May 26, 1998 (Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The following is from The Christian News, May 4, 1998. It reminds us of how deceptive and corrupt Hollywood productions are. If the devil is not the author of most Hollywood movies, he could do no better himself. They depict sin as glamorous and life without God as liberating. Ordinary Christians are petty and mean and immoral. Pastors are even worse. Hollywood’s vicious attitude toward the things of God is evident in its refusal to portray normal, loving Christian families and godly Christian pastors, though there are multiplied thousands of these in our society. Modern Hollywood movies rarely show the consequences of sin. Eternal values are almost never addressed, and when they are, briefly and rarely, they are passed over only in the most superficial manner. The Hollywood entertainment business has been one of the most damnable influences in our society, and it is disgrace that so many fundamental Baptist families are so intimately connected with Hollywood and it is frightful that so many fundamental Baptist pastors are very quiet on this topic. Now to the article "The Real Titanic" by Joseph Sobran --

James Cameron, the director of the Oscar-winning Titanic, has apologized for the film’s defamatory portrait of First Officer William Murdoch. In the movie, Murdoch takes a bribe, shoots a third-class passenger, and kills himself. In real life, Murdoch behaved heroically, sacrificing his life after laboring frantically to save others.

As a reparation, Cameron has donated $8,340 to a memorial fund for Murdoch. "What makes Cameron’s revision of history so misleading," notes Doug Phillips, president of the Christian Boys’ and Men’s Titanic Society, "is that in interview after interview Cameron has stressed that he went to great pain to ensure absolute historical accuracy.

Phillips has made it a mission to set the record straight on the real Titanic. The movie merely follows a school of historians in trying to debunk the Christian heroism of the men on the ship, hundreds of whom chose a terrible death to honor the simple code: "Women and children first."

Such historians prefer to portray the ship as an epitome of class warfare, with the privileged rich consigning the poor to drowning when the chips were down. This cynical scenario has no room for chivalry.

Phillips feels passionately that this is a historical libel. He cites statistics that support his contention that women were favored even in the panic and confusion of the moment.

For every woman who was lost, for example, nine men died. A higher ratio of women in third class were saved than of men in first class. One in 11 second-class men survived, as against one in five third-class men; even if this ratio was accidental, it shows at least that third-class men weren’t victims of discrimination.

Phillips notes that "there is no credible evidence that first-class passengers were given priority seating rights. To the contrary, there are numerous accounts of first-class passengers giving up their seats and assisting third-class passengers into lifeboats."

The movie’s most obvious sin of omission is its nearly total failure to show the passengers praying and singing hymns in their hour of crisis. An authentic depiction of the world of 1912 could hardly leave out its religious dimension. In fact, if the ship had sunk as recently as last night, it’s safe to say that more people aboard would have appealed to God than do so in the film.

But Hollywood frowns on any sympathetic portrayal of Christian activities, and its profits would plummet if it observed Christian standards of morality and decency. IN THAT RESPECT HOLLYWOOD FILMS FALSIFY THE PRESENT AS MUCH AS THEY DO THE PAST, SINCE THEY BARELY ACKNOWLEDGE THE EXISTENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.

It’s simply a cultural fact that Christianity shaped Europe and North America, but you’d hardly know it from watching movies that pride themselves on their historical accuracy in even the tiniest physical details. The hero and heroine of Titanic display language, attitudes, and sexual abandon that would have been unlikely on several counts in 1912. In those days, even a girl who didn’t value her chastity had to think about pregnancy, disease, and social ruin. And it’s doubtful that the passengers on the real Titanic were discussing Picasso and Freud, who wouldn’t achieve fame for several years.

The movie uses these anachronisms to manipulate the sympathies of contemporary audiences. They serve no other purpose--certainly not the purpose of authenticity. The two chief characters are meant to claim our sympathy not because they are really admirable, but because they are a cute couple who, unlike the other characters in the milieu of 1912, share the attitudes that have become fashionable in the 1990s. The whole thing is actually a kind of fantasy, as unreal as a time machine.

Like productions of Shakespeare that superimpose Freud, Marx, feminism, and existentialism on the plays, the Titanic movie cuts off its audience from the past it purports to represent. ITS FIDELITY IN THE VISIBLE PERIOD DETAILS DISGUISES ITS BLEND OF INCOMPREHENSION AND HOSTILITY TOWARD THE ANCESTRAL CHRISTIAN CULTURE.