Sunday, February 22, 1998

'Titanic' reminds us of less cynical time

By Leonard Pitts

I was leaving a screening of the movie "Titanic" one afternoon when I chanced upon these two fellows standing outside the theater, wrestling with what they had seen. "OK," began the one, "so she had a fling with this guy on the ship..."

It seemed such a perfectly '90s interpretation. The movie charted the course of a deathless love, yet this guy saw only a "fling." It was as if his heart lacked the software to process the higher interpretation. Tina Turner, I guess, had it pegged: What's love got to do with it?

And not just love, but any fine feeling requiring a leap of faith. "Titanic" is well on its way to becoming the most popular film of all time, despite the fact that it has no space aliens or dinosaurs. Indeed, the movie is relentlessly unhip and stubbornly unjaded, a celebration of selfless gallantry that sees in human suffering a gateway to grace.

And as such, it raises the unavoidable question of whether we still believe in those virtues. Or any virtues. After the corrupt politicians and the cheating preachers, after true lies and hard betrayals, after that which was stark black and white muddies to an indefinable gray, how do we rally ourselves back to certainty? The point isn't that there's nothing to believe in, but rather, that we seem to have somehow lost the will to believe, the ability to face our lives with something other than a post-ironic smirk.

That smirk has become the currency of our culture, a hipper than thou twist of the lip that bespeaks self-conscious self-awareness and an arch assurance that behind every silver lining there is a dark cloud. Cynicism has become validation, and faith a folly for fools. Nobody believes in nothing, nobody stands for squat. Not the nihilistic rapper with the hard streets rep, not the bad-boy athlete with the big-bucks contract, not even the politician with the aw-shucks smile and the gleam of sincerity in his eye.

Yet isn't it telling how a stubborn decency, an obstinate sense of the geometrically square, keeps making its way back from the fringes to the center stage? From the feisty conventionality of Rosie O'Donnell's talk show to the merciless cuteness of the pop group Hanson, to the public backlash against the gamier details of this latest Washington scandal, we seem to find ourselves moving forward by looking back to a less complicated time before angst was king and inquiring minds wanted to know.

I don't know if we can truly reclaim that day, but there's a yearning in us, isn't there? A seeking that stirs even the young, who know about "back in the day" only from what they've read in books or heard from elders.

My middle son Marlon complained to me just the other day that his generation is coming of age "in a world without heroes."

Mind you, I'm not at all convinced that he wouldn't, in a brighter mood, find something heroic in, say, Michael Jordan. But his words tugged at me just the same.

Our children have learned to wait for the other shoe to drop, for "heroes" to be unmasked and values betrayed. That I didn't do that as a child may mean I was naive. May also mean I was blessed.

I had -- people of my generation had -- a capacity for belief that seems alien to these times. Now we shield ourselves with cynicism, forgetting sometimes that a defense that protects us from things we scorn can also protect us from things we need. In holding ourselves safe from lies, we also hold ourselves safe from truth.

Which is a verity worth remembering as the R.M.S. Titanic steams into port at last, transmuted along the way from a ship of steel and wood into something that has begun to look very much like a generational watershed -- a movie that defines the strivings of its time. "Titanic" is a postcard from once upon a day, a glimpse of how gallantry once looked and love once felt. It is a reminder of who we used to be.

And a marker of our struggle to be that once again.

Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald.

Knight Ridder Newspapers