He is the man from square one, the one through whom the disappearance of Titan arrived. In 1997, long before AvatarJames Cameron directed one of the most popular films in the history of cinema, titanic. “I love wrecks”, he said in a documentary of the film’s DVD edition, and “the RMS Titanic is the ultimate wreck”.
It was the film’s extraordinary success that rekindled interest in the story of the tragically famous luxury liner, fueling the mystery that has driven thrill-seeking millionaires to pay crazy sums to see with their own eyes, to 4,000 meters deep, the most famous wreck in the world.
“One of the most unforgiving places on Earth”
The last example is therefore the tragic epic of the Titan, the submarine that disappeared this week, with five people on board. Without Cameron and his storytelling power, they probably wouldn’t have descended into the depths of the ocean that grabbed them.
Cameron himself knows something about it, since before making the film, he went down to explore the wreckage of the titanic aboard a Russian military submarine. Five years later, he had plunged again, this time more than 11 kilometers deep, into the deepest and least explored ocean trench in the world, “The Mariana Trench”. “In one of the most unforgiving places on Earth,” he said in an interview with New York Times shortly before his departure“it’s not like you can call roadside assistance to pick you up”.
Requested for more than forty-eight hours by journalists around the world, James Cameron does not respond and has not yet commented on the disappearance of the Titan. But in an interview with Releasepublished on the release ofAvatar 2 in December, he offered his vision of our relationship to the ocean, which for him is our relationship to humanity: “Water, as you know, is a metaphor for the unconscious. We dive into the water as we burrow into our subconscious. We enter the world of dreams. We go back to his past. We reconnect with this non-verbal part of the mind. In the film, the ocean is also literal, an equivalent of our oceans […] The Na’vi are not aliens, they are a better version of ourselves. And the men in the film are the worst.
“The Great Conflict of Mankind”
Titan Adventurers would therefore be the worst version of ourselves. This is even clearer in Cameron’s distinction in our interview between two types of humans: “Human beings are all of that, I’m not telling you anything. My hope is that viewers will side with the aliens to feel what it feels like to be invaded. To become a refugee, to have to fight to defend his land, for his survival. With any luck, some will come to their conclusions about what I call the great conflict of humanity, between the “takers” (those who exploit) and the “caretakers” (those who preserve). So far we have been a civilization of exploiters, but there are enough saviors among us to help us find the way to the other side, that is, beyond the extinction that threatens us. This path exists. It takes us towards a different consumption, and a drastic change in the way we look at the value of things.
While there are theoretically twenty-four hours of oxygen left in the Titan, we can meditate on the path chosen by its fortunate, fortunate passengers until they are no longer so.