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See the ghost fly over the sea
In which I finally get around to writing up a few of my reactions to Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Spoilers, spoilers everywhere. Why is it always some unwise hour of the night when I undertake these projects? Oh, right. The brain is nocturnal. Pity about the rest of me.
I had intended to talk more about characters, but perhaps I should get the myth out of the way first. I can say clinically that the first third of the film rather flailed around, plotwise, and the second was essentially a single massive action sequence, and the last was like five different endings all piled one on top of another, and that while at least this time around there were no sequences that I would have enthusiastically junked (cannibal island, I'm still looking at you), the recurring question of how many of the characters were betraying how many of the rest at any given time somehow took up more space than it should have—and yet I came out of the film with a surprising sense of awesomeness. And I think much of this had to do with the fact that not only did most of the characters' lives resolve in reasonable and resonant ways, but the mythological aspects of the world were upheld. That counts for a lot with me.
I am indebted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fleurdelis28 (with whom I also saw the film) for pointing out that while we have been watching Will, Elizabeth, and Jack, what we have been seeing is the final play-out of the story that started however many centuries ago when the goddess Calypso fell in love with Davy Jones and made him the ferryman of the sea's dead.1 He may have been bargaining with Bootstrap Bill and Jack Sparrow and whoever else was unlucky enough to stray across his decks, but she has been arranging her own release—and perhaps their reunion—for some time now. She is the one from whom Jack obtained his compass of the heart's desire, which has led him to all sorts of places that mortals usually overlook or avoid. She resurrected Barbossa not only as a guide to the sea-routes of the underworld, but because nine pirate lords bound her into the shape of Tia Dalma, and only nine can unbind her; she needs him and Jack both, or at least the items in their possession that neither passed on before he died.2 And otherwise her interest in the affairs of the mortal world is exactly nil: the maelstrom into which she dissolves at the outset of the battle between the Brethren of the Coast and the East India Trading Company does not take sides and heals itself up into untroubled sea as soon as Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman have disappeared into its depths; she has at last what she came for.3 Now the rest of the world can get on with its life.
There is also the question of balance. With the binding of Calypso, Barbossa charges, men came to rely less on their seafaring skill and more on the knowledge that a goddess was their ace in the hole—as indeed he himself counted on, facing the East India Trading Company. And the sea itself is out of whack. Davy Jones was supposed to care for all those who died at sea, but he abandoned his responsibilities to become the devil of the sea, who offers men one kind of hell in exchange for staving off another, and so they drift with no one to guide them through the waters between this world and the next.4 The goddess Calypso—which is not even her true name, only the most common name men have for her: many gods and many voices—has been uneasily human since the time of the first Brethren Court, and who knows what damage that has done to the normal course of the tides and the sands and whatever else is governed by the sea? However unpremeditatedly,5 Jones has come to fill that vacuum: "I am the sea." But he is only the heartless, drowning sea. He is shipwreck and desolation and worse things waiting, and while I do not pretend that Calypso is all the shining surface of the sea, she is not malevolent. Freeing her at once renders the world oddly less and more mythical, in that humanity must shift for itself where the ocean is concerned, but the sea has also regained its proper depth. And a ferryman whose honor will hold him to his post and whose heart is safe. More on this next time.
I am now so tired, I don't even have a clever simile. Tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, there will be some species of follow-up to this post. But not until my eyes stay open of their own accord. Right now, not so much.
Chase the dog star over the sea
Home where my true love is waiting for me . . .
Round the Cape Horn to Valparaiso
—Sting, "Valparaiso"
1 We are not given much information about the general structure of this underworld, but since there does not seem to have been specifically a sea-psychopomp before Jones, we both wondered if Calypso might not have created the position as a way of keeping him with her: essentially she made him her consort, immortal so long as he kept to his post and like to her in power; their τιμαί encompassed both the living sea and the dead, for the indefinite rest of time, whereas they would have had sixty, at the most seventy years together if he had remained an ordinary human man. In theory, this was a better idea than Endymion. But it is Calypso in the Odyssey who laments that while gods take can take mortal lovers with impunity, goddesses are not so fortunate: "And now in turn you gods resent that a mortal man is staying with me: / him I saved when he was aboard a keel, / alone, since with a bright thunderbolt Zeus had struck / his swift ship and shattered it in the middle of the wine-colored sea. / There all the rest of his noble companions perished, / but him the wind and the wave bore and brought here, / him I cared for kindly, and fed, / and would make immortal and ageless all his days." (5.129—136) There is also some fine solar mythology in the sunrises and sunsets to which entry to and exit from the underworld are explicitly linked, and I think Douglas Frame might have some words on that subject.
