Summary
The next day, Rose and Jack stroll on deck together before dinner. After making small talk, Rose thanks Jack for his actions and his discretion. Rose tries to explain the dread and inertia she feels as Cal's bride-to-be, but when Jack asks her if she loves him, Rose takes umbrage at the forward question. After threatening to leave, she snaps Jack's sketchbook out of his hands and begins admiring his drawings, at one point expressing her surprise that he has been to Paris. Rose tells Jack that he is a gifted artist.
In first-class dining quarters, Ruth and other upper-class women attempt to avoid Molly, while at a table nearby Bruce Ismay urges the Titanic's captain, Edward Smith, to increase the ship's speed, so that they can make headlines with an early arrival. Back on deck, Rose is charmed by the details of Jack's itinerant life, and the two joke about cavorting together. Jack teaches Rose how to spit like a man, just as Ruth passes by with Molly and the others. All but Molly regard Jack coldly.
Molly gives Jack a tuxedo to wear to dinner, and Jack later waits at the entrance to the first-class dining room, diligently studying the comportment of other first-class passengers. Cal and Ruth fail to recognize Jack, but Rose smiles upon seeing him dressed up. In the dining room, Rose points out various aristocrats to Jack, such as J. J. Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim, and remembers how seamlessly he blended in, despite Ruth's best efforts to embarrass him.
At dinner, when Ruth asks what Jack finds so appealing about being a penniless artist, Jack delivers a rousing speech about making "each day count," to which everyone toasts. After dinner, as Cal and the other men adjourn to the smoking lounge for cigars and brandy, Jack kisses Rose's hand goodbye, slipping a note into her fingers that reads, "Make it count. Meet me at the clock." Several minutes later, at the clock on the landing in the first-class lobby, Jack asks Rose if she wants to go to a "real" party.
Below deck, Jack and Rose join third-class passengers who have congregated in a common area to have a ceilidh—a party with fiddling, dancing, and alcohol. Jack dances with a small girl before inviting Rose to join, amused by how quickly she adapts to her new surroundings. Rose drinks beer and performs a difficult ballet move to impress nearby arm-wrestlers, unaware that she is being watched by Lovejoy. The next morning at breakfast, having been informed of Rose's behavior, Cal upturns the table in a furious rage, and demands that Rose honor him as her husband-to-be, before charging out of the room.
Later in Rose's bedroom, Ruth sends the maid away so she can forbid Rose from seeing Jack again. While lacing up Rose's corset, Ruth reminds her that her deceased husband left the family saddled with large debts, which Rose's marriage to Cal will help fix, telling Rose that women's choices are "never easy." When Jack tries to visit Rose at the ship's chapel, Cal's valet bribes White Star Line agents into removing Jack from first-class quarters. Later, while Rose and Ruth are visiting the captain's quarters, Captain Smith receives reports of hazardous icebergs, but reassures the women that such reports are normal, and that the ship is in fact speeding up.
Strolling the deck with Ruth, Cal, and Thomas Andrews, Rose correctly points out that the ship only carries enough lifeboats for half of the passengers. Andrews confirms this fact, adding that he was overruled by the White Star Line, who found that the lifeboats cluttered the deck. As the group proceeds, Jack—disguised in a bowler hat—quickly pulls Rose into a nearby gym room. Rose tells Jack firmly that she cannot see him anymore and that she loves Cal, but Jack persists, honestly but passionately declaring his feelings for her. Jack expresses his fear that being married to Cal will extinguish Rose's spirit, but a conflicted Rose tells Jack to leave her alone, and leaves. Later, at dinner with Ruth and some friends, Rose watches intently as a mother at the next table teaches a small girl how to daintily arrange her napkin on her lap.
Analysis
In the first half of the film, Cameron labors to show how rigid social divisions separate the worlds in which Jack and Rose live, as well as how those differences ironically make their courtship work. Passionate and straightforward, Jack does not seek to control Rose, unlike Cal, but is also unafraid to point out her foibles and flaws. Rose is, for instance, unaccustomed to the kind of blunt honesty that Jack exhibits when he pointedly asks her if she loves Cal. Although at first she chafes at his forward manner, she ultimately finds his lack of decorum refreshing.
The characters in Rose's orbit —especially Cal, Ruth, and J. Bruce Ismay—overwhelmingly reflect the kind of pride, arrogance, and excess that winds up dooming the Titanic to a watery grave on its maiden voyage. J. Bruce Ismay, based on the real historical figure who was controversially the highest-ranking White Star Line official to survive the disaster, is first glimpsed explaining the haughty reasoning behind the name "Titanic." Obsessed with marketing the scale and luxuriousness of the ship, Ismay exerts pressure on Captain Edward Smith to speed up to make an early arrival—an anecdote that was speculated upon by the public after the Titanic's sinking, but was never confirmed.
As a desperate woman whose place among the upper classes has become precarious, Ruth, Rose's mother, compensates by being one of the most elitist and imperious characters in the film. Like Cal, Ruth seeks to control Rose's every move, using her as a pawn to keep their family name afloat in the eyes of their high society friends and acquaintances. Ruth, who Rose remembers treated Jack like a "bug to be squashed," goes out of her way to try to embarrass him at dinner, contemptuously dismissing Jack's "rootless" existence. Ruth, who cannot imagine life without her riches, not only burdens Rose with an unhappy marriage to an abusive man, but also emotionally manipulates Rose by calling her "selfish" for exhibiting any kind of independence.
There are only two characters in the film among the upper classes who retain their empathy and humanity. The first is The "Unsinkable" Molly Brown, an example of what Ruth snidely calls "new money." Molly sides with Rose in her skirmishes with Cal, helps Jack find a tuxedo to wear to dinner in first class, and eschews the suffocating manners and narrow mindset of the upper crust. The second is Thomas Andrews, based on the Titanic's actual naval architect. Thomas Andrews explains to Rose that he lobbied for more lifeboats on the ship, but was overruled by the White Star Line, making him a key moral counterweight to the forces of greed and arrogance represented by J. Bruce Ismay.
Rose's longing to be liberated from the stultifying confines of upper-class life is on full display when Jack takes her to a party below deck, where her spirits improve almost immediately. Unlike Ruth or Cal, who would be horrified by the scene of raucous music and drunkenness, Rose laughs uproariously and boldly joins in. Cameron highlights the comic disparity between first class and third class by cutting between Cal mildly sipping brandy in the smoking lounge, and the uproarious party below deck. Jack's sensitivity to Rose's happiness in her new surroundings lead him to make an impassioned speech about the "fire" that he fears Rose will lose as Cal's wife. Rose later remembers that Jack saved her "in every way a person can be saved," including by encouraging her to pursue what makes her happy.
