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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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.

assuming it doesn't wreck itself in Season Four.

I gather that it doesn't! I am semi-spoiled for S4 (and have hit a point of not wanting to be more spoiled before I watch it); I gather there were things that caused fannish debate and upset, things that made people cry with joy, and the general sense is that yeah, they stuck the landing.

(Such are the advantages of closed canon.)

and the general sense is that yeah, they stuck the landing.

Excellent! I'm glad to hear it; even some very good shows don't.

and I would enjoy seeing what that looks like on TV

Among other things, this (gratuitous gifset): http://havingbeenbreathedout.tumblr.com/post/164064291734

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

I actually wasn't entirely sure whether you two knew each other (I'm not sure why I thought you might, but there seemed to be some common interests).

I actually wasn't entirely sure whether you two knew each other (I'm not sure why I thought you might, but there seemed to be some common interests).

Unless they were/are on LJ/Dreamwidth under a different name, no. I don't have a Tumblr. I read about a half-dozen belonging to friends, but that's it. I understand that a lot of fandom has migrated there, but it is the kind of social media platform, like Twitter, with which it would be actively unhealthy for me to interact. I'm not even doing so hot with Dreamwidth right now.

*nods* I don't have a Tumblr, but intermittently read some that belong to friends or that I've stumbled across via link-hopping and find interesting (havingbeenbreathedout being in the latter category).

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.

*nodnodnod*

But also -- the queerness is not incidental, it's absolutely intrinsic to the heart of the show (Flint's queerness especially). It's very very much about people who are living marginalized lives (whether because of sexuality or race or gender or disability, but sexuality might be the one the show returns to the most), whose lives are not included in the official histories, who are misrepresented and distorted by the narratives of empire.

Competing narratives, storytelling as politics, who controls the narrative, "who lives who dies who tells your story" is a HUGE element of the show.

These say some important things:

http://kolbrun.tumblr.com/post/159374452877/black-sails-in-its-deepest-dna-is-a-story
http://notkatniss.tumblr.com/post/149532884112/reluming-piningflint
http://notkatniss.tumblr.com/post/160392289757/edwardnygmaa-captain-flint-all-this-will-be
http://some-stars.tumblr.com/post/162942603198/candlewinds-flint-monsters

(I realize you don't need further selling on the show, I'm just in the stage where I need to babble.)

Also this is funny because it's true:

https://twitter.com/philistella/status/910075928751038464

(And given that Talk Like A Pirate Day derives from Newton's Silver, it's all a beautiful circle.)

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"

(Having written this, I realized that, 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, the most likely answer is that she would stab you with a fucking sword. Especially since this is essentially her canonical response to identity crises.)

Having written this, I realized that, 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, the most likely answer is that she would stab you with a fucking sword.

I mean, I consider that a legitimate response to many questions about sexual identity.

*nods* It's very fair and reasonable, really.

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!

Why so?

It's not the fault of the actor, I think, and it's kind of a hazard of the part -- given that they have a lead character who loathes having forced himself into the role of a pirate, and another character who doesn't want to be a pirate but is doomed by literary destiny to become one, they need a character who is Unconflictedly Pirate Who Just Wants To Pirate. Which is liable to be less interesting.

But they don’t ever manage to give the character any internal conflicts beyond two tropes I find among the most tedious imaginable: ”Must be Strong Man!” vs. “I wish to fuck this woman, who weakens me with her assertion of her own goals!” and “This is a Father Figure!” vs. “Must rebel against Father Figure to become my own man!” (the latter played out twice).

Also, he doesn't give a shit about his crew committing gang rape, which while realistic also puts the character well over a moral event horizon for me, and makes it a lot harder for me to enjoy him.

(There's no logical consistency in this given the mass-murdering ways of some of the characters I do love; it's just a thing.)

Definitely an individual mileage thing, though; plenty of people seem to have enjoyed the character hugely.

Definitely an individual mileage thing, though; plenty of people seem to have enjoyed the character hugely.

That's fair, but I appreciate the answer. It does seem to me that Pirate Who Just Unconflictedly Wants to Pirate is not an archetype that needs to have quite such stereotypically macho tropes attached to it. [edit] Especially not on a show with that many canonically female and/or queer pirates!

Edited 2017-10-30 01:33 (UTC)

(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)

Wait a minute, so on top of everything else you are telling me that Black Sails is a TV-length songfic of "Pirate Jenny"?

Wait a minute, so on top of everything else you are telling me that Black Sails is a TV-length songfic of "Pirate Jenny"?

YES!!! *frantic nodding* (For multiple characters in the show, but especially for Max.) To the point where I have already semi-seriously considered re-learning how to vid so I could make the vid.

To the point where I have already semi-seriously considered re-learning how to vid so I could make the vid.

MAKE THE VID. I CAN PAY YOU IN NO CURRENCY BUT MOVIE REVIEWS BUT MAKE THE VID.

But but but it also possibly needs to be vidded to P.O.S.'s "Thieves/Kings". And Dar Williams "The Ocean", but only if "I" and "you" can at various points mean at least three different characters. Also I need to actually watch season 4. Also I can't vid. It's a problem.

And Dar Williams "The Ocean", but only if "I" and "you" can at various points mean at least three different characters.

I don't see why not. You can do that sort of thing with editing. Also I love that song.

Also I need to actually watch season 4. Also I can't vid. It's a problem.

*hopeful look anyway*

Also I love that song.

*muffled shrieking*

Okay, this is the point where I have to restrain myself and not spam you with all the lines which would be piercingly applicable to Black Sails and Flint is the one who lives with the ocean but also he is the ocean, and the ones who know you so well are the ones who can swallow you whole and that's what the ocean can know of a body and we've all lost people, haven't we? And this town is a song about you, and you are the welcoming back from the ocean. *flails*

Have a gifset and quote that may speak to you: http://waxjism.tumblr.com/post/166048899996/lmwechirrut-and-one-night-he-was-alone-on-the

"It was as if the sea had conjured that man out of nothing and then taken him back for some unknowable purpose."

at least three different characters.

Self-correction: at least four.

"It was as if the sea had conjured that man out of nothing and then taken him back for some unknowable purpose."

That does resonate. Thank you.

(I am listening to both Dar Williams and Peter Mulvey's versions of "The Ocean" as we speak. Lines I have always loved: "What are you trying to find? I don't care, I'm not kind / I have bludgeoned your sailors, I've spat out their keepsakes / Oh, it's ashes to ashes, but always the ocean—")

Self-correction: at least four.

You've already sold me on the show!

I do want you to relearn how to vid so I can know who they are, though.

Edited 2017-10-31 09:27 (UTC)

I do want you to relearn how to vid so I can know who they are, though.

I suspect if/when you find time to watch the show, the possibilities will be very obvious. Honestly, the biggest problem with this song would be vidding it without being painfully on-the-nose.

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The broken oar and the gear of foreign dead men

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