“One good deed is not enough to redeem a man of a lifetime of wickedness.”
“Though it seems enough to condemn him.”
When I originally chose this topic for Year Of The Month (2003), I was going to open it up with thinking about how we talk about movies made by, for lack of a more specific phrase, bad people. Johnny Depp and Geoffrey Rush have both done things bad enough that there are people who don’t want to celebrate or even talk about their work, which I find perfectly understandable and respect as a personal choice. However, in the year since I committed to writing this, I’ve written positively about the works of other famous abusers, finding too much good to be achieved in writing about good works to avoid talking about good movies with one bad person in them. When it comes down to it, I really haven’t changed my position at all from the last time I wrote on the topic; people like me who genuinely care about other people’s feelings do eventually hit this limit on how much we’ll let other people control our behaviour. If there’s a consequence to writing positively about the work of an abuser aside from “it makes me feel bad and I’ll think you’re a bad person”, I’ll gladly hear it out.
I wanted to write about the entire original Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy because it’s such an odd beast. The first film is an above-average piece of popcorn entertainment with a classical Hollywood sensibility – camera movements lifting straight out of Spielberg’s playbook and using dozens of extras for one reaction image a la Akira Kurosawa – and some vivid and weird imaginative choices. Everyone up to your film-illiterate aunt recognises the weirdness of Depp’s performance as Captain Jack Sparrow; the conventional take on him is that he’s a supporting player who thinks he’s the protagonist. Film aficionados also remember and treasure the visual spectacle, with a rare case of CG that continues to hold up decades later. The POTC crew (wow, that term is more appropriate than ever) commit to some offbeat and memorable visual choices; the biggest classic Hollywood element to this thing is how it feels like the product of hundreds of people all committed to the same broad goal. I could imagine every extra and production assistant being excited to get to go in and work on a classic pirate film every day.
The first film was constructed, right from the title, to be the first in a franchise, so the decision to make it into an epic trilogy is the first in a series of confusing, counterintuitive decisions that have given the sequels a reputation of admirable overambition. It made a little more sense watching it twenty years later; the main theme of the trilogy is the myth of piracy, and the main flaw is that the films have absolutely no idea what they want to say about it. If the first film has a theme, it’s of finding a balance between heroism and piracy, or more accurately between doing good and being pragmatic. Both Will and Elizabeth have to make compromising decisions to save people (consider Elizabeth impulsively accepting Norrington’s marriage offer to save Will) but are also still trying to do good and suffering all the while.
One of the scenes that make both the film and Jack in particular work is when he and Elizabeth are drunk on the abandoned island and he tries explaining to her why he cares so much about the Black Pearl. On paper, it’s generic (“What the Black Pearl really is… is freedom.”), but between the score by Klaus Badelt and Hans Zimmer (understated for the moment but clearly driven and heroic) and Depp’s performance, both within the scene and without, it makes a strong emotional sense. On a practical plot level, it becomes clear that being on the Black Pearl is all Jack cares about, and the reason he’s so flippant and even dangerous is because anything other than that – the laws of man, the bars of a cage, Will’s self-esteem – can be casually destroyed or maintained depending on his mood, so long as it doesn’t get in the way of getting the Pearl. Indeed, one of the best runners is that Jack is actually kind of a piss-poor captain on account of him caring more about the getting of the ship than the maintaining of it.
This mutates heavily in the sequels. It reaches its most embarrassing and earnest in the opening scenes of the third film*, in which the End of the Age of Piracy is signified via the hanging of a singing child. First of all, the end of any Age is usually less of a bang than a whimper; piracy itself died out as most of the pirates sold out and went corporate, becoming privateers, as opposed to any big epic battles between all the pirates and all the soldiers. One could compare the situation of the characters to the slow, spluttering death of the age of Superhero Films, in which there are a few public embarrassments and people mostly just not caring any more.
*I’m keeping track of them via their number rather than their title because I don’t remember or care which one is which, and I’d be surprised if many reading this do either.
