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If you have a daughter who's passed through adolescence in recent memory, you've probably seen a bedroom shrine dedicated to Leonardo DiCaprio, he of the delicate features, full lips, and smoldering eyes. Just another Hollywood pretty boy, you say? Take a look at What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1994), in which the heartthrob convincingly portrays a mentally challenged child. And if you never saw William Shakespeare's Romeo +Juliet (1996), you missed the aplomb with which the adolescent icon could handle iambic pentameter. It was Titanic (1997) that nearly sank Leo DiCaprio's career.
But isn't Titanic one of the biggest box-office hits ever? Yes—but DiCaprio's character, Jack Dawson, is so simplistically conceived, so shallow, that it's easy to confuse the actor with the role. Jack can do no wrong; not only does he deftly dance with peasants in steerage, he can also hobnob with the wealthy on their upper decks; he is artistic enough to draw the semi-clothed Rose but tough enough to hold his own in violent confrontations; and, of course, he allows himself to be left behind in freezing waters in order that Rose might live. In contrast, Rose's supercilious fiance seems petty or malevolent in all his actions. Jack, of course, is blond and almost always dressed in white or light-colored clothing, while his swarthy antagonist is always in black. Hi ho, Silver!
But this is what mass-market audiences love: clear signals as to whom to love, whom to hate. And although Jesus blurred such distinctions with stories about blackened Samaritans and whited sepulchres, Christians all too often buy into the binary. What else could explain the outrageous popularity of the Left Behind series, which is filled with cliched phrasing and simplistic characterizations (not to mention dubious eschatology)?
Significantly, repeated several times in Left Behind is the assertion that prophecy appears "in black and white in the Bible." The black and white marks on the Bible page are turned into black and white demarcations between the saved and the unsaved, as when authors Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye employ the sheep-and-goats metaphor of Matthew 25 to distinguish those who accept or reject the Mark of the Beast.
Ironically, of course, Matthew 25 muddies the waters about the conditions of salvation. Prophesying about the end times, Jesus states that the Son of Man will return to separate the sheep from the goats, placing the former at his right hand and the latter at his left. Those to his left will ask, "Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?" He will answer, "Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me," and send them "away into eternal punishment" (Matt. 25:31-45, RSV).
But simplistic divisions between good and evil are not limited to any party or persuasion. The discourse of political correctness spread like wildfire because it so easily and clearly divided the good people—those who employ sensitive and inclusive terminology—from those benighted individuals who fail to consider how traditional language conventions marginalize others.
The defiance of convention also marks the "political correctness" of movie heroes. This easy binary between the good individualist (Jack Dawson) and the evil establishment (on the Titanic's upper decks) even applies to films that seem to be morally ambiguous, like American Beauty (1999), where the character played by Kevin Spacey becomes a hero, practically a martyr, in his defiance of upper-middle-class suburban convention. When I saw this unpleasant film, the audience cheered as Spacey threw a dinner dish against the wall. The binary was quite clear.
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