Dead Man's Chest Post 2: Christ Figures and Bad Guys

Intro (Warning: I HIGHLY recommend cutting and pasting this out to a Word document to read it more at your leisure ... if you want to know why, scroll down to the length details given in the section "The End (finally)" ... if you noticed Pauli's cautions on getting into late-night bull sessions with me at Lumos, you can guess why :) ) Ok, I am herein embarking ("it's a nautical term") upon the rewriting of the original post on Jack and Barbosa - let's Hope I don't end up feeling like shooting anymore monkeys :) I wanted to use Sumara's questions on this because I think, as I said, that it is insightful on her part that the 2 basic questions came up together, because I think they are connected. In fact, I think they are connected in a theme that we have discussed here occasionally in relation to Harry Potter - the theme of the "cunning" of the serpent. So to sort of lay out the following I'll restate Sumara's Questions: 1. Jack seems to be heroically Christ-like in facing the beastie on his feet ... but what do you make of how he got there? How "intentional" is it? Or did he simply "get caught" by Elizabeth. 2. Barbosa was the "bad guy" in movie 1 but at the end of Movie 2 he seems to be going to be the path to the finding of Jack resurrected from battle with said beastie Christian Salvation Language First, if we're going to examine Christ figures and Christian imagery, it will be good to sort of set a base by establishing the prevalence of the language and motifs of it in the second movie. First there is the Kraken, which Bootstrap actually refers to once using the OT name of the great sea-monster: "Jones's Leviathan will find you." Leviathan is part of the OT image-set of the sea as representative of chaos. In Genesis, there is the "formless and void" of the primal waters - chaos - Creation is primarily a bestowing of ordered relationship. The chaotic waters are used elsewhere, like in the Psalms often, the Psalmist talks of the waters overwhelming him etc. Leviathan is a part of this whole image set (In Job, said terrible beastie's name is "Behemoth") One professor I had put it this way as regards Genesis: if you asked an Israelite, "well if ex nihilo creation is not the emphasis of Genesis 1, then where did the formless waters come from?" They would answer, "well, God made them, of course" - but that's not the emphasis of Genesis 1 and the Hebrew verb Banah("Creation Ex Nihilo," as a distinct concept, develops in the Christian era - although the fact that it does underlie Hebraic on a more latent level definitely sets Israel off from surrounding nations, in whose mythologies the matter of the world was often the body of a defeated god, who was defeated by their present god in a "war cosmogyny" - in a sense the reason that "Ex Nihilo" is only latent, and not explicit, in the "literal sense" of the mind of the Hebrew is that "Ex Nihilo" is a cosmogyny [origin of the cosmos] and the emphasis of the Genesis account is cosmology [order of the cosmos - hence the first 6 days are a "framework" with 3 realms being created on the first 3 days and the 3 rulers of those realms being created on the corresponding second set of 3 days: the realm of Light and Dark ruled by sun moon and stars; the realms of the Sky, Land and Sea that were separated by the firmament on day 2 ruled by the birds, and fish and beasts created on day 5; and the realm of biological life ruled by humanity) (however, to be fair, I must mention that if I apply the same process to the waters as I do to the serpent below - I would have to say that "creation ex nihilo" is not in the literal sense of the Hebrew author's mind but it IS "in the text," when the text is viewed as written by the unified author of the whole Bible, the Holy Spirit - and what I have said about "latent" vs "explicit" here is the same as what I say below about the serpent being definitely evil temptation and this being the thing in the Hebrew author's mind that makes it congruous for the serpent to be interpreted as the devil by Christianity) . Here the emphasis of Creation is that God bestows existence by bestowing meaning through order and relation (In a sense, this is what the Christian concept of Hell becomes based in: Aquinas spoke of evil as a "privation of being" - Hell is the final state of remaining evil, but you don't "cease to exist" in Hell, you continue to exist but in a state of finally and thoroughly disordered relationship with God). For the Hebrew mind extistence is relational - the body is primarily the means of relation to other persons (this is the concept behind St Paul's use of the Greek word soma for "body," he's using a Greek word but with a Hebrew background behind it). That is why the Genesis 1 account culminates in the Genesis 2 account of relation between man and woman and the Sabbath as humanity's relation to God (some great stuff here too on DMC's use of tension between sea and land, because in Hebrew "man" - "Adam" - is formed from the ground - "Adamah," which is feminine gender, and you have Tia Dalma in the watery land of a river delta vs the dry desert