Contemporary Significance of the Titanic

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In the second half of Down with the Old Canoe, Steven Biel concerns himself with the way the Titanic disaster has been incorporated into contemporary culture. Biel points out that after 1912 the Titanic disaster reappears in American culture in the 1950’s. Writers and artists from this time period triggered a renewed interest in the Titanic by producing works that incorporated the Titanic into the popular culture of the time period. Biel contends that the most significant of these works is A Night to Remember by Walter Lord. After the success of A Night to Remember, Lord’s book was adopted into a feature film. Biel argues that Lord intended for his novel to be a slight “political critique” and to challenge “the Cold War gospel of progress”(159). Again it seems evident that the Titanic disaster represents a form of disenchantment with technology. In 1912 the disaster represented people’s anxiety about modernity, and it is interesting to see how these same feelings are placed on technological advancements made in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The sinking of the Titanic represented an end of an era to some people and created nostalgia to a time where the future was not as frightening.

Additionally, I think the discovery of the Titanic and all that it represented in the 1980’s is intriguing. Biel argues that the 1980’s represented a return to the “frontier spirit” (what would Turner say?).  He believes that Reagan and his economic and foreign policy initiates embodied an era of  “individualism, adventure, expansiveness” (208).  Therefore, the discovery of the Titanic in the oceanic frontier epitomized this era. Like dajames, I find it interesting that these sorts of beliefs existed only thirty years ago. This odd adoption of the Titanic by people that believed it constituted the general feeling of time continues the tradition set by everyone else since the disaster of assigning their own meaning and significance to the sinking of the Titanic. It does not surprise me, but furthers the argument that the culture meaning of the Titanic resonated inward.