sovay | The broken oar and the gear of foreign dead men

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The broken oar and the gear of foreign dead men

So I feel like I owe writeups of several things, including Readercon and the movie I saw last night, but what you're getting right now is a list of different movies altogether. Over dinner tonight,

derspatchel and I were pipe-dreaming the program for a festival of maritime film. (I don't even remember. I think we were talking about John Ford.) Inevitably, it's kind of a list of our favorites. So far we agree on—

Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), dir. Frank Lloyd

Captain Blood (1935), dir. Michael Curtiz

Captains Courageous (1937), dir. Victor Fleming¹

The Long Voyage Home (1940), dir. John Ford

The Cruel Sea (1953), dir. Charles Frend

The Caine Mutiny (1954), dir. Edward Dmytryk

Moby Dick (1956), dir. John Huston

The Secret of Roan Inish (1994), dir. John Sayles

Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003), dir. Gore Verbinski²

Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), dir. Peter Weir

We very regretfully did not include either 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) or Treasure Island (1950), although James Mason and Robert Newton are deservedly classic and inimitable in each.³ I am uncertain whether A Night to Remember (1958) counts as maritime film or just a disaster movie that occurs aboard a ship, albeit a wrenching and excellent example of the form. (You will notice Cameron's Titanic (1997) is not on this list.) I am also not sure I can count Splash (1984), formative sea-movie of mine though it is, and I know I can't count Pacific Rim (2013), although somehow it feels like one should. There are no documentaries; there should be some. Some more recent films couldn't hurt. And something non-American. Also it has not escaped my notice that this list of directors is kind of a dickfest and I cannot believe women never make movies about the sea. Tell me what we're missing!

1. If, as my husband stipulates, the audience remembers that the very last lines are terrible.

2. The first movie remains the best example of swashbuckling I have seen since Errol Flynn. I love so much about the second and third, but they are so wildly inconsistent I cannot in good conscience include them. Davy Jones and the Flying Dutchman and Calypso/Tia Dalma: fantastic. Elizabeth Swann coming into her piracy: could've used more, but that's why we have fanfic. The cannibal island and whatever the hell was going on with Singapore: naaarp.

3. Newton's Long John Silver is extremely imitable, but that is part of his glory.

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You're welcome. :)

I will also add, on the topic of U-571, that it is one of two movies* which spring to mind where the script makes compelling effect out of a character switching languages -- in a way that I'm not sure you can replicate in prose, because it relies on the audience perceiving the change without losing comprehension of the content. (I suppose you can do it in prose; you just need your audience to be appropriately bilingual.) It's a very minor note in the film, but it's one of the random little bits that sticks with me and makes me want to watch it again.

. . . dammit, why am I getting on a plane tomorrow? I want to watch all these movies! :-P

Your review of At World's End is splendid, as your reviews tend to be. I hadn't parsed all the mythical elements to quite the same extent, but yes: unlike most of what we get, it is a fantasy movie rather than merely some flavor of action or romance or whatever taking place in a fantastical world. That's surprisingly rare, and deeply satisfying to me even when we get a flawed version.

*The other is The Two Towers.

Man of Aran?

Nine

Man of Aran?

I've never seen it! Or The Edge of the World (1937). Good call.

In Which We Serve (1942) Coward/Lean

Have you seen The Sea Hawk? It's my preferred Errol Flynn pirate film, although parts of it are incomparably cheesy.

Have you seen The Sea Hawk?

I saw it on a big screen once! As I understand it has pretty much nothing to do with Sabatini's original plot, but it's fantastically swashbuckling all the same.

Leviathan (2012)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2332522/?ref_=nv_sr_2

Run, don't walk.

I suppose the 1989 Peter Weller starring one might work, too, though that's more cheese-horror.

In Which We Serve (1942) Coward/Lean

Thanks! I have seen that one, but not in years (it was before I started noticing John Mills). It may have been mentally edged out by The Cruel Sea.

Leviathan (2012)

Right; that sounds amazing. Thank you!

(I suppose you can do it in prose; you just need your audience to be appropriately bilingual.)

I've seen language-switching done successfully in prose; it does presume on the audience's understanding, but I think that's actually a good reason to do it.

It's a very minor note in the film, but it's one of the random little bits that sticks with me and makes me want to watch it again.

What's the corresponding moment in The Two Towers?

. . . dammit, why am I getting on a plane tomorrow? I want to watch all these movies!

I'm sorry! Bring movies to watch when you're no longer on a plane? (Where are you going?)

Your review of At World's End is splendid, as your reviews tend to be.

Thank you! Those films were a huge space in my brain and they happened at just the right time. The summers of 2006 and 2007 were full of the sea. It helped me survive them.

That's surprisingly rare, and deeply satisfying to me even when we get a flawed version.

I think it must account for some of the fandom's instant and deep and enduring love for the series. Aside from the fact that it swashbuckles gloriously, of course, and the protagonists are all interesting people, and Davy Jones' sailors were like things I had written or dreamed. And there's a Kraken.

