Remember that infamous door? Yup, the one at the end of Titanic (spoiler alert!) that has actually inspired scientific experiments and even a 2012 episode of Discovery’s MythBusters? Well, the controversy rages on (and on!) about whether it was a door or a piece of wood paneling and if Jack and Rose could have fit on top of it together and, thus, have both survived. But all that debate aside, I think the door/paneling has far greater significance for our examination of what Titanic is really trying to tell us, its viewers.

There’s a lot to unpack here. In a theatrical running time of 3 hours and 15 minutes, Titanic presents gobs of characters wading through their various social issues while first strutting around the most luxurious vessel to ever cruise the seas and then attempting to escape that glorious ship after heinous errors made by the crew and the ship’s ownership amid the blatant arrogance of a culture that elevated science to divinity and then stood by horrified when their god failed them. That is a lot to take in.

But despite all the layers of social inequity and cultural misguidedness, what Titanic‘s story really boils down to is something deeply personal; and, as we saw with Roger Ebert’s thoughts in the Weekday Warm-up, this is why Titanic affects its viewers so profoundly. Jack and Rose’s love story–nauseatingly cheesy as it frequently is–isn’t what Titanic most wants its viewers to take to heart. Instead, the film confronts us with life and death–the joy and privilege of possessing the former and the inevitability and challenge of experiencing and accepting the latter. How each us of deals with life and death stems from our individual core belief system. And it goes without saying that we all strive to find meaning and significance in our lives and our deaths. In short, we don’t want “all this” to be for nothing.

So back to Jack and Rose and that crazy door-thing. It’s one of the most parodied scenes in cinema, to be sure. But in case you’ve chosen to live under a rock, here’s a brief summary (again, spoiler alert for those who dwell under boulders). Jack and Rose survive the sinking of the Titanic only to find themselves thrashing around in the frigid Atlantic with a sea of their co-passengers quickly drowning and freezing all around them. Always coolly logical, Jack locates Rose in the melee, saves her from a panicked man trying to drown her, and tells her he needs her to swim away for him. They distance themselves from the chaos a bit and find a rather large piece of wooden debris, the infamous door/paneling. A gentleman by conviction rather than financial/social standing, Jack helps Rose aboard the door, but the wooden piece flips over when he tries to climb on with her, dumping her again into the ocean. Instead of making another attempt to share the life-saving door, Jack helps Rose up onto it again and then makes an unvoiced choice to remain in the water and hold her hands, their heads close together, while waiting for the certain swift return of the distant lifeboats. When the boats don’t arrive and Rose relinquishes hope for their survival and professes her love for him, Jack reprimands her, demanding that she promise him that she will never give up, whatever may happen. The lifeboats do return at last, but it is too late for most of the passengers in the water. And the tragedy that everyone remembers (and rails against) from Titanic is that gentle, optimistic, kind Jack does not survive. He freezes to death, hands still clasped with Rose’s; and she must very quickly decide whether to let herself succumb to death with him or to honor the pledge she made him to never give up. She chooses the later, but she must literally let Jack go in order to make this decision. She repeats her promise to him as he sinks into the ocean forever. It is an absolutely heart-wrenching scene (regardless of the unlikeliness of the romance or how horrid one feels most of Jack’s and Rose’s lines are…).

Life and death are not more drawn out or visualized in Titanic than in that final scene with Jack and Rose after the sinking. But what their situation with the door/paneling really does is play out in full what the film has already shown us over and over in little snippets: people confronting their own mortality–some being forced to choose between life and death, others having the choice made for them, but all having to come to grips with who they are in this life and what is coming next. Just as Jack and Rose must separate at the end of the film, one to death and one to life–so also do many other couples and families share this harrowing experience as the women and children are loaded onto lifeboats and the men stay behind. We see one father console his children that their parting is “only for a little while.” A third-class mother lulls her children to sleep with a story of another world, a better, magical land of “eternal youth and beauty.” The long-married and elderly Strauses choose to die together rather than be separated.

