The Tragedy of the Submarine: A culture play

you supposed to be at the house, sad.

the meme is an recurring feature of the culture play (tweet link)

In ten years, in a hundred years, how are we going to explain the headline: Cardi B Snaps On Missing Titan Sub Billionaire’s Stepson, which recently appeared on Vibe.com. According to the article, Cardi B said:

“Ay so one of the billionaires that’s missing underwater, on the submarine shit… One of the billionaires, their stepson, is at a Blink-182 concert. People was like, ‘What is he supposed to do, be sad at the house? Is he supposed to go look for him himself?’ Yes. You supposed to be at the house, sad.”

This, of course, is one of the storylines attached to the larger cultural moment we recently lived through: the tragedy of the Titan Submarine. Cardi B, a rapper who is known for her unpredictable candor online is in an argument with the stepson of a billionaire who is trapped in a real-life Schrödinger's chamber.¹ Oh and the billionaire’s stepson character has an online stalking charge. And there’s something about an OnlyFans model. That’s a storyline too. In another of the storylines, there’s this headline Logitech’s stock hit by reports its $30 game controller was used to steer missing sub near Titanic.

What started on Sunday with a handful of billionaires locking themselves into a metal tube and voluntarily sinking to the bottom of the ocean became something else this week. It became a moment: a culture play. For a few days, everybody was talking about “the submarine shit.” The play seemed to conclude on Thursday when Rear Admiral John Mauger of the US Coast Guard gave a briefing in which he announced that they found the submarine’s remains only a few hundred yards from the bow of the Titanic.

What an ending — and what a show. It turned into a psychological horror for a minute there when the coast guard said they heard banging sounds “every 30 minutes” while searching for the missing submarine. And then somebody posted an almost certainly fake audio clip of what they suggested was the billionaires trapped inside, on the dark bottom of the ocean, banging on the walls of their submarine in a doomed signal for help. In 12 hours, something like 1.3 million people listened to the audio.² And we all knew that the billionaires would run out of oxygen on Thursday morning. Everybody knew that.

This is 2023, and this is how a culture play works: an incident grows storylines like legs and runs off with our imagination. Maybe they write it into the cold open on Saturday Night Live, like they did with the Chinese Spy Balloon, which was another of our culture plays. That storyline ended like a comedy, with the government tacitly admitting that UFOs are constantly zipping around our stratosphere and, well, yeah, that’s all they know. I wrote about that too.

Obviously, the only personal part of this story to you is the question of how you feel about it. What’s your opinion of it? You, being a rational person, would not willingly climb into a private submarine piloted by an eccentric millionaire with a $30 video game controller. And you’re not a billionaire yourself.³ You probably don’t have much empathy for them.⁴ You probably shouldn’t be glad they died, but I’m not suggesting anything there either. But what does the sum of these feelings say about our collective cultural toward attitudes toward billionaires?⁵

These culture plays are separate from the big things that actually drive world events. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for instance. The BP oil spill was a culture play, but the disappearance of the polar ice caps is not. We just don’t have the attention span for it. And for some reason, we prefer that our culture plays aren’t too sad. There was a great piece in The New Republic this week about how while we’ve all been watching this “submarine shit,” a boatful of migrants drowned in a shipwreck near Greece and their tragedy went basically unnoticed in the press. What does that say about the state of the American press? Probably nothing good, but nothing surprising either.

And where does the culture play exist? Online? In conversations among friends and strangers? Is that all the Titan Submarine Tragedy was — something, other than the weather, to talk about with strangers?

And how are we meant to consume culture plays? In the course of the Titan submarine tragedy did you occasionally feel yourself getting uselessly sucked-into the storylines? Did you ever read five breathlessly-written pieces with headlines like Frantic final search for stricken Titanic submarine as oxygen levels dwindle and finally realize this whole situation has zero impact on your life. I did. And I felt a bit ashamed of it too. But then again, what was I supposed to do — be at the house, sad?

1. At the point the Cardi B - billionaire’s stepson argument took place, the billionaires in the submarine were almost certainly dead. According to the Coast Guard, the submarine just imploded. Probably less than two hours into the trip. The billionaires had been dead since Sunday. But on Thursday, the stepson went to the New York Post in an attempt to spin the news cycle back in his favor and said, “This whole situation is a fucking nightmare. Especially what Hamish is going through down there. It is just fucking god awful.” — so on Thursday, the stepson character — like most of us, was talking about these men as if they were still alive. In our cultural imagination, they were alive and they were running out of oxygen.

2. Because (see previous footnote) the billionaires were already dead, that means the banging came from something else. Apparently, shipwrecks make noise? What a chilling thought — just hold that in your mind for a moment. The writer in me wants to take it a bit further, though — what was the banging? I like to imagine it was the sound of a single diamond, lodged in some corner of the Titanic since it went down but when the wreckage of the Titan submarine landed on the bottom, the force of its impact on the ocean-floor dislodged the diamond and it went trickling, all alone in the dark ocean, down the Grand Staircase of the Titanic. That’s a better ending than Rose letting Jack freeze to death in the Atlantic.

3. It’s unclear how many billionaires were on the submarine but it looks like at least three. If there’s a moral to the story it’s the uselessness of a billionaire’s billions when he’s trapped in a tube at the bottom of the ocean.

4. I’m on a bit of a Shakespeare kick lately and it struck me that, if Shakespeare were writing today, the Submarine tragedy contains the exact sort of stock figures Shakespeare would turn into complex characters. Billionaires and an OnlyFans model and a shady stepson and a bombastic rapper.

5. Also, what does the Submarine Tragedy say about the behaviors of billionaires? These men are either live in terror of the world, building themselves doomsday bunkers in New Zealand. Or they’re convinced of their own invincibility, sinking themselves to the bottom of the ocean in a metal tube.