Viewpoint: The Titanic exhibition in Singapore shows that out at sea, it pays to be rich

SINGAPORE – Some say the Oscar-winning movie Titanic (1997) is anti-rich propaganda.

The millionaire Cal (Billy Zane) is a swine who desires the aristocratic Rose (Kate Winslet), but cannot have her because sexy starving artist Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) has lured her into his scruffy arms.

And some have also noticed this: First-class girl Rose is so taken with third-class Jack that when she is elderly and close to death, she chooses him as her afterlife companion, not the husband and children with whom she has spent most of her life.

The romantic disaster epic about the titular ship’s 1912 sinking in icy waters is riddled with examples of bias against the rich, such as when third-class passengers meet locked gates stopping them from reaching the lifeboats so the posh folks can board first.

Writer-director James Cameron guessed correctly that most moviegoers fly economy, and we are the type to glare at first- and business-class passengers boarding ahead of everyone else, hoping they trip and fall.

Visit

the new exhibition

with a title almost as long as the ship, Titanic: An Immersive Voyage – Through The Eyes Of The Passengers, and you will see that maybe the film is not just anti-capitalist propaganda.

On a wall is a detailed chart showing the rates of survival, divided by class. As you might have guessed, the highest percentage of passengers lost at sea came from third class. Seventy per cent of people from the cheap decks died, compared with just 34 per cent from first class. Why would the exhibitors want to break down the numbers like that, unless they want us to think about the relationship between income and mortality at sea?

As one walks on through the exhibition, which opens in Singapore in mid-August at the Fever Exhibition Hall in Scotts Road, the question becomes more urgent: Do you want to be poor, sexy and dead like Jack; or rich, swinish and alive like Cal?

Items are borrowed from permanent collections, such as the Titanic Belfast museum, or from private collectors. They include flags, parts of crew uniforms and letters. There are also props from the movie, as well as posters from other films about the Titanic.

There is even a photo spot shaped like the ship’s bow. “I’m flying, Jack!” one partner might say, as the other hums the movie’s theme song My Heart Will Go On by Canadian singer Celine Dion, and thinks about man’s hubris and nature’s power to humble even the most mighty of mortal technologies.

Also on show is cutlery that people like Cal might have used as they dined on roast squab with cress, peaches in Chartreuse jelly and Waldorf pudding.

I am not making those dishes up. They are taken from a display that lists the dinner menu that fateful night 113 years ago.

Sadly, unlike the Harry Potter: A Forbidden Forest Experience I attended in 2024, there was no equivalent of butterbeer or chocolate frogs at the Titanic exhibition’s media preview on Aug 5, despite both being held by the same organiser, Fever. Now I will never know the delights of a Chartreuse jelly, whatever that is, and why wealthy folks of 1912 were all gaga for it.

Then there are two rooms that hope to immerse viewers, in more than one sense of the word, in the events of the sinking.

In one, you sit in a lifeboat as a wall displays the SOS messages sent between the Titanic and ships nearby. This experience demands that you be in a quiet, contemplative frame of mind.

In another room, participants don a virtual-reality headset that puts them in a submersible exploring the debris of the doomed ship. This is a more fun experience, but passive, and can feel like watching a video, but with extra steps.

In the end, what you get out of the exhibition will depend on what you put into it – by reading the wall displays, poring over the artefacts and being in one’s own quiet place, thinking about how the deaths of around 1,500 people changed the rules of maritime safety for the better.

To help you get into that mind space, here is famously grumpy English poet Thomas Hardy, writing about the tragedy in his poem The Convergence Of The Twain: “And as the smart ship grew, in stature, grace, and hue, in shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too. Alien they seemed to be: No mortal eye could see, the intimate welding of their later history.”

He also writes about sea worms crawling over the mirror and the glass opulence of the grand ballroom, but you can look that up for yourself.

Book it/ Titanic: An Immersive Voyage – Through The Eyes Of The Passengers

Where: Fever Exhibition Hall, 25 Scotts Road
When: From mid-August until 2026; Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays and Sundays (10am to 7.30pm), Fridays and Saturdays (10am to 8.30pm), closed on Tuesdays
Admission: From $20.90 (Singapore resident adults) and from $15.90 (Singapore resident children)
Info:

str.sg/CcY9