In Evangelism Outside the Box: New Ways to Help People Experience the Good News, Rick Richardson uses the movie Titanic as a symbol of the cultural shift into postmodernism. I haven’t seen the movie in seven years, and I wasn’t really thinking about the philosophy of the movie when I saw it. It was just boring romantic junk to me. Richardson sheds some new light, and it explains to me why the movie was so wildly successful:

The movie Titanic provides striking images of this shift in cultural vision. The ship represents all that the modern has made possible. People have unlocked the secrets of nature and the world and created a ship that stands as a monument to their creative imagination and their technological and economic capacity to triumph. But what all these moderns don’t realize is that they are trapped on a ship that is doomed to sink under its own weight.

The larger story is mirrored in the personal story of Rose. She is engaged to marry a great modern capitalist who controls the world through aggressive, visionary application of his reason and power. He is the lord of his world, and he protects and privilege with all his power. Understandably, Rose is not happy. She is trapped, screaming out, suffocated by this world of power and privilege and lordly men.

Jack Dawson, the artist, the man who lives for the moment, the man who creates his own meaning and morality–his own reality–saves Rose in “every way a person can be saved.” In gripping and visually captivating drama, the ship of modernism goes down. But in the end, all that death and destruction doesn’t matter. What really matters is that the heart will go on (as expressed in the movie’s theme song). And so the new cultural vision of the creative artist who makes reality and lives in a world of emotional truth and relational connection, is born and baptized and even triumphs. In a poignant moment, after telling the story of the Titanic, Rose staggers to the rail of another ship and throws the most valuable diamond in the world into the sea as a tribute to the man who led her into the new postmodern world and who died saving her decades earlier.