Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

ISMAY: But this ship can’t sink!
ANDREWS: She is made of iron, sir. I assure you, she can. And she will. It is a mathematical certainty.
— From James Cameron’s Titanic

July 28, 2015: Scale model of the Titanic’s bow as it appears on the ocean floor, viewed at “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition” in Dubuque.

Twenty years ago, Titanic opened in theaters, the capstone in a period of public interest in the tragic event. It is the only movie from the 1990s left in the top 20 grossing movies of all time (non-inflation-adjusted). It won 11 Oscars.

I unashamedly, unreservedly love this movie. I admit there’s a bit of suspension of disbelief involved (Rose’s dress is great, but she would’ve frozen to death at least three times). James Cameron’s obsession with detail and getting things as right as possible make the movie hold up. I saw it four times in theaters and one more time in IMAX.

In the time since the movie, additional exploration of the wreck site — much of it by Cameron himself — and forensic analysis show that the ship’s breakup likely began at a point where the superstructure was closer to the waterline as opposed to high in the air. That would go a long way toward explaining why many witnesses believed the ship sank intact. The vertical final plunge, though — that happened.

But there’s more to my interest, because when The Movie came I was already hooked on the ship and the story, as you can see in the History Day folder screenshot above. (What, you don’t know where to find everything you’ve ever made that’s still in a compatible format?) I’ve devoured pretty much everything Titanic-related before and since (except The Unsinkable Molly Brown and the 1996 musical, which I just haven’t gotten around to seeing). I was in on the books, the documentaries (RIP Bill Paxton, who joined Cameron for Ghosts of the Abyss), and the movie’s soundtrack (RIP James Horner). I’ve been to artifact exhibitions in St. Paul (twice) and Dubuque, and visited the permanent museums in Orlando and Branson.

Fall 1997 was when I really got in to making web pages. I had done a 4H presentation on coding the year before, but that was when I started putting things on Angelfire. One of my first ventures was making a ratings page for all the Titanic paraphernalia I saw. I dabbled in a proto-blog that would’ve required uploading a page each time I wanted to update it.

1997: The Internet is a brand-new, exciting world!
2017: I am afraid to read the Unabomber manifesto in case I find something I agree with.

It is hard for me to remember, at times, how unconnected most of the rest of the country was at the time, and even for the next five years. Drop someone from 2002 who was aware of the Internet into 2017 and she’ll probably be able to find her way around, except we’ll have to explain the stupid “hamburger” menus and how high-speed access brought the demon of autoplay video. Drop anyone from the second half of 2007 into 2017 and there’s virtually no learning curve; changes revolve around Twitter and Google Maps continuing to futz with their interfaces. But in 1997-98 — when The Movie was so extravagant it would need TWO videotapes, with versions in 4:3 and widescreen — the average reader was still getting news from newspapers. (Consider: the Starr Report came out nine months later, and it was printed at length. Today, it would be available as a PDF.)

The Internet wasn’t a part of most people’s everyday lives at the time, but there were already Titanic-related sites or pages online, including for the movie itself. Over the next decade, the web grew from BBS’s to blogs with everyone doing their own thing.

And then the Second Eternal September began.

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Sept. 26, 2006 — Facebook, the Internet’s leading social utility, today announced that it has expanded to enable everyone to connect with their friends and the people around them.

It’s fair to consider that date the close of the Golden Age that started with Netscape 1.0 in December 1994. By the end of 2006, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter were all here, and I — er, “You” — was named Time’s Person of the Year. Then those sites began to eat the rest of the Internet.

The late ’90s were also the peak years for multimedia. There were Enhanced CDs, which is the cue to point out that “Baby One More Time” is old enough to vote. Cameron had the foresight to make James Cameron’s Titanic Explorer, a multi-CD interactive exploration of the ship from conception to the wreck’s present state. What made this more interesting was the use of scenes from the movie — including deleted scenes — to bring the events to life. But now, first with Flash, then with HTML5, and now in “apps”, the self-contained experience has fallen by the wayside and things we view today stand a greater risk of being lost forever.

Mid-December 2017 is the 16th anniversary of the announced launch of Iowa Highway Ends, but I was around the Internet before that and I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around the big 2-0.

This is also the first weekend for Star Wars Episode VIII, making Trump the sixth of seven presidents in a row that have had a Star Wars movie released during his term. By this time next year, Titanic’s initial release will be closer to the original release of the original Star Wars than the present day.