Titanic in popular culture

The story has been interpreted in many overlapping ways, including as a symbol of technological hubris, as basis for fail-safe improvements, as a classic disaster tale, as an indictment of the class divisions of the time, and as romantic tragedies with personal heroism.

Wyn Craig Wade comments that "in America, the profound reaction to the disaster can be compared only to the aftermath of the assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy ... the entire English-speaking world was shaken; and for us, at least, the tragedy can be regarded as a watershed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The novelist Joseph Conrad (who was himself a retired sailor) wrote: "I am not consoled by the false, written-up, Drury Lane [theatrical] aspects of that event, which is neither drama, nor melodrama, nor tragedy, but an exposure of arrogant folly.

saw the self-sacrifice of millionaires like John Jacob Astor and Benjamin Guggenheim as a demonstration of the generosity and moral superiority of the rich and powerful, while the very high level death toll among Third Class passengers and crew members was seen by others[who?]

[9] The Titanic disaster led to a flood of verse elegies in such quantities that the American magazine Current Literature commented that its editors "do not remember any other event in our history that has called forth such a rush of song in the columns of the daily press.

After evoking the iceberg, "stratified ... to the consistency of flint," he gives a vivid view of the disaster in pentameter verse: Climbing the ladders, gripping shroud and stay, Storm-rail, ringbolt or fairlead, every place That might befriend the clutch of hand or brace Of foot, the fourteen hundred made their way To the heights of the aft decks, crawling the inches Around the docking bridges and cargo winches ... As the ship sinks, Pratt describes the great noise heard by those aboard and in the lifeboats:[a] then following The passage of the engines as they tore From their foundations, taking everything Clean through the bows from 'midships with a roar Which drowned all cries upon the deck and shook The watchers in the boats, the liner took Her thousand fathoms journey to the grave.

In many cases, they were not simply mere commercial exploitation of a tragedy (though that certainly did exist) but were a genuine and deeply felt popular response to an event that evoked many contemporary political, moral, social and religious themes.

The song "A Hero Went Down with the Monarch of the Sea" described Astor as "a handsome prince of wealth, / Who was noble, generous and brave" and ended: "Good-bye, my darling, don't you grieve for me, / I would give my life for ladies to flee."

As one Denver columnist put it, "the disease-bitten [immigrant] child, whose life at best is less than worthless, goes to safety with the rest of the steerage riff-raff, while the handler[s] of great affairs, ... whose energies have uplifted humanity, stand unprotestingly aside.

[26] Other songs were written and performed by Rabbit Brown, Frank Hutchison, Blind Willie Johnson and the Dixon Brothers, who drew an explicit religious message from the sinking: "if you go on with your sins," you too will go "down with the old canoe.

"[27] In "Desolation Row", the final track of his album Highway 61 Revisited (1965), Bob Dylan sings "praise be to Nero's Neptune, the Titanic sails at dawn"; the poets Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot are pictured as "fighting in the captain's tower," disregarded by spectators.

[b] Lead Belly's song portrays the black American boxing champion Jack Johnson attempting to board Titanic but being refused by Captain Smith, who tells him: "I ain't hauling no coal.

He was converted into a mythical black stoker aboard Titanic whose exploits were commemorated in "Toasts", long narrative poems performed in a dramatic and percussive fashion which were a forerunner of modern-day rapping.

The Broadway musical presents a considerably embellished version of the real Margaret Brown's exploits; it portrays her taking command of a Titanic lifeboat and keeping the survivors in her charge going with bravado and her pistol.

[46] Jeffrey Hatcher's play Scotland Road (1992) (the title refers to a passageway on Titanic) is a psychological mystery which opens with the discovery of a dehydrated woman found on an iceberg in the North Atlantic in 1992.

By the end of April 1912, no fewer than nine American companies had issued sets of Titanic slides that could be bought or rented for public showings, accompanied by posters, lobby photos, lecture scripts and sheet music.

A. Pryor ... chartered a tug boat, and has the real genuine money getter ... [the pictures] are GREAT, showing all notable persons connected with the tragedy, the lifeboats, the life preservers, and have the last bill of fare that was served on the Titanic.

One of the most elaborate visual responses to the disaster was a "Myriorama" (a neologism meaning "many scenes") titled The Loss of the Titanic performed by Charles William and John R. Poole, whose family had been staging such shows since the 1840s.

According to the publicity material for the Titanic Myriorama, it featured "the spectacle staged in its entirety by John R. Poole, and every endeavour made to convey a true pictorial idea of the whole history of the disaster ...

Hitchcock disliked the idea and openly mocked it; he suggested that a good way to shoot it would be to "begin with a close-up of a rivet while the credits rolled, then to pan slowly back until after two hours the whole ship would fill the screen and The End would appear."

An equally fictitious young German First Officer, Petersen, warns against Ismay's reckless pursuit of the Blue Riband, calling Titanic a ship "run not by sailors, but by stock speculators".

The film makes little effort to be historically accurate and focuses on the human drama as the couple, Mr. and Mrs. Sturges, feud over the custody of their children while their daughter has a shipboard romance with a student travelling on the ship.

This proved unsatisfactory for some, notably Belfast-born William MacQuitty, who had witnessed the launch of Titanic as a boy and had long wished to make a film that put the nautical events front and centre.

The film focuses on the story of the sinking, portraying the major incidents and players in a documentary-style fashion with considerable attention to detail;[81] 30 sets were constructed using the builders' original plans for RMS Titanic.

He aims to gain a decisive American advantage in the Cold War by retrieving a stockpile of a fictitious ultra-rare mineral of military value, "byzanium", that the ship was supposedly carrying on her maiden voyage.

"[107] The British writer Filson Young's book Titanic, described by Richard Howells as "darkly rhetorical ... [and] heavily laden with cultural pronouncement", was one of the first to be published, barely a month after the disaster.

In trying to draw lessons from these events, Wade writes, "Titanic was the incarnation of man’s arrogance in equating size with security; his pride in intellectual (divorced from spiritual) mastery; his blindness to the consequences of wasteful extravagance; and his superstitious faith in materialism and technology.

[120] In 2012, to mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking, historians Tad Fitch, J. Kent Layton, and Bill Wormstedt wrote and published On a Sea of Glass: The Life & Loss of the RMS Titanic.

Unsinkable Cayenne, a historical novel in verse written by Jessica Vitalis and published in 2024 by Greenwillow/HarperCollins, explores the discovery of the Titanic from the perspective of the twelve-year-old protagonist, who notes parallels between the social strata on the ship and her own life.

[148] For many devout Christians the disaster had disturbing religious implications; the Bishop of Winchester characterised it as a "monument and warning to human presumption", while others saw it as divine retribution: God putting Man in his place, as had happened to Noah.