The broken oar and the gear of foreign dead men

[sovay]

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.

Comments

[rydra_wong]

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

[sovay]

... 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.

[rydra_wong]

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.)

[sovay]

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.

[rydra_wong]

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).

[sovay]

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.

[rydra_wong]

*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).

[rydra_wong]

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.)

[rydra_wong]

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.)

[rydra_wong]

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.)

[sovay]

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.

[rydra_wong]

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