Not long ago, I wrote a post about a historical Easter egg that appears at the very end of the timeless cinematic classic, Titanic.
In the post, I casually claimed that Rose dies in her sleep at the end of the movie, with a brief disclaimer saying that it's open to interpretation — although, I must admit, I took a strong stance.
What makes me so sure? Well, after Rose goes to bed and closes her eyes, she's aboard the Titanic again. So what, right?
Well, once aboard, she enters a room full of people who died when the ship sank. There's William Murdoch and Thomas Andrews — and, of course, Jack Dawson in the back.
The question is, if it were a dream, why would she see these two random characters (William Murdoch and Thomas Andrews) instead of people she spent a lot of time with on the ship, like her mother or Cal Hockley?
Did Rose even cross paths with William Murdoch? If they did meet, it must have been brief. Would she really be dreaming of him almost a century later?
And, of course, there's this famous exchange in which a dying Jack assures Rose that she'll "die an old lady, warm in her bed."
Well, she's old. And in bed. And she certainly looks warm!
But then I was scrolling through the comments and stumbled upon this observation from the highly astute Jaime Mouritsen:
For those of you who aren't ~in the know~, "Every night in my dreams I see you, I feel you, that is how I know you go on" are the opening words to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On," which was written exclusively for the Titanic soundtrack.
If we can use the soundtrack to draw conclusions about the film, then it might very well be a dream at the end, a recurring dream that Rose has had every night for... 84 years.
When asked about it, Director James Cameron said, "You don’t need to know!"
