We are but an iceberg floating in the sea of online discourse and hark, the Titanic has hit us once again. Three weeks back I wrote at length about Ghosts of the Abyss, a film covering James Cameron’s return to the wreck of the Titanic. Promptly after I published, a submarine imploded (then exploded) while trying to reach the wreck. A historic echo, a goulash reenactment.

Since then my YouTube recommendations have been full of videos explaining how and why that submarine imploded (then exploded), many of them pairing somber music with their descriptions and suppositions. This kinda content doesn’t call itself true crime, it places itself as engineering analysis or educational content. But the gawking is the same, the detachment, the video sponsors and adverts sitting alongside graphic descriptions of final moments. It’s a weird discordance, there were always adverts for soda and TV dinners during the Channel 4 documentaries of my youth, but they felt more predictable, confined to 4min breaks, not in the content but around it. But a YouTuber can pivot mid-sentence from the worst day of several peoples lives, to the details of a coffee subscription service. And this is just their living, the world we’ve created and they’ve flourished in. Where an off the cuff video about some millionaire tourests being turned into fish food in an instantaneous, if horrifying way, must prioritise its sponsor and timeliness over accuracy. Sometimes you see the discordance and discomfort in these youtube personalities. Like if they could describe the details perfectly, get the mechanics of crush depth across accurately. They could be forgiven for a segway from carbon fibre hull analysis, to Raid Shadow Legends.

One of the things that cropped up, was a film from my favourite genre, A Full Movie On YouTube, a genre filled with documentaries and forgotten feature films. All uploaded in glorious 360p and often just not available elsewhere. In Titanic Adventure, Tony Robinson, a British television tradition who always plays the everyman, teams with James Cameron (of corse) to dive the Titanic and tell some of its stories. This is a perfect clash of US and UK media personalities, Cameron is cool, collected an expert explorer and adventurer. Tony Robinson is the guy from Blackadder who they got on Time Team to dumb it down for a general audience. Robinson cuts though a lot of Camerons bravado and assumption, he asks more open questions than the director is used to, makes him reconsider the mechanics and reality of musicians playing while the ship sank. Robinsons Documentary is a good pairing for Ghosts of the Abyss, it offers a more informal and less reverent look at the wreck and the process of diving to it. One where people offer more philosophical answers and the technology doesn’t have so much of the focus.

In one moment Robinson asks Cameron if they could have saved the crew and passengers. Cameron answers confidently, he has thought about this at length, but he clearly never expected the question from the Blackadder guy. While first he clarifies that he’s speaking with the benefit of time, that there wasn’t really anything anyone could do, his answer is illuminating in its own way.
“They could have put everybody that they couldn’t fit on the boats, on the iceberg, ‘coz it was not sinking.”
It’s the way you’d reply to a google interview question, lateral thinking, the problem is the solution. It’s a microcosm of who Cameron is, he wanted to dive the titanic so he made a film about it and wrote diving it into the film. The documentaries about him diving it, both this one and the last, are how he funds what he wants to do. Because why pay to go somewhere if someone will pay for you to be there. Cameron is doing the same thing as the YouTubers, just on a larger scale. When he dove the Mariana Trench, traveling to the deepest point of the ocean, he strapped a custom Rolex to the outside of his submarine. He made advert of his adventure, the watch still ticking at nearly 11km down.

I think that’s what I liked most about Titanic Adventure, that it showed a more human Cameron. The one who just likes exploring, making suppositions about Titanic, having his assumptions challenged. Not the one who must shill his latest movie, his sponsors latest super product.

It’s a side of him missing from Expedition: Bismarck, another documentary, made by Cameron about him exploring a different famous wreck. It hasn’t got an accompaniment piece by a British everyman documentarian. But has got a somewhat dispassionate voice over by Lance Henriksen, for what that’s worth. Here Cameron is a background figure, the exhibition leader, seen only making hand gestures, heard saying only sweeping statements. The rest of the doc is quite fragmented, there’s footage of Nazi rallies with rock music playing overtop, a subplot with Bismarck survivors and their British opponents meeting. It’s a kinda découpage of stuff that kinda fits together, kinda tells the story and mostly feels like it should be there. But the whole is less than its parts. The actual footage of the exploration is amazing of corse. But it would stand better on its own, without the trappings and dramas of a traditional documentary built around it. In making it a media product, in capitulating to the demands of the expedition funders. The film is lesser, which is mainly annoying, rather than some great missed opportunity or injustice. In brief, I had much the same takeaway from Ghosts of the Abyss. In which a different celebrity talked from a similar script over footage of a different boat. The wreck just upstages everything else, like a good actor doing a cameo in a bad movie, you just want to linger on them.

Cameron appears to have put aside deep sea exploration to make endless Avatar movies. His recent moonlighting as an expert, sitting in a Canadian hockey jersey, talking about Titanic, a wreck he spent more time exploring than its captain spent captaining. I’m glad Ocean Gate sent me on a journey though his past diving wrecks. That a tiny, now tinier submarine, made me think about the dissidence between explorer and salesman.