More important than realism, though, is dramatic necessity. The fall of the pirates isn’t really coming from any choices the characters made coming back on them or limiting their options. Will’s final fate replacing Davey Jones doesn’t feel like an extension of his basic motivation, and indeed feels like a betrayal, seeing as he consistently and explicitly prioritised protecting and being with Elizabeth over doing good. More likely it was chosen because it sounds like a cool fate for him to have.
“You’re the worst pirate I’ve ever heard of.”
“But you have heard of me.”
On the other hand, I get where the impulse to make these mistakes comes from, because pirates are fucking cool and the End Of An Age is deeply fucking cool. In the third film, Barbossa remarks that it’s sad being the last of something because eventually there’ll be none left, but there is a ridiculous, staggering high one gets from thinking of oneself as the last shining light of goodness in a dark and depressing world (speaking as a guy who thinks of himself as one of the few carrying on the legacy of the AV Club’s film and TV criticism, alongside other more obscure internet pop culture critics lost to time). There are even points in the films where it seems to work, most of which are connected to plot; there’s something genuinely sad about a mystical monster like Davey Jones becoming a tool, comprehended, quantified, and used by the British Empire.
One thing that sparked my imagination was how, in the first film, Will hates pirates but still in a deeply romantic way – he will kill them on sight and on principle because they are inherently evil. Who they are and how they work make up a large part of the fabric of his mind. I find myself thinking, of all things, of leftists who romanticise punching Nazis. They have a vivid image of how the Nazi thinks and what he wants so that they know how to recognise it and respond correctly. I also think of misogynists and the traps they reveal in this kind of thinking – how many men have you read who describe women in ways that do not at all reflect your lived experience, let alone even capturing specific women?
It almost feels like two aspects of the experience of being a Romantic. Davey Jones is Bad and the Enemy, but he has to be killed through an epic swordfight in a massive magical whirlpool in which pirate ships are firing cannons at each other, not co-opted by the British Empire. I’m aware I’m imbuing this with more meaning than the film intends or achieves, but this is what I’m getting at in thinking there are ideas worth engaging with and taking from the films (and potentially putting in much better stories). In fact, if I apply this thinking to pop culture criticism, I can see my Davey Joneses are the bad cultural critics who I believe apply the wrong morality to the job but I still recognise as peers playing on the same field, whilst my Lord Becketts are organisations like Univision who destroy the field and all the magic of playing entirely. If I think of myself as a creative instead, my Joneses are bad webcomics and Avatar: The Last Airbender, and my Becketts are heartless schlock.
Norrington is my favourite character in the trilogy. The first movie’s secret weapon is that its characters are a little stronger than they first appear; the comedy pirates are, by turns, terrifying, ridiculous, endearing, and terrifying. Norrington is a stuffed shirt servant of the British Empire, but he legitimately serves. As a kid, I was always drawn to characters who defined themselves by responsibility first – characters like Cyclops of the X-Men or Jake of Animorphs, who saw themselves as foot soldiers of a cause larger and more important than themselves. These are characters traditionally overlooked and often scorned by male members of fandom; I am aware of Cyclops in particular being dismissed as a boring character (especially comparing him to the more self-indulgent and violent Wolverine) and often written in ways that betray the essential appeal of the character.
(I was much later made aware that female members of fandom tend to love and romanticise those responsible kinds of characters. I leave the full implications on both genders to you.)
Norrington is self-disciplined and self-denying for a greater cause (“How can you pass that up?” / “By remembering that I serve others, Mr Sparrow, not only myself.”), and the movie follows that even when it makes him look better than the heroic (or funnier) characters (“Do not make the mistake of thinking you are the only one here who cares for Elizabeth.”). Both the text and Jack Davenport invest him with a greater intelligence than you’d expect too, like when he deliberately does the exact opposite of what Jack asks of him in a scheme, correctly guessing that he’s working a larger goal.
