What if Friedrich Nietzsche reviewed Titanic (1997)? He’d skip the romance and cut straight to the unsinkable lie. Brilliantly unnerving.

If They Watched — The Illuminous Narrators Edition

① PROLOGUE: THE COFFEE CHAT

THE CINE SAGE: Friedrich. You came. I half expected a telegram informing me you’d decided civilization wasn’t worth the commute.

NIETZSCHE: (surveying the chalkboard menu with the expression of a man reading a medical diagnosis) I ordered something called a “dark roast, no room.” The barista seemed personally wounded by my refusal of oat milk. This is your modern agora?

THE CINE SAGE: Every age gets the symposium it deserves. Speaking of which — we’ve chosen a film for you. Titanic. 1997. Leonardo DiCaprio. Celine Dion. Three hours of the grandest, most tearful, most unabashedly sentimental spectacle the twentieth century’s end could produce.

NIETZSCHE: (a long pause, then, with the slow ignition of genuine interest) A ship that was declared unsinkable… and sank.

THE CINE SAGE: On the nose. The whole film’s on the nose. That’s rather the point.

NIETZSCHE: Then it may be the most honest artwork in your entire century.

THE CINE SAGE: (raising the espresso cup) And on that extraordinary note — ladies and gentlemen, the floor belongs to Friedrich Nietzsche. Try to keep up.

② THE NARRATION

They tell me this film made more money than several small nations produce in a year, and that grown adults wept in multiplex theaters wearing paper cups of popcorn in their laps like votive offerings. I find this neither surprising nor contemptible. I find it diagnostic.

Begin here: a ship is built — and the men who build it declare, with the full chest of industrial modernity, that God Himself could not sink it. This is not hubris in the ancient, literary sense. This is something far more interesting. This is the nineteenth century’s faith — blind, structural, made of rivets and capital — dressed up as engineering. James Cameron, whether he fully understands it or not, has made a film about what happens when mankind mistakes its own cleverness for permanence. The iceberg is not the villain. The iceberg is simply honest.

Now. Into this allegory, Cameron deposits two lovers. Jack Dawson — the splendid, penniless artist who wins his passage in a card game and boards the ship of civilization with nothing to lose and everything to feel. Rose DeWitt Bukater — caged in comfort, suffocating beneath the weight of what her class demands of her. I have written at some length about the herd and those rare spirits crushed beneath it; I did not expect to encounter my thesis wearing an Edwardian corset, but here we are. Rose is not simply unhappy. Rose is becoming. That is the more precise word. She is in the process of willing herself into existence against every force that profits from her remaining nothing.

Jack, meanwhile — Jack is almost too convenient a symbol for my purposes, which makes me slightly suspicious of him. The beautiful young man who draws her nude, who teaches her to spit off the bow of the ship, who insists she feel something — he is vitality itself, and vitality, as I have observed at considerable personal cost, tends not to survive prolonged contact with the established order. Tuberculosis took my health in my thirties. A first-class ticket takes Jack to the bottom of the North Atlantic. The metaphor is inexact but the trajectory is identical.

What ruptures me — intellectually, you understand, not sentimentally — is the moment the ship breaks apart. Everything the wealthy have assembled: the china, the hierarchy, the certainty of arrival — it all goes vertical. In that chaos, for approximately four minutes, every human being on that ship is precisely equal. The masks dissolve. The order that was always artificial reveals its artificiality. I wrote, in a moment that my contemporaries found offensive and my later admirers found convenient, that one must have chaos within oneself to give birth to a dancing star. The ship does not give birth to dancing stars. But it does, briefly, give birth to truth.

Rose survives. Jack does not. This, the audience is told, is tragedy. I submit it is also completion. Jack’s function was never arrival. His function was transfiguration — to break Rose open, to hand her a life she would then have to live entirely alone. That she lives it is the point. That she lived it as herself is the rarer achievement. The heart of the ocean drops to the sea floor at the end, and I confess — I felt something. Not sentiment. Recognition.

I spent much of my productive life in a small room in Sils Maria, ill and largely unread, certain I was writing for an audience that did not yet exist. I understood something about building things for the abyss and trusting the abyss to eventually look back. Cameron built his ship of a film for an abyss of ten million dark theaters. The abyss wept. We should not mock the weeping. We should ask what it knows that the dry-eyed critics do not.

The unsinkable always sinks. The question is only whether you were dancing when it did.

③ EPILOGUE: THE GOODBYE

Friedrich, if you’re reading this from wherever you’ve retreated to with your dark roast — thank you. Particularly for the moment you called the iceberg “simply honest.” I’m having it embroidered on something.

What I couldn’t say while he was still holding the floor: there’s something almost unbearable about watching Nietzsche — the man who declared God dead and wept over a beaten horse in Turin — discover genuine feeling in James Cameron’s spectacle. He tried to vivisect the sentiment and ended up inside it. That’s the trick the film plays on the rigorous. It always wins.

Here is what his reading quietly reveals about us: we keep returning to Titanic not because we enjoy watching disasters, but because we suspect, somewhere beneath the popcorn, that we are also aboard something declared unsinkable. Every era is. The film lets us grieve it in advance, from the safety of the dark.

The Cine Sage’s Verdict: Nietzsche came to autopsy the most sentimental film of the twentieth century and left having written its most rigorous eulogy.

Next in the series: another extraordinary mind, another film that had absolutely no idea they were coming. You won’t want to miss the introduction.