As Scottsdale gets a new Titanic exhibit, this ASU professor explains why we'll never let go

LAUREN GILGER: OK now, Mark, let me take you back in a pop culture time machine to 1997.

MARK BRODIE: I am ready. Let’s do it.

[CLIPS FROM THE MOVIE “TITANIC” PLAY]

Sounds from the film “Titanic,” of course. Lauren, how many times did you see that in the theater?

LAUREN GILGER: Oh man, at least four or five. But my big sister, I remember, saw it 13 times and kept every movie stub.

MARK BRODIE: That is a lot of time for a pretty — admittedly — pretty big cultural moment.

LAUREN GILGER: It was such a huge cultural moment. And the story of Titanic kind of always has been, since the ship sank in 1912. There was a 1958 film called “A Night to Remember” before that 1997 James Cameron blockbuster. There was a Tony Award-winning musical, countless books and more.

And now you can immerse yourself in the disaster in a whole new way: “Titanic: The Immersive Voyage” opened in Old Town Scottsdale last month. It features full-scale reproductions of parts of the ship, plus 3D views and a virtual reality tour of the wreck site more than two miles under the ocean.

So what is it that still captivates us about the Titanic? ASU film professor Kevin Sandler has some ideas. He co-edited a book about it back in 1999 called “Titanic: Anatomy of a Blockbuster.” And he came into our studios recently to talk to me more about it.

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KEVIN SANDLER: Well, it was considered to be the most expensive, you know, the biggest spectacle movie by a director potentially out of control. And so people were prepared for this movie to tank.

LAUREN GILGER: Really? I didn’t know that.

KEVIN SANDLER: And it had a premiere in Japan. The response was amazing. And thus when it hit globally, it just became this massive hit and made more money its second week than it did its first week.

LAUREN GILGER: And it was incredibly expensive to make, right? And long. Like I remember as a kid it was on two VHS tapes, right? It was unique in many ways. It was an outstanding film in many ways.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah. I mean, long. Particularly at that time; now we’re accustomed to seeing movies that are three hours in length. But back then, that was hubris, you know. To make a movie that long, that was like, “Gone with the Wind” kind of long.

LAUREN GILGER: It better be that good, right?

KEVIN SANDLER: It better be good. And people were just expecting it to sink.

LAUREN GILGER: Just like the ship.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah. But it did not. It was this massive hit, as you’re outlining there.

LAUREN GILGER: And it’s kind of maintained at some level or another the public’s fascination in the decades since then — like we’re seeing now, this new exhibition opening in Scottsdale, this immersive Titanic thing. It pops up here and there in pop culture and is still a cultural touchstone, I think, to even younger generations.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah, people are still fascinated with Titanic. I mean, they watch the movie, they explore the history. They continue to want to buy into the disaster. They bought into the makeup, they bought into — they wanted to buy the Heart of the Ocean. They wanted to dance to the song in clubs. I mean, the fascination with Titanic has, you know, been there since, you know, the ship went down in 1912.

LAUREN GILGER: Right. And you edited a book kind of shortly after the movie came out about this and kind of exploring the fascination with Titanic. One of the things that you talk about in the book is that Titanic is and was popular because of its popularity.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah, I mean, it became really popular when the movie “A Night to Remember” — the book and “A Night to Remember” — came out in the late ’50s. And was really expensive, was the most expensive British movie made at the time. In the same way it was the most expensive movie made at the time when Cameron’s “Titanic” came out. And so you had this kind of spectacular, majestic, emotional, expensive reinterpretation and visual of this ship going down. Because unlike other disasters — like the Hindenburg, that was filmed — Titanic was not filmed, right, of course.

And so you had to visualize what happened. And because of an iceberg, because of its size, because of its cold, because of the amount of people on board, that you can just tell this incredible story, emotional, dramatic story in many, many, many ways.

