Birthing the Blog (3 of 4): DEAD MAN’S CHEST

To celebrate the rebirth of my personal blog as a study of the Gothic, I am reposting four entries from years past.  They are a little musty and damp, but they’ll give a sense of what this blog is going to sound like in the weeks and months to come.

This third installment (from 2006) is a review of Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man’s Chest.  So I basically said that I thought it was one of the greatest movies ever.  The post started the closest thing to a shitstorm I’d ever seen on my site.  Several friends of mine are movie buffs and they tried to tear my argument apart.  Maybe they did.  But rereading the piece four years later, I still buy its premise.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest may just about be the most important and wonderful film I’ve ever seen. In order to say that I’d have to split some hairs amazingly fine, but I still find it difficult to be too superlative in my praise.

And utterly exasperated too, because I think the critical reception is absolutely wrong-headed about the film; that they’re watching it wrong and what they point out as its flaws are actually aspects of its greatness.

…

Many of the positives come easily:

The highest honor, in most peoples’ eyes, goes to Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, deceptively dark, deceptively light, deceptively errant, deceptively erring captain of the Black Pearl.

Second on the list we’d probably point out the imaginativeness of the whole enterprise. The Flying Dutchman was to this film what The Black Pearl was to the original. Davy Jones is a villain worthy of the last run’s Barbossa. As far as the conceptual landscape of the piece, its creators are not resting on their laurels.

Finally, we’d talk about the other actors and their performances. Keira Knightley was given more room to stretch and expand than last time, Jack Davenport, Bill Nighy, and poor, stiff Orlando Bloom were either great or at least as solid as they’ve ever been.

Where most reviews start to get critical is in talking about the plot. So last Friday, when Jessica and I went to the theater to see the film, I was expecting a tangled, or at least a loose, plotline.

The plot is simultaneously loose and tangled.

I want to draw, in hugely broad and generalizing strokes, the history of western storytelling. The first recorded stories were probably records that had originally been passed along orally (in some cases for many hundreds of years) before being permanently set down in a fixed form. Since space and memory were more of a limited commodity back then (that is, a culture’s literary tradition being progressively limited by a storyteller’s memory, clay tablets, and papyrus) retained stories took on multiple roles: history, theology, and entertainment. The Epic of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest illustrations of this amalgamative treatment… in dozens of episodes, Gilgamesh is led through explanations of the universe, rousing adventures, and a quest for the life of his friend Enkidu. The Iliad and The Odyssey are preeminently praised largely because they are myths infused with a strong sense of character and personal consequence (even when destination is fixed). Beowulf and the Tragedy of Rostram and Saurab are later examples. And of course, I’d be crucified in some circles for saying this, but the Bible, the Jewish Talmud, the Islamic Hadiths and the Hindu Vedas all have the qualities of amalgamative tradition. In all cases, the stories being passed along were also intact mythologies; they attempted to situate their characters (and, by extension, humanity) in the Universe, and by default, the Universe (the gods, nature, etc.) was the central protagonist, at center stage, holding all the cards. And so on.

With the proliferation of trade, increase in travel, and especially the development of the printing press, recording and disseminating print became much easier. This coincided with the golden age of Elizabethan theater, Shakespeare, Jonson, Molière, Cervantes and the rise of the novel, and progressively more “refined” forms of storytelling. And I could say a lot now about Protestantism, industrialization, the rise of the a middle class, Western imperialism, the Enlightenment and Romanticism and so on… these all led to and informed a less integrated literature; one that was more concerned with detached reflection that exaltation and revelation. While there was still room for theme, symbolism, and stylization, it either existed in harmony with the psychological story taking place, or (as in both modernist and postmodern movements) strove against such conventional structures as an explicit and deliberate critique.

I’m trying to draw very broadly two distinct traditions; one in which a story is practical and multi-dimensional and stylized by default, and one in which a story is esoteric, abstract, and psychological by default. The break is not clean; Cervantes and Chaucer were separated by several hundred years, represent the extremes of a period of transition, and both would have seemed alien to each other as well as to contemporary or ancient texts.

Mainly, however, the point that I’m making is that by the time film came around at the turn of the twentieth century, Western art was analyzed in default strictly along lines of character and plot.

It stands to reason, then, that most examples of films and screenplays would either be written as the psychological default or deliberately and consciously stand against it.

There are some exceptions actually; all that I know of take the form of an adaptation of an earlier text or story, and one of the best examples (ironically) is The Ten Commandments. Charleton Heston manages to play a psychologically intact Moses through most of the movie, but at the end his transformation is so complete and daunting that it’s frightening; we might say obsessive and hallucinatory (if we couldn’t say that this is, after all, Moses). An even better example is The Passion of Joan of Arc in which the fire and the host run the show, and clearly dominate all characters except the namesake, and maybe Antonin Artaud.

