Take the most famous cruise movie of all time, Titanic. In terms of Hollywood's strict genre classification system alone, the film is a problematic synthesis: whether this is a high-tech disaster film, a melodrama, or a recent boom in Hollywood. What about the retro genre? James Cameron's frenzied, gamble-like behavior in the making of this film all reflects a director's enormous anxiety when dealing with the subject matter, not because "Titanic" is already a The subject has been remade many times, and now he has to go beyond all these old works, and it is precisely because he has to recreate this great trauma inscribed in the real world (the Real): this ship called "Unsinkable" The ship of "unsinkable", which represented the crowning achievement of capitalist industry in the nineteenth century, encountered the Impossible at the beginning of the twentieth century, which it excluded from imagination and expectation. Undoubtedly, this is a shocking experience in the history of human experience, and the task of reproducing this experience is entrusted to the Hollywood "DreamWorks".
Although made in 1997, "Titanic" is enough to be the "original text" in cruise movies. In Foucault's sense, the Titanic as a symbol is a "Heterotopias". Compared with the beautiful utopia of fantasy and the gloomy and chilling "dystopia" (dystopia), heterotopia is a utopia that is localized and re-enacted, but at the same time resists and reverses the imaginary picture of utopia. In Titanic, British society in the early 20th century is condensed into an enclosed space. On this grand narrative carrier isolated from the Atlantic Ocean, decks, floors and police strictly define the activity space of different classes, while those narrow corridors, passages and stairs provide the possibility for the loosening and channeling of the class gap ; If the former is a replica of the real world, then the love that transcends classes between Jack and Rose also provides a utopian solution to the former. However, in the ingenious weaving of the text, this taboo love is regarded as a shocking behavior on the one hand, but it is also "indignant" on the other hand: Didn't the Titanic hit the iceberg exactly when the couple When lovers have sex?
No matter how glamorous Cameron casts Jack as the representative of the proletariat, it is still the American dream and the eventual arrival of postmodern capitalist society. We still have another way of interpreting the story of Jack and Rose: this is a story of a capitalist culture where bourgeois agents break away from the red tape, steal the fire from the underground counterculture, and rekindle the life of capitalism . Before the sinking of the Titanic, the untouchables living on the bottom of the ship supported the rotten life of the nobles on the top of the ship with their labor; after the sinking of the Titanic, the cultural blood of the untouchables will flow in the blood of the bourgeoisie. This is the fable of the Titanic.
Still, some directors have a far more gloomy picture of the world than Cameron's. The end of the trip is also the skyline of New York, but the 1900 in "The Pianist at Sea" did not have the courage of Rose to set foot on this dream land. He chose to turn back and return to the Virginian where he has lived for 30 years. No matter how things change, on a cruise, time always stands still. The 1900s chose the monotony of day-to-day life, while more people set foot on cruise ships in search of excitement and redemption. The young couple in "Bitter Moon" sets off on a cruise to save their marriage, only to end up shattering it all in kinky sex. The choice of Hugh Grant is yet another wicked ploy by Roman Polanski: when the British gentleman is ripped under a woman's thigh, Polanski points to the illusory nature of capitalist culture.
Today, cruise ships seem to be enjoying a resurgence. However, it seems that people rarely pay attention to the past and present of cruise ships. In fact, after the sinking of the Titanic, the giant cruise ship, a symbol of aristocratic luxury, almost disappeared. What it illustrates is not only the fear of nature by human beings, nor the shyness of industrial civilization in the art of artifacts, but the inevitable passing of an era and a class. In our era of efficiency, the endless consumption of time represented by cruise ships and the energy consumption of life caused by excessive leisure time almost constitutes a threat to contemporary biopolitics. After all, if the loafers of Baudelaire's day could have taken tortoise walks as a cheap way of resisting modernity, then cruise ships are a luxury version of that resistance, although both did come from two extremes of society. Perhaps, we should look at another cruise movie "Ghost Ship". Yes, it's a horror film, but it's still an extremely interesting film: when the rescue ship of contemporary present, rationality and the bloody laws of capitalism encounters the ghost ship that symbolizes the past, irrationality and aristocratic life, history The wreckage will unleash a lingering force of terror that haunts like a nightmare, and who's to say that these silent structures in the sea aren't the Angel Janus summoned by Benjamin?
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