An Old, Familiar Story

In what was once an Urban Outfitters on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, there is now not quite a museum. You might say it is simply a “space,” one that in the last two years has been rented out for blockbuster traveling pop-ups and immersive museums. Currently, it is hosting Titanic: The Exhibition, a yearlong show dedicated to the most famous shipwreck in history. Standard admission is $38, and when I visited on a recent afternoon, a healthy-sized crowd was filtering in and out. This is not, in fact, the first immersive exhibition I’ve attended at this venue—for professional reasons, in October 2021, I found myself at a show devoted to Banksy titled Genius or Vandal—so I remembered the oddness of the cavernous two-story space, which still does not manage to conceal its bones as a former retail space. (One can imagine the checkout counters studded with lip balms and circa-2009 hipster-humor books; descending the stairs, one can easily picture layered tank tops and jean shorts on headless plastic mannequins.)

Like many pop-up exhibitions of its type, Titanic sells tickets based on name recognition. We all know the outlines of the story—and almost all of us have seen the movie—and, at the very least, we know how it ends. There is no rediscovery here; we are on a well-trodden path, one that might even appeal to nostalgia. The exhibition includes original artifacts, mingled with facsimiles of other artifacts, scale models, videos, letters and documents, and photographs, many of which are blown up on screens. Because it includes very little wall text, understanding what’s on view more or less requires the audio tour, so the experience becomes one of listening to someone talk for about an hour and a half, all while walking through a cavernous and confusingly organized exhibition.

Titanic lacks the depth of informed research we would expect from a museum exhibition, as well as the visual panache of something more fully cinematic—an IMAX documentary or even the Banksy exhibition, tasteless as it was. (Though it is, on the spectrum of pop-up immersive exhibitions I’ve seen, perhaps the deepest; it’s not a bad way to spend an afternoon if you find yourself for some reason marooned near Union Square and want to learn a little bit about the RMS Titanic.) Titanic wants to do everything—tell us about the people on the ship, tell us about the sweep of the grand narrative, show us some objects, and re-create some of the ship’s physical spaces. This is one of the more baffling aspects of the exhibition—walking through a simulation of the cabins, which have the feel of a movie-set version of a nice hotel. What exactly are we doing here? (Maybe taking pictures, but even that seems weird.)

Really, because the exhibition is so totally structured by its audio tour, it is about trying to guide us through a story, or many stories. Titanic tries to take a narrative we know and open it out into others, highlighting the specifics of the lives of dozens of passengers and crew members, homing in on retellings of different moments, showing us letters that provide day-in-the-life accounts of the ship. We are here to listen and look. As we descend into the basement and look at artifacts, our audio guide even makes the familiar, somewhat clichéd point that every object we are looking at—lockets, prayer books, rings that were pried off the fingers of corpses, model ships—contains its own story. I found myself wondering: Do they really? Yes and no. Looking at a necklace that belonged to Kate Phillips, the woman who partially inspired Kate Winslet’s character in the movie Titanic, I see a sapphire piece of jewelry that in the low light of the downstairs area appears almost black. The narrative isn’t simply there—it comes from the telling of the story that surrounds it. The movie Titanic, for all its epic sweep into melodrama, can make an object like this something it could not otherwise be: a talisman and a metaphor and a symbol. An exhibition can do that too, but this one—the inertness of its objects, the surface-level description—mostly left me cold. We end on a memorial of sorts: the names and ages of all the passengers on the Titanic and a plea to remember the people in a speech about the power of the story. The audio guide even claims that the power of narrative has really made the Titanic “unsinkable,” a claim so lofty—and inaccurate—it was hard not to laugh. Narrative undoes nothing, despite all our hopes.

I think that, like many disaster stories, the story of the shipwreck continues to compel us because it contains so many traces of human choices and fallibility. There are stories about people who nearly boarded the ship but didn’t and others about people who were switched at the last minute because of a coal miners’ strike. There are stories about a mysterious ghost ship in the distance that might have saved lives but didn’t. There are stories about couples trying to pull one another aboard a lifeboat. There is something morbid in our fascination, certainly, but I don’t think it’s all macabre. Disaster narratives bring us close to the brink of understanding of the fragility of human life—how close at hand such a thing might be to ourselves and those we love; how there but for the grace of God go we. There are moments in this exhibition that do bring us close to this, like seeing the scores of the musicians who legendarily kept playing as the ship went down. But the format of it all feels impoverished: all the attempts at bells and whistles, the lack of coherent organization, the abundance of cliché and the appeal to the familiar. There is a reason that the movie works—it has chosen one way to tell the story. It does not ask us to wander in vast cavernous halls, trying to piece it together on our own.