land Jones, who is the sea [in a sense he is the perversion of marriage because he did "become one flesh" with the woman as wild and untameable as the sea], chooses to bury his heart-chest in ... but can't get much more into it than that here). The chaos of the sea is carried through to the Gospels in Christ calming the waters on the sea of Galilee, and other instances where, especially, John picks up Ezekiel's vision of the river flowing from the right side of the Temple, flowing out to the sea and turning all the salt water fresh (basically in John 20 they catch 153 fish and that is the numerical value of the Hebrew names of the two towns listed in Ezekiels vision, "as far as x and y" - that's the basic argument for the connection). Christ as redeemer is Lord of the chaos of the sea, and lord of all the beasts therein, including the biggies like the one that swallowed Jonah for 3 days. (Back to DMC) In DMC you even have this sea imagery carried to the level of the crew of the Dutchman in a way that, I think, connects with the OT dietary laws (I could be reading this in but it just seems like it would be a really odd coincidence). With the exception of Sharkey's head, all of the crew pick up particularly crustacean elements (and the shark head is the only thing about sharkey that breaks the rule ... he has a crab growing out of his back ... I know, I seen it 4 times now :) ). In the OT dietary laws it wasn't only pork that was off-limits, sea crustacean dwellers were too, because they are bottom-dwellers, scavengers. In fact, one of the things that makes me think it would be really odd as a mere coincidence is that we have Bootstrap eating one (I had the same reaction as Jack ... I have been scarred by the experience of a friend eating a particularly messy snow-crab across the table from me, a table I did not feel put enough distance between us in that case) When it comes to Biblical language of salvation in the film, we have two instances. The first is Pintel and Ragetti's conversation about reading the Bible ("you get credit for trying!") and their discussion of "salvaging is sort of like saving, after all." Then later you have a very key figure (as per the first Pirates post) bring up redemption - Jack says, "ah, the dark side of ambition," and Norrington says, " I prefer to think of it as redemption." All in all, very loaded with the language of Christianity and the Bible. Jack's Cunning So, I am going to make a case here for Jack as "Cunning," a term and concept we have discussed in Harry Potter as connected with the serpent, and as a human capability that is good in and of itself (in the NT believers are encouraged to be "wise as serpents and gentle as doves"). The first thing to note, however, is that, while "cunning" is a human potential created by God and therefore good in and of itself, the serpent in the garden of Eden is definitely cunning taken in the bad direction, perverted to evil purposes and temptation to evil. As I hinted in a comment with Sumara, the "Hello beastie" of standing and fighting on your feet cannot be separated, in PotC, from the line, "Why fight when you can negotiate?" The thing under question is that relation between them and the difference ... when does Jack stop trying to negotiate (ie use his free-spirited wits, often himself and others escaping by the skin of their teeth ... but he most-often does pull it off) and when does he stand and fight head on, and what does it say bout him as a Christ figure (remember that Christ was good with verbal wits too, when he tells the Pharisees, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," it involved a sort of well-sprung verbal trap in that it put the ball back in their court - they could have honestly claimed they thought themselves without sin, but the thing they were trying to do was to trap him in a web that would put him either in trouble with Jewish law for denying the justice of an OT law, or with the Romans for ordering a death sentence, which only the "authorities" [which did not include the Pharisees] were allowed to do under Roman law. Christ's response does two things: it confronts them head on - they knew that He was condemning their arrogance - while outwitting them in their own little game - they couldn't say "he told us to stone her" because he could have simply replied "can anybody who has ever heard me speaking in the Temple and elsewhere honestly say that they could have mistaken me to be saying that? could they actually say, with a straight face, that they got the impression I thought you were a good bunch of guys, without sin?") Soul Music At one point Pauli turned me on to Motown classics, so I like to use the concept when I can. Here, what I mean by "soul music" is a passage from the Kraken piece of the soundtrack and it's relation to a certain aspect of Jack as "Christ figure" (this is another "examining a border context of the use of images before I get into the part where I make an argument for seeing things one way or another, sort of as a basis" thing). There are several main elements to the Kraken piece on the soundtrack: you have the heavy, and heavily