Intro
I did various levels of this in
sporadic places on Muggle Matters, but there it was in random comments threads
I hijacked occasionally, and this is the first I can remembering doing an
official write up of the entire 1–3 film trilogy of Pirates of the Caribbean:
Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man’s Chest, and At world’s End.
There is a specific reason for
grouping 1–3 together as a trilogy: Gore Verbinski directing and Ted Elliot and
Terry Rossio envisioned the three as a trilogy (the last two had to be crafted
so as to retrofit the first into being the first of a trilogy rather than a
stand alone, which was what it was originally done as). I like trilogies to
begin with. I like set literary projects as opposed to the open-ended sequel
mania that is going on with the “extended universe” phenomenon (I really liked
when JK Rowling tweeted that it was not going to be “at least five fantastic
beasts films” … just “five films,” meaning exactly five, no more, no less: a
set literary project with a conceived ending point).
The Trilogy
My basic theory and theme for this
post is that I think the first three films have a unique thematic literary
value and coherency that make them a trilogy. I don’t think it carries across
to On Stranger Tides, although I think that’s a really fun movie (and I even
appreciate the self-deprecating humor at the end, see the caveat at the end for
fuller consideration). I think that, while the first was written as a
stand-alone, they were able to extend the basic theme of the first into a
trilogy of main themes that fit together into a theme for the trilogy of films.
That theme of the trilogy was what
a man needs to do to have the romance with the woman (Ted and Terry
specifically said in the alongside-commentary for Black Pearl that, at its core,
it is a romance). This does not mean a specific task he must perform to get her
or to be worthy of her, but rather, what he must do be in the right frame of
mind for a romance to work, for he himself to enter into it.
Pirates 1: Curse of the Black Pearl
I’ll get to the “a man needs to do”
theme in a moment, but first I would like to mention the thing that first
hooked my interest in the first film because it relates to my whole way of
looking at narrative art. The thing that caught me was the idea of a compass
that doesn't point north.
The compass, especially in
navigation, is emblematic of material accuracy (which is needed for successful
sea navigation). In literary matters, what is sought is not such materialistic,
scientific knowledge. And so Jack’s compass does not point north, but rather to
the heart’s deepest desire, which if the Black Pearl itself for Sparrow (and
thus, functionally, the Isla de Muerta because that is where the Pearl is … Ted
and Terry said that, when they got the contract for the 2nd and 3rd
films, they were afraid that they had tied things up too tightly in the first
and were much relieved to find that they had left themselves enough wiggle
room; I think the compass was the main element with which that was the case).
Of course, my interest in such an issue is in contrasting relationality as the
base of literary meaning against taking materialism as that.
So, now to my main point about
Curse of the Black Pearl, which is where a man must stand in order to have the
romance work for him. The key scene comes at the end of the film, when Will
stands between Jack and Norrington, defending Jack. Norrington says “you forget
your place, Mr Turner,” and Will replies, “No, it’s right here where it’s
always been, between you and Jack.” Sparrow represents the free spirit and Norrington
the order of law. The “everyman” character (Will, the faculty of choice and
action, Turner, the place where the central action turns) must find his place
in the world in the balance or interplay between free-spirited imagination and
the necessary order of law if he is going to be able to have the romance with
the woman work out for him (see aside comments in my post on Tolkien versusShakespeare for a little bit of exposition of term “everyman” coming from the
“everyman play” type of work in medieval drama).
I believe there is also a nice
little final inclusion of the male-female romantic in a passing allusion made
at the end of the film. Obviously Jack’s relationship with the Black Pearl, the
ship, has resonances with the Will and Elizabeth romance, but I also think it
is significant as a nice little faint allusion at the end that it is the
she-pirate Anamaria, who is the only female member of the crew, and who pilots
the Interceptor when pursued by the Pearl, and who is black, who puts Jack’s
cloak on his shoulders and says “the Pearl is yours.”
