Diversity in the Movie “Titanic”

Diversity in the Movie “Titanic”

            All through the 20^th century, minority groups have been making some significant steps towards equality in American society. That has been seen from land-owning rights, rights to vote, and now in film industries. All these improvements make us one community as Americans. But unfortunately, it has not gained access to the entire American society as a collective whole. All these challenges are because of white supremacy and racial discrimination beliefs that had been there from the 19^th century. These notions had gained the mindset of the American directors and movie actors for a very long time that it gave way to segregation of the minority groups. A film like Titanic, for instance, is an independent American romantic story that, on a human gauge, was created in the late 19^th century. The film was written, directed, co-edited, co-produced, and partially financed by James Cameron. The director used several good actors such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, Kathy Bates, Billy Jane, Bernard Hill, Francis Fisher, Bill Paxton, and David Warner. Despite the success of the movie, Titanic has represented several instances of diversity. All these actors showed a range of different things that help the audience understand marginalization in the film. The following essay will analyze all these factors in detail to understand the vast diversity of the film Titanic, has portrayed.

The lesser groups, such as the African Americans, are mostly treated as second and third-class individuals. Black Americans have never been treated as equals to the whites because of the idea of being brought to the country as slaves against their will. The movie industry in the 19^th century mostly stereotyped blacks as stupid, lazy, foolish, submissive, violent, cowardly, and irresponsible. These kinds of demeaning are enhanced and strengthened by the undesirable representation of African Americans in the movie industry. Blacks actors have never been permitted to even act as black in the early movie works. But instead, the only people who got hired to represent characters were the white actors and actresses. The white actors could even act as “blackface” to describe their stereotyped behaviours but not use their real faces. Titanic is an independent movie, written, directed, co-edited, co-produced, and partially financed mostly by one person, James Cameron, the director of the film. Most of the actors that James Cameron picked to perform the story of Titanic mainly were American natives. The other native citizens, such as the Irish natives, were underrepresented. It is crystal clear that human categorization played a central factor in the film. Race, as a human classification, is grounded on common physical or social conditions, as well as potentials. Jack Dawson (Leonard DiCaprio) is a white man who plays the character of blackface in Titanic.

From the movie, James Cameron, the film director, explains Jack’s character as a poor young man in the assumption that he was dumb, uneducated, and thus, thought of as a criminal. That is because Jack did not come from a wealthy life and did not have money. Society views him as a poor Irish man. The Irish man understands that, according to his status, he cannot be allowed to get into the new liner in town. Therefore, he decides to find a way to get into the Titanic. Through gambling, Jack Dawson wins his passage into the Titanic. In this case, diversity by color and race has played majorly in the film Titanic. Since the blacks were negatively stereotyped as foolish unwise, unfortunate, and as slaves, James Cameron declined to hire a black actor to play this role perfectly. By snubbing to get a black actor to represent this demeaning stereotyped role, the director created “blacks in a hostile light” (Horton, Yurii, Price, and Brown).

Besides, blacks, in the film industry in that era, were deliberately shown in movies with bad stereotypes that strengthened the white power and authority over the black people. As compared to any other medium of entertainment in the past few decades, the harmful stereotyping of blacks have had enormous control of people’s minds and how they view blacks in the society ever since film industries began. The blacks are seen as people from the second or third-class category, while the American Natives sit in the first-class standard. During dinner, Caledon Hockley and his Native American group dined under one social class, the first-class table. They were snobby and looked down on every other character that did not belong to their social grouping. Even though Jack wore fancy clothes, Cal kept reminding him that he belonged to the third-class passengers. Because Cal was a white actor and he wanted to maintain the power and control over Rose, his fiancée, he turned down Jack’s heroism by merely declaring that he was “some assistance to Rose” (Ebert).

The film industry outlines the values, morals, and pictures of our cultural descriptions. Most viewers in the world, even those who have not met black individuals before, are certain that the demeaning categorization of blacks is accurate in reality. The audience believes what they see in films about the negative stereotypes about blacks. Ever since the movie-making industry began, these horrifying stereotypes have been on the increase and that they have continued to harm the black culture negatively. These are the reasons why many directors and producers do not consider black faces in their movies because of fear of the outcome in their film. James Cameron feared that a black ethnic group had a negative image in society and that it would affect the sales of the Titanic film if he considered incorporating any black individual. The ugly stereotyping affected the blacks negatively that they got extinguished from Titanic film.

It has been a long journey, from 1914, where we had the first African American actor to act in a film, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as the main character. The year 1915 became a crucial year in the history of motion pictures because of D.W. Griffith, who delivered a film The Birth of a Nation, that reinforced a particular group by the name Ku Klux Klan, or Klan, or simply KKK. The Ku Klux Klan group is a white supremacist hate set of a category whose main aim was to target the black Americans (Horton, Yurii, Price, and Brown). The KKK was the most opposing African American movie that was ever created. The NAACP association, (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), worked so hard in solidarity with an effort to prohibit the movie, The Birth of a Nation, because of its cruel depiction of African Americans as less than human as equated to the overvalued and adored Ku Klux Klan. The blacks needed a platform to be heard, just like the privileges the whites had. Racism had taken over the American soil that James Cameron saw that it was best if he worked with whites alone. In that era, the blacks were considered as “shuffles, head-scratching, and skinny-faced fools with wired looking eyes who supported themselves on brooms and spoke bad English” (Horton, Yurii, Price, and Brown). Therefore, for them to get a good and definite character that would not encourage negative stereotypes in movies, they were forced to make their films.

The film industry is guilty of promoting what many people know as racist acts and beliefs. Even though there has been a slight improvement in the industry, three decades of changes demand higher results, more extensive than the ones we’ve seen over the past few years. The deceit has grown massively that we can see the same diversification and segregation of people and culture in the film Titanic. The film regulation teams do not care about the protests, cries, and objections from the collective societies. They are instead concentrating on the Bottom Line, whether the film will show in red or black. Their main aim is to make money out of the film, which only attributes to the positive representation of the majority group and the negative depiction of the marginalized society. And that will continue to encourage diversity in the film industry.