Das Boot is one of my favorite, favorite movies.

I'm not sure whether this counts at all, and I kind of don't want to explain what it's about if you haven't seen it, because it's better to go in knowing nothing, but Limbo by John Sayles is excellent and set in a maritime community in Alaska that includes women. Most of it takes place on land, though.

Mr. & Mrs. Brian Norris' Ford Popular (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgHsCyWkB5g)

I'm not sure whether this counts at all, and I kind of don't want to explain what it's about if you haven't seen it, because it's better to go in knowing nothing, but Limbo by John Sayles is excellent and set in a maritime community in Alaska that includes women. Most of it takes place on land, though.

I like John Sayles: I'll give it a try. Thank you!

I feel like you really can't have a proper maritime film festival without some version of Treasure Island. I also feel like some animation would be good; perhaps Ponyo? Though I'm blanking on what English-language animation might suit.

I am reminded that I've been meaning to ask you if you've ever seen Ondine or any episodes of LXD, in particular the shipboard episode or the mermaid episode. They all have great dancing, but I think you'd very much love the mythos of those two.

I am reminded that I've been meaning to ask you if you've ever seen Ondine or any episodes of LXD, in particular the shipboard episode or the mermaid episode.

I have seen and love Ondine (I think the last third is weaker than the first two, but it has the right ending); I've never heard of LXD. Mermaid episode?

I agree completely on Ondine. LXD is short for The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. Rising is the shipboard episode. Tails of War is the mermaid ep. They are both very short, about ten minutes.

Tails of War is the mermaid ep.

So that was clearly a tiny little fragment of a much larger story and I have no idea who any of those people were, but the dancing was impressive and the cast is diverse and those were legitimately freaky sirens. Do we see them again?

[edit] Rising is the shipboard episode.

I have not seen dance filmed that way since the heyday of movie musicals: it serves to delineate character, express emotion, and spatially describe the nature of things. There is incredible inhumanness in some of those movements. And they use long shots, so you can see the choreography. There's some slowing and speeding of film, but I believe what I'm looking at is not enhanced by CGI. If that's the case, this show is incredibly rare.

What can you tell me about the characters and the plot?

Edited 2014-07-28 06:59 (UTC)

I was going to Okinawa, for a karate seminar; now I am back.

What's the corresponding moment in The Two Towers?

The scene where they're in the armory at Helm's Deep, preparing for battle, and Legolas and Aragorn shift into and then out of Sindarin. The choice of when the shifts happen carries a lot of character nuance for me.

(Over here having searched to confirm my recollection that you like things piratical …)

Have you seen Black Sails? (Which is among many other things a Treasure Island prequel.)

I am currently mainlining it, having just finished S3. It's flawed and messy and has some stuff in early eps that some people reasonably bounce hard off, but: pirate show with canon queer and poly representation all over it (at least four canonically queer lead characters), anti-imperialist revolution, some excellent female characters, soaked in meta about narrative and story-telling, and with Toby Stephens knocking it out of the park in the lead. Worth attention, I think.

selenak: Black Sails: Why Everyone Should Watch It! (from early 2015)

Spoils the Big Backstory Reveal of mid-season 2, but I think it's very worth being spoiled for because it's such an important and telling point in the show’s favour that it went there (to the accompaniment of the sound of dudebros howling in betrayal and the cast flipping them off on Twitter). And also it means you can appreciate some things that’d otherwise only make sense on a rewatch.

Have you seen Black Sails? (Which is among many other things a Treasure Island prequel.)

I have not, and thank you for the recommendation! Narratives with ordinary bisexuality and prominent non-romantic relationships are attractive to me, in addition to the Age of Sail.

(For future reference, while I appreciate the heads-up, I very rarely care about spoilers. I try to remember to take some care with them in my own writing, because so many people I know do care, but otherwise my position remains as stated here.)

How does the third season hold up?

Narratives with ordinary bisexuality and prominent non-romantic relationships are attractive to me, in addition to the Age of Sail.

I had inferred as much!

in addition to the Age of Sail.

One of the things I'm enjoying about the show is that it uses its clearly-vast sets/VFX budget (and Michael Bay as a producer) plus historical consultants (they built the Walrus from the actual plans of a specific ship) to show things that are interesting to me to see. For example, the mid-season-3 setpiece has an 18th-century pirate ship being sailed into the heart of a "ship-killer" storm, and -- okay, I wanna see what that might actually look like!

(I don't have any pre-existing Age of Sail investment, but it's so much more interesting than watching buildings blow up.)

How does the third season hold up?

VERY well. So far, I've liked each season more than the last. Season 1 is rocky and leads with all its wrong feet, which is one reason why being extensively spoiled helps (I think the rape plotline is a lot easier to tolerate when you know that Max isn't a disposable character being broken to show how grimdark things are, she's going to be taking over the world for the rest of the show) (at the end of S3, I realized that there are currently three plot threads about different women handling leadership/power, and I like that a lot). The end of season 1 and the whole of season 2 is when I really got hooked, and season 3 I liked even better.