Pirates 2: Dead Man's Chest
Now things get a bit more dicey
because of the imagery and its source work. So I am going to try to soften that
as much as possible (because there will be people who go “oh my goodness … this
is just totally gratuitous and ridiculous!”) by leading with the more
traditional, and I think more thorough, expression of the core thematic.
Genesis 2:24 reads, “Therefore a
man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, and they become one
flesh” (NRSV, Ignatius Catholic Edition). To put it shortly, Will is having big
problems with this, particularly with leaving his father (Bootstrap Bill)
issues behind, and hence the film begins with Elizabeth alone in the rain in a
“left at the altar” type tableau. And that opening of the film pairs with a
very distinctive image at the end of the film, to which I will get in a moment.
I don’t know if Ted and Terry, the
screenwriters, had Genesis 2:24 in mind or just approached the same issue from
the side if contemporary psychology’s noting of it, but it wouldn’t surprise me
if they did have Gen 2 in mind because they seem to be a bit into incorporating
the Old Testament. I am chagrined to have to admit that I did not catch the
adaptation of Job 3: 7–9 in Dead Man’s Chest and had to find out in the
alongside commentary that that is what Davey Jones’s high poetry is the first
time they call the Kraken (but I did notice on my own that their heavy use of
bottom dwelling creatures for the Flying Dutchman crew fits very well the
Jewish dietary laws against bottom dwellers, which is most likely done, at
least this is the best explanation I have ever heard as a logic, because, as
bottom feeders, they feed on the decay on the bottom, on death … and life and
death are the prerogative of God, so, for instance, you don’t eat animal flesh
with its “lifeblood” in it because the blood was conceived of as where the
animating lifeforce actually was, so consuming blood was consuming life, just
as consuming those who consumed decay as bottom feeders was to consume death).
So, now for the dicey part, the
image. The question is what Elizabeth/woman becomes for Will/man in this
situation. The main place I am aware of the image to which I am about to appeal
and that I am going to say is undeniable at the end of Dead Man’s Chest is
Camille Paglia, who writes of it in her book Sexual Personae (1991), but you can also go to a Wikipedia page
specifically on the term and see the trope in the folklore of several cultures.
So, here we go … the term/image is
“vagina with teeth.” What this means is that the man (psychologically,
unconsciously) sees the woman as a threat to masculinity (in the obvious threat
of castration). This is, at core, psychology, and the human unconscious works
with such images and ideas. This is what Elizabeth/woman becomes to Will/man
when he is unable to process his father issues and thus has trouble “leaving
his father and mother and clinging to his wife” … she becomes a threat to his
masculinity. This is not to say that woman naturally is a threat. It is what
the man makes her into in his unconscious when he cannot process through his
issues and find his bearings.
I do not agree with Paglia on the
positions I have read that she holds in other of her writings, such as Vamps and Tramps (1994), that
pornography and strip clubs are actually empowering of women. I believe that
there is an objectification in those things that is inherently bad, but I also
think she is wrong on the practical level. For every Jenna Jameson who becomes
rich and powerful (and I think there is a problem with “empowerment” as a goal
in the way in which the term is usually thought), there are scores of others
whose lives are greatly lessened, if not ruined, by these things. But I do
agree with Paglia on the issue of male fear of the female.
What I am interested in most here, however,
is not simply, or even mainly, presenting the image at the end of the film and
defending that this is the accurate characterization of it. What most interests
me is what the image leaves open-ended as a possible moving on, which also
comes in that key image at the end of the film.
That image is Jack Sparrow facing
into the mouth of the Kraken. For some it may be a reason to entirely reject
the film, but at the very least I don’t think that the basic nature of that
Kraken mouth can be denied (at one point earlier, when the Kraken is engulfing
an earlier ship, the suckers on the underside of the tentacles also, I would
argue, have a definitely visual quality, meaning resemblance to female anatomy).
