The rocks of the ocean shall make me a bed and the shrimps of the sea shall swim over my head

[sovay]

It is not true, it seems, that desires fade when fulfilled. I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest again last night with gaudior and rushthatspeaks, and I still have the barroom brawl hornpipes and several sea chanteys stuck in my head. On the bright side, I continue to like the film immensely. I maintain that the entire cannibal island sequence could be excised and the tone would not suffer, but that's a small complaint against the increased complications of character and all of the sea-myth, which had no less of an effect on me this time around for all that I knew what to expect. Damn, but someone knows their folklore.

I'm likewise fascinated by the ways in which this film plays off its predecessor. With as few spoilers as possible . . . Dead Man's Chest takes place in territory I tend to associate with Into the Woods, The Fantasticks, and lately Princess Tutu: the practical consequences of the happy ending. What happens after. Curse of the Black Pearl ends with a traditional swashbuckling finale. Jack is about to be hanged for his crimes, Elizabeth is about to marry a man she doesn't love, and Will is about to return to his nonentity life as a blacksmith's apprentice—and so he effects a dashing rescue, as a result of which the Governor of Port Royal and Commodore Norrington are moved to act on their better instincts, what's right rather than what's lawful; the Governor gives his blessing to Will and Elizabeth's marriage and Norrington gives the Black Pearl a day's head start. It's every fledgling pirate's dream. And from minute one of the sequel, it's all coming apart at the seams. There were loopholes; there were oversights; there are costs. In real life, happiness demands a little more forethought, and all the protagonists are paying for its lack.

Their moon was cardboard; fragile; it was very apt to fray. And what was, last night, scenic might be cynic by today. The play's not done—oh, no, not quite, for life never ends in the moonlit night. And despite what pretty poets say, the night is only half the day. So let us truly finish what was foolishly begun, for the story's never over and the play is never done until we've all been burned a bit and burnished—by the sun!

I don't feel that I have much to add to the internet-wide discussion of Pirates of the Caribbean, because in truth there are people out there who have put much more thought into the subject than I, but I will keep on like this if anyone's curious. These movies have become fruitful for speculation in a way that I only hope the third film can live up to; after such weird and skilled storytelling, it would be a criminal shame if someone fumbled the mythology in the finale. In the meantime, I point you toward gaudior's excellent thoughts on tropes, subverted, successfully and un-, and a genuinely brilliant post to which rushthatspeaks introduced me, about liar's dice and characterization. Don't miss the comments in the latter; the one about the significance of names made the sparkplugs of my brain go bzzzzzzpffft.

There are worse noises for a brain to make.

Comments

[stillsostrange.livejournal.com]

I watched the first one again recently, and was very impressed at how the foundations are all laid out. I especially like the end "You forget your place."//"It's right here" scene, where Elizabeth stands with Will and Jack. And with only the first movie, it seems like she's standing with Will, because he just said he loves her and HEA yadda yadda. And of course she's really standing with the pirate, and then Jack runs off and leaves her with Will as a placeholder.

I can only pray the scriptwriters don't chicken out in the 11th hour.

[sovay]

And of course she's really standing with the pirate, and then Jack runs off and leaves her with Will as a placeholder.

I've just said about half of this over on gaudior's journal, but it doesn't count as plagiarism if it's oneself, right . . . ?

I'm still not convinced that Elizabeth is attracted to Jack so much as she is to the pirate's life that Jack embodies—which in its turn raises all sorts of questions about her attraction to Will. When she saw him for the first time, unconscious and adrift, she thought he was a pirate. She might have taken his medallion initially because she feared he'd be hanged if anyone else saw it and recognized what he was, but she kept it—and never told him she'd stolen it—because it was a link to that mysterious, adventurous world with which she associated Will and for which she always longed. At ten years old, she sang Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate's life for me . . . I'm very curious to see where her romantic loyalties will incline now that she's realized that she's capable of being a pirate herself, not just a pirate's lady.

As for Will, while he's not a character with whom I identify, he does intrigue me—a so far unalterably honorable man with a real talent for lawlessness, to which I do not think he has yet reconciled himself. He's no slouch in the adventuring department. He's stolen treasure from around Davy Jones' own neck and survived the Kraken twice; that's mythic like Odysseus. But while he may have acclimated to the idea that his father was a pirate rather than a respectable merchant seaman, I'm not sure that Will doesn't still think of himself as a blacksmith's apprentice who's in over his head. Which is true in one sense, but entirely false in another. And I'm not sure he'll last if he can't adapt mentally to who he's become.

That said, I'm not sure that he is a pirate. I cannot see him betraying anyone to their death with a kiss. But I can see him as the steadfast husband of a trickster pirate queen—if Elizabeth wants him; for himself, Will Turner, not for whoever she imagined he was or what she believed he stood for.*

I can only pray the scriptwriters don't chicken out in the 11th hour.

Yes. There are so many lovely possibilities for complication in the air right now, I would like these films to end as iconoclastically—and rightly—as they began. I say we sacrifice some studio executives to the depths just to make sure.

*And if, for God's sake, they talk. I'm not having the whole next plot arc turn on misconceptions à la The Scarlet Pimpernel that could be cleared up in fifteen minutes if each party only trusted the other enough to speak. There's enough angst to go around as it is, thank you very much.