Abstract
Towards the end of James Cameron's extraordinary and extraordinarily successful film Titanic, the heroine now known as Rose Calvert, charismatically played by Gloria Stuart, gives a numbing account of the rescue effort, or lack of it, mounted by those who had made it into the lifeboats. Only one boat came back to cruise the dark waters above the sunken ship: Six were saved from the water ... out of fifteen hundred. Stuart, playing a 101-year-old survivor, manages a delicate balance between the resignation associated with wise old age and the outrage she shares, we would hope, with those who are young. It is a dismal comment, presumably one claiming some historical accuracy, on the behavior of human beings in exigent conditions, conditions of life and death, a terrifying representation of those who stand by and mind themselves and their own business while others perish. As such it addresses what is perhaps the preeminent moral problem of our century, brought regularly to attention since 1945 and most recently in the discussions surrounding both the UN nonresponse to the Rwandan massacres and the publication of Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust: the problem of passivity or passive cruelty, of standing aside, of failing to act. By this time the film has shown us all the syndromes of class struggle, of homo homini lupus, associated with the myth of the Titanic. The third-class passengers are locked below decks while their betters commandeer the lifeboats that are available for only about half of those on board, the better half, as Rose's odious suitor Cal puts it. We have been told of the outrageous disregard for safety that led to the underpro-
Published Version
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