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Notes -
Right, when I watch Titanic now, I weep not for charismatic hobo Jack Dawson, but for the quickly-impending self-inflicted implosion of European society - in which the vast majority of the people involved were hapless victims cast into destruction by the hubristic and unnecessary decisions of a sclerotic and insulated privileged class which had outlived its usefulness - that the film implicitly depicts. It’s grotesque what happened to those unsuspecting families on the Titanic, just as it’s grotesque what happened to the countless men who were slaughtered in the World Wars. At least on the Titanic, most of the men responsible for the disaster - Captain Edward Smith, Thomas Andrews - suffered the consequences themselves (although not the man arguably most directly responsible, J. Bruce Ismay, who escaped on a lifeboat and lived another twenty-five years). Most of the men responsible for the World Wars did just fine for themselves afterward.
I used to love WWI/WWII movies when I was younger, it scratched that Star-Wars-esque heroism itch. Now I avoid them unless I'm willing to end up demoralized watching Hollywood dance on the grave of Europe. Some are really good and worth watching like Dunkirk, but it's a genre where my interpretation of the films has radically changed from adventure-heroism to tragedy.
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