James Cameron wants to help the Mythbusters prove that Jack and Rose could not have both occupied that door-raft

Apologies for another Titanic-related post this week, but this one has Mythbusters in it. James Cameron did an interview with IGN in which he talked about the conversion to 3D, yada yada yada... And then a minute before the end of the video, the interviewer asks Cameron if he's aware of the Reddit thread trying to debunk the whole "door couldn't hold both Jack and Rose" thing. Cameron argues that while sheer surface area may have allowed two people to lay on top, physics would not. It flipped when Jack tried to get on, you see. And the filmmaker says that Discovery Channel's Mythbusters will be tackling this mystery of buoyancy on an upcoming episode, and he would like to help them prove that he was right.

I feel like Cameron has actually run this experiment in his own personal laboratory numerous times, and that's why he's so sure of this. (Plus, science totally backs him up.) Though I still think that if Jeremy Sisto played Jack, he not only would have found a way for both him and Kate Winslet to get on that thing, he would have saved both of their lives with sex warmth.

James Cameron: No, There Was Not Room for Two on the ‘Titanic’ Raft [Flavorwire]

When she isn't nerding out that the holidays are coming, Jamie is a reader at Monday Night Fan Fiction at Fontana's in Chinatown, NYC (next date: TBA, 7:00 PM). All work is original, written by the readers, so if you have a brilliant fanfic idea stuck in your head, send it via Twitter: @jamielikesthis

MORE: James Cameron • Mythbusters • titanic

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

Brainspore

Forget about looking for a way for physics to keep Jack alive, we should be trying to figure out how to ensure that Rose drowns.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Surely there’s a Titanic-Aliens mash-up.
  - Felton / Moderator
    
    The icebergs mostly come at night. Mostly.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Ice-firmative.
      - http://profile.yahoo.com/65CSAR3QATRNKJW4NYNB2BESZE JohnQPublic
        
        What do you mean it cut the power? It’s ICE! how can it cut the power??!!
      - Felton / Moderator
        
        “Man, this water is freezing!”
        “What do you want me to do, fetch your wetsuit for you?”
  - bcsizemo
    
    Throw in a bit of Prometheus and you can have her give some caviar to Jack, sexy time, and at the end a brand new face hugger explodes from her torso…
    
    Or extend Bill Paxton’s part and add in some good one liners.
http://twitter.com/lampbane Kris N

It flipped when Jack and Rose tried to get on from the same side. Any one who’s ever boarded a pool float or raft from the water with another person knows you’re supposed to board from opposite sides.
- benher
  
  My theory was just that Rose wanted to stretch her legs out.
Bodhipaksa

“We’re gonna need a bigger door.”
- Felton / Moderator
  
  This was no boat accident! Oh, wait.
http://www.gyrofrog.com/ Gyrofrog

I’ve got this cold-related headache and, to top it all off, now I’ve got Gloria Stuart repeatedly intoning “Titanic was new!” in my head. What helps, a little, is to imagine Dicky Moe breaching, and in one gulp swallowing Jack and both Roses. I do not have the brainpower at the moment to mentally render this in 3D, though.
RightReverendRex

I would be interested in proving the “sex warmth” theory as well.
RightReverendRex

Mostly non-related, after seeing this in the theaters with my daughters, I had asked them afterward what they thought a good McDonalds® or Burger King™ tie-in toy might be and my youngest who was 6 at the time suggested a “Jack” toy that could float on top of the cup of soda with the ice.

I love my weird kids.
http://profile.yahoo.com/65CSAR3QATRNKJW4NYNB2BESZE JohnQPublic

And because there was no other source of buoyant flotsam for Jack to find nearby after the ship loaded with an unimaginable amount of crap – much of which had floating potential – broke in half and went down right there?

I was completely (though reluctantly) *WITH* the movie until ancient Rose tossed the blue diamond overboard. Then, I just had this face until the credits rolled:
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Without having actually seen the film, I had gotten the impression that Rose was buoyant flotsam.
  - toyg
    
    Is that a fat joke? On Kate Elizabeth Winslet, Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire?
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      It’s a meta-comment on the fact that everybody kept referring to Kate Winslet as ‘that fat girl’, which I found inexplicable.
- jetfx
  
  However, for all the flotsam the Titanic left behind only a handful of people survived outside of the lifeboats. The water was cold enough to kill in under 30 minutes.
- spejic
  
  Sure, but how do you find it? Your head is only inches above sea level, so you can’t see far. And if you go swimming to go look for stuff, you lose heat even faster.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003490777713 John Andersson
  
  Surely you’ve seen the alternate ending though…
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2tYHcXNwAk
  - SamSam
    
    Oh.
    My.
    Fucking.
    Whaaaaaaaaaa?????
    
    Wow. Someone actually thought that ending might have been a good idea? What has been seen can never be unseen.
thecleaninglady

Next they can probably disprove that the R2d2 sounds on the X-wing could not have been heard in outer space?

Also, I am still waiting for the debunking of Baron Münchhausen’s trip to the moon which I clearly saw in Terry Gilliam’s movie.