syncopated, cellos that go along with the crew often; you have the whirling syncopated strings and brass that accompany the mayhem during the Kraken's attack ... and then you have that ominous organ of the Kraken's finisher - which you see on the ship of men being led by the wedding dress "spirit" when the Kraken attacks after they pick up Will, as you have that looking straight down shot and the Kraken's mouth opens beneath the ship and swallows it. So, where do those guys go? - They go down below, basically they are in a physical symbol of hell/Hades/sheol. The thing is, Jack has a certain responsibility for those guys because Will got them into it while getting out of Jack's wheelings and dealings. The fate of such men is important because it functions as an image ... when they are going up the river to Tia Dalma's Gibbs tells them about the Kraken and says "imagine the last thing you [I forget the verb he uses] ... the stench of a thousand rotting corpses" - which is basically what Jack gets at the end. More-over, Jack has certain responsibilities because, in his attempts to outwit Jones, he has been "soul-dealing" - "99 Souls, 3 Days." In the end Jack can't get out of going into the Kraken because these things have led to his responsibility to "descend into hell/Hades and release the captives," so to speak ... and of course I speak thus because the "descent into hell" during the three days in the tomb is a traditional Christian belief about what Christ did (it is also the name of a very thick, but very good if you can get through it, novel by Charles Williams - what I mean by thick is that often its "landscape" is much more psychic/psychological than physical) AND, I just realized in thinking about the movie (in the midst of tossing things from one bin into another and back again, trying to prepare my worldly belongings for the move to New York ... looking a bit like Jack frantically emptying and re-filling the jar of dirt) that we have, in the beginning of the movie, a foreshadowing of Jack as Christ figure and the fact that he will need to "die" at sea and be resurrected in movie 3 - especially a clincher because it is our "introduction" to his character in this movie. He blows a beastie away (crows being notorious as birds of death) and arises from a coffin at sea. "Riding the Waves" vs "Playing the Angles" So, I have been saying that there is a relation between Jack's final stance of "Hello Beastie" and his statement to Will, "Why fight when you can negotiate" ("it's just a matter of having the proper leverage" - like in movie one, and notice that in this movie, "turn-about is fair-play," and "not much incentive for me to fight fair then is there?" comes back to bite Will in the butt a little - in movie 1 he told [unconscious] Jack "Sorry, I'm not going to be your leverage" just after he whacked him over the head with an oar, and Jack's gets him back in this movie with a good oar-whack on the head, and a classic line, "into the boat ... unless you plan to use him to hit something with") So, what of Jack's "cunning negotiations?" (which will be discussed more fully below, under the "intentional ambiguities" of the movie makers). I would say that the thing that leaves Jack's negotiations open to being congruous with his eventual standing and fighting is that he is "riding the waves" rather than "playing the angles." But admittedly, this is sometimes questionable - I mean, that little deal with Davey Jones over "establishing stand-in principle but haggling over price" is pretty shady - and in the end I think Jack does have to, in a certain sense "become" the Christ figure by being "shown" by Elizabeth that the time has come to stop "riding the waves" - because Jones's question of "can you live with yourself," is a very real question: if the deal goes south and Jack loses his gamble of being able to ride the wave successfully, Will's fate is on his head. I think Jack is trying to trick Davey Jones with the "not half as cruel as allowing them to be joined in Holy Matrimony," and that he does believe that their love and marriage can be a good thing ... but it is pretty dicey business. And then there is the whole thing even, from last movie, of the Jack-Elizabeth thing. Is he just "testing her" to make sure she will be true to Will? I'm not sure it's that simple ("not that easy, is it?") So, what of Jack Sparrow, who is he? I think, like I said in a comment on my last post about G. Swann, he is a character in flux between being symbol and being human, but that his "symbolic value," as it were, must be based in his humanity (in other words, he is a mix of traditional Christ symbol and realist psychological character of the type that really began with Shakespeare, it the tale end of the medieval period). Thus, he really does go through some draw to be, as an individual human being, the particular fulfillment of Elizabeth's draw to the pirate husband. But it is also in tension with his own kind of "knowledge of his own symbolic role," ie that she wants Will as a "good man" but wants the free-spirit to be in him too, and the primary path for the latter is Will's relationship with