Happy Together: Bill Paxton Was Always James Cameron’s Best, Imperfect On-Screen Avatar

With Happy Together, Jesse Hassenger examines collaborations between actors and directors that have lasted for three or more non-sequel films.
When James Cameron won the Academy Award for Best Director back in 1998, he clutched his award in his hand and declared, “I’m the king of the world!” The moment was subsequently derided as cringeworthy hubris—as Cameron meeting the moment of his Titanic triumph with the same unchecked ego that he’d become known for as the director of the most expensive movie ever made (multiple times) and the most successful movie ever made (then just once, though he’d go on to do it again). It seemed, frankly, kind of unfair: Cameron wrote and directed an epochal worldwide megahit, which then won a record number of Oscars. Who else had any business quoting his own “king of the world” line—a line meant to express momentary elation, not literal world-conquering—back at us, the people who supposedly loved his work?
In retrospect, here’s why I think that moment rubbed so many people the wrong way: In Titanic, that line is crowed by Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) as he stands on the bow of a majestic ocean liner, rushing toward what he imagines, in his youthful bravado, to be some glorious, unknown destiny. But despite Jack being cocksure, energetic and partial to strong women, he is not James Cameron. So Cameron quoting his own line from Jack didn’t quite scan, even though it makes all the sense in the world on paper. A young DiCaprio is not Cameron; neither is Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime, nor Sigourney Weaver in hers, nor any CG representations of Sam Worthington. No, our on-screen James Cameron is Bill Paxton.
Not literally, of course, and maybe not even with the symbolic clarity of certain directors using certain actors as their obvious proxy. I don’t think Cameron actively thinks of himself as the punk who gets killed by the T-800 early in The Terminator or as Hudson, the Marine who can’t stop yammering in jest and/or fear in Aliens, or, especially, as Simon, the used car salesman pretending to be a spy in True Lies. In these roles—the majority of his work for Cameron—Paxton ranges from major doofus to mild buffoon, and Cameron doesn’t seem like he’d place himself on that spectrum. In that sense, his can-do spirit probably does inform DiCaprio’s Jack.
In Titanic, however, there’s a better match at the edges of the movie. In his least buffoonish Cameron role, Paxton plays Brock Lovett: Mr. Framing Device, the treasure hunter who explores the Titanic wreckage in search of a diamond necklace, attracting the attention of the century-old Rose (Gloria Stuart), who then proceeds to tell the epic tale of romance and disaster that would win a barrel of Oscars. Lovett’s role is to feel appropriately awed by this firsthand account, gaining newfound appreciation for Rose’s experience, rather than the fortune and glory to be gained by recovering a valuable necklace. This makes him something of an audience surrogate: A guy who knows the story of Titanic, but gets a refresher on its human component.
Yet it’s easy to see Paxton’s character as a Cameron stand-in, too: He’s literally a man with a movie camera, as well as the master of expensive submersible equipment with a vaguely working-class veneer. At the outset, Lovett doesn’t have Cameron’s natural sincerity; he rattles off some hushed narration as he films the wreckage of the ship, only to self-mockingly switch it off, having satisfied his professional obligations for expressing awe. Beyond his lust for treasure, he’s also too immersed in his technical knowledge of the ship’s sinking to find a more human perspective on its tragedy. (“I never got it,” he admits after hearing Rose’s story. “I never let it in.”) In other words, he needs to rebalance his sense of spectacle, riches and genuine emotion—something Cameron quite self-consciously does with Titanic—far more successfully than he did on his previous film, True Lies, the closest he’s come to making a big, expensive Nothing Blockbuster.
Paxton’s part in True Lies is crucial to both what sets the movie apart, and what makes it such a sour experience. If Lovett is a guy who initially bullshits his way through the requisite awe only to rediscover genuinely respectful wonder by the end of the story, Paxton’s Simon is a man who delights in bullshitting, and becomes utterly terrified when faced with the prospect of his lies coming true. He’s a used-car salesman who ostentatiously and clumsily lies to women about being a spy in order to entice them into bed, who accidentally targets Helen Tasker (Jamie Lee Curtis), the frustrated wife of actual spy Harry Tasker (Arnold Schwarzenegger).