Summary
Alone with Rose in their cabin, Cal viciously slaps and insults her, before an attendant intrudes and instructs them to don their life belts. All over the ship's lower decks, White Star Line employees rouse sleeping passengers. Captain Smith sends a distress call as the ship's crew frantically cut down and ready the lifeboats. Out on the deck, Thomas Andrews asks the crew where all the passengers are, and is stunned to realize they are all still in the dining quarters, listening to music, oblivious to the ensuing disaster. In first class, Molly Brown expresses ire at the confusion, and Ruth blithely tells her maids to turn on the heaters and prepare tea. Spotting Thomas Andrews, Rose pleads with him to tell her the truth, and he admits that the ship will sink within the hour, and urges her to board a lifeboat immediately.
Deep in the ship's hull, the master-at-arms handcuffs Jack to a pipe, before leaving him under the watchful eye of Lovejoy, armed with a pistol. The ship's messenger tells Captain Smith that the nearest ship to receive the Titanic's distress call, Carpathia, will take four hours to arrive. Captain Smith blanches at the news, and is barely able to instruct the other crew to start loading women and children into the lifeboats. To put the passengers at ease, the ship's band sets up on the deck and begins to play.
In third class, Fabrizio and Tommy Ryan try to evacuate along with the other passengers, but a White Star Line agent refuses to open the gate at the top of the stairs. Out on the deck, flares are launched as crew members begin to lower the lifeboats. Through a porthole, Jack watches the water rise, and Lovejoy punches him in the gut before leaving, taking the handcuff keys with him. Standing on deck with Cal, Ruth, and others, Rose watches Molly board the lifeboats. Outraged by her mother's elitist concern that the lifeboats be seated by class, and by Cal's callous indifference to the mass death about to occur, Rose refuses to board the lifeboat. When Cal chases her down, Rose spits in his face and flees.
Rose finds Thomas Andrews and beseeches him to tell her where a master-at-arms would take someone under arrest. Andrews gives her complex instructions leading her down through the crewman's passage below, and Rose strong-arms an elevator operator into descending into D-deck, which is flooding rapidly. Rose wades through knee-deep water and finally finds Jack handcuffed. After failing to find the keys, Rose frantically runs through abandoned corridors in C-deck, crying for help, as the lights flicker. After failing to enlist the help of a White Star Line attendant, Rose breaks the glass of an emergency compartment to retrieve an axe, and runs back downstairs, where the water line is now nearly at the ceiling.
Jack has Rose take two practice swings with the axe before trusting her to take a swing at his handcuff links. Miraculously, Rose hits the mark, freeing Jack, and the two rush up to C-deck. Lovejoy tells Cal that one of the attendants is admitting men on the lifeboats in exchange for bribes, and Thomas Andrews berates an attendant for barely filling the boats before lowering them. Jack and Rose end up where a mob of third-class passengers, including Tommy Ryan, Fabrizio, and others, are furiously trying to pass through a locked gate upstairs, guarded by armed White Star Line agents. Cal retrieves the Heart of the Ocean from the safe, stashing it in his coat, and heads to the lifeboats.
After dashing to another stairwell blocked by intransigent White Star Line agents, an enraged Jack—with the assistance of Tommy and Fabrizio—uproots a wooden bench in the corridor and uses it as a barricade to destroy the gate. Tommy punches one of the agents savagely on his way out. Out on the upper decks, crew members struggle to maintain order, firing their pistols in the air to stave off anarchy. Cal attempts to bribe Murdoch as Jack and Rose, now on the upper deck, rush toward viable lifeboats. Lovejoy spots Rose and notifies Cal, who chooses to pursue Rose rather than board a lifeboat. Murdoch says nothing when J. Bruce Ismay sneaks onto a lifeboat at the last second.