2 Somehow it makes a bizarre sort of sense that Ragetti's eye should have been one of the nine original bindings on Calypso; despite the frequent presence of curses and maritime deities, there is not a lot of random free-floating magic in this world, and I did always wonder where on earth he'd gotten it.
3 Not to throw my hat into the fanfiction ring, but I think there is a case to be made that their relationship is a valid interpretation of the legend of the Flying Dutchman, or at least the Wagnerian tradition thereof. He finds a woman who knows him for what he is and loves him: and that is also their tragedy, that they do still love one another, even after she has betrayed his love and he has betrayed her trust; that it is her nature to be wild and alluring and ever-changing and it was not his nature, once upon a time, to be cruel. Admittedly it's difficult to pick out her true feelings from their conversation in the hold of the Black Pearl, but when she speaks to third parties like Pintel and Ragetti, she defends him passionately; conversely, I disbelieve Davy Jones when he claims to Will and Cutler Beckett that the only payment he wants is Calypso murdered, and I listen to him when he tells her that his heart will always be hers. And I find it difficult to believe that, once unbound and informed by Will that her lover was the instrument of her imprisonment, she could not have trivially destroyed him if she felt like it. He dies with her name on his lips and her abyss receives him. Who knows where his soul goes after that?
4 Leading one to wonder what curious conversations Will may have on his first day as boatman of the dead: if no one has been bringing them across, then he has at least Governor Swann and Norrington to ferry, and perhaps even Davy Jones himself.
5 I do not believe that his intent, when he asked the eight other pirate lords to help him bind Calypso to her bones, was to take over her powers as the sea; more that in the same way that she considered it a love-gift to entrust to him those who had given up their lives to her, he imagined that in human form she would be more comprehensible, less capricious, perhaps more firmly bound to him: not realizing that the binding was already there. And that while their physical meetings would have been only once in ten years, and that is a difficult way at best to carry on a relationship, it strikes me that in fact she would always have been with him. The Flying Dutchman is a ship that sails not only on, but within the sea, jealously barred from the land, and a beautiful obeah woman is not the sea's only face. He recognizes her in At World's End when the stormclouds gather and the maelstrom begins to form: his face upturned to the rain as he whispers her name is heartbreaking. But I doubt he was thinking along those lines at the time.
I had intended to talk more about characters, but perhaps I should get the myth out of the way first. I can say clinically that the first third of the film rather flailed around, plotwise, and the second was essentially a single massive action sequence, and the last was like five different endings all piled one on top of another, and that while at least this time around there were no sequences that I would have enthusiastically junked (cannibal island, I'm still looking at you), the recurring question of how many of the characters were betraying how many of the rest at any given time somehow took up more space than it should have—and yet I came out of the film with a surprising sense of awesomeness. And I think much of this had to do with the fact that not only did most of the characters' lives resolve in reasonable and resonant ways, but the mythological aspects of the world were upheld. That counts for a lot with me.
I am indebted to
fleurdelis28 (with whom I also saw the film) for pointing out that while we have been watching Will, Elizabeth, and Jack, what we have been seeing is the final play-out of the story that started however many centuries ago when the goddess Calypso fell in love with Davy Jones and made him the ferryman of the sea's dead.1 He may have been bargaining with Bootstrap Bill and Jack Sparrow and whoever else was unlucky enough to stray across his decks, but she has been arranging her own release—and perhaps their reunion—for some time now. She is the one from whom Jack obtained his compass of the heart's desire, which has led him to all sorts of places that mortals usually overlook or avoid. She resurrected Barbossa not only as a guide to the sea-routes of the underworld, but because nine pirate lords bound her into the shape of Tia Dalma, and only nine can unbind her; she needs him and Jack both, or at least the items in their possession that neither passed on before he died.2 And otherwise her interest in the affairs of the mortal world is exactly nil: the maelstrom into which she dissolves at the outset of the battle between the Brethren of the Coast and the East India Trading Company does not take sides and heals itself up into untroubled sea as soon as Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman have disappeared into its depths; she has at last what she came for.3 Now the rest of the world can get on with its life.There is also the question of balance. With the binding of Calypso, Barbossa charges, men came to rely less on their seafaring skill and more on the knowledge that a goddess was their ace in the hole—as indeed he himself counted on, facing the East India Trading Company. And the sea itself is out of whack. Davy Jones was supposed to care for all those who died at sea, but he abandoned his responsibilities to become the devil of the sea, who offers men one kind of hell in exchange for staving off another, and so they drift with no one to guide them through the waters between this world and the next.4 The goddess Calypso—which is not even her true name, only the most common name men have for her: many gods and many voices—has been uneasily human since the time of the first Brethren Court, and who knows what damage that has done to the normal course of the tides and the sands and whatever else is governed by the sea? However unpremeditatedly,5 Jones has come to fill that vacuum: "I am the sea." But he is only the heartless, drowning sea. He is shipwreck and desolation and worse things waiting, and while I do not pretend that Calypso is all the shining surface of the sea, she is not malevolent. Freeing her at once renders the world oddly less and more mythical, in that humanity must shift for itself where the ocean is concerned, but the sea has also regained its proper depth. And a ferryman whose honor will hold him to his post and whose heart is safe. More on this next time.
