Stop Saying Rose From ‘Titanic’ Should Have Sold That Diamond

6 Diamonds Are Worthless to Diamond Merchants

A few centuries ago, diamonds were truly rare. People mined them only in Brazil and India, and so few diamonds existed that they were valuable, purely because of how supply and demand interacted. Perhaps they were useless, like so many luxuries, but they did have rarity.

Later came the discovery of diamond mines in South Africa. Many miners independently dug through claims for diamonds, then Cecil Rhodes bought up a bunch of these claims through his De Beers Group. De Beers soon controlled the entire diamond supply, and then as even more mines were discovered, they managed to control something more important: distribution. They created a network whereby they set how many diamonds entered the market each year and at what price. They had enough diamonds themselves that the stuff could be as common as glass, but they enforced scarcity and marketed the gems as valuable.

For example, there’s that famous slogan, “a diamond is forever.” When copywriter Frances Gerety first came up with it, it sounded like gibberish to everyone else at the ad agency. It was ungrammatical, for starters. An object can’t be an adverb. “A diamond is forever” makes as much sense as “a diamond is often.” 

But the slogan resonated with people, and it told them that you must treasure diamonds. You certainly shouldn’t sell your diamonds, anyway. And if you tried, you’d find diamond merchants unwilling to buy them.

5 The Diamond Industry Didn’t Buy Secondhand Diamonds

The year is 1912. You walk into a diamond store offering to sell your diamond, hoping to get rich. You are then crushed to learn that they aren’t interested. They, like all diamond stores, are part of the De Beers diamond cartel, who sources diamonds for next to nothing and then decides exactly how many diamonds they wish to sell. They will not pay you a million dollars for a gem they plan to sell for two million. They will not pay you a hundred dollar for a gem they plan to sell for two million. They have all the gems they want. 

That doesn’t mean they have infinite wealth. They still struggle to sell the gems at the price De Beers has picked. They have expenses, as they have to pay for labor, rent and marketing, just like any other business. But it does mean they have no use for that additional diamond. 

We can equate this to walking into the headquarters of some video game company and offering to sell them a thumb drive containing a copy of a game they sell. In this imaginary scenario, you aren’t asking them to refund a purchase but are just selling them a copy, so they can make money reselling it to someone else. They won’t buy it at any price. With development on the game done, it costs them nothing to make more digital copies, so though they are willing to sell copies of the game to people, they have no reason to buy one from you. 

4 But This Isn’t Just Any Diamond

“Okay,” you might say, “so they have an effectively limitless supply of diamonds. But this diamond is special. Rose has the Heart of the Ocean, a 50-carat diamond that would today be worth $300 million. De Beers doesn’t have an infinite supply of those!”

That is true. But that doesn’t make selling it easier. It makes selling it harder. If you try selling a Picasso painting to a local art gallery, they would assume it is fake. Same deal if you try to sell what appears to be the biggest diamond in the world. 

In the unlikely event that they take the buyer seriously enough to ascertain whether this diamond is real, they will recognize it as the Heart of the Ocean, because everyone in the industry knows this famous jewel. They will also know that the Heart of the Ocean is currently the legal possession of the insurance company that paid Cal Hockley after it was lost during the sinking of the Titanic. 

Either Rose is now thrown in a cell for trying to sell this stolen gem or she identifies herself as Hockley’s dead fiancée, to whom he gifted it. Either way, this means Cal and her mother now track her down, which is the one thing she wants to avoid.

3 Well, What If She Tries Selling It to Someone Else?

Perhaps Rose could try selling it to someone other than a reputable diamond merchant linked to the De Beers cartel. Maybe she could go to a pawn shop. But no: No such place would buy a diamond that huge without details of its provenance because no one would buy a diamond that huge from them without details of its provenance. 

So, maybe she should find someone less reputable still? Maybe she just needs to find a good criminal fence. Or someone willing to cut the diamond into a hundred smaller ones, which would be worth much less collectively than the big gem but which she stands a chance at selling. 

But now, we’re just imagining the plot of some exciting crime story instead of responding to the story they gave us. Is this 17-year-old girl (Rose is 17 in Titanic, in case you missed it) supposed to go walking through the shadiest part of 1912 New York to chat up suspected criminals, telling them she has a giant diamond she needs help laundering? Seems like a nice way of getting herself killed. 

As she grew up, Rose would become slightly less vulnerable to being stabbed perhaps, but only marginally so. She’d also become less desperate, making the idea of seeking out the underworld to illegally turn this diamond into cash all the more unappetizing.  

2 Of Course, That’s Not the ‘Real’ Reason She Didn’t Sell

The movie Titanic, sadly, isn’t really about the 20th-century gem trade. It’s about characters, and the movie implies that Rose could have sold the diamond but chose not to. She chose not to because her goal her was to break away from Cal and the life previously set out for her, and she wouldn’t really be doing that if she funded herself with Cal’s money. 

At one point, the movie did more than just imply that. They shot an alternate ending where the crew catches her tossing the diamond in the ocean, and she explains her motives. It’s a terrible scene, and it reveals little we couldn’t have figured out for ourselves.

We’ve previously pointed out several reasons the deleted scene is so bad, from the painful dialogue to the fact that dropping the diamond in front of a crew armed with submersibles means they’re just going to head back down and fetch it as soon as possible. There’s another reason, too: The scene declares the lesson of the entire movie to be to make each day count, much as Jack taught Rose to. Newly enlightened, Lovett (Bill Paxton’s character) asks Rose’s granddaughter to dance because he now realizes that's more important than going after diamonds. But, see, he could do both.

Rose chose between a life of wealth that was boring (and constricting, and involved having to sleep with someone named “Cal,” etc.) and a life without initial money but with endless exciting opportunity. In real life, maybe people who wash ashore penniless in New York face a rockier road, but that’s the fairy tale choice the movie sets up, and we accept it on its terms. For Lovett, however, finding the diamond is an exciting opportunity. It’s a grand adventure. We know James Cameron thinks journeying underwater is a grand adventure. That's what he personally chooses to do in his free time, and even making Titanic was just an excuse to go exploring under the ocean. 

So, yeah: The movie never gave Lovett a reason to turn from the diamond. But it did give one to Rose. 

1 And the People Complaining About This Know That

However, you won’t have much luck arguing that character-based reason with the people who say Rose should have sold the diamond. They already know it. 

The version of this fan complaint that’s been making the rounds lately uses a shot of Rose dangling the diamond out over the water. That shot appears nowhere in the movie. It comes from the deleted scene we just talked about.

That means whoever made that post heard the argument laid out explicitly in the deleted scene and refused to be convinced by it. 

So, if you hear someone making this complaint yet again, don’t bicker with them over Rose’s character, a topic about which they’ve already made up their minds. Instead, talk about a subject everyone enjoys: treasure hunting. 

Talk about how no one can inherit the diamond from Rose because it’s the official property of that insurance company, or their successors, even in 1996, the year the movie takes place. (“You mean 1997,” they might say. “No,” you say. “The movie came out at the end of 1997, but it is set in 1996.”) Talk about how Rose could never sell it legally and how even Lovett can’t just scoop it out and sell it because the company still owns it. Treasure hunters who try looting old wrecks regularly discover this issue. Talk about how, for all we know, the insurance company hired Lovett, and he and his crew will merely split a predetermined finder’s fee. 

Talk about how, hey, a company chartering an expedition to retrieve a precious mineral was also the premise for Cameron’s next picture, Avatar. Now there's a movie everyone loves digging deep into. 

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