Save yourself!

It's Titanic time, or 100-years-after-Titanic time, and of course the 1997 film was on tv yesterday, and of course I watched it (not all of it, mind you. I mean, I've seen it before, I've seen it before in the way I can still mouth most of the dialogue with them, and the ending is really, really cheesy).

Now I remember the first time I watched, and I couldn't get over how stupid these people are. First we have Rose, who goes back onto the doomed ship not once but twice to save Jack, the second of which (her jumping from the lifeboat) I especially couldn't get over, to still have him die and her live. She could have just gone with her mother the first time, and the outcome would be no different, really. But then I thought, with my 12-year-old romantic head, this must be real love. And after reading up on some things, it turns out that some women did refuse to go into the lifeboats, deciding to stay with their husbands and die together. In my 26-year-old pragmatic head this still feels somewhat unbelievable, because I think the survival instinct is one of the strongest we (and all animals) have, but I can see how it would happen.
No, the people who amaze me even more are the crew. The guy manning the elevator Rose takes to go find Jack (the first time), that guy is still at his post. The ship is sinking, but he's still doing his job. The guys walking around with the life jackets, or the guys keeping the gates for the third-class passengers closed, those people all know they're going to die, they're going down with that ship. And they accept it, and not only that, they just keep on doing their work.
Amazing.
I can't imagine that happening now, that the guy would still be at the elevator telling people that it is out of service and they should take the stairs. Today, it's more of a "save yourself!"situation, as we could all clearly see when the Italian captain left his sinking ship way before most of his passengers.

And even more clearly, you can see this in the new hit-film, The Hunger Games. Now I'm gonna spoil everything there is to spoil about this film, or more precisely, about the novel (which is different in several key aspects from the film), so if you don't want to have things spoiled, stop reading now.
In The Hunger Games (for those very few who don't know anything about it), in some post-apocalyptic dystopian America, twelve districts have to send "tributes" (a boy and a girl teenager), who will fight the other 23 in a large arena until one of them survives. It is a critique on modern society, modern politics, modern game-shows, and modern consumerism, combined into one neat Young Adult package. It is a great book to read, even though I detest first-person narratives written in the present, and even quite believable given the unbelievable plot.
Now the main character is Katniss (also named after a plant, like Rose), and her fellow male tribute is called Peeta (I still cannot decide whether his name is a critique on the hideous names people give their children nowadays, with them trying to be original and making it "Sem" in stead of "Sam", or (as in this case) "Peeta" instead of "Peter"). Anyway, mid-way through the Games, the rules change and now two tributes can win if they're from the same district. Katniss and Peeta pretend to be in love (Peeta actually started this strategy way before they went into the arena) with lots of kissing and sweet words and desperation, so the audience will like them and send them gifts. In the end, obviously, they do win (this is why I don't like first-person narratives written in the present. If it were written in the past, we could at least know that she'd survived and was re-telling what happened. But now, it may well be that she did get killed, and the story would abruptly stop. Only that doesn't ever happen, because you know she will survive, which frustrates me. Anyway...). For Katniss, it was all a big game of pretend, and as she says multiple times "we acted to be in love to save each other's life". For Peeta, not so much, for him it was the real thing.

Now there are only 15 years (seriously!) between Titanic and The Hunger Games, but see how far we have come. Nowadays, you can pretend to be in love, you just lie to the guy, to the organisers of the program, and incidentally to the whole country, to save your life. And it's not just a simple lie, no, it's being in love, which is still one of those things that people consider to be very special. After the Games, Katniss basically doesn't want to have anything to do with Peeta, because the game's up and they can now go home and ignore each other, right? Not only is she so self-absorbed and egoistic to not see that he is really in love with her (and has been for the past 10 years or so), when she does realise it, she doesn't make it any easier for him. He was a tool to survive, and now that she has, he can be discarded.
Now all of this sounds very harsh and it is true that at some point Katniss does cry at the thought of Peeta being killed, but that's just because she would be alone again. When she does get the chance to kill him in the end she doesn't because she dislikes the whole idea of killing, not because she's incapable of doing it. The whole Rose/Jack situation, going back to die together, is not much of an issue. It seems like it is, when the two of them attempt to commit suicide at the end, but that's just a ploy to have both of them win. She is solely focussed on her own survival, and it's nice that he survives with her, but she would've been okay with being the only one.

In a way, it makes me sad to think that this is the way we are now. We've become so egoistic and self-absorbed that we will do anything to survive. On the other hand, I do think The Hunger Games is probably a more realistic representation of human spirit than Titanic. Those guys staying at their posts, the orchestra that kept playing, all of them were lower class men, so maybe they knew there wasn't a chance for them anyway. Maybe if we were in that situation (but when are we, ever, living in a world where everything is possible), we would act the same way. If they had had the slightest idea that they could save themselves, they would probably have done so. So we haven't become egoistic and self-absorbed, we've always been; as I said in the beginning, the spirit to survive is something you find in every living being.
Which means that Jack and Rose and those women staying behind are the odd ones out. They are the romantic, altruistic idealists, and because Titanic focuses on them you may be led to think that this is what people are like. But underneath it all, most people are survivors, are egoistic, will save themselves when the time comes. I'm not sure whether this makes The Hunger Games the better story, but I do think it may be good to realise once in a while that this is what life is like. This is what we are like. And we'll just have to accept it.