As Jack persuades Rose to board a lifeboat, Cal spots them and urges her to do the same, giving her his coat. Cal convinces Rose to leave by telling her he has an "arrangement" that will save both him and Jack. As Rose descends, Cal admits to Jack that only Cal with benefit from the arrangement. Looking up at Jack, flares exploding behind his face in the sky, Rose is overcome with emotion and flings herself back onto the ship. The two rush toward each other and reunite in the first class lobby where a tearful Rose tells Jack, "You jump, I jump, right?" At the sight of the two reuniting, Cal becomes blinded with jealousy and rage. He grabs Lovejoy's pistol and begins wildly firing at them, pursuing them back down into the lower decks. After losing sight of them, Cal realizes that Rose, wearing his coat, now has the Heart of the Ocean.
Analysis
Time—a key theme throughout Titanic—becomes an especially urgent and vital one once the ship has sustained irreparable damage to its hull. The combined hubris of Captain Smith, William Murdoch, and J. Bruce Ismay means they can barely comprehend Thomas Andrews when he gravely tells them that the ship will be “at the bottom of the Atlantic” in under two hours. The lengthy running time of Cameron’s film means that he is able to represent the scene of the sinking almost in real time—from the shock of the initial impact, to the denial and confusion that immediately followed, to the horrifying foundering and breakage of the entire vessel. Though he tries to remain calm, once Captain Smith realizes that it will take the Carpathia four hours to reach the shipwreck he knows that he and countless others will die.
Class remains a determining factor for the experiences of many of the ship’s casualties and survivors. Thomas Andrews is shocked to discover the liner’s first-class passengers still dining obliviously, even after the ship has struck an iceberg. While passengers in third class immediately rouse their neighbors and desperately try to escape the encroaching water, those in first class are offered soothing reassurances that nothing is wrong. In this way, Cameron shows the irony of the ship’s survival rates—whereas third-class passengers struggled desperately to escape, they still perished at greater rates than the first-class passengers, who were given priority seating on the lifeboats.
Rose’s nearly averted suicide attempt in the first half of the film helps contextualize and explain her audacious decision to risk death rather than board the lifeboats early with her mother. Her firm repudiation of a future as Cal’s wife is crystallized by her spitting into Cal’s face, a gesture she practiced earlier with Jack. That Rose would rather be, in Cal’s words, “a whore to a gutter rat,” indicates the vanishingly low regard in which she now holds Cal and her mother, whom she caustically upbraids for fretting about class matters, even while thousands of lives hang in the balance. Only Molly eventually takes a stand against the amoral and rank behavior of the other lifeboat passengers.
Rose’s courageous and determined attempt to save Jack, who has been handcuffed and left to die by Lovejoy in one of the lower decks, provides the foundation for one of the film’s most suspenseful and action-packed set-pieces. Cameron is able to render the passage of time with the steadily encroaching waterline, which is initially at Rose's knees when she enters D-deck, and later has risen up to her neck. Rose’s efforts to descend into the hull of the ship at a moment where everyone is rushing upward is at once a sensational reversal that commands the audience’s attention—a hallmark of melodramatic genre—and an example of her unwavering devotion to Jack. Jack trusting Rose to swing an axe at his hands is a similar example of his devotion to her.
Perhaps the film’s most melodramatic moment arrives after Cal and Jack work together in an unlikely fashion in order to convince Rose to board a lifeboat and save herself. Upon descending in the lifeboat and watching Jack’s face lit by the flares being launched into the night sky—a dreamlike image worthy of high melodrama—Rose leaps back onto the ship, unwilling to abandon him after he proved unwilling to abandon her. Rose’s line, “You jump, I jump, right?” is, first, a callback to the circumstances under which Jack and Rose first met, and also a reflection of the “’til-death-do-us-part” mentality that has bound the couple after only a few days. That Rose would prefer to die with Jack than live with Cal echoes the similarly extreme, fateful decisions made by the young lovers in Romeo and Juliet, and anticipates Rose’s later choice to enter America as Rose Dawson.