Oh, well.
- http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=695903977 John Neumann
  
  I KNOW you are lying because NO ONE sees Terry Gilliam movies. :D
  - http://profile.yahoo.com/65CSAR3QATRNKJW4NYNB2BESZE JohnQPublic
    
    That’s only because Terry Gilliam movies never get finished.
- bcsizemo
  
  +1 for the Baron reference! Trip to moon, I was more impressed with hitching a ride on the cannonball (if I’m remembering that correctly, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it.)
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=695903977 John Neumann

My beer-imbibed pals and I debated this at length one time. We came to this conclusion: Dump the girl off, make you fortune rifling through the pockets of the floating dead and find another female afterwards.

How to stay afloat with your ever-bulging pockets of loot? Make a raft of the dead. It grows as your fortune improves.
- http://burntheflag.ca Jardine
  
  So “disregard females, acquire currency”?
  
  http://www.josephducreux.com/disregard-females-acquire-currency.jpg
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  Make a raft of the dead. It grows as your fortune improves.
  
  And floats better as putrefaction progresses.
  - Brainspore
    
    I think corpse-rafts tend to bloat a lot faster in tropical locales.
  - Daemonworks
    
    And floats better as putrefaction progresses.
    
    And gets warmer.
- Bucket
  
  But a corpse-raft could get very dangerous if they all turn into zombies.
  
  Unless you could arrange them so that their undead flailing wound up propelling you through the water. Like the cilia on a gigantic voodoo paramecium.
  - Dave Jenkins
    
    Gigantic Voodoo Paramecium. Sounds like the dorm band at med school.
  - Ryan Lenethen
    
    Just make sure the bity bits are facing downward. Also as a perk, a surpise for sharks!
- ocatagon
  
  And that’s why you don’t make movies.
http://profile.yahoo.com/65CSAR3QATRNKJW4NYNB2BESZE JohnQPublic

hey looking at that image, couldn’t Rose give her lifevest to Jack now that she’s on a raft? Might buy the fellow some time to look for another raft.
Halloween_Jack

My idea was simply for them to take turns in the water.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=781965222 Ken Breadner

That whole scene bothered me. Jack, go find your own piece of flotsam. You’ll be apart from your precious Rose for a few hours…and then you’ll have the rest of your life.
- Aleknevicus
  
  Absolutely! The ease of securing flotation on flotsam is why so few people died in the actual disaster.
http://profile.yahoo.com/IYWR7HERWNRPAJSPDYMCGM5Y2I yahoo-IYWR7HERWNRPAJSPDYMCGM5Y2I

I wonder if we ask… oh… I don’t know… maybe some surfers about how fantastically difficult it is getting up onto a skinny board in rocky seas.
- Brainspore
  
  However challenging it is for a surfer I bet it’s probably a lot harder when you’re shaking uncontrollably from hypothermia. Let’s face it, if it were easy to find a way to survive in that icy water then a lot more people would have done it.
http://www.facebook.com/teleny Alissa Mower Clough

Yeah, and according to early-20th century etiquette, a young girl cannot accept large gemstones from a gentleman to whom she is not married, nor wear them until she is at least 25. Yup, not even if you’re a Vanderbilt, a Morgan, or a Rockefeller. It smacks of prostitution. (They were kind of touchy about that, since giving jewels for sex was a rather common pastime, among gentlemen of that period.)

Now, if Cameron were to have made a movie about Alvah and Consuelo Vanderbilt, and how she was sold (for some millions) to get a Duke in the family, THAT would have been a movie….but no, it’s not good Hollywood, since without Alvah we probably wouldn’t have women’s sufferage….
timquinn

By the anthropic principle of film theory if Jack had not died on that night the story wouldn’t have had enough pathos to merit being produced, therefore the film would not exist for us to see and critique. We only see the film because Jack dies, therefore he had to die.
- Donald Petersen
  
  Damn him to hell for dyin’, then.
http://www.madziabryll.com Cefeida

I always thought it was just too damn cold for him to manage to get up there. Cramps, frozen limbs, impaired coordination and all that.
DryDry

To add more nitpicky ridiculousness to a ridiculous debate, if there was some other very buoyant debris stuck up under the door, like, say, a sealed barrel or two, the door certainly could have supported both of them.
ocatagon

If he had just tried a little harder in the movie, nobody would be complaining.
rully roslan

but in my opinion is the greatest movie ….
drabkikker

IT’S NOT A DOOR.
http://twitter.com/SallyPage SallyPage

Of course, if Rose had stayed in the lifeboat she got on rather than taking that flying leap back onto the sinking ship, then Jack could have had the headboard that could also be used as a flotation device. So that means that Rose killed Jack AND the two kids from steerage who could have taken the seat on the lifeboat that she took and then bailed from.
James Penrose

It’s even sillier as there were dozens of dead people floating around wearing *life jackets* !

Grab a few off the corpses who usually won’t mind if asked nicely, put them on, then see if you can slide a couple under the door to boost buoyancy and see what works.