More often, however, screenwriters and directors consciously flirt with a line, and it usually happens in big epics where the character is at the center of a whirlwind with only haphazard and tenuous connection to the edges: Kurosawa’s Ran, Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam, Lawrence of Arabia, Citizen Kane and just about anything by Kubrick. Kubrick, perhaps, is the most daring in his probing, but still, they all ultimately default to character as the preeminent, driving element. They can still, ultimately, collapse into personality as the final rendering of reality.

That is, there may be monsters and gods, but it’s always a human at center stage.

Not so with Dead Man’s Chest.

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The critics are coming down on the plot because they are reading it by a definition of narrative convention rarely transgressed by even “experimental” filmmakers. By these standards the Odyssey, the Bible, or Majnun and Leila would be in tatters. This highlights the truly impressive feat of Dead Man’s Chest: while it does meet the criteria of psychologically plausible and interesting characters, most engagingly in Captain Jack and Elizabeth, it is not beholden to them, nor does it prefer them. With the economy of a text that encapsulates religious, political, and artistic worldviews, the focus is on Acts of God and Forces of Nature.

This mythological preference is most explicit in the role of “destiny” in the film. If half of the films out at any one time invoke “destiny” and “fate” at some point, Dead Man’s Chest means it, and not as the shadow play destinies that play out in the films of Kurosawa and the plays of Chekhov. Davy Jones and the Kraken are Forces of Nature as uncompromising and inevitable as the Greek and Sumerian gods; what seems like a “convoluted plot” is, in fact, an intricate dance of the characters to assume a mastery that they can plainly sense is insufficient. Like all great ancient texts, they prove their mettle not in their ability to best their fate (for if they escape, it is only at the behest of a higher power) but in their execution of an appropriate response. This plays out, beautifully and majestically, in Will’s ill-advised gambling exploit, Elizabeth’s final submission to circumstance, and above all, Jack Sparrow’s ultimate plunge. From the opposite angle, the “three day” gift of Davy Jones to Sparrow, the momentary retreats of the Kraken, and the (strategically placed) providential coincidences are all active elements; their favor is neither arbitrary nor is it “earned” by the characters. It is borne of the antagonists’ curiosity, and needs no further explanation. The characters (unlike the critics) understand this, and cope as best they can.

Also consider the use of objects. Dice, compass, ships, the thrice discarded dress, the twice discarded and once reclaimed cap, the dripping tea cups and floating coffins are far more than props or set pieces; they are totems. Like Coleridge’s albatross or Medea’s golden fleece, these objects are tools of negotiation between the supernatural world of the antagonists and the immediate world at hand. There is a correspondence between these objects, the antagonists, and the protagonists as objects of curiosity. As such, these objects take center stage as characters in their own right.

Consider how many issues are resolved by mythological conventions. Many people are appalled at the body count of this film; it seems arbitrarily cruel to any minor or incidental character. Yet from a mythological perspective, the higher powers have no interest in these creatures. Why, then, shouldn’t they die? They’ve no claim to attention nor any tools of negotiation. How might the film’s disemboweled ships (all hands on deck went down) stack up next to the death of every firstborn of Egypt or the slaughter of 100,000 knights in the last battle of Mallory’s King Arthur?

Finally, to return briefly to the plot, if nature / the gods come upon us as a succession of waves, as obstacles in the form of sequential threats and deliveries, than a plot that emphasizes the nets characters weave around each other in a frantic effort to stay afloat is not only plausible, but necessary to sustain plausibility in such a story. The alternatives are a single sustained arc of struggle and defeat, or that the characters really are equal to their obstacles and can face off as a Force of Nature themselves. The first would prohibit an involved story, the second a touch of humanity.

And this is the source of my awe and admiration. Dead Man’s Chest is not only a vividly rendered story with compelling and exciting characters in an exotic, almost umbral setting… it’s a point of negotiation between modern fiction and mythology. I can touch Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth; I can connect with them as human beings. And they can connect with a quite literal personification of Death, of the Sea, of Wild Nature; of erratic elements that are thoroughly inhuman in disposition. That is, I am drawn with the protagonists in the spirit of Longinian sublimity. My admiration is a response to the protagonist’s composure in the face of inevitability. My empathy is a response to their passions and vulnerabilities. The film is a point of contact, successfully tugging at two wildly different styles of storytelling and bringing them back into communication.

It brings me into contact with the Sea and Death myself.

It allows us all to be, audience, characters, and nature, at center stage.

Essentially, it has accomplished what Kubrick and Scorsese have not.