At the end of the popular film Titanic (1997), Rose, the film’s protagonist, now an elderly woman, throws an expensive necklace into the ocean and then goes to bed to (apparently) die.



As she drifts off, in her bunk in her cabin on board a Russian research vessel, a cabin that is decorated with a lot of photos of herself seemingly arranged in chronological order, her psyche travels down to the deepest depths of the ocean, through the decaying wreckage of the RMS Titanic, the famous sunken ocean liner, on which a younger Rose was a passenger. As her soul inhabits the wreck, the Titanic is restored to its original condition—and Rose is now apparently doomed to spend an eternity trapped on this cursed ship, along with, seemingly, every other soul who died aboard that ship or in the icy water into which it sank.


Rose is in hell. This is obvious and inarguable. The reanimated ship, the scene of the worst tragedy she ever witnessed, is now her permanent mental prison, both inhabited and guarded by the souls of those she saw perish decades ago—those whose deaths she, honestly, did nothing to help prevent.

In death, it turns out, Rose did not escape the Titanic after all.