Summary
Jack is watching a luminous sunset on the bow of the ship when Rose appears, telling him she has changed her mind. Before she can explain herself, Jack tells her to close her eyes and lifts her onto the first rung of the railing. Rose spreads her arms and opens her eyes, feeling like she's flying, and the two share a passionate kiss. Back in the present day, Rose tells Brock and the others that that was the last time the Titanic ever saw daylight. Brock and Lewis share their frustration that Captain Smith chose not to heed the iceberg warnings.
Later that night, Rose invites Jack back to her first-class cabin, where Jack admires her art collection, especially a painting by Claude Monet. Rose retrieves the Heart of the Ocean from her safe, and tells Jack she wants him to draw her like "one of [his] French girls," wearing only the necklace. Rose reclines nude on a sofa, and holds still while Jack studiously draws her. Back aboard Brock's vessel, Rose describes the encounter as her most erotic experience, to her audience of rapt, enchanted listeners. However, she tells Brock and the others that she and Jack did not consummate their affair then.
Elsewhere on the ship, Lovejoy tells Cal that he has not been able to locate Rose, much to Cal's chagrin. In the wheelhouse, one of Captain Smith's officers tells him that the calm water will make icebergs difficult to notice, but Smith does not heed the warning. When Lovejoy knocks on the door of Rose's cabin, she swiftly ushers Jack into the adjoining room, and then exits through the corridor. Lovejoy spots them retreating in the hallway, at which point Jack and Rose sprint into a lobby elevator and descend laughing into E-deck.
Still being pursued by Lovejoy, Jack and Rose descend further into the ship's boiler room, and wind up in a cargo area holding luggage and automobiles. Jack opens the door to one car and pretends to chauffeur Rose around in a mock-genteel fashion, before Rose pulls him into the back seat. In the ship's crow's nest, two lookouts banter back and forth, and crew members on deck tell the ship's chief officer, William Murdoch, that they misplaced the lookouts' binoculars. In the cargo room, Jack and Rose make love in the back seat of the automobile, steaming up the windows.
Returning to his cabin, Cal opens the safe and finds Jack's drawing, and a disparaging note from Rose. When White Star Line officials search the cargo area, Jack and Rose have already escaped. The two tumble laughing back onto the deck, where Rose tells Jack that she plans to leave with him, not Cal, when the ship docks. Right above them, the two lookouts in the crow's nest spot a massive iceberg directly ahead of the ship, and immediately notify the wheelhouse. All over the ship, the crew mobilize in a blind panic, throwing the ship's engine into reverse and steering the ship leftward. Several horrified crew members look on as the ship veers slowly, eventually making contact with the iceberg.
The entire ship shudders from the impact, and several lower deck areas immediately begin flooding, including the boiler room and cargo area where Jack and Rose were just moments earlier. Murdoch tells the crew to note the time of the collision in the ship's log. Murdoch informs Captain Smith about the iceberg, while in third class, passengers have already been startled awake by water seeping into their cabins. As Tommy Ryan runs through the flooded third-class corridors, advising others to flee, White Star Line employees reassure first-class passengers that all is well. Cal tells a nearby attendant that he has been robbed, and to fetch the master-at-arms. On deck, Rose and Jack overhear Captain Smith talking with his crew, and they realize that something is terribly wrong.
Rose returns with Jack to her first-class cabin to notify Cal and Ruth about the collision, and Lovejoy surreptitiously plants the Heart of the Ocean in Jack's coat pocket as he ushers the two inside. Before Rose can explain the emergency, Cal orders the attendants to frisk Jack. Upon finding the diamond and noting that Jack's coat was reported stolen as well, the master-at-arms arrests Jack, as Rose looks on helplessly in disbelief. Congregating with Captain Smith, Murdoch, Ismay, and others, Thomas Andrews breathlessly explains that the ship will not be able to survive the damage sustained to the hull, and will sink within one to two hours. Captain Smith darkly tells Ismay that the ship will make headlines after all.
Analysis
The bow of the ship is a symbolic space that Jack first explores with Fabrizio. For Jack and Fabrizio, the bow symbolizes freedom, power, and potential—the unlimited possibilities that the ship seems to afford them as a spectacular vessel heading proudly into a new world. For Jack and Rose, the bow of the ship symbolizes their passionate love as well as their imagined future together. Jack physically lifting Rose onto the railing and instructing her to spread her arms mirrors the literal ways in which he has encouraged her to become more self-possessed, and indicates the intimate level of trust between them. The fact that the scene takes place at sunset not only provides an evocative, romantic scene, but also reflects the fact that Jack and Rose's affair will be tragically cut short.
Other areas of the ship retain similar symbolic overtones. For example, Jack and Rose running through the ship’s boiler room while escaping from Lovejoy, with coal churning and fires blazing dangerously all around them, represents the fiery and sudden nature of their affair. The sequence of the film with the sunset scene, the drawing scene, and the carriage scene is in many ways the apex of Jack and Rose’s romance, and the emotional climax of the film, after which point the plot shifts dramatically to deal with the sinking of the ship.
The scene where Jack draws Rose explains to the viewer the origins behind the drawing that Brock Lovett and his team uncover at the beginning of the film. It provides psychological context and emotional resonance to an image that the materialistic Brock only studies at first because it features a gigantic diamond, the “Heart of the Ocean.” However, the film returns to the frame narrative during this pivotal moment to show how enraptured Brock and the others have become by Rose’s tale, compelled more by the dramatic events of her narrative than by whatever information it may yield about the resting place of the Heart of the Ocean.
The foreshadowing in the film intensifies as the ship nears its fatal collision with the iceberg. Cameron represents Captain Smith as a weak and pliable man, heedless of iceberg warnings and susceptible to the insidious urgings of J. Bruce Ismay. The ship’s chief officer, William Murdoch, is similarly negligent, failing to recover a lost set of binoculars for the lookouts that might have helped avert disaster. When the ship strikes the iceberg, the editing of the film becomes much more frantic, cutting quickly between various areas of the ship, as the White Star Line crew members helplessly struggle to mitigate the disaster that the audience already knows will result in the deaths of over a thousand people.
Titanic has been labeled an example of melodrama—a type of film genre that presents sensationalized events and exaggerated characters in order to rouse the audience’s emotions. The film to which Titanic was most widely compared at the time of its release was David O. Selznick’s Gone With the Wind, another epic melodrama about loss, romance, and disaster. Cameron uses the heightened, explosive romance between Jack and Rose to engage the audience emotionally in the disaster itself, and to introduce real stakes into the story—for example, whereas the audience knew going into the film that the ship would sink, they would not know the fate to befall the couple until the final act. After the ship strikes the iceberg, the film undergoes a dramatic tonal shift, becoming a propulsive action-thriller that tests the moral compass of every character introduced thus far.
