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All the psychoanalysis trying to explain our fascination with this particular tragedy seems to ignore Occan's Razor.

We are absolutely obsessed with all things Titanic. Wasn't it the highest grossing movie ever? If these same 5 guys in the same submarine were lost prowling some random spot in the Atlantic Ocean, the story would be a footnote.

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I don’t think so. I think “Tourist submarine disappears” was always going to be a story because those three words rarely end up in the same headline.

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Titanic was the highest grossing movie because it was perfectly designed for a specific type of t(w)eenage girl in the time before social media.

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Ha yes. In my case though, I was an insufferable contrarian indie-film college person when it came out and I went to a big-box theater for the first time since "Dracula" in 1992 to see it *solely for the meticulous dedication to how the Titanic probably actually looked.* It was a lot of hours and romance hokum to sit through but it fed my historical nerddom.

Soon after, my mom got a dual-cassette bootleg VHS version of the movie. Amazingly, the first of the two tapes ended right when the boat hits the iceberg, so I watched the first part a couple of times just to see the boat again if I was bored.

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Hey no fair! OK, so it was and I was but...

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