Titanic is already by far the Number One Movie to Sob To, but a Reddit fan theory that’s been re-circulating on the Internet thanks to the Alltime Movies Facebook page makes it even sadder.
What the theory basically suggests is that Jack wasn’t real. He was just a figment of Rose’s imagination, a heroic figure that she needed to conjure up in order to survive her relationship with Cal and, spoiler alert (lol), the ship’s sinking.
The evidence presented is as such: she first meets Jack when she’s thinking about committing suicide because she feels trapped in an engagement with a man she does not love. During this nervous breakdown, she imagines a man who is the opposite of Cal in every way: kind, spontaneous, noble, selfless, and full of life. A man who believes in her, and could truly love and protect her without needing to control her. A man she could love with all her heart. A man too good to be true. Meet Jack Dawson!
In her desperation, Rose believes Jack is real, and they have the kind of adventures that usually only exist in fantasies (you know, sex in a car that is actually enjoyable). And Jack convinces her to “break free to stay alive,” thereby voicing her own subconscious, and making her stronger and braver.
When the ships hits the iceberg and begins to sink, she needs Jack in order to find the strength to survive (even though, realistically, as a female first class passenger she had much better chances than many others on board). This culminates in the tragic and highly contested door scene in which Jack dies, and the idea is he couldn’t get out of the water and survive on the door with her… because he wasn’t real. Rose says, “I’ll never let go,” and lets him drift into the abyss because she doesn’t need him anymore, but promises to keep the lessons he taught her with her forever.
The biggest real-deal “evidence” for this theory, however, is that the bearded dude from the excavation crew says that there was never any record of Jack on the Titanic’s passenger list. Of course, fans of the film would say, “Well, duh, he won the tickets in a card game literally minutes before the ship sailed, so of course there’s no record.” The other big hurdle to this theory is that you see him talking to a lot of other people on the boat, and not just Rose, so it’s not a Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense type of thing — and he also influences the lives of many of these other people. But since we’re hearing the story entirely from Rose’s perspective, it’s possible she’s just an unreliable narrator. We never really meet these characters; we only hear about them through’s Rose’s narrative, so any number of them could be real or imaginary. Also, you know, it is a fictional movie.
However, I choose to reject all of that because Rose and Jack are the best love story of all time and as far as I’m concerned he was real and they reunited in heaven and everyone who died on the ship clapped and they lived happily ever after.
