‘Titanic’ may be based on a true story, but when it comes to a poor person sketching your nude body, the movie completely abandons any grounding in reality. Here are six things James Cameron’s 1997 epic gets totally wrong about letting a vagrant draw you naked.
1. In reality, you would have to supply the charcoal pencil and sketchbook: Titanic makes it seem like once you ask a penniless pauper to draw you naked, they’ll be ready to go on the spot with their own pen and paper. The truth? A real poor person would lead you into a CVS for the necessary supplies and then nag you to buy them some malt liquor and smokes, too, while you’re at it.
2. You’d have to lie inside their shopping cart instead of on a Victorian chaise to pose for the sketch: We get that James Cameron had to take some creative liberties to make a movie as ambitious as Titanic, but this is just sloppy.
3. A poor person would scheme a way to steal and sell your nice clothes after you’ve disrobed: The amount of trust Rose places in Jack when she leaves all her expensive, custom-tailored garments unguarded is 100 percent Hollywood imagination. Were Titanic to take place in the real world, Jack would be eyeing her satin robe on the floor and greedily pondering how much gambling money it would fetch for him, all while the orphan he agreed to split the profits with nicked it from the room without Rose noticing. Instead, Jack’s focus remains solely on his sketch during this scene, not conveying even a hint of the scheming that would be going on in the mind of a street person in this scenario.
4. They’d kill the mood by complaining about their clubfoot the whole time: Yup, in reality, you can forget any semblance of a romantic atmosphere in this situation. Try to look relaxed for the sketch all you want, but it’ll be exceedingly difficult to do so when the guttersnipe drawing you unwraps the duct tape holding together the Birkenstocks he found in the trash to give his clubfoot some air. We can pick apart small details all day long, but it is unforgivable that Titanic didn’t once have Jack tell Rose his clubfoot was killing him after a long day of collecting scrap metal.
5. Instead of a luxury vehicle, a poor person would follow up the sketch session by inviting you to have sex in the sedan they live out of: We hate to be the ones to break it to you, but in actuality, the only foggy window Rose would be leaving a handprint on would be one inside a 1998 Toyota Camry with a hot-plate rigged up inside it. To think that a poor person would take your virginity in anything nicer than a junker filled with clothes and plastic bags is laughable, yet millions of people left Titanic with that impression.
6. The underclass is so filthy that their sooty hands would smudge up the drawing—and they’d still have the nerve to demand you pay for it! Leonardo DiCaprio looks as suave and clean-cut as ever throughout Titanic, but rest assured, a real-life Jack Dawson would be covered head to toe in gunk and grit from shoveling coal in the engine room all day, with the exception of his fingers, which would be sticky from the two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew he’d been drinking out of all day after swindling it from a first-class family. Had James Cameron done his research, the oceanographers in the film would’ve discovered a nude sketch dirtied top to bottom with filthy black fingerprints, one that Jack had demanded Rose pay him $5 for until she gave in just to get him off her back. If you love Titanic for the romance and the action, that’s all well and fine, but if you appreciated it for the realism, sorry, but you’ve been gypped.
