#5. The Sad Story of Whoever Married Rose from Titanic
How It Ended:
At the end of her three-plus hour rambling response to Bill Paxton's single question of "Do you know where this comically oversized diamond is?" excruciatingly old Titanic survivor Rose finally tells him that she doesn't know, asks him not to disturb the ship's wreckage so as to leave the dead at peace and then predictably succumbs to her sheer oldness and (apparently) dies herself.
Then, as the movie ends and Rose appears to die in her sleep, we are treated to a scene where Rose and Leo DiCaprio share a passionate kiss to the thunderous applause of everyone else who perished in the sinking. The most common interpretation of this scene is that Rose and Jack have been reunited in the afterlife. It makes sense, since that's really the only way to give a Hollywood happy ending to a film about the drowning deaths of hundreds of people.
Strangely, they all booed when they started having sex, moments later.
The Horrific Aftermath:
At the beginning of the film, old Rose is brought to the ship by her granddaughter, which means that after surviving the sinking of the Titanic and arriving in New York, she met someone else and got married. She even mentions in her babbling to Bill Paxton that she had a husband whom she had never told about Jack.
While we understand that she loved Jack for those few hours they spent together on a luxury liner, it's really hard to not to consider Rose as kind of a terrible person for basically using some poor guy as a marital and sexual surrogate for the majority of his life. Old lady Rose tries to explain this away with some bullshit line about "a woman's heart is a deep ocean of secrets," but essentially the sad man she wound up marrying is only filling a void for her -- he loved her and pledged to honor and cherish her, but she was thinking about Jack the whole time.
No mere man can compare to the memory of those suspenders.
To be fair, maybe her feelings for Jack only rekindled after all those years because she finally told her story to Bill Paxton. Maybe she really did love her husband, but talking about Jack reminded her how much she loved him, too.
Actually, it doesn't look like it -- right before the afterlife scene, the camera pans across the dozens of photos that Rose says she never goes anywhere without. Most of them depict her fulfilling many of the promises she had made to Jack while on the Titanic. Conspicuously absent are wedding photos, family photos or anything to indicate that Rose actually gave a single shit about her husband.
"And here's me with a guy I met at the deli. And a guy I once rode an elevator with."
And, if the "afterlife" interpretation of the film's ending is to be believed, her husband gets to stand around and watch as his wife of many years spends eons dancing with some 19-year-old guy that he's never even seen before. That's like a Twilight Zone episode.
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