I don’t want to get any more detailed than I absolutely have to because, as I
said, my main interest is not obsessing about proving the theory with details,
but rather showing where I think the film indicates progress can be made. If
one just looks at that mouth, I don’t see how it can be denied, and as it has
teeth, so it is the V with teeth. The only thing I would add for that basic
identification is the mucus, not the quality of it or any minor detail like
that, which would be gratuitous to go into anyway, but simply that it is there.
I don’t think I need to do any explaining of how it fits into the anatomical
element mentioned by Paglia, but its presence adds, I think, to the
undeniability of this reading of the image.
This is not to say that you have to
be thinking with your mind always in the guttural, always looking for genital
visual phrasing, in order to get anything out of the film. Will’s encounter
with Bootstrap Bill is gripping as father and son, and Depp’s and Nighy’s
interaction as Sparrow and Jones is classic all the way through. But I am
saying that the romance tension is the core of the film, the context into which
all the rest fits, and that it has a very distinct shape that is represented in
a key way at the end of the film and that pretty much fits Paglia’s description
dead on. As I said, this may be a reason for some to reject the film
thoroughly, but at the very least one cannot rebut with “I think it’s just a
stupid film to begin with and I would reject it especially if what you’re
saying is true but I think you’re imagining all that anyway” … that is just bad
reading.
So, as I said, I am most interested
in where this goes as far as possible resolution of issues, meaning the issues
between a woman and a man who unconsciously views her as a threat. And that is
where Sparrow comes in. In this film, he is not symbolic of one of the two
poles (free spirit and law) that a man must balance, but rather symbolic of the
man himself and how he should proceed. In the face of the Kraken mouth, we see
Jack raise his sword, which is very much a phallic symbol, and smile, and say
“Hello, Beastie.”
The point here is not the phallic
reference of the sword and physical action about to be done in some crass
innuendo-driven interpretation. The point here is that he is smiling, and it is
not a mean smile or a derisive smile … it is a playful smile.
This is going to be a slightly
involved element to describe, and I will have to go further into my own
thoughts about the differences between men and women and how we process things
than I usually like to do. I did so in one other post, in the “defense of
romance” part of the post on the a chiastic reading of Fantastic Beasts andWhere to Find Them, and here I would offer the same type of statement that I
hope I do not cross any lines that I should not cross in doing so, and I appeal
for forgiveness if I do.
The point is that Jack is
engaging—not fighting, but engaging. I think, based on my own observations in
life and in some things I have seen some people do with it in fiction, that a
woman who is of a healthy turn of mind mainly wants a man to engage. Her viewpoint
in the situation in which the man has unconsciously turned her into a V with
teeth is not to tell him to go away and not come back until he has that all
sorted out (although there definitely may be issues on which she has to tell
him that it is something he has to take care of for himself, not because she
doesn’t want to help but because they are of the kind that one has to deal with
on one’s own if they are to be dealt with at all … like father issues). She will
likely want him to relate to her from where he is at present, even if that
is a bit rocky.
In this setting, the physical
sexual action that the scene phrasing shows as about to happen (Jack with his
phallic sword facing into the open mouth of the Kraken) is mainly symbolic of
the psychological action, the talking through the issues (a bit tricky: Jack
and Kraken visually allude to the sex act, but sex is really mainly emblematic
of the whole psychological realm of masculine-feminine romantic relations).
To explicate and support this, I am
going to draw on a scene from another work of “film” fiction. I put film in
quotes because it is a current TV show, although I know that those who want to
dismiss stuff like Pirates as pretty much meaningless will probably also
dismiss a show like The Walking Dead as useless, but I am going to use it
because I disagree with them: I think the scene is meaningful and I think it
works for understanding what I am getting at here.
I binge watched the first five
seasons of Walking Dead in about 3 weeks of solid, every-day use of my
elliptical machine down in the basement, so I am not sure exactly which season
this appears in, but I think it is season 1 (and it has to be 1, 2, or halfway
through 3, which is when Lori dies). Lori Grimes, wife of the main character,
Rick Grimes, has a flashback to a conversation on a park bench with a friend.
