Emotional Payoffs

There are about five movies that I will always sit down and watch, over and over again.  One of them is Titanic.  I love that movie.  It’s got romance and action and set in one of the most fascinating and tragic moments in history, and I’m a little shy to admit it, but I love, love, love, “The Hearts Will Go On” theme song by Celine Dion. 

SPOILERS (but really who hasn't seen this movie?)

But there is one scene that grates on me every time I see the movie.   It is when Rose gets on a lifeboat, and as she is lowered from the sinking Titanic, she looks up at Jack and jumps back onto the ship.  I understand that it is supposed to be a great, emotional moment, showing that Rose is choosing Jack.  She is choosing to stay on a sinking ship just to be with him.  She is giving everything up, her wealth, her privilege, her safety because she loves him too much to leave him.  I think it is supposed to be a great romantic moment, but I hate it.  It is the one flaw in what could’ve been a perfect movie.

The reason this moment is so passionately despised by me is that in that one action Rose essentially kills Jack.    In the end when Rose and Jack are in the water, he dies of hypothermia because there is no room for him on the slab of wood.  If Rose had stayed on the lifeboat, Jack could’ve had the slab, and he would’ve been the one who was pulled out of the icy water.

I would forgive Rose for killing Jack if her actions had been noble, if she had given her spot to another passenger, but she doesn’t.  She gets on the lifeboat and then changes her mind about being saved and jumps off when it is too late for someone else to take her place.  Rose knows that there aren’t enough lifeboats that half the people on the ship are going to die, and yet she takes a spot and then leaves it, without thinking about how she selfishly stole a chance from someone else to survive, like one of those little children that died with their mother (that scene was heartbreaking).

That scene could’ve so easily been rewritten so that Rose either nobly gives her seat to someone else or doesn’t have the option of getting on a lifeboat after she saves Jack from the brig.   Plot-wise there was no need for that scene.

But I doubt I’m seeing something that James Cameron didn’t see.  He is a master story teller.  His skills are way beyond mine.  He has written/directed/produced some of my most favorite movies of all time.  I seriously doubt that if he somehow magically came across this blog post he would think, “Wow, this chick has a point.  Why didn’t I or the other hundreds of other people working on this movie realize that Rose basically kills Jack?"

So why would James Cameron choose to have Rose jump back onto the ship?  I’ve never asked him nor have seen or read anything about him discussing this, but I’ve thought about this a lot, and I think I’ve got a decent answer. 

It is all about emotional payoffs.

Sometimes logic needs to take a backseat in storytelling (not always, just sometimes).   Stories, for the most part, are an emotional experience, and anything that gives an emotional payoff takes precedence over logic.

I read this blog post by writer Alexandra Sokoloff a while back on “What Makes a Great Climax.”  In this post, Alexandra talks about the ending of the movie Jaws (SPOILERS).  

It is powerful ending, where Sheriff Brody is hanging off of the mast of a sinking boat with his gun and Jaws is coming right at him, chewing on the oxygen tank.   Brody shoots at Jaws aiming for the oxygen tank but keeps missing until the shark is almost upon him and then he shoots the tank and Jaws explodes.

In her post, Alexandra talks about how author of the book and co-screenwriter of the script Peter Benchley reported arguing with Spielberg over the ending.  Benchley thought the shooting-the-oxygen-tank death of Jaws was completely implausible, that audience wouldn’t buy it.  But Spielberg believed that if he drew the audience in on this emotional journey that they would go with it, that they would trust him.

I’m going to quote Alexandra directly here because I love how she worded this in her post. 

“Spielberg paid that movie off with an emotional exhilaration rarely experienced in a story. Those characters EARNED that ending, and the audience did, too, for surviving the whole brutal experience with them. Brilliant filmmaker that he is, Spielberg understood that. The emotion had to be there, or he would have failed his audience.”

So maybe blowing up a shark by shooting at an oxygen tank he just happens to be munching on isn’t the most plausible way to kill a shark, but there is a huge emotional payoff there, in seeing the shark that had tortured Brody and killed and maimed his friends die in such a dramatic way.  It doesn’t have to be logical as long as it delivers the emotional payoff that the audience wants.  Honestly, I think that scene was brilliant.  It certainly worked for me.

I think that is the reason Rose had to jump from the lifeboat back on to the Titanic.  That was a big, emotional moment, and the scene needed to be big and emotional.  Rose needed to make that choice, choose to be with Jack and give up everything to be with him, and if she had missed the lifeboats, she wouldn’t have been able to make that choice.  And if she had given her spot on the lifeboat to someone else, that moment of choosing Jack wouldn’t have been dramatic enough.   It was the turning point of her character arc, and that moment had to be big. 

If you are on the emotional journey with Rose, you’re not supposed to be thinking about her taking someone else’s spot or how Jack might have survived if she had stayed on the lifeboat.  You’re just supposed to be relieved that she chose Jack over Cal and her mother and that soulless life of wealth and privilege that was destroying her spirit. 

I think the take home message here is that there are those moments that need to be emotional and need to be big to give the audience or readers the emotional payoff that they are waiting for.  And these are the times when logic sometimes has to step aside because the story comes first, and you have to do what is best for the story even if it isn’t what is most logical.  Of course there will be readers who might be annoyed with the lapses of logic, but those are the ones who are not emotionally invested.  You need to give that emotional payoff to your readers who are.

So tell me, did that scene in Titanic bug you too or were you too emotionally invested to think about it?

~MaryAnn