“Titanic’s” Jack Dawson has probably one of the most active afterlives of any fictional character we can think of.
It’s been nearly 20 years since director James Cameron sent the “unsinkable” behemoth ship to the bottom of the ocean in the classic movie, but there is one debate that keeps surfacing: Could Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack both have survived on the makeshift “raft” at the end?
Heck yeah, Cameron told The Daily Beast recently. He was specifically rebutting the science put forward by “MythBusters,” which explored whether a piece of wood debris from the ship might have been able to keep them both out of the frigid waters.
The “MythBusters” hosts suggested that the life jackets Rose and Jack wore could have been used to add buoyancy to the raft.
“OK, so let’s really play that out,” Cameron said. “You’re Jack, you’re in water that’s 28 degrees, your brain is starting to get hypothermia. ‘MythBusters’ asks you to now go take off your life vest, take hers off, swim underneath this thing, attach it in some way that it won’t just wash out two minutes later — which means you’re underwater typing this thing on in 28-degree water, and that’s going to take you 5-to-10 minutes, so by the time you come back up you’re already dead. So that wouldn’t work. His best choice was to keep his upper body out of the water and hope to get pulled out by a boat or something before he died.”
