What are you sinking about?

I was skeptical about the premise of seeing a movie like this in, shall we say, a more “involved” dimension, for two reasons. The first was that I wasn’t particularly interested in being any closer — virtually or otherwise — to the sinking ship than necessary. Remember that moment in the beginning when Rose develops some serious cabin fever and is all but ready to plunge into the ocean, until Jack and his heightened hormones — I mean, moralism (“If you jump in, I’m going to have to jump in after you. I’m too involved now”) — saves the day? She’s all yours, Jack. No fatal attraction for me.

And then I reconsidered. There are a lot of these moments in the “Titanic.” (Spoiler alert: At the end of the film, the ship does sink.) Such as when Captain Smith goes down with his ship. Or when the Titanic’s band serenades her sinking. Or when the first-class passengers don their finest for one last aristocratic hurrah. Or before Jack warns Rose — they are the last living passengers to leave the Titanic — that she must kick for the surface as vigorously as she can lest the ship drag her down in its final fatal drive toward the bottom of the ocean. Or, finally, in that inimitable moment of cinema, when Rose tells the frozen Jack that she will “never let go” as she, yes, lets go of his hands and we see him disappear from view underwater. This scene is so powerful because it defines an act that most of us must perform or perhaps have already even performed in our lives — part with a loved one at the grave — as not parting, as not saying goodbye, but rather as clinging desperately, defiantly to the shreds of memory as the waves of life force us onward, upward. It is an utterance of the necessary pain and poetry we must undergo if we are to remain human: Throughout our lives, our hearts must perpetuate the links to what our physical bodies can never recover.

Perhaps this is why we can “never let go” of the Titanic, or of disasters like it. Life may go on, but something non-living, some trace of what has lived and perished before us, snags our interest and sucks us toward “the heart of the ocean,” toward a contemplation of ghosts and graves, and up to — but not beyond — the very gates of the vast unknown. So much of history revolves around death. There are those chilling questions we find ourselves asking — How did Hitler die? How many perished in the Black Death? — that are merely morbid curiosity, but then there are those inquiries — What were the Greeks and Romans like? Who was the real Shakespeare? Why did the Allies win World War II? — that, comprising the bare bones at the heart of the historical enterprise, seek to resurrect the dead before our eager eyes, and for what? Perhaps because all things dead and gone, as our common lot, are inherently fascinating, but also because the very process of investigation clothes the dead with the illusion of life and helps us “flesh out” our own understanding of a living world.

The second reason is as follows. As a persnickety classicist and general snob (mea culpa) toward all things pop culture, I could expect only the worst from the new flashy film. Perhaps 3-D is to cinema, and to art in general, as the Big Mac is to the burger, and to cuisine in general: cheap, cheesy and food for the masses. Forget reading a collection of survivors’ accounts or visiting a museum dedicated to the disaster, forget even watching the film in its ordinary format: We need something to literally pop out of the screen and physically engage our senses to appreciate the story and empathize with its characters. Perhaps the next version of the film will include actual kisses from Kate Winslet or freezing cold ocean water dumped on the audience at critical points in the plot: a bawdier spectacle for smaller brains that, honestly, sounds like a theater visit in “Brave New World.”

But after seeing the film, I am cautiously more optimistic. It is a part of our most sacred and spiritual nature to try to experience the inaccessible, restore the past, revive the dead and seek inspiration in remotest realms. Our oldest masterpieces, like Homer’s “Iliad,” and newest attempts to cope with tragic loss of life on a similar scale, like the Titanic or the more recent depiction of 9/11 in “United 93,” if not artistically comparable, at least aspire to a similar purpose and derive from a like-native thirst: As Herodotus said best, “to the end that ... the deeds of men may not be lost by lapse of time” — even if one needs special glasses these days to see heroic deeds on display.

Brandon Bark is a classics major from Baton Rouge, La. He can be reached at bbark@princeton.edu.