Job and the Kraken in Dead Man's Chest

Wow ... been a while since I have posted anything ... been too caught up in studies (although I do occassionally post length comments over at John Granger's Hogpro site when something strikes me over there, most recently it has been addressing Dr Bloom's criticisms of Harry Potter).

I just thought I would hop on and catalog this thought/thing I read while going through an article for a paper I am doing on Genesis 1:1-3 and the chaos theories of creation. It comes from a scholar named Bruce Waltke (last semester I had to get familiar with and use a grammar of Biblical Hebrew syntax that he did with another scholar named O'Connor), in an article he wrote in 1975 (in the journal Bibliotheca Sacra, volume 132). In watching the DVD extras of Dead Man's Chest, of course the sceen-writers' commentary was the main thing I was going for, since I have been trying to figure out where these guys are coming from ... contemporary, post-modern, hollywood screen-writers who wind up with a lot of ancient Hebraic symbolism in their work peaks my interest greatly. During the notable moment of high epic style poetry by Davey Jones: "Let no Joyful sounde be heard, let no man look to the skies with hope, and let this day be cursed by we who ready to wake the Kraken" the screen-writers let slip the name of Job. In reading Waltke's article he cites the specific place, Job 3:8 - "Let those curse it who curse the day, who are prepared to rouse Leviathan." Just thought that was a neat piece of info to throw up here.

Further Considerations

Here Waltke is discussing the ancient near Eastern parallells with creation/consmogyny accounts found int he Hebrew Scriptures/Christian Old Testament, foremost among them is the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, in which the seam monster that is killed, and from whose remains the hero god fashions the world, is Tiamat, and is a she-god. If you watch those scenes from DMC where the Kraken attacks, especially the final one where Jack confronts it, whether or not Gore Verbinski and his boys consiously intended it to be this way, there is an undeniable qaulity to the Kraken's physical appearance that resembles feminine anatomy, and when you have Jack standing there with a standard Phallic symbol like a sword ... Im not saying that either the Bible or Verbinski Et Al are misogynist ... with respects to the former [the Bible] the specific passage I am studying, Genesis 1:1-3, is classed by Waltke under its own heading among 4 types of OT creation passages, not under the heading that is the "chaos sea-monster" type, but even with those passages that are the Hebrew authors only seem to pick up the "big chaotic dragon" image, IE with no female overtones [unless you take the word for "deeps" in Gen 1:2, TheHoM, to be a derivative of the name "Tiamat" from the Enuma Elish, but another scholar I was reading, David Tsumara, notes this as highly unlikely precisely because the Genesis term would have completely lost any trace of the feminine morpheme, the letter combination that generally connotes a word as feminine. In regards to the POTC film-makers, I would note my own interpretation of the films as crises or romantic love. Will is having some problems and Jack is connected to them. Will has father issues, the need to save his father from Jones and the need to come to grips with the fact that "Pirate's in you blood boy, and you'll have to square with that!" Hence the precise form of the question of the films is given by the polar opposite evil of the Kraken, the imperious materialist (to the same level of "evil" as the Kraken, but on the materialist extreme rather than the mythical extreme) Lord Culter Becket: "Ahhhh ... a marriage interrupted? ... or fate intervened." Will CAN'T get married till he settles his father and impotency issues (the same writers mentioned in movie 1 that in the cave, when Will whacks Jack over the head with the oar, which is repaid in DMC, that if Barbosa had been going to kill Elizabeth at that point and it was up to Will to save her ... he failed ... she was dead). As one who loves Will Elizabeth gets caught up in this internal conflict of his by becoming and external manifestation of it, IE her onw conflict with the compass and desire for Jack, she is struggling between the "good man" that Will wants to see himself as and the pirate that he is (recall at the end of the first movie, Will is called a good man and she says "no, he's a pirate." Will still ain't "squared with that" in movie 2). Another manifestation of Will's struggle and the fact that he is incapable of marriage as of yet, and has to take a "sidetrip" and accomplish some things first, is that Jack cannot avoid that all of movie 2 is simply "a sidetrip on the way to the gallows" (emerging from the coffin at the beginning of DMC and asking the skeleton beneath him "do you mind if we take a little sidetrip). In short, whatever Jack as free-spirit is and his journey of coming to grips with the "chaos" type of free-spiritedness, it is connected with Will and the crisis of his romantic standing as a man, in which, because it requires him to accomplish these death-defying feats, such as going to worlds end to recapture the pearl and then kill Jones to free his father, he actually would feel threatened by romantic love ... hence Jack's half of it is. In fact, Jack is almost an opposite pairing with Elizabeth: she is torn between two men/two sides of the same man (Will) that are in conflict with each other; Jack winds up at the end of DMC with two female images in conflict - the Pearl (ships always, and indeed all vessels but especially ships, being refered to in the feminine, and you even have language in the first movie of a masculine drive to protect the feminine's purity/reputation: "Stop blowing holes in my ship!" ... perhaps this is part of the source of Will's tension, Jack's mythopoeic outlook enables him to express the feminine as freedom for the masculine, "tha's what a ship really ... freedom" but perhaps Will is unable to come to grips with exactly how free-spirited that freedom is and thus feels the woman as Jack does the ship at the end, chained to the mast ... both of them have to come to grips with it) and the Kraken with its obviously feminine-genital physical characteristics.

