Missing the boat on love

The only possible conclusion? They didn't see a ship sink. Or rather: the ship that went down--and the hundreds with her--were so peripheral to what they were really watching that the disaster itself carried not an ounce of emotional weight. All that they saw, and all that the filmmakers intended for them to see, was what someone, somewhere, in a combined fit of compulsive lying and equally compulsive longing, imagined to be love. A love in which neither lover discovers, much less has to tolerate, anything seriously objectionable in the other. A love that gives everything and transforms lives. A love that requires only that one be willing to die for it.

Titanic's manipulative fantasy can't be blamed on writer and director James Cameron, because in one way or another we've all shared it. Who among us doesn't want such a love or to believe themselves capable of paying the price? And who, never having experienced that love, doesn't secretly feel that they have missed, shall we say, the boat?

In a superb irony, this most romantic of fantasies is played out against one of history's most famous calamities. Fantasies, no matter how cherished, tend to fall apart in moments of dire peril. The masks that we all hide behind are ripped from out.faces. There is in fact nothing more challenging--and no truer signal of love--than really recognizing another human being. Our very lives are at stake in this act of seeing or not seeing. For in that confrontation, we are forced to see ourselves. To face others without masks is to watch while they face something in us, something we have not seen. (A Moslem proverb puts it nicely: You can't read the words that are written on your own forehead.) The acceptance or rejection of what another sees is nothing less than the acceptance or rejection of love. It should come as no surprise, then, that at the crucial moment of unmasking, many of us, most of the time, look the other way.

Titanic's filmmakers don?t want anybody to look the other way, however, so they've banned human beings. The ship is boarded by stereotypical characters--and actors who revel in not surprising us. Most prominent is the hero Jack, the quintessential American boy-man, Tom Sawyer resurrected. Though he plays Jack with charm, Leonardo "DiCaprio has such limited acting skills and possesses such an androgynous beauty that he can make any scene unreal just by showing up. That's not DiCaprio's fault, it's his gift. He relieves an audience of a sense of consequence.

So, too, does Rose, the impetuous beauty faced with a suffocating marriage. In a cunning move, filmmakers cast Kate Winslet. She's fleshy enough not to intimidate most young American women, thus allowing them to imagine themselves in the part. She also can act (just watch her pull off the masks with a single expression as Ophelia in Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet). Winslet is adept enough to be convincing as Rose without making her seem quite real.

When Winslet's Rose gazes at DiCaprio's Jack, we see she feels something. But what? Unfortunately, what passes for love in Titanic is fascination. Sly fascination, concerned fascination, sexual fascination, whimsical fascination--her look always radiates fascination. Anything deeper would sink this ship faster than the iceberg.

Cameron would have us buy the assumption that infatuation is enough to transform a life. In Titanic, Rose is transfigured by fascination, not by surviving disaster. Indeed, the film is the epitome of an America that flits from one fascination to another. Our advertising industry--if not the engine, at least the instigator, of our economy--is based upon igniting urgent obsession after obsession. A root reason for Titanic's success is that it equates this same captivation with the most profound transformative love. It says that the same impulse ignited by a slick commercial can fulfill your deepest longings.

Yet there's no denying that the deepest longings of millions have been touched by Titanic. Why should this love story, in that setting, touch such a nerve? Perhaps the filmmakers have . ignited not only our romantic longings but our apocalyptic fears.

America today often feels like it's sinking even though statistics say we're stronger than ever. Our touted technology creates constant, troublesome changes in our lives, our values, our families. Most people possess more than they ever did, yet many feel less secure. Who wholly trusts the stability of the ship? Who doesn't wonder, "Is America sinking?"