Dear Titanic fans, Jack died and James Cameron wants you to get over it

When it comes to whether or not Jack could have lived, James Cameron is handing angry Titanic fans a quarter and telling them to call someone who cares.

If I had to make a list of things I’m still angry/bummed/traumatized about in  TV/movies, it would go something like this (here’s my obligatory spoiler warning, but honestly most of these movies have been out for years so if you haven’t seen them I’m most certainly judging you):

• Ricky’s death in Boyz in the Hood
• Mia’s death in Best Man Holiday
• The fact that Forrest and Jenny don’t get married until Jenny is literally about to die in Forrest Gump
• Smash (I may never get over this).
• And, of course, Jack’s death in Titanic.

Apparently, Titanic’s director James Cameron doesn’t want to hear any more about how Rose could/should have shared that door with him so they both could have survived. No matter what Mythbusters says, Cameron is standing by his decision to have Jack freeze to death in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean just before Rose gets rescued.

“Obviously it was an artistic choice, the thing was just big enough to hold her and not big enough to hold him,” Cameron told Vanity Fair. 

“I think it’s all kind of silly, really, that we’re having this discussion 20 years later. But it does show that the film was effective in making Jack so endearing to the audience that it hurts them to see him die.”

As a dancer, I respect Cameron’s artistic choice, and I appreciate that he’s unwaveringly stood by it for 20 years. That to me is more admirable than the great pains people took to prove once and for all that Jack could have and should have survived.

But the logic doesn’t lie and according to (mostly) objective facts, Jack should have survived and would have if Rose had just scooted over a hair.

In an effort to reconcile my own frustration, I have my own fan theory that I think lets James Cameron off the hook and makes perfect sense in the context of the movie.

A few lovely souls on the interwebs have hypothesized that Jack wasn’t actually real, that he was a figment of Rose’s imagination due to the stress she was under during her time on the Titanic.

I’d like to believe this Redditor’s theory that Rose projected all of her wishes and fears to create her “ideal” man, and had this fantastic adventure with him on the Titanic. It would explain why he stayed in the water and froze to death, it also I think is a better explanation for one of her final lines in the film. “I don’t even have a picture of him. He exists only in my memories.” If Jack wasn’t real, he wasn’t meant to live past Rose’s time on the Titanic, and his death becomes more symbolic rather than literal. Rose has reclaimed her life and plans to live it to the fullest so Jack’s work is done.

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Of course, there’s no word from Mr. Cameron on the validity of that idea.