Jack and Rose, then, aren’t atypical; they’re the norm for passengers from the Titanic, the unsinkable ship which sped nearly 70 percent of its passengers and crew to their icy, watery deaths. But we get more attached to Jack and Rose, so their picture of self-sacrifice (on Jack’s part) and acceptance of that sacrifice (on Rose’s part) resonate with us in a way that is uncomfortable, disturbing, and also beautiful. Jack knows that he will die if he stays in the water–at their first meeting, when Jack dissuades Rose from ending her life by jumping off the back of the ship, he tells her of a time he fell through the ice into a frigid pond. This past experience was traumatic and extremely painful. Hence, Jack’s choosing and accepting such a death demonstrates his deep feelings for Rose: He loves her more than he loves himself. On the other hand, Rose could easily let herself die when she discovers Jack has passed away. She has already denied her former life of wealthy meaninglessness, and Jack’s passing marks the death of the new future Rose has pictured for herself and him, a life of freedom and happiness. With Jack gone, she seemingly has nothing to live for–and only minutes to suffer without him before the cold claims her life as well. Still, after only moments, she chooses to honor the promise she made to Jack. His sacrifice and his demonstrating to her how to live outside of herself and think of others has changed Rose from the spoiled brat we meet at the beginning. Rose’s decision to fight for life isn’t for herself; it’s for Jack. For her to live means he will also live on. Their little catch phrase “You jump; I jump” could also imply “You live; I live.” Rose’s lost love (of only a few days’ time!) will survive in her memory and heart forever. Death doesn’t have the final word. Life does.

For Me Then…

My grandma is dying.

So, the past few weeks have been a struggle as there are a few other difficult things going on for me as well right now. And while I love this movie, the idea of talking about death and dying isn’t super appealing at the moment. Still, I feel that Titanic‘s thrusting death and life into its viewers’ faces so dramatically can’t really be ignored if we’re talking about what movies mean and how they affect us.

With the above discussion focusing on the door/paneling scene in which Jack, in essence, gives his life so Rose can have a chance to live out hers, we haven’t addressed the film’s final scene, the one in which Old Rose (apparently) dies in her sleep–“warm in [her] bed,” as Jack told her she would be. We see the wreckage of Titanic on the ocean floor morph into the beautiful ship it once was. The doors open, and there are all the passengers who perished–including Jack, who is smiling and waiting to embrace Rose (also smiling). She is young again and wearing an almost-wedding-ish white dress with flowers in her hair. They kiss, and everyone applauds as the film closes with a view of the glass ceiling. It would seem that Rose has died and gone to heaven, where she finds that Jack has been waiting for her the whole time.

It’s a really beautiful (if not confusing) scene and comes quickly on the heels of the camera panning over several pictures of Rose through the years–after Titanic, after Jack. She is smiling in most of the pictures. She is living her life to the fullest. But that is not to say that there is not an element of deep sadness in all the photos as well. It is beneath the surface, but we know it’s there because we were just with her and Jack on the door when she is facing the awful decision of carrying on when her hopes and dreams lie dead before her, when she must be thinking (as we all undoubtedly do sometimes), Where is the hope? What is the reason for continuing if life is full of such pain and disappointment?

The hope that the film offers us, the reason for living that it proffers, is that all life is valuable. One goes on living in order to honor those who have come before, who have made sacrifices for us to be able to live those lives that are often difficult, but which can still be meaningful. One carries on because at the end of one’s life there is something more. Thus, the vague, almost fulfilling ending of Titanic.

Just the other day, a friend told me a story with a similar idea. A woman told her pastor that when she died she wanted to be buried with a fork in her hand. The pastor was very curious why and asked for an explanation. The woman told him that when she was a child and went to her grandmother’s house for dinner, she was always told to keep her fork after the main meal as there was sure to be some tasty dessert: “Even though the dinner was delicious, I knew that the best was yet to come.” The woman wanted everyone who filed past her casket to ask the pastor why she was holding a fork, and he was to tell them it was because the best is yet to come.

As a Christian, I know that death isn’t final. There is life after what we experience in this temporal world. And if we believe and trust in Jesus Christ for our salvation, the best is yet to come. Despite the earthly pains of illness, rejection, or loss, the future is secure for those who are in Christ. Death has no power over us, and those who go before us into eternity will be waiting to greet us when our own lives are over.