Summary
Back in the rapidly flooding lower decks, Jack and Rose find an abandoned child. They take him with them and try to flee, before the child's father finds them and takes the child back. Jack and Rose try to warn the father he is running the wrong way, before a torrent of water explodes through the corridor, sweeping all of them up in the current. Jack and Rose manage to navigate up a stairwell to another locked gate, where they catch an attendant on his way up. He tries to unlock the gate but drops the keys and leaves. As the water envelops them, Jack dives down and grabs the keys, unlocking the gate at the last second, allowing them to escape.
As the scene on the quickly flooding upper decks descends into chaos, Cal spots a crying child who has been abandoned. Murdoch throws Cal's cash back in his face, and shoots Tommy Ryan in the commotion. Feeling guilty and desperate, Murdoch then turns the gun on himself. Cal seizes the child and uses her to secure a spot on a lifeboat. In the smoking lounge, Rose and Jack find Thomas Andrews despondently looking at a clock above the fireplace. He apologizes to Rose, and gives her a life jacket. Although the bandleader encourages the other musicians to leave, they rejoin him and keep playing. Below deck, an Irish mother puts her children to sleep.
As water overtakes the upper decks, the band finally concludes their playing. Water bursts into the wheelhouse, killing Captain Smith. The remaining passengers, including Jack and Rose, scurry to the stern of the ship as the bow continues to sink below the ocean. A gigantic smokestack falls and kills Fabrizio and several others. Jack and Rose run past a chaplain leading a group in prayer, and cling to the railing of the ship's stern, where they first met. As the bow sinks and the stern rises, the ship cracks in half, killing Lovejoy and countless others. Jack pulls Rose over the stern's railing, as the back half of the ship—now completely upright—plunges straight downward, and disappears beneath the ocean.
Amidst the throng of castaways, Jack guides Rose to a piece of debris that she climbs on to remain afloat. A nearby survivor blows a whistle, trying to summon the lifeboats back. Molly tries convincing the passengers on her lifeboat to return, but they are all too afraid that the survivors will swamp the boat. Ruth covers her ears to drown out the screams of the dying. One lifeboat captain attempts to consolidate so that they can return. Hanging onto the debris, Jack makes Rose promise that she will survive, and to "never let go" of the promise. After a time, the first lifeboat returns, but nearly all the castaways have perished. Upon seeing it, Rose tries rousing Jack, but realizes he has died, and watches his lifeless body fall to the bottom of the ocean, pledging to "never let go."
Rose hoarsely tries calling the lifeboat, and catches its attention by scrambling over to the corpse of the man with the whistle, blowing on it. In the present day, Rose explains that of the twenty lifeboats nearby, only one returned, rescuing a mere six people, of which she was one. At dawn, the Carpathia takes the 700 survivors aboard. Rose spies Cal but avoids him, and, in present-day narration, tells Brock and the others that he committed suicide after the stock market crash of 1929. Upon landing in Ellis Island, gazing at the Statue of Liberty, Rose register with the customs official as Rose Dawson.
In the present, Rose explains to Brock, Lewis, and the others that they would not have found any record of Jack, given that his name was not on the manifest. She says she never spoke of him to anyone —not even her future husband—and that he saved her in every possible way, only existing now in her memory. Later, Brock tosses a cigar overboard, acknowledging to Rose's granddaughter that for all his efforts, he never fully absorbed the human tragedy of the event. At night, Rose approaches the edge of the ship, climbs onto the railing, and drops the Heart of the Ocean back into the North Atlantic, remembering how she had found it in her coat pocket upon arriving in America.
The diamond sinks to the bottom of the ocean, and Rose retires to bed, surrounded by her picture frames. That night, she dreams she is back on the Titanic, surrounded by many friendly faces, including Thomas Andrews, Tommy Ryan, William Murdoch, Fabrizio, and others, all gathered around and smiling. At the top of the first class landing in front of the ornate clock, she finds Jack waiting for her. He takes her hand, and the two kiss. The onlookers burst into applause, as the camera spirals upward, fading into white.
Analysis
One of the most famous anecdotes of the Titanic’s sinking is that of the band that continued to play on the ship’s decks, even as it slowly sank into the ocean. The grace with which the musicians perform amidst the chaos of the disaster, in an effort to keep the passengers calm, is a striking image that has endured throughout history, for example providing the name for Randy Shilt’s AIDS memoir …And the Band Played On. The legacy of the band is a testament to the resilience and joyousness of the human spirit, even when overwhelmed by calamitous events. Cameron uses the band’s string music to accompany another classically melodramatic sequence where Captain Edwards steps into the wheelhouse to die, and an Irish mother—having realized she cannot escape—puts her children to rest below deck so that they may die in their sleep.
The sinking of the Titanic is a test of character for all of its passengers, all of whom are tasked with difficult moral choices involving self-preservation that separate the courageous from the cowardly. Cameron contrasts the moral integrity of Jack and Rose with the moral bankruptcy of Cal, twice using an abandoned child as a plot device. Whereas Jack and Rose find a small child seemingly lost below deck and refuse to abandon him out of the goodness of their hearts, Cal grabs a small child only so that he may procure a seat on a lifeboat reserved for women and children. Cameron also contrasts the shamelessness of men like Cal and J. Bruce Ismay, who bribe and sneak their way onto lifeboats, with William Murdoch, who is so overcome with guilt he commits suicide.
Jack and Rose find Thomas Andrews in the first class dining quarters, staring at a clock above the mantelpiece. An ornate clock is also engraved in the wall where Jack and Rose meet for dinner on the first night of the voyage, and where Rose’s dream sequence at the end of the film later takes place. Clocks and clock imagery are symbols that convey the urgency of the present, the enduring power of history, and the way human memory functions as a medium between the two. Thomas Andrews, staring at the clock and literally counting down his minutes left on earth, knows that the ship will soon vanish beneath the North Atlantic.
In her recollections to Brock and his team, Rose invokes the kind of moral reckoning that the survivors had to confront: “waiting for an absolution that would never come.” Molly Brown is the only passenger on her lifeboat who advocates for returning to look for survivors, and her life is threatened as a result. The mismanagement of the lifeboats became a major point of controversy after an inquest revealed scores of preventable deaths. Jack makes Rose promise that she will survive to mitigate any feelings of guilt or hopelessness on her part, which he fears might jeopardize her chances of escape if he dies in the icy water, which he eventually does.
After Rose concludes her story, Brock realizes that the Titanic is more than merely a shipwreck harboring a valuable treasure, but rather the site of an almost incomprehensibly tragic human event. Rose dropping the “Heart of the Ocean” back into the North Atlantic, rather than giving it to Brock and his team, symbolizes the fact that the passions and mysteries lurking at the center of the human spirit will always be more priceless than mere objects, and in fact are the very things that infuse those objects with value. The act also symbolizes Rose returning her own heart to be alongside Jack’s, at the bottom of the ocean. Viewers debate whether Rose’s dream sequence at the end implies that she dies in her sleep, but the sweeping, grandiose reunion she imagines with Jack in front of the Titanic’s ornate clock, and Cameron’s decision to end the film with a fade to white, both imply that she has reconciled with the events of her past and is ready to join Jack in the afterlife.