Keep in mind that there is also a 3rd feminine image set in that scene, one which has interesting variances in the movies thus far and which, in this particular case I suspect will be how Jack winds up having survived when we meet him in Singapore in AWE ("sure as the tide, Jack Sparrow'll turn up in Singapore" and pictures of Depp in eastern constume and the fact that Chow Yin Fat is an oriental pirate in AWE) ... land. In Hebrew the word for land is feminine and is, in fact, the femine pair (adamah) with the word for mankind, "adam." The dirt that Tia gave Jack was still on the deck of the ship when the Kraken swallowed it, I suspect that, alah Jonah and the whale, that DRY ground is going to give the Kraken an upset stoumach. As far as the Kraken as feminine, note Tia Dalma's identification of the sea with a woman ("No, I heard it was the sea he fell in love with" ... "Same story, different versions! and all are true!" - pointing here at herself, and I think the subtle point is that she herself is the one Jones fell in love with, she has the same locket on her table, but it is possible that she was just pointing to herself demostratively as "A" woman, either way the point stands on the identification of sea and woman). Tia is an interesting character herself ... she lives in the wetland of a river delta, a land that is both "dry-land" and "wet-land." This is different from where Bill found himself when he made his deal with Jones, the ocean bottom - a place that is land but weighed down and crushed by the sea. Even more interesting is the "land" where Jones chooses to hide his heart, the geological opposite of Tia's swamp, a desert island, in the sand (interestingly, it is in the non-desert part of this same island tha we find a defunct church, which the three-way machismo sword duel [criticized wonderfully by Elizabeth, "oh yeah ... let's just pull out oru swords and start banging away at each other!" - note that this is just after Will has commanded her to watch the chest: a man who tells the woman "you just take of the/my heart/'love', while I go off and do my 'serious business'"] passes through ... and what is this place called? the Ille de Crucis, Island of the cross or of suffering/pain ... in moive one there is the island of death).

Actually the themes collide in the person of Bootstrap, or at least I suspect they do - that we will get some MAJOR info on BSB in At Worlds End. Will's pirate issues flow, at least in part, from his father issues. If you watch the DVD of movie all the way through to the end of the credits with the screenwriters commentary on, you not only get the easter egg (the monkey taking a piece of gold from Cortez'z stone chest before the island is claimed by the sea, and hence trapped in undead state in movie 2) but they also give you, as a prize for waiting through all the credits, the proper chronolgy of events prior to the first movie, which includes a niece piece of info on Jack's relationship with Bill. Just as Will sailed the interceptor into Tortuga with Jack during movie 1, so Bill sailed the Pearl into Tortuga, just the two of them, after Jones had raised it from the depths for Jack (then they picked up a crew, including first-mate Barbosa). I suspect something crucial will come out in AWE that puts Jack every bit as much in responsibility for Bootstrap's plight (remember that he originally got tossed over board by Barbosa for defending Jack) as will is responsible for saving him in order to come to grips with his father issues.

I predict that AWE will end with Jones dead (after the spot being removed from Jack's hand ... unless said terrible beastie was undone alreay in spitting Jack up, or unless "being eaten" once removes the spot and said terrible beastie is "satisfied" with regards to Jacks person ... but, on my interpretation of the Kraken I have to suspect that it will make at least one onscreen appearance and have to be settled out as an issue if Will's issues with his feminine soulmate are not settled out eyt going into AWE< which obviously they are not), Will having killed him (Jones, with the knife Bill gave him in DMC), with Jack as captain of the Dutchman - myth redeemed and whole (""one soul bound to crew aboard a ship" ... "but the Dutchman already has a captain"), Bill as first-mate of the Dutchman (symbolizing Will's resolution with his "pirate blood" - that he accepts the death of Lord Cutler Becket (maybe at the hands of Norrington of Gov Swan, or maybe at the hands of Mr Mercer [what a wonderfully wicked character that was] and then Mercer dispatched by Swann or Norrington as the arm of Justice), Swann returns as govenor of Port Royal, Norrington either taking up blacksmithing in partnetship with Will or, more likey, restored as commodore and military counterpart to Swann (but the two of them kind of give up on hunting and killing pirates, due to the fact that Jack now has the biggest baddest mythical ship around ... no use, mate), and Will and Elizabeth finally get married and she finally gets the man she needs ("If not for these bars, I'd have you already" ... the bars are, unrealized by her, actually made by Will's crisis in manhood, she with her fingers dropping in unrequited love as he goes gallavanting off on his mission without even giving her a goodbye kiss) .... and they live happily ever after ... well, we'll see LOL