Thursday, September 10, 2009

Un-Titanic


Whilst lurking around on YouTube looking for suitably gruesome excerpts from Raise the Titanic (see post below) I came across this, a meticulous model of the model used in the film. This, ahem, raises a number of interesting questions about the nature of fakes, copies and models and the way that they inevitably transform the objects they depict. Models usually miss bits out, fudge the details, change materials and make mistakes. Their wrongness is actually what makes them interesting.

As a fictionalised representation of the ship following its accident the model seen above is completely inaccurate. As Murphy makes clear in the comments to the post below, the Titanic turned completely on end as it sank before breaking clean in two. The two ends of Titanic were found some distance away from each other on the sea bed. None of this was known at the time Raise The Titanic was made so the model depicted here appears - apart from its single discreetly snapped off funnel - improbably intact.

There are other extraneous details of the video too; the TV screen in the background, the white sofa and the odd bareness of the room that testify to a life spent making too many models maybe. Anyway, that is probably enough Titanic related trivia except to add that given the combination of the spectacular nature of the tragedy, its endless repetition through film and books and its cold war connections, the name of the ship's discoverer seems perfectly appropriate.

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