Took Kiddo to the centennial showing of Cameron’s Titanic Saturday. I got my money’s worth-it held up well after all of these years. Not the boat, the film. Boat still sank.

I expected the post-production 3D rendering to ruin the experience for me, but I conceded to take Kiddo anyway. After all, she never saw it in theatres and she’s a Titanic FA-REAK. One project in a college history class – that’s all it took. That and the terror that I might die from hypothermia. I still remember working night shift at the hospital on a relatively slow night and getting this call:

“Baaaabe!”

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Who died?”

“I don’t want you to!”

I laughed. I’m not the most sensitive person when I’m caught off guard. “I’m dying?”

“No, but you could. Can I see you?” I could hear her crying.

After trying to cover up my laughter with a concerned “Aww,” I added, “Sure. I’ve got a break in a bit.”

When she arrived she told me how she had just watched Titanic for the first time. “I would have pulled you up on that raft with me,” she keeps saying.

Good to know. I’m rarely in the freeze-to-death mood.

Because of all of this, she was super excited to see it in theaters – this time with my arm to lean on. So we bought our tickets–

…and after paying the extra cash for the RealD glasses someone recycled from a previous movie, I picked up my dutiful $6.25 bag of popcorn—dutiful because that’s the only way the theater generates revenue. We lost our dollar theater after no one bought food. They had fifty-cent Tuesdays. Fifty. Cent. Tuesdays. Fifty cents for a show and people couldn’t buy some candy to keep the place open. It’s a parking lot now. Talk about paving paradise…

The 3D was way better than any other post-rendering, probably because Cameron invented RealD. Certain scenes that had green screens or CGI built-in seemed tweaked for the sake of depth-of-field in the 3D process. One shot in particular worked well. Frazier chases Winslet and DiCaprio down a five-story stairwell with some sort of decorated Colt .45 in hand. He leans over the edge and shoots. The bullet hits turquoise water below.

Now the shot was great in the original, great coloring and framing, but the water in the 3D version exploded from the first floor up to the fifth and out through the screen. Subtle moments like that made for a decent rendering of an older film. I still wish they’d bump up the brightness and saturation to compensate for these polarized lenses, but I guess I can’t have my pie and eat it too. (I’m not a cake guy).

What struck me was the symbolism. I was too young to care about film interp when I first saw Titanic. This time around, I noticed how Cameron juxtaposed fire and ice and of the rich and poor. Most of all, the gap between generations stands out. Everywhere you turn in this film, you see contrast between the old and the young. The old are selfish and stuck in their ways, but they remember how things used to be. The young are selfish and ungrateful, but they hold the keys for the future. The captain of the search crew realizes by the end that the real heart of the ocean isn’t this 56ct. diamond Rose still owns. That’s not what he risks losing. Worth from the true heart gets lost if we refuse to hear the story straight from our elders. True heart comes from hearing them tell it.

Rose starts, “It’s been eighty-four years—“

“I know it’s hard, but try to remember,” the captain says.

“Do you want to hear this story or not, Mister?” Rose responds. “It’s been eighty-four years and I can still remember the look of her…”

Cameron begs us to listen to the stories of elders in order to better write our own. I found out that all kinds of kids lit up Twitter with the following:

The story came into their lives through entertainment or selfish gain, not through the mouths of their ancestors. Ignorance isn’t always bliss. Sometimes ignorance is like freezing to death, making us numb to the world.

In the theater we sat down behind a married couple and their college-age daughter. The couple pulled out smartphones before the previews and started checking Facebook. They were so uninvolved they never noticed the advertisement asking them to turn off their phones. We would have watched the film in pitch darkness except for those two intrusive beams. They blinded us to the story before us, a story about listening to the elderly. I asked Kiddo to move down to their row so we could enjoy the film. She obliged.

Halfway through the film, someone behind us shouted, “Turn it off.”

I looked over. There the couple sat absorbed in a fabricated digital version of their selves.

“Are you freaking serious?” came the voice behind us.

You two never looked up. Never turned off your phones.

Twenty-six bucks for you two to play on your smartphones and never interact with one another or your daughter during a film about listening, a film about ignoring physical wealth for things that really matter like love and art and truth, a film about learning from other generations. Twenty-six bucks for that same social crap you filled your head with as you walked out, ignoring your daughter all the while. Twenty-six bucks for checking your email in the bathroom and refusing to look the young man at the register in the eye when you ordered your slush.

Twenty-six for the drive home where you connected to disconnect.

You’re sinking, friends.

You’re sinking.

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