I am greatly looking forwards to season 4, but am currently postponing starting it for a few days for the sake of prolonging the experience.

All of the seasons have had elements that haven't worked for me (I am so so bored by Charles Vane, so so bored), and you can see the points when the writers are trying to crow-bar things to get to a particular Cool Moment they want, and the writing's sometimes bad though sometimes very good. But it's full of unexpected good things, including things I've not really seen on television before. And the character development is glorious.

Further babbling and links to follow, I hope, but I'm going to post this now as Firefox keeps threatening to eat it and I have to run off and climb things in a bit.

Particular things I have not really seen elsewhere on tv include:

The Anne Bonny-Max-Jack storyline. Whether one reads Anne as lesbian or bisexual (and apparently there is heated fannish Discourse about this -- "calling her a lesbian is bi erasure" versus "you're erasing the identity of lesbians who have had sex with men in their pasts" - and personally so far I think it comes down to "it depends how she'd personally choose to identify if brought into the present day and required to choose between two 20th-century terms neither of which even has equivalents in her historical context"), it's very clearly a story about her discovering that loving women sexually/romantically is a huge and essential part of her being, and leagues different from her experiences of sex with men. It's not "oh hey she can be attracted to women too".

... and at the same time, her life partner (in all possible senses) is this dude.

And the show lets her struggle with it and try to work out how to reconcile these things and fit them together in her life, and handles it with a complexity and nuance I really didn't expect to see, and lets the characters react and bounce off each other in unexpected ways and doesn't demean or villainize any of them (this is the point when I started adoring Toby Schmitz's Jack Rackham).

These are among the posts that made me think "... huh, maybe I should check out this show", and I was not disappointed:

http://havingbeenbreathedout.tumblr.com/post/162966005293/on-queer-friendship-fandom-and-negative
http://havingbeenbreathedout.tumblr.com/post/163140211543/thank-youuuuuuu-for-your-posts-on-representations

Miranda Barlow/Hamilton. MIRAAAAANDA. Because she's not stabbing people with swords or running a pirate town or doing anything Strong Female Character(tm)-ish, she's leading a life of well-behaved seclusion and exile and suffocating in it and this action!!!pirates!!!show gives her agency and perspective. And because the relationship with James (Flint/McGraw) makes no sense if you try to read them as a "couple" and all the sense in the world when you read them as the surviving two-thirds of a broken triad, two people held together and kept apart by this ghost between them. Because her grief and rage could burn down the fucking world. Because the show is explicit that she is the co-creator of the "Captain Flint" persona.

Selenak reacting to The Reveal when it aired, and meta-ing:

https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1058222.html

... and at the same time, her life partner (in all possible senses) is this dude.

And that's clever also because there is the long-established narrative trope of the two straight men who have (in a well-done version of this trope) real and meaningful and essential relationships with women and are also basically a couple with one another; I am not sure I have ever seen it done with a mixed-gender pair and certainly never with a queer woman and I would enjoy seeing what that looks like on TV, since I've seen it with real people I know (where complexity, nuance, and occasionally arguments were definitely involved). The closest fictional instance I can think of is the protagonist of Tanith Lee's Anackire (1983) and the couple there gets together right at the end of the book, so there's not much room for the kind of exploration you describe.

These are among the posts that made me think "... huh, maybe I should check out this show", and I was not disappointed

These posts are also great because the original poster appears to have similar feelings to mine about the meaningfulness of romantic vs. not romantic definitions, which I don't see a lot; that increases the chances that the value they see in Black Sails' handling of non-romantic/non-sexual relationships will be my experience as well.

And because the relationship with James (Flint/McGraw) makes no sense if you try to read them as a "couple" and all the sense in the world when you read them as the surviving two-thirds of a broken triad, two people held together and kept apart by this ghost between them.

And again, I have seen that in contexts that were not explicitly romantic—the wife and the best friend with the memory between them—but rarely if ever in a context of canonical poly. Basically this show sounds like it is very normal about a whole bunch of things that are normal for people but vanishingly rare for mainstream TV, especially historical fiction which so often behaves as though queerness was invented by the 1960's or at most the 1930's.

I don't know when I will have the time to watch this show, as there are several other pieces of major television that I am either held up on or don't have the space to start, but you have certainly made it sound like something I am almost guaranteed to like, assuming it doesn't wreck itself in Season Four.

I had inferred as much!

I tend to assume I'm obvious about the things I like.

For example, the mid-season-3 setpiece has an 18th-century pirate ship being sailed into the heart of a "ship-killer" storm, and -- okay, I wanna see what that might actually look like!

Agreed!

(For the record, Master and Commander has excellent storms.)

The end of season 1 and the whole of season 2 is when I really got hooked, and season 3 I liked even better.

That is definitely a preferable progression to the alternative. I hope it continues.

(I am so so bored by Charles Vane, so so bored)

Why so?

I hope the climbing went well!

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The broken oar and the gear of foreign dead men

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