Jack, not her own - but ... "not that easy, is it?" The purest statement of it is From Elizabeth behind bars at the beginning, "I believe in you ... both of you" - her faith in Jack through Will's relationship with him - but it's very easy to run afoul of the reef and be facing Davey Jones once the ship (of unfolding that trust in real life) actually gets underway. Below, under the same heading of "intentional ambiguities" (which I'll say, here, has to do with "existentialism"), I'll talk about this whole thing from Elizabeth and Will's side of the equation. But for present, in closing out this "riding the waves" section, I'll just make a comparison to another movie that is strictly about disillusionment and loss of identity from "playing the angles." In the Cohen Brothers' 1990 "Miller's Crossing," Gabriel Byrne's character, Tom Reagan, "wins." In the end he is still alive and he is in the good graces of the mobster who came out on top ... but he walks away disillusioned, having basically, I think, lost his soul from "playing the angles" (This is, at least to me, a very dark movie ... and guess what ... it's got a hat symbol that runs through it). In short I think that the thing that makes Jack able to become a Christ-figure, whereas Reagan is more of a Judas -character in the end, is that Jack only "rides the waves" whereas Reagan "plays the angles" ... but Jack's is still a very tricky business - "not so easy, is it?" Intentional Ambiguities: So, just to help with a little weather-eye as to where we are, or rather how this sub-section will work, based in what of it I have alluded to above - basically I see 2 main "intentional ambiguities" in the final sequence where the Pearl goes down: One involving Jack's "heroics" and the other involving Will and Elizabeth's relationship. Existentialism What I am speaking of under "Intentional Ambiguities" is basically known as "existentialism." What I mean is that existentialism is what is going underneath the action. I do not necessarily suspect that this is what the film-makers would call what they are doing. I think that they do what they are doing on the conscious level, but that they would speak only of things like the "tension" created by the "ambiguity" or "ambivalence" of the imagery and characterization, as a path leading the viewer hopefully to discover certain things in the experience ... maybe not, they may be thinking of "existentialism" or they may not be (would be hard to tell) ... what I'm more sure of (I think) is that they are focusing on the image tension and concerned, in the text itself, with "intentional ambiguities" as a path to drawing the viewer in a certain frame of mind in thinking about the characters ... Existentialism is what I am suggesting is the framework that makes it work, what is "behind" their text and them (although, like I said, they may be consciously intending existentialism - don't know ...) Existentialism can be, for our purposes here, of two basic types, which come out in two main formulations. The basic formulation of Existentialism is "existence before essence," which means that a thing exists before it is defined and then is defined in existing (how's that for a tongue and brain twister?). This definition, though, leads fairly easily to the bad kind of existentialism, where it is said that a thing (particularly a person) exists and then decides what it means to be a person and makes themselves that. The formulation that is more conducive to Christian thought is that of "becoming" - as distinct from language of "being." (NOTE: In orthodox Christian thought, this does NOT work for the divinity of Christ - He was fully God before He ever entered the Incarnation, and his humanity was pure from the beginning too, He grew in "stature" and understanding, but his humanity did not have to first be purified before being untied with his humanity [Saint Thomas Aquinas discusses at length the "growth" of Christ's human knowledge, but not His purity]. It should also be noted that this type of existentialism does not work that well with what is known as the "state of grace" - you can "Be" in the state of Grace before your life of "becoming" is complete ... this type works best for character types in stories, although I do believe this life to be one of "becoming" - but those are deep waters - which is why we have Dogma ... we're called to explore and understand more deeply this mystery as we are able, but we have some guidelines to help us not to "run afoul of the reef") Just as a side note, the lines in literature are not so cut and dried as this, but generally not to problematic. For instance, Ralph Ellison used a lot of existential imagery and language in his Invisible Man - but what he was examining was a case of sociological "existence before essence." "African Americans" were a distinct group before they had any distinct positive definition as a group (an "essence" to their cultural identity in the USA) ... I mean outside of being slaves (which is not a positive thing for human beings, of course) . I liked Ellison's book a lot when I read it for a course in 20th century American novel. The