She tells her friend that she wishes Rick would yell at her, and then says
something like “isn’t that messed up? A woman wishing her husband would yell at
her?” What she goes on to explain, though, is that what she wants is
communication, even if it is heated (as long as it is not abusive) … “anything,”
just so she can know what he is thinking and feeling. In other words, to use
the term I used above, she wants him to engage, and she wants him to engage
from where he is right now, what he is thinking and feeling right now, even if
that means yelling: “If I’m being a bitch, tell me I’m being a bitch.”
And here is where I get to the part
of trying to say something about the feminine perspective and hoping I don’t
get slapped in the face for it, but even more so that I don’t do something to
deserve getting slapped, whether I actually do get slapped or not. But I think
that men and women think the word “through” differently in the phrase “working
through your problems.”
I would say that men think the word
“through” in what I will call the “obstacle” sense. The point is to get over or
under or around the problem or to get through it by blasting it apart or
whatever works so that, and this is the important point, you can get to the
place you would have been if the obstacle had not slowed you down in
the first place. The obstacle mainly slowed you down or maybe even threatened
the relationship. But now you’re “back on track” (in the masculine way of
thinking).
Women think the word through in
what I would call the “instrumental” sense. Hashing out the details and
communication, even when it is heated, is how you get to that place you would
NOT have been able to reach otherwise. Problems and issues are going to arise
no matter what; working them out is actually HOW the relationship progresses
(in the feminine way of thinking … and on one level I know they are right … on
another level, I am just as stupid as every other biped with a penis and
testicles).
That’s what I think is embodied
(and yes, particularly with certain body parts symbolized, but that in and of
itself mainly symbolic of the psychological dimension) in Jack Sparrow standing
facing the mouth of the Kraken with his sword raised, smiling and saying
“hello, beastie.”
Pirates 3: At World's End
The main theme for this movie, I
argue, is what Martin Heidegger called “being towards death” (see my post on "Story Time 2" for an important note/caveat on Heidegger
and the delicate nature of dealing with his work because of his historical
context). This term in Heidegger means that the continual awareness of our own
mortality is a core, fundamental, deep part of our experience of our existence.
And Will has to find his place in that experience too if the romance is to make
sense.
The way this plays out in the film
is that Will becomes intimately involved with death, meaning the many deaths of
ordinary humans, by being the one who captains the Dutchman for its original
purpose: to ferry the dead to the next world.
But the sea as feminine is also a
key image here. Just as the mother’s water is the place in which life
originates, it is across the sea that the dead must be ferried or escorted by
the Dutchman and her captain and crew. Instead, however, the original pirate
lords tried to capture and tame the sea for money, and that is also why Beckett
wants Jones’s heart, to rule the seas.
(I have always loved that beginning
to the third movie with the condemned pirates singing: “The king and his men
stole the queen from her bed and bound her in her bones; the seas be ours, and
by the powers, where we will, we’ll roam” … I also like that, while everybody
gives it as “never shall we die” in any copy of the lyrics you find online, it
is slurred and could also be heard as “ever shall we die,” as in “we shall
always die as thieves and beggars”).
There are a couple of images
involved in this that usually get criticized as, at best, the imagery getting
out of control, and admittedly, they are a bit over the top, but I think that
part of the rationale is that what is being discussed in the symbolism is in
and of itself that over the top: relations between men and women are often that
chaotic; it’s just the way life is.
The first it the queen herself, Tia
Dalma, and more precisely what she becomes when the pirate lords use the pieces
of 8: a hundred-foot-high woman. I know that some are going to scoff at this,
and I am not saying that there could not be serious critique of the image or
how it was done (but I also think there can be a point to something being over
the top, as in what I’ll say in a minute about the wedding in a maelstrom), but
I’m just going to say it … that’s a blow up doll. While Beckett is evil, the
pirates have not been honorable either, including Barbosa and his attempt to
free Calypso mainly as a way to win against Beckett and his kind. They both
objectify and try to subordinate and rule Calypso/the sea in the way that is a
bit like the objectification in the “adult” industry (even if Barbosa is being
truthful about mainly wanting to set her free, it is mainly her as an ideal …
an objective).
