We are at the point in the plot where the ship has already hit the iceberg. The ship’s builder (Thomas Andrews, played here by Elon Musk) has done the math and calculated that the vessel has only another 90 minutes afloat. Heroic efforts by the crew would buy the boat another half hour.
The ship’s Captain (Edward Smith/Donald Trump) has given the order to evacuate to the lifeboats.
Now a group of passengers are in open revolt, mostly from among the first-class cabins and steerage. They insist that “experts” told them the ship is “unsinkable.” They can’t (or won’t) see the fatal blow below the waterline. The engines are still running and the lights are still on, so everything must be fine.
Ninety minutes comes and goes, so they say Andrews/Musk has to be wrong about the math. They accuse Andrews/Musk of a hidden agenda. Does he own the lifeboats?
They say that the Captain just wants them off the boat so he could have the ship all to himself, or something.
You can’t have missed the totally organic, completely spontaneous grassroots protests against Trump and Musk held across America yesterday. “Hands Off!” There was even a small group who gathered in my mid-sized, Midwestern suburb.
Yesterday, I wrote of the newly relevant 2011 film Margin Call. At its heart, Margin Call is a disaster movie, in this case one about a manmade catastrophe of financial engineering, rather than the usual civil engineering or naval architecture.
Disaster movies seem to go in and out of fashion every few decades. They were big in the 1970’s (Airport, Earthquake, Hindenburg, Towering Inferno) and seemed to always feature a Charlton Heston or Steve McQueen. They came back big in the 1990’s (Armageddon, Outbreak, Titanic, Volcano).
A standard feature in all these productions is the architect/engineer/scientist character whose warnings of doom go unheeded or mocked.
But in this real-life version, we don’t have the budding romance between Jack and Rose, or a third-rate subplot involving missing jewelry, to distract us.
So, how will it end: “I’m king of the world”? or “I’ll never let go, Jack”?
