Last night, my wife and I watched “A Night to Remember” on TCM. For those who haven’t seen it, this is a starkly different take on the Titanic than you may remember from the recent James Cameron version. There’s no epic Celine Dion anthems, no naked Kate Winslett and it’s about 60 minutes shorter, too.
Of course, all the historical basics are much the same– the boat still sinks and the steerage still gets locked below the deck as the water rises (women and children and the wealthy first, apparently) – but the biggest contrast is the scope of the drama. In James Cameron’s bodice ripper version, the camera homes in on a story of singular love and the tragedy is in the fleeting romance ended by unthinkable disaster. It is a story of heroic, selfish love.
But in the 1958 film, the heroes are the officers of the White Star Line, who, in spite of certain death, keep cool heads and dutifully and selflessly work diligently to save as many lives as possible.
The officers do an admirable job of keeping the panic in check. The gentleman calmly move about the ship, relating the captains orders to place the women and children in the lifeboats “as a mere formality. Meanwhile, the outwardly unshaken men wryly comment to one another, “I take it you and I might be in the same boat later?”
Even after the captain declares “every man for himself!” and widespread panic sets in, the officers continue to implore the crowd, “Don’t panic! Have some pride in yourselves! If we can get organized, we’ll survive.”
The hero in the 1958 film is the courageous, honor-bound staff of the White Star Line, not an uppity, handsome churl who wins the heart of an icy, high-bred maiden. Likewise, the villain is not a spoiled, jilted lover he’s a man who shamelessly sneaks onto a lifeboat, abandoning hundreds of women, children and his dignity on the sinking ship. This message is clear, as the camera frames his guilt-racked visage as the ship slips into the ocean in the background.
The Sinking Ship, The Grand Applause
Okay, so what does this have to do with credit cards? Nothing, really. It has more to do with the attitudes we take towards our occupations. As Hollywood reframes our historical tragedies – Pearl Harbor, Titanic – we make them interesting to modern audiences by making them very personal stories, where love and loyalties between individuals are more important than the suffering of society as a whole. It’s no stretch to compare the current state of our economy and the financial industry to a sinking ship. And who is at the helm of the consumer finance industry? Who are the White Star Line officers to the dire situation that is the credit industry?
As far as we’ve seen in America, there are none. From the outset, it has been “every man for himself!” In fact, even after the CARD Act was made law, one hundred percent of credit cards offered online by leading bank card issuers continue to include practices that will be outlawed once the Act takes effect next year. (Pewtrusts.org) That shows that the lenders, the bankers, the credit card issuers will do anything that they can get away with to turn a buck, simply because that’s the American way of doing business. When the government clamped down on rampant unfair lending practices, the industry responded by ratcheting up interest rates an average of 20 percent while they still could, again, according to Pew Health Group.
Where is the dignity? Where is the concern for the fellow man, woman and child? How come the lifeboats are filled with the ones who steered us into this iceberg, while the steerage is left locked beneath the deck and the engine room workers are vainly attempting to bail themselves out?
Read more at Master Your Card.
Photo by vsmoothe.