I am now so tired, I don't even have a clever simile. Tomorrow, or perhaps the day after, there will be some species of follow-up to this post. But not until my eyes stay open of their own accord. Right now, not so much.
Chase the dog star over the sea
Home where my true love is waiting for me . . .
Round the Cape Horn to Valparaiso
—Sting, "Valparaiso"
1 We are not given much information about the general structure of this underworld, but since there does not seem to have been specifically a sea-psychopomp before Jones, we both wondered if Calypso might not have created the position as a way of keeping him with her: essentially she made him her consort, immortal so long as he kept to his post and like to her in power; their τιμαί encompassed both the living sea and the dead, for the indefinite rest of time, whereas they would have had sixty, at the most seventy years together if he had remained an ordinary human man. In theory, this was a better idea than Endymion. But it is Calypso in the Odyssey who laments that while gods take can take mortal lovers with impunity, goddesses are not so fortunate: "And now in turn you gods resent that a mortal man is staying with me: / him I saved when he was aboard a keel, / alone, since with a bright thunderbolt Zeus had struck / his swift ship and shattered it in the middle of the wine-colored sea. / There all the rest of his noble companions perished, / but him the wind and the wave bore and brought here, / him I cared for kindly, and fed, / and would make immortal and ageless all his days." (5.129—136) There is also some fine solar mythology in the sunrises and sunsets to which entry to and exit from the underworld are explicitly linked, and I think Douglas Frame might have some words on that subject.
2 Somehow it makes a bizarre sort of sense that Ragetti's eye should have been one of the nine original bindings on Calypso; despite the frequent presence of curses and maritime deities, there is not a lot of random free-floating magic in this world, and I did always wonder where on earth he'd gotten it.
3 Not to throw my hat into the fanfiction ring, but I think there is a case to be made that their relationship is a valid interpretation of the legend of the Flying Dutchman, or at least the Wagnerian tradition thereof. He finds a woman who knows him for what he is and loves him: and that is also their tragedy, that they do still love one another, even after she has betrayed his love and he has betrayed her trust; that it is her nature to be wild and alluring and ever-changing and it was not his nature, once upon a time, to be cruel. Admittedly it's difficult to pick out her true feelings from their conversation in the hold of the Black Pearl, but when she speaks to third parties like Pintel and Ragetti, she defends him passionately; conversely, I disbelieve Davy Jones when he claims to Will and Cutler Beckett that the only payment he wants is Calypso murdered, and I listen to him when he tells her that his heart will always be hers. And I find it difficult to believe that, once unbound and informed by Will that her lover was the instrument of her imprisonment, she could not have trivially destroyed him if she felt like it. He dies with her name on his lips and her abyss receives him. Who knows where his soul goes after that?
4 Leading one to wonder what curious conversations Will may have on his first day as boatman of the dead: if no one has been bringing them across, then he has at least Governor Swann and Norrington to ferry, and perhaps even Davy Jones himself.
5 I do not believe that his intent, when he asked the eight other pirate lords to help him bind Calypso to her bones, was to take over her powers as the sea; more that in the same way that she considered it a love-gift to entrust to him those who had given up their lives to her, he imagined that in human form she would be more comprehensible, less capricious, perhaps more firmly bound to him: not realizing that the binding was already there. And that while their physical meetings would have been only once in ten years, and that is a difficult way at best to carry on a relationship, it strikes me that in fact she would always have been with him. The Flying Dutchman is a ship that sails not only on, but within the sea, jealously barred from the land, and a beautiful obeah woman is not the sea's only face. He recognizes her in At World's End when the stormclouds gather and the maelstrom begins to form: his face upturned to the rain as he whispers her name is heartbreaking. But I doubt he was thinking along those lines at the time.