Spectacle Matters: Titanic, The Sweet Hereafter, and the Academy and Genie Awards

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30, no. 3, 2000 Spectacle Matters: Titanic, The Sweet Hereafter, and the Academy and Genie Awards Gillian Roberts In spite of the fact that, as Atom Egoyan has noted, “both The Sweet Hereafter and Titanic have big crashes with ice and water that take place halfway through the film” (qtd. in Lacey, “Tale” A2), these two films would seem to share little between them. They were made in the context of vastly different industries, according to different aesthetic concerns, with large discrepancies in their budgets and box-office grosses. However, the Academy Award nominations, announced in February 1998, inserted Titanic and The Sweet Hereafter into the same category, as both Atom Egoyan and James Cameron were nominated for Best Director. This grouping of the films sets the stage for a deeper comparison beyond Egoyan’s casual observation. These two films, which feature large vehicles crashing into or through ice, depict these accidents through opposite relations to spectacle. As an extension of the accident, death itself becomes spectacle in Titanic; The Sweet Hereafter, in contrast, invokes death without representing it. The narrative structures of the films also differ: Titanic shifts unproblematically between present-day narration and Rose’s memories of the ship; The Sweet Hereafter confuses temporal relations without using the clear flashback structure of Titanic. In addition to the internal workings of the texts themselves, the films have acquired other meanings and significance through awards and recognition bestowed upon them. While awards shows operate as cultural monitors, negotiating taste, taste itself becomes an issue in Titanic, the “half disaster flick, half period romance” (Johnson 86) which dominated the Oscars for 1997. Receiving the middlebrow stamp of recognition bestowed by the Academy Awards, Titanic, as “an artistic achievement for a blockbuster king” (Lacey, “Winners”), can co-exist with The Sweet Hereafter, a film made by a director who “has been called an ‘auteur’ … rather inaccessible to mass audiences” (McKay). Such awards have reinforced (in the case of Titanic) or elevated (in the case of The Sweet Hereafter) public recognition of the films: the success of Titanic at the Academy Awards, where it won eleven prizes, has added to Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 318 the spectacle of the film itself; The Sweet Hereafter won three prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, achieved a certain amount of recognition in Canada by winning eight Genie Awards, and received two Oscar nominations. But these moments of recognition for The Sweet Hereafter did not enhance its spectacle nearly to the extent that Titanic’s awards did. The relation of spectacle between the films and the awards shows which celebrate them reflects the status of spectacle within the films themselves: while both films involve accidents that can be deemed “tragic” in various ways, the distinctions between their representations offer major points of contrast. The Oscars, however, provide a point of intersection for these films and may function in some ways to level distinctions, even as the elements of the films themselves point to vastly different sensibilities in the treatment of a similar subject. As Justin Wyatt and Katherine Vlesmas note, “James Cameron’s Titanic entered the public sphere first and foremost through its budget” (29). Much of the media discourse surrounding the making of Titanic focused initially on the fact that, at $200 million (US), it was the most expensive movie ever made. In order to explain going $100 million over budget, James Cameron invoked his subject matter as justification: “The scale of this picture was largely determined by the scale of the event it’s depicting ” (qtd. in Waal 33). Part of the film’s excess is its bid for authenticity: Cameron “had Twentieth Century Fox build him a forty-acre production site on Rosarito Beach, in Mexico, including a million-gallon seawater tank that would house the scale model of the Titanic. The model itself was a 7/8 scale replica of the ship” (Waal 32). Excess characterizes not only size but also attention to detail: Cameron “persuaded the original carpet manufacturer to make an 18,000-square-foot reproduction of its ‘Titanic’ weave”; further, “sets match old photographs right down...