The second is the maelstrom Calypso
summons … and the fact that that is where they have the actual wedding of Will
and Elizabeth. Many thought that was just too much all thrown in jumbled at the
end and that it went just stupid. But I think part of the point is for it to be
over the top. I have talked to people who have been married for a long time in
good marriages and who are honest enough to admit that sometimes things come
close to the edge and you can see down into the abyss into which a couple could
easily fall, just like those ships eye each other across the bottomless chaos
of that whirlpool (and they know those who are not surviving the maelstrom so
well, and it’s always an intention when they pray the rosary nightly with their
kids … no names mentioned, just “people whose marriages are struggling”).
The fact that all this still
relates back to the Will and Elizabeth romance is shown in the fact that Sao
Feng (and I loved Chow Yun-Fat as Feng) believes Elizabeth to be Calypso, who
actually winds up being Tia Dalma.
(Side Note: For the most part, I stay off politics when
writing my essays on this blog, but not always, and I have to note here that I
think this jab at the “adult industry” and the men who run it rings especially
true when the president of the United States elected in 2016 rose to prominence
through, among other things, being interviewed by and on the cover of a
pornography magazine whose title glorifies the rich male brat image, the
playboy.
I am aware of the potential problem
of a male trying to be the “champion” of a female cause, of the fact that it
can turn into just another instance of the male being condescending and
objectifying. I am reminded of the scene in Pretty Woman in which Richard Gere
does such a thing, saying something about how he would never want to objectify
Julia Roberts, and when he has walked back through the door so that only the
camera can hear her, Roberts says quietly, “you just did.” But women are not
the only ones who were belittled by the 45th president of the United
States during his 2016 campaign. He also mocked the disabled. And he also
mocked those with psychological struggles when he tweeted a very unflattering
picture of the wife of a rival with the threat to “spill the beans” on her,
most likely meaning an incident a year or two prior in which she was struggling
with depression. And as a member of the “diagnosed” class, I take personal
offense. So, at the very least, I have to explain my motives as being not
letting such playboys get away with any because getting away with one makes it
much easier for them to get away with the others, but I hope there is at least
some possibility of my own comments here being also a genuine attempt at
respect for women).
Conclusion:
I have sensed sometimes in some
people (and not just my interlocutor below in the caveat who hates Lost) who
seem to me to have a feeling that things must be either deep or fun, not both.
I think that they can be both.
The only thing I would add in
conclusion is that the trilogy ties together in that Beckett’s goal of securing
the seas for money by ridding it of piracy does also weigh in on a certain side
of the issue in the first movie, finding a balance between free-spirit and law,
but here it is revealed in a fuller form in free-spirit versus greed.
Caveat:
Stranger Tides and Blowing
off Steam
I think Stranger Tides was fine and
fun and an enjoyable romp. I think it was kind of over the top, but all the
more fun for that. I liked that it kind of did some good old humble poking fun
at the eccentricity of the Sparrow character in the final scene with Sparrow
and Gibbs and Sparrow saying “Excellent! I can do this …” I thought its theme
was decent, although maybe a little more haphazardly executed. Overall, it was
a really fun film.
But I have encountered a use of the
film, as petty as it might sound, as ammo against seeing the first three as
having any decent literary meaning. To clarify, what I mean is that I’ve known
a person who, knowing my thoughts on the value of films 1–3, once went out of
their way in conversation (I think it happened a couple times, but it wasn’t a
regular thing necessarily) to bring it up out of nowhere and say "well, I
think the fourth was better than any of the first three" … to which my thought was, “oh God, you’re on
again about this militant denial of any real meaning in PotC and now it is that
the fourth, which was undeniably a more over the top romp, is the best out of
all of them, since you’re not able to say they all suck in all ways and still
remain cool … I think I’m gonna go play with the kids; they’re much more fun
than the adults.”