This all makes it very funny and weirdly appropriate when he becomes a hideous drunken wreck in the second film, bitter that the world punished him above and beyond for showing one piece of undisciplined mercy at the end of the first film. From an archetypal standpoint, he gains the ability to call the protagonists on their bullshit, correctly and otherwise; from a dramatic one, he alternates between sidekick and antagonist as the chances for both revenge and redemption arise. One of the best bits in the movies is in that spectacular water wheel sequence, when Will and Norrington are mostly working together against Jack to get the heart of Davey Jones, only for Jack to get the upper hand by leveraging Norrington’s desire for revenge against him, which Norrington gladly falls into.
“Four of you tried to kill me in the past. One of you succeeded.”
The basic storytelling flaw of the Pirates sequels is incredibly easy to express: it tries way too hard to make the conflict interesting. When you get right down to it, storytelling is easy: get your characters to want something and I will follow them wherever they go. The trick isn’t to make what they want interesting, it’s to make other characters who want other things and to let them collide. The first film gets this, and we get interest and even some meaning out it. The second film trips itself up right from the start by having Jack explicitly not know what he wants, as if wanting to sail the Pearl and dodge all the consequences of his actions isn’t enough, and it tries to make him compelling by showing his inner life in weird and interesting ways. The third film descends into completely abstract notions of freedom that are almost impossible to connect to except in equally abstract ways, although there are exceptions; I’m a big fan of the ten minute sequence in which three characters betray each other in a row.
On the other hand, the biggest strength of these three films is their visual imagination. The second film manages to top the undead pirates of the first with undead marine zoology pirates, and Davey Jones is rightly remembered as a spectacular example of CGI on film. But almost every single scene in the trilogy has a spectacular visual image carrying it through; indeed, even as the plot gets more turgid, the imagery gets more beautiful with things like the the Arctic ice covering the characters (and causing an extra to lose a toe to frostbite). I can question the necessity of showing Jack in his own personal ironic Hell, but I can’t question the memorability of him talking to a crew of himself, or the Black Pearl riding a wave of rock crabs across the desert.
Oddly, the least interesting visual sequence in the film is the climax of the third – the ostensible emotional catharsis. I’m not saying it didn’t look difficult to animate a whirlpool with pirate ships floating between, or to set up massive crowd swordfights on a set with artificial rain, but it looks so dreary, muddy, and boring compared to things like a guy fused into the side of a ship with his brain being visible behind his face. If it works, it’s because of the dialogue (“Barbossa! Marry us!” / “I’m a little busy at the moment!”) and it having one last big setpiece in which Jack chases something across multiple fights.
“The only rules that really matter are these: What a man can do, and what a man can’t do. For instance, you can accept that your father was a pirate and a good man, or you can’t. But pirate is in your blood, boy, so you’ll have to square with that someday. Now, me, for example. I could let you drown, but I can’t bring this ship into Tortuga all by me onesies. Savvy? So… Can you sail under the command of a pirate? Or can you not?”
When this trilogy worked, it’s because it was simultaneously swooningly romantic and about grubby little people backstabbing and outsmarting each other. My two favourite Will Turner scenes are 1) when he’s playing dice against Davey Jones and apparently badly losing, only to reveal it was all a cover for finding the key he was looking for and 2) when he meets Davey Jones with Lord Beckett and reveals he’s been scheming with the latter, surprised but rather pleased to be playing the supervillain. The cool thing about pirates is that they’re both self-serving and communal (and this is as true of historical pirates as their fictional examples; I’ve always been amused by the fact that real pirates had unions, insurance, and arguably better conditions than their military counterparts).
It’s a very dramatically satisfying setup, because drama thrives on loyalty and betrayal, and piracy demands a certain amount of discipline and loyalty from its protagonists whilst also allowing the temptations of treasure and revenge. Pirates Of The Caribbean also takes advantage of the spectacle allowed by fantasy; the Kraken attack is as amazing now as it was twenty years ago, and the simple magic operating by simple rules creates opportunities for fascinating decisions on the part of the characters. There’s also room for genuine goodness and heroism. A good writer could probably take the rules of this world and sketch out more vivid characters and plots with them.