Spectacle Matters: Titanic, The Sweet Hereafter, and the Academy and Genie Awards

Abstract

In spite of the fact that, as Atom Egoyan has noted, “both The Sweet Hereafter and Titanic have big crashes with ice and water that take place halfway through the film” (qtd. in Lacey, “Tale” A2), these two films would seem to share little between them. They were made in the context of vastly different industries, according to different aesthetic concerns, with large discrepancies in their budg­ets and box-office grosses. However, the Academy Award nominations, announced in February 1998, inserted Titanic and The Sweet Hereafter into the same category, as both Atom Egoyan and James Cameron were nominated for Best Director. This grouping of the films sets the stage for a deeper comparison beyond Egoyan’s casual observation. These two films, which feature large vehi­cles crashing into or through ice, depict these accidents through opposite relations to spectacle. As an extension of the accident, death itself becomes spectacle in Titanic; The Sweet Hereafter, in contrast, invokes death without representing it. The narrative structures of the films also differ: Titanic shifts unproblematically between present-day narration and Rose’s memories of the ship; The Sweet Hereaf­ter confuses temporal relations without using the clear flashback structure of Titanic. In addition to the internal workings of the texts themselves, the films have acquired other meanings and significance through awards and recognition bestowed upon them.