This same person once also wasted a half hour of both of our
time (when I had been rather hoping to get downstairs on their family's
eliptical and work off some bad eating choices) in a meandering conversation on
movies just to try to work things around to try to say something negative on
Lost because I had recently said in an FB convo that I liked the show when they
had interjected a criticism of it into a completely unrelated conversation on
the X files (I was mainly saying to somebody else simply why I thought X Files
never hooked me as much, and professor X pops in with “at least it’s not Lost”)
... when the person couldn't work things around to Lost naturally, and I was
just sitting there wondering where this long drawn out convo was heading, they
finally asked "do you really like Lost" and when I just said simply
"yeah, yeah I do" and didn't give them any fodder, they couldn't
manage to find a way to go on an extended argument ... I think mainly because
they had probably hardly ever watched any of the show, if any at all (or at
least that is my best guess as to why they couldn't carry such a convo further
on their own). I think I was supposed to begin some impassioned defense of
literary structure or themes etc, to which they would reply with some
"intuitively insightful" witty or snarky catch word they came up with
in the form of "that stuff is all good and fine but it's just esoteric if
you don't have [my common man's handle term for what is really the deepest
consideration in literature]" and I would sort of see that they, in their
"common man" wisdom, were right, and I would be slightly embarrassed
at having tried to make so much out of Lost rather than being part of their
“standing against the tide of popular opinion,” and then they would be “understanding,”
and then the ewoks would come out and we would talk to sparkly-glowy Anakin and
celebrate and all that ... or at least I think that was the desired script
(maybe minus the ewoks and Anakin), ... either way, I think I botched it up for
them by being clueless and basically just uninterested in making any defense
against their particular criticism, and so it just fizzled and awkward silence
intervened. They are the same person who liked to criticize Pirates in the
first three films because it "didn't have an actual text behind it": "an
actual text" can become kind of a magical incantation for those who are
not really all too skilled at analyzing any text in the first place.
It strikes me as noteworthy too
that the claim against the films as “not having an actual text behind them” is
made, it seems to me, by those (in this particular case, this one person) who
do not have as strong of a knowledge of the “actual texts” of the Western canon
of literature and the broad movements in the history of that canon as do the
film makers, who have usually had to go through literary education. In the
alongside commentary for the first film, Ted and Terry, the screenwriters, note
an odd quality of the film: at its core it is a romance, but then you have
these undead pirates alongside that, which are a horror trope. And then they
reveal their education when they note (paraphrasing) “but then, horror is sort
of the grandchild of romance by way of the gothic.” That is actual detail about
the actual history of the Western canon in which “actual texts” exist.
Of course, I have to add that I
think it is possible that this particular person did not like particularly the
last two PotC movies being added and making a distinct trilogy. This particular
person is a big fan of the Marvel Comics Universe, which I think fine, but I
have given my critique of the whole “extended universe” phenomenon and a way of
thinking of which I believe the whole “easter egg” thing is emblematic in my
post on Dr Strange. That way of thinking is, I believe, very based in a
“serialism” that relies on an ongoing opening onto successive sequels, more
like a serial TV series than a story along the lines of Aristotle’s definition
of having “a distinct beginning, middle, and end.” It’s possible that was this
person dislikes (unknown even to him/herself) is the distinctiveness of a set
literary project like a trilogy (and that perhaps they liked Stranger Tides so
much because it worked against Pirates being a set literary project, a trilogy,
as a way to deny the term “literary” to Pirates of the Caribbean at all).
Strong arguments definitely may be
possible against my readings and praise of the Pirates of the Caribbean films,
as well as any of the other literature or film I read and praise on this blog
(or defenses of ones I pan), meaning even that arguments could be made against
my own readings while still praising the film itself (that I am just out in
left field and that my praise or scorn cannot be taken as any good indicator),
but I don’t think that those from whom I have heard criticism to date are the ones who
are qualified to do it (of course, maybe I don’t warrant a blip on the radar of
those who are qualified—that’s a distinct possibility too) … but such is life …
just a thought.
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