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Amor só de Amor é servo
Love is slave to Love alone
(my favourite verse by Camões)
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It looks like it’s fashion now: the Titanic as simile of the financial/economic crisis. I’m not a believer in coincidences, but many times they really happen and, when it comes to ideas, coincidences happen even more often.
As far as I’m concerned, the tragedy of the Titanic was just a proof of how men fail when they’re playing god. The ancient Greeks called it hubris, the very worst of all classical "mortal sins". But in 1997, Titanic became something more in my life. James Cameron’s film had an impact hardly any other film had on me. I still watch it, time and again, and I still love it to bits. Those four hours so many viewers complained about are not long at all for me. They are a pleasure made of music, rhythm, photography, technique, drama, great acting and romance. But I also saw the West there, of course with America leading, heading for the fall. This apocalyptic feeling never left my mind during the last decade, as I painfully witnessed the decadence of our society, the corruption of our values and our beliefs turned upside down and sold for easy profit.
As the movie appeared one year after The English Patient (probably my favourite film ever) which had left me entirely overwhelmed, I wrote then a big article, comparing the two love stories, for a regional newspaper, Jornal de Leiria. You can find it mentioned in my bibliography, in the beginning of this blog. The title in English would be: Love and Death conquer the Oscars. With all the Scorpio influences I’ve got in my horoscope, Eros and Thanatos are extremely important to me. I had a cathartic need of writing what I wrote and I still vouch for every word.
Therefore, it was very natural for me to see America as the Titanic at the present. Even so, the analogy came to my mind in March, when I declared the fall of the American Empire in my blog. Mind you, the actual sinking was very slow.
Knowing that, in the last months, others used the same simile is evidence of two facts: first, the influence of American culture is global, as we all have the same references; and, secondly, I thought of it first. Good for me!
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