LAUREN GILGER: Is there something maybe a little darker here, you think, Kevin? Like we in American culture, I think, tend to have a fascination with tragedy. Is this part of that, you think?

KEVIN SANDLER: I think there’s that fascination with tragedy with us and certainly in other countries. Certainly tragedy, particularly of disastrous proportions. I mean, this is like a disaster movie that continues to perpetuate in Hollywood movies ever since this movie came out. I mean, we’ve constantly — all these action movies are kind of end-of-the-world kind of scenarios.

And in many ways, Titanic is kind of like the end of the world for many people with many people who died, but with some survivors. And so it’s a disaster movie, it’s a romance, it’s historical fiction, it’s action-adventure, it is a walk down memory lane. It is a lot of these kind of things that bring out certain emotions and feelings for people depending on how they view it through a particular genre.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. Is there a note of nostalgia now in the continued popularity of not just the story of “Titanic,” but the film itself?

KEVIN SANDLER: You know, that’s a good question. You know, nostalgia is one of those things. Nostalgia for a pre-technological time, nostalgia for an America at the turn of the century. But there’s also this kind of fascination with, should it be done? Can it be done? Can technology take us so far?

And we have, certainly just a few years ago in which we had the Titan submersible that exploded on the way down to viewing the Titanic.

LAUREN GILGER: To go see it. Another big cultural moment just all about this, yeah.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah, and so Titanic kind of just, you know, just when you thought Titanic was over, somehow it comes up again. And here we have this Scottsdale exhibit in which you can now experience Titanic by sitting in a lifeboat with 3D projections or wearing VR goggles to experience what it is that you’ve experienced before, particularly in the Cameron movie.

LAUREN GILGER: There’s a level, especially in the film, that explores this, but I think just in any kind of historical study of what happened on Titanic, about class too, right? And that’s another kind of perpetual American obsession, I think, and maybe uniquely American one.

KEVIN SANDLER: Yeah, I mean, I think for many British people who watched the movie — and it’s discussed in the book — this is a movie about really class struggle, about the people in the middle class, the lower classes, and the upper class, and people moving to a perhaps classless middle-class society in the United States.

But I mean, it’s kind of a movie that imagines something different while at the same time imagining closing something off. So it imagines kind of class equality, imagines female equality and empowerment, it imagines true love, it imagines sacrifice and honor in the face of danger, while at the same time cautioning us: Don’t be too proud. Don’t be too overconfident, you know, all these things.

So it provides this kind of well of emotional touchpoints for us to glop onto.

LAUREN GILGER: Do you think all of the kind of media obsession and this kind of new thing where you can immerse yourself in the Titanic experience — and the film, too — do you think that it overshadows the actual real human tragedy that took place?

KEVIN SANDLER: Uh, yes.

LAUREN GILGER: Simple as that?

KEVIN SANDLER: It allows us to experience the sense of chance, the sense of danger, the sense that sometimes things aren’t fair in a very safe space. We know we can’t control nature. We know we can’t control our destiny. But it shows people encountering the most horrific things and either coming out ahead or not coming out ahead and asks us to imagine what might we have done.

LAUREN GILGER: Are there any cultural equivalents to this, you think, Kevin?

KEVIN SANDLER: I always imagine people wanting to continue to buy into this disaster is the same way that they buy into say Disney, or they buy into Marvel, that they want to experience this film that really moved them in many different ways. So it could be, “Oh, I’m going to go see ‘Titanic’ the musical again,” which came out and won the Tony just like the movie won the Academy Award. “I want to go visit the real Titanic below. I want to go visit this exhibition. I want to go to Southampton where the Titanic was launched.” That “I want to experience the same feelings that I did that first time that I saw a movie that I fell in love with.”

LAUREN GILGER: All right, we’ll leave it there. ASU film and media studies professor Kevin Sandler joining us. Kevin, thank you so much for coming in. I appreciate it very much.

KEVIN SANDLER: Thank you.