them up and spilled over to the next compartment in any case.
              • Not the case, because the weight of water in the first 4 compartments wouldn't pull the ship down deep enough for the water to spill over to the next compartments. It would have just stopped there.
              • Actually, the bulkhead problem was not as big as you are making it out to be. The ship could handle having any two compartments flooded or the first four, which were smaller than the other compartments. Standard operating procedure was to try to pump water out of flooded compartments, which was done surprisingly well on Titanic. At least one boiler room was pumped dry before the wall holding back water in the adjoining room gave out. I'm not quite sure how the whole 'not sealed at the top' thing worked, but I imagine that, assuming sealing off the area with the watertight doors was not enough, the pumps could keep up with the flooding if the damage was not rated as catastrophic. Unfortunately for the Titanic, it was.
  • Wasn't Rose - a young, fertile, healthy woman extremely lucky not to get pregnant after having sex with young, fertile, healthy Jack in the back of that car in an age before contraception and abortion? You know; unwanted pregnancy was the main reason besides religion women tried not to have casual sex back then and considering she was fully aware that her husband-to-be was a violent dick and her mother would probably disown her she would have realized the risk of an illegitimate child would have probably been a bad move. It's blatant that this scene, and the infamous art scene beforehand, exist solely to feature the two most desirable Hollywood stars of the age having a Fanservice scene together rather than anything realistic or intelligent.
    • I'm curious as to how you know Jack was fertile, since he never had children, and I don't recall a portion of the film where he gets a sperm motility test done. It's hardly unlikely when a single instance of sexual intercourse fails to result in pregnancy. I mean, planned pregnancies rarely come that easy! It also has little bearing on the scene since they probably weren't using contraception (though perhaps Jack is a master of the pull-out method!), but 1912 was not "before the age of contraception"; in fact, condoms were a commercial product in the 19th century, and contraception of one kind or another has existed all through human history. And "before the age of . . . abortion"? I think you mean legal abortion. Is the characters' behavior irresponsible? A touch so, perhaps, but unbelievable? Unrealistic? Hardly. Not for a dashing bohemian wanderer who has clearly been around the block a few times and a repressed society girl struggling against the confines of her station and in the passionate blush of first love. It would be unrealistic if they said let's wait! the way the good children of abstinence-only education pamphlets might.
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