My Barf Will Go On, or, Repeat Viewings of “Titanic”
To add to our re-watching conversation, as inspired by Barbara Klinger’s “Beyond the Multiplex”:
I was too young to see “Titanic” in theaters, and after it came out on VHS, my parents had no interest in it, so I missed the first wave of Jack Dawson enthusiasm. Cut to 2005: my family and friends were renting a beach house in North Carolina, and halfway through the vacation, I got very sick. Unsure whether it was food poisoning or something contagious, my mother exiled me to a screened-in porch, where I was left with nothing but a lobster pot (for barf reasons), a TV/VCR, and one VHS tape: “Titanic”. As I couldn’t move myself off the couch, I watched “Titanic” four times in one day, and now forever associate it with stomach illnesses (so much so that I watched it this week at 3am, during a bout of food poisoning).
I could rely on Klinger for analysis of my re-watchings of “Titanic”, seeing it as another form of “cinematherapy”, perhaps considering it as a film that produces a strange feeling of comfort in unpleasant situations. Or, we could just say that “Titanic” is vomit-inducing.