Titanic 1997. Aibu to not realise how young Ruth was and that I don’t think Cal was that bad?

[phatt]

So it’s been a few years since I watched Titanic and always assumed that Ruth was in her 60s but she’s actually late 30s/early 40s. So she could have also got re-married (less likely but still a possibility.)

I know I’ll get flamed for this but I don’t think Cal was an outright villain. He did attempt to connect with Rose and love her but for his fiancé to be socialising with people in third class (when social standing was huge) and to blatantly cheat on him very openly then you can see why he’d be pissed off.

Also I’m judging him by Edwardian standards and not modern day. Obviously he did acts that made him a “bad” person as well.

If anyone was a wrong un, it was Rose.
First she goes tarting about with a steerage passenger, steerage of all things!
Then she tells Jack that she'll never let him go before promptly letting him go.
To top it all off, she denies her mum the chance to know that she's alive and well, throwing her mum into a lifetime of grief and guilt.
Maybe Ruth should have put Rose to work as a ' seamstress ' The trollop!
No wonder Cal was raging, the poor cuckolded fool.

That said, I'd have Cal and Mr Andrews together as a sandwich with me as the filling. Very tasty.

Exactly this!

She “denied” him physically - they weren’t sleeping together. The “his wife in practice” comment was rage at her refusal to sleep with him. Basically “I get everything else from you apart from sex”

Yes, i always thought this at the end and the fact that she throws the necklace in the water. The poor sods spent years looking for the necklace, she made them all sit through her story and failed to mention it was in her pocket the whole time.

There's a difference between not associating with third class, and actively looking down on.and sneering at those you deem "beneath" you.
She did the latter.
Her daughter was suicidal and engaged to an abusive twat, but hey he had money and a good background so wahey, perfect marriage material for her teenager not

I agree with the pp who say Cal and Rose were NOT sleeping together. Cal wants to, but she's denying him. If she was already sleeping with Cal, sleeping with Jack wouldn't have been such a big deal.

The line about “you may not be my wife in law but you are in practice”, I just thought meant engagement was a huge deal back then, with a huge scandal, damaged reputation, or being sued for breach of promise. So in the eyes of society they were already bound together.

Ps I always had a bit of a thing for Mr Andrews too.

It's a story, it's fiction, a thing that is not true and is created for entertainment

She asked of the lifeboats would be organised according to class as well didn’t she. Then Rose says something like ‘mother half these people are going to die’ and Cal says ‘not the better half’.

A point about the lifeboats that often gets missed though. They actually did comply with number they should have had aboard (of course they had more) in the (thought to be incredibly unlikely) event the ship ran into trouble, most of those lifeboats were meant to ferry passengers across to any other boat in the area that picked up a distress call. They’d then row back for more which is why at first they were making all the third class passengers wait, as they’d be second to last in the queue (crew last) lifeboats were never meant to support the entire number of passengers on the ship at one time.

There was a ship close enough to help, the Californian. It picked up the signal, saw the flare, and no one knows why it decide it didn’t come and offer assistance.

So Cal was in 30s and Rose only 17?Interesting

*of course they COULD have more, as Andrews wanted, but chose not to.

Damn who hurt you? Why are you trying to make out I said everyone was shortsighted with the whole “us” comment when it was aimed at one person - who’s response back to me showed they clearly weren’t offended.

Professionally offended much?

I view it with such different eyes than when it came out in the 1990s and I was a teenager. Aww poor Rose, mean Cal, gorgeous jack. Why can't she be with the one she loves? Now I'm older in my forties, I see it so differently. Jack was no great love. Her and her mother were screwed financially. Marrying Cal was a sensible choice.

Even nowadays, sadly so much of a woman's future is governed by who she chooses to marry and have children with.

Hilarious!!!!!

But Pride and Prejudice was written by a brilliant novelist who wrote with knowledge and wisdom about women’s choices in her own period and class, which was undergoing a shift from economic/dynastic ideas of marriage to ‘companionate’ marriages between individuals. Austen herself, after her father had died and left her, her sister and their mother without a home and on a tiny income, had the opportunity to marry her friends’ rich brother for money, and accepted, before changing her mind, in the knowledge that she would have been able to house and support them for life.

Cameron’s Titanic is a deeply silly, overblown blockbuster (which is fine — that’s what they’re for), but there’s absolutely no point in comparing it with JA’s portrait of a very different society, or looking for any kind of authenticity in its portrayal of women, or social class.

A well-educated, intelligent, independent-minded young woman like Rose would have had lots of opportunities, (educational, career etc) open to her in 1912, and absolutely no reason other than money to find herself trapped in a loveless engagement, and modern audiences aren’t sympathetic to ‘gold-diggers’, so the plot needs her silly, venal, genteelly-impoverished mother to be the ‘acceptable’ reason for her entrapment.

No one ‘hurt’ me, what an odd thing to say. I just have no idea why you’d want to invite discussion and then turn so prickly about it, it’s just weirdly defensive!

I don’t get how “wife in practice” is linked to having sex. They are engaged so she’s basically practicing at being his wife.

I don’t think she denied him physically. They seemingly had sex as there’s a scene where her maid Trudy is saying how they are the first people to use the sheets and Cal interrupts and says something like - tonight when I get in the sheets I’ll still be the first.

James Cameron will probably make a lot more money as a result of this Titan disaster because it's just put the film and associated merchandise back into peoples minds. They'll be resurgence of renting/buying/watching it.

And I don’t get why you took a comment not aimed at you and made it about you. So odd. Do you need attention that bad? Because I won’t be providing it any further to you.

And saying who hurt you isn’t an odd thing to say, it’s a commonly used phrase.

True. I also had no idea that he’d actually been to the wreckage himself.

🤷🏻‍♀️ Well I’ve not heard it before. I think calling someone’s interpretation short sighted on a thread you started is a bit too dd since we are supposed to be discussing a work of fiction for FUN and then lashing out with insults… but you do you!

Also it was my interpretation too, I said it in the first place 😂

That said, I'd have Cal and Mr Andrews together as a sandwich with me as the filling. Very tasty

There's room for a little sauce on that sandwich (I'm the sauce)

In 1912 I can easily see why you'd prefer your daughter to marry a wealthy man rather than a penny less artist. Even today, marrying a solvent man isn't the stupidest thing you could do.

there was still room for two on that door

This bugged me for 20 years then someone said that while there may have been space for him, it wouldn’t have supported both of their weight!

On Rose, I used to love her when I watched it as a teenager, now I think she is awful. Jumping off a lifeboat that hundreds of people were desperate to get on to go and find a man she had just met? Nah Rose!

I didn’t know that either!

Also the PP’s post about the lifeboat provision and the nearby ship that failed to help, was interesting.