The Nineties: A Book

by Chuck Klosterman

But the response from audiences was so overwhelming that part of covering Titanic inevitably became an exercise in trying to explain why people were so obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio. Article after article emphasized how teenage girls were seeing the movie multiple times, a box office phenomenon previously associated with adolescent boys. DiCaprio was twenty-three, but he looked younger and acted older. There was also this idea—impossible to prove or disprove—that the perception of the character DiCaprio played and the perception of the person he actually was had morphed into a singular entity, and that the consumption of Titanic was simply the means for consuming its main actor. Instead of buying a ticket to Titanic and seeing DiCaprio, it was as if kids were buying a ticket to DiCaprio, who happened to be inside a movie called Titanic. He was bigger than the biggest movie of all time. And what’s noteworthy about this was not that it happened, but what DiCaprio did to sustain and expand this hyperbolic level of popularity: almost nothing. DiCaprio was not a recluse. He participated in all the perfunctory functions expected of someone promoting a movie, he showed up at the various award shows, and he led an active social life.[*] But he did very little in terms of self-marketing. He rarely gave interviews and appeared in only five movies in the six years following Titanic (one of which was a small role in Woody Allen’s Celebrity).