Jack-in-the-Boat So, what is the "intentional ambiguity" with Jack in the final scene? Glad you asked :) (more like said, "get to the point already!" LOL) When Jack is in the boat he looks at the land and then back to the ship and then checks his compass and looks slightly dis-heartened. The ambiguity is in what he is thinking, for which there are several possibilities. The first is that he is trying to run away all together and then feels guilty. The other is that he is not so cowardly, but not so forthright either (as he is when he makes his final stand, hat and all, before said terrible beastie) - that he is still riding the waves, still wheeling and dealing, still casting the dice and seeing how they land. He may be thinking that, since the beastie is sentient (can discern things like who has the spot, can be drawn to the hat etc) that it will come after him and leave the ship, but also gambling that he can make it far enough in to frustrate it, or at least make its maneuverings in the shallows difficult enough that he can escape to land. He may be looking at the land longingly for the cowardly escape or he may be looking at it realizing that the beastie must be able to sense how close it is to the shallows, and thus he must go back (once said compass, for the first time in the movie, tells him what he wants and how to get there, although, either way, this is understandably a little disheartening for our hero). Of course, said beastie is probably a little blind with rage too, after that first blast Will gave its tentacles with the cannons, maybe too blindly enraged to discern captain from ship. After all, they were together a few moments ago ... and the ship is a "marker" for the Kraken in the same way the hat works as a decoy earlier. So is Jack counting on this as a decoy while he absconds or is he frustrated by it as a hero? So, Which is it? That's the hard part, and that's also exactly why Jack is a Christian existential symbol of the human person who has the potential to be Christ-like. Even at the very end, Jack is still trying to "wheel and deal" his way out, trying to use his legitimate cunning, and has to have it revealed that it is time to stop trying to "negotiate" and to say "hello beastie." (basically when said hat is past back at him --- hmmm, maybe said beastie is a revealer of some sort, maybe the first ship was not a mistake ... maybe, because of the original deal, in order for said beastie to "get Jack" it has to be all three things of the deal together: hat, ship and captain [that is the problem with proofreading and editing your own stuff - gives you another chance to mull over and then you wind up writing more ... it's a trap :) ]) One can spend forever second-guessing one's own motives and desires etc, and it is not that there is not a very proper place for examining your conscience (as a Catholic I believe it should be done daily and especially before going into the confessional) ... but there is also the place where you have to examine the situation without obsessing about how you got there, and stand and do the right thing. So, I would say that Jack Sparrow is, as a both Christian classical and Christian existential symbol, a symbol of the human being and the free-spirit (the sparrow in the field) with the potential to live up to being Christ-like. This is precisely what I mean in speaking of Jack as "cunning," in the terms of the serpent. The serpent in the garden was a creature made by God, just as cunning is a human potential created by God as a good thing (indeed, Christ's answer to the Pharisees could be said to be very "cunning"). The particular serpent in the garden was not necessarily, in the mind of the Hebrew author of Genesis, the "devil" in the way we think of him in later Christian revelation, but later Christian revelation is a congruous development (by the Holy Spirit as the unified author of Scripture) and thus a fuller revelation of the same reality (ie "what happened in the garden of Eden") - precisely because in the mind of the Hebrew author the serpent was not just "cunning," but was "cunning" (that human potential) concretely taken in the direction of evil. Jack is more "raw cunning" but if he is to become cunning taken in the right direction (the direction that would make the movie "good" from a Christian standpoint) he must "become" what the Christ symbolism in the character has been pointing to, which he does when he stands and fights at the end. If the pirate is to be the Christ figure, then "Now ... show me that horizon!" must be the same as "Hello Beastie." Or, in the words of Robin Williams as Peter Pan/ning in the movie "Hook": "To die, that would be an awfully big adventure." Elizabeth and Will In the House (hut) Whilst I was editing said terrible beastie of an encyclopedia (which my friend Mike told me on the phone Friday was finally in to the publisher), one of Mike's fellow profs at GCC had not yet seen DMC, and then he went to see it and said he pretty much really liked it but felt the "love triangle" was unnecessary. He said he thought it would have worked just as well for Will to be upset with Elizabeth over her chaining Jack to his doom, rather than the more sordid issue of a love triangle. I wasn't as sure then what I thought of that but I am more sure now, that I think this it is both-and ... another "intentional ambiguity." (and maybe even more than an "ambivalence" and more properly a "multi-valence" - but I'm not sure yet). I have already discussed some of this above, but, as I said, from Elizabeth and Will's side of it, when they are in Tia's hut, I do not think the the only question Will is asking Elizabeth is "would you bring him back if you could? do you love him instead of me?" I think that when they leave in the long boat and she says what she says, that he knows that she shackled him into it. I think that part of the question is, "what part of me do you love? can you love the pirate part too?" This is, of course, a reversal from movie one, where, as Sumara pointed out, she removed his aristocratic hat ... but here her perspective may have changed some, she may be hearing Jack's words, "not so easy is it." On the ship, I think she says "I'm not sorry" more to convince herself than Jack. The shoe is, so to speak, "on the other foot" from movie 1. There will had to find his place of balance with respect to Jack, protecting Jack from the institution. Here Elizabeth must try to find what her place is with respect to that same balance, which may be why we hear such a sympathetic line from her to Norrington, "James Norrington ... what has the world done to you?" And Will's question is both "will you have the pirate part of me?" as well as "do you want only the pirate part? in which case you might as well have Jack himself." In short, there are two halves to Elizabeth's original statement of "I trust you ... both of you." There is the obvious possibility that she might trust only Will and not his connection to Jack, his pirate half - but there is also the possibility that she might trust only the pirate half, that she might want Jack instead of Will. This is, I believe, the conflict that is going on with the compass always pointing to Jack. If Jack is the "free-spirit," the "artistic," the imagination, this is a similar choice (although I'm not saying exactly the same ... I had more on this in the "lost post" but I can't remember it right now) to what I described as Rogue's decision in X-men 3. I suggested, based in Cyclops as vision and Phoenix as unbridled psychic emotion that kills him, that mutant powers symbolize the imaginative power, and that in Rogue this is manifest in an extreme form of "empathy," so extreme that she not only empathizes with the state of another but begins to draw out their very life-force (the original meaning of the Greek psyche/psyche, as well as the Hebrew nephesh which it is used to translate in the Septuagint, and the Latin anima which is used to translate both in the Vulgate). She cannot control the use of her power, cannot choose when to use it or not, as Kitty Pride can choose whether or not to walk through a particular wall, so, for the sake of communion she chooses the suppression cure. I'm not saying Elizabeth makes the right choice, just that that is the nature of the choice she makes - and that I think this is the whole question Will is asking in Tia Dalma's hut. Just as Jack tells Will, "Pirate is in your blood and you'll have to square with that someday" - this is where Elizabeth deals with squaring with it. Movie 1 opens with Elizabeth and her fascination with pirates as a girl (and there is a tip-off there in the "re-orientation shot," when she wakes up the audience sees her as if she is standing upright, and then the camera spins and pans back to show she is lying down). This is all tied to Will's identity too because it is his father's role in his own identity that provides the medallion, and in this movie you have a reversal of the father quest, like in Return of the Jedi - "I will not abandon you." We know this father/identity quest will play out in movie 3 because Stellan Skarsgard is already credit-listed as Bootstrap for World's End. (This whole set of images surrounding Elizabeth's dilemma is really neat because, if you notice, this movie opens with the same song as movie 1, "Yo Ho Ho and a bottle of rum . a pirates life for me" - Movie 1 opens with her singing it as a girl, then she teaches it to Jack on the rum island [and believe you me ... I do intend to get to the rum island and my jar of dirt :) ] and he says he's going to teach it to the whole crew and then ends movie 1 with it - "and really bad eggs" ... at least, I think it's the same song, and if not I shall simply pull the fast one of demonstrating how it being different but related songs shows a particular development from movie 1 to movie 2 - and so on and so forth ... :) ) In a way, movie 2 picks up where movie 1 left off ... Will made his choice in finding his place, so that Elizabeth could find her place beside him (that being the treasure) and this movie could rightly be called Elizabeth's movie because it is about her choice and thoughts concerning that role in relation to the pirate/free-spirit/cunning and the institution (Norrington's in movie 3 too