Daniel Mendelsohn recently asked, “Why do we love the Titanic?”, seeking to understand how it has happened that:

It may not be true that ‘the three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic,’ as one historian has put it, but it’s not much of an exaggeration. . . . The inexhaustible interest suggests that the Titanic’s story taps a vein much deeper than the morbid fascination that has attached to other disasters. The explosion of the Hindenburg, for instance, and even the torpedoing, just three years after the Titanic sank, of the Lusitania, another great liner whose passenger list boasted the rich and the famous, were calamities that shocked the world but have failed to generate an obsessive preoccupation. . . .

If the Titanic has gripped our imagination so forcefully for the past century, it must be because of something bigger than any fact of social or political or cultural history. To get to the bottom of why we can’t forget it, you have to turn away from the facts and consider the realm to which the Titanic and its story properly belong: myth.

Some reasons Mendelsohn gives for the Titanic’s continuing presence in the popular imagination (even before that big movie of a few years back):

– “The magnificence, the pathos, the enthralling chivalry—Benjamin Guggenheim putting on white tie and tails so he could drown ‘like a gentleman’—and the shaming cowardice, the awful mistakes, the tantalizing ‘what ifs'”

– “For some, it’s a parable about the scope, and limits, of technology: a 1997 Broadway musical admonished us that ‘in every age mankind attempts / to fabricate great works at once / magnificent and impossible.'”

– “For others, it’s a morality tale about class, or a foreshadowing of the First World War—the marker of the end of a more innocent era.”

– “less a historical dividing line than a screen on which early-twentieth-century society projected its anxieties about race, gender, class, and immigration.”

– “the most obvious thing about the Titanic’s story: it uncannily replicates the structure and the themes of our most fundamental myths and oldest tragedies. Like Iphigenia, the Titanic is a beautiful ‘maiden’ sacrificed to the agendas of greedy men eager to set sail; the forty-six-thousand-ton liner is just the latest in a long line of lovely girl victims, an archetype of vulnerable femininity that stands at the core of the Western literary tradition.”

– “But the Titanic embodies another strain of tragedy. This is the drama of a flawed and self-destructive hero, a protagonist of great achievements and overweening presumption.”

Mendelsohn concludes:

All this is why we keep watching Cameron’s movie, and why we can’t stop thinking about the Titanic. The tale irresistibly conflates two of the oldest archetypes in literature.

This is all fine, but afterward I kept thinking of Duncan Watts and Matt Salganik’s emphasis on path dependence, feedback loops, whatever you want to call it. The Titanic is famous for real reasons (it’s a good story, it came along at the right time, etc.), but it’s also famous for being famous (and, at this point, famous for being famous for baing famous).