Titanic: 100 Years Ago, or Yesterday?

by Emily Cormier

Last month the Opera House had a free showing of Titanic by James Cameron as part of their Centennial Celebration Film Series. 100 years ago this April, the brand new luxury liner Titanic sank in the Atlantic Ocean on its maiden voyage to New York City, so the movie was an appropriate choice for the start of the free series--since the Opera House also turns 100 this year.

I had never seen the film, and I dragged my friend Ann along with me to watch what would be an agonizing three hours of drowning: the passengers in the Atlantic, me in my own tears.

I had not expected such an assault on my emotional faculties, and my reaction represents the effectiveness of the film to provoke a specific response. Films are means of communication: all screenwriters and directors have something they want to tell the world. A good film makes the viewer think, forcing them to see the world from a certain perspective for as long as the movie lasts. The hope is that this perspective will last after you leave the theater and remain with you in your daily life. Titanic accomplished this in full.

The class struggle in the film is especially poignant because the sinking of the ship pits the rich against the poor in a life-threatening situation. Those in the lower holds of the ship are separated from the upper class for the entire journey, unseen and unconsidered by their rich counterparts. The wealthy families believe they are entitled to the best treatment, and that their lives are more valuable than those below them.

As the ship begins to sink, the lower class are locked in steerage until all of the wealthy men and women are comfortably ushered on to the life boats. The depth of the class system stretches into the very roots of the human heart, and we are reminded that those class boundaries still exist in our own hearts; we all think of ourselves as better than someone, give our own lives more value than someone else's. But if it came down to it, would you take another's life in order to save your own? Or does that make you just like the first class passengers on the Titanic?

This movie brought me to the edge of my existence, so that I could look at the world as a whole: how thin the line between sophistication and savagery are. When our survival instincts kick in, the money, the manners, no surface civility matters, the only thing we have left is our integrity and true intentions.

What separates us from animals is our ability to choose whether to resist our animal instincts, or to embrace them depending on the situation. We have consciences, and feel the weight of what we do. Though we are animals, survival is not our primary concern. For humans, existence is worth nothing without a reason behind it, and in the case of the move Titanic this reason is love. The central female protagonist, Rose, is willing to give up her privileged spot on the lifeboat to stay with Jack because she has had enough of surviving- she's been doing it all her life. Jack was the one who showed her how to live.

As a whole, this movie was so powerful to me because it represents what I love and hate the most about humanity: the profound mercy and self sacrifice of the people who decided to stay behind and drown rather than take up space on the life boats, and the utter savagery and emptiness of the men who panicked and killed each other to save their own lives.

Emily Cormier is a senior at Deer Isle-Stonington High School. She will be attending Bowdoin College in the fall for English.

Hamlet, Prince of Deer Isle?

By Ann Dunham
Student Blogger

Millions of people love Shakespeare. Some love the emotions, some the characters, some simply the way he describes the experience of being human. For me, what’s most amazing about Shakespeare’s works is their timelessness. Like a good work of art, Shakespeare's plays express aspects of life that transcend time. Love, revenge, war, and political intrigue are just a few themes found in his work that are applicable to any era. The ideas he expressed were cutting edge for his time, yet because they focus on such universal issues they are still very “in” today.

In my sophomore English class at Deer Isle-Stonington High School, the teacher challenged us to rewrite a few scenes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. A friend and I teamed up with the idea that this play, set in a royal palace in Denmark in the late Middle Ages, could translate very well to 21st century Deer Isle. Instead of living in a beautiful palace, most characters resided in modest houses. Hamlet spent most of his time in a boat house as the son of the most successful lobsterman on the island, while his best friend Horatio transformed from man to seagull. Despite the many changes, the main themes of the play were still communicated. Revenge, death and murder were still there under all of the decorations of setting and time. We even threw in some extra comedy, and the transition was still very believable.

Next time you read one of Shakespeare’s plays, or perhaps when you see Much Ado About Nothing live in rotating performances with the contemporary play Elizabeth Rex June 27-July 16 at the Stonington Opera House, think of how you can relate to the characters, how you can see the actions on stage happening in real life, and how relevant Shakespeare really is to your life.

FMI about performances of Much Ado About Nothing and Elizabeth Rex, please click here.

PHOTO CREDIT: Hamlet (2005) at the Stonington Opera House.