We’ll never really know if director James Cameron knew what he was filming when he made Titanic. What I doubt less is that he knew exactly what ending he had to give the story. At this point, we'll discover nothing new about the death of poor Jack to keep Rose afloat, although doubt will always exist. Could he have survived? As it turns out, the answer was in a movie frame.
Jack’s death. Let’s start with one of the most famous deaths in movie history, that of Jack Dawson. Jack could have survived, or so many of us think. Where there’s room for one, there’s always room for two. However, the character, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, decided to leave the whole piece of wood to Rose, played by Kate Winslet. Far from forcing him to get on it, she dedicated herself to contemplating him curled up while the protagonist dies an agonizing death and his body parts slowly freeze.
And with that, Cameron served up the great controversy.
The MythBusters arrive. In 2012, this popular TV show added fuel to the debate with a live test. What did the hosts do? A dry run with dummies and a miniature replica of the piece of wood from the movie. The board does indeed tip, but when they attempted the feat with a full-scale replica, they discovered Rose could have removed her life jacket and placed it under the board for extra buoyancy. This method lifted the piece of wood, so most of the main characters’ bodies (80%) were out of the water as they floated.
MythBysters' conclusion was clear: “Jack’s death was unnecessary.” The video went viral, and Cameron was quick to defend himself. The director responded that people were “missing the point” with the whole issue of the character’s death.
It was a narrative license. By 2017, Cameron was starting to get tired of being asked this question. He was often called a sadist or accused of having little dedication to science. Cameron had previously acknowledged that the character’s death was a plain and simple narrative license. Still, when he saw that no one was paying attention, he decided to try the situation that occurred in Titanic himself.
“I was in the water with the piece of wood, putting people on it for about two days, getting it exactly buoyant enough so that it would support one person with full free-board, meaning that she wasn’t immersed at all in the 28-degree water so that she could survive the three hours it took until the rescue ship got there,” he explained.
Cameron’s last study. So, could Jack have survived or not? Two years ago, at the urging of many movie fans, Cameron said something previously unknown. In an interview with Toronto Sun, he revealed that he had documented a “scientific study” showing that two people couldn’t have survived on the floating door at the end of Titanic.
“We have done a scientific study to put this whole thing to rest and drive a stake through its heart once and for all,” Cameron said. “We have since done a thorough forensic analysis with a hypothermia expert who reproduced the raft from the movie, and we’re going to do a little special on it,” he added.
Cameron and his team included two stunt experts with the same body mass as Winslet and DiCaprio in this study. They put sensors all over their bodies, “and we put them in ice water, and we tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods, and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived. Only one could survive.” The director added, “he [Jack] needed to die. It’s like Romeo and Juliet. It’s a movie about love and sacrifice and mortality.”
The baker. Narrative license or not, the truth is that Cameron knew something that went unnoticed by many viewers at the film’s premiere. Among the many historical characters strategically placed in the movie to represent real people who boarded the Titanic, one held the answer fans expected regarding Jack’s end.
His real name was Charles Joughin. He was 33 and boarded the Titanic to work as the ship’s head of pastry and bakery. Joughin was resting in his cabin when the Titanic struck the iceberg on April 14, 1912. He oversaw the sending of as much food as possible to stock the lifeboats, and while doing so, he take a sip of the bottle.
The whiskey bottle. That’s how the British Wreck Commissioner’s inquiry recorded it. “I went down to my room for a drink,” Joughin explained, adding that he had a bottle of whiskey in his cabin that would accompany him for the rest of the fateful day. The man then went upstairs and helped women and children into the boats, occasionally taking a swig, which may have calmed him and made the chaotic situation more bearable.
The frame. And here comes the moment—Joughin appeared several times, but this is the clearest—when reality and fiction meet (min. 01:22). The movie shows us the baker, played by actor Liam Tuohy, in the company of Jack and Rose and the Titanic breaking in two.
Unlike the movie, however, the baker was reportedly the only person left at the end of the Titanic as it rose into the air, hovered for a moment, and then sank into the ocean. “I do not believe my head went under the water at all. It may have been wetted, but no more,” he told the inquest.
The sea crossing. So Joughin was one of the survivors left floating in the icy waters of the North Atlantic (like Jack) who lived to tell the tale. How did he survive? Researchers explained that the water temperature at night was about 28 degrees Fahrenheit. In addition, they considered the effects of immersion in such freezing water, which is why most of the castaways died within minutes.
We know that a person dies of hypothermia within half an hour as the core body temperature drops to an extremely low level (below 77 degrees Fahrenheit), at which point the heart begins to feel sluggish, beating less and causing blood flow to slow or stop completely, leading to death.
But the man didn’t stop moving. For hours, he swam and swam until he found the floating wreckage of a boat that had capsized. He barely held on with a dozen other people in a scene reminiscent of the movie’s end. Eventually, Joughin made it to a second boat with more room. He had survived more than two hours.
The bottle made all the difference. We should remember that by the time Joughin was in the water, he had drunk practically half the whiskey bottle. The commission in charge of the investigation said that the bottle and Joughin's highly likely drunk state could have saved his life.
The theory: Alcohol increases the rate at which a person succumbs to hypothermia, which occurs because it causes blood vessels to dilate, allowing warm blood to flow away from vital organs where heat is needed most. This can cause a person’s body temperature to drop more quickly, hastening death.
However, this occurs in cold air. In freezing water, the commission said, the impact of a sudden immersion like Joughin’s can cause blood vessels to constrict severely, overcoming the dilating effect of alcohol and keeping body heat close to vital organs, possibly prolonging life. Also, since alcohol is a depressant that slows central nervous system activity, the whiskey may have prevented his body from reacting badly to the physical stress of sudden immersion in “ice.”
The man of a thousand lives. After fully recovering in New York and returning to England, Joughin participated in the official government investigation into the sinking. He then began working on the British liner Olympic until the outbreak of World War I just two years later.
Joughin took his talents to the naval fleet as a baker, serving aboard the SS Congress. Interestingly, this ship also met disaster when a fire quickly consumed it and sank miles off the coast. This time, however, Joughin was safe in a lifeboat from the start of the evacuation (and there were no casualties).
Jack vs. Joughin. After surviving numerous shipwrecks, two world wars, and enough drama to make several movies, Joughin died in December 1956. However, we’ll always remember him as the “Titanic baker,” the real-life character who proved that Jack could have survive without Rose’s help.
All he needed was a damn bottle of whiskey.
This article was written by Miguel Jorge and originally published in Spanish on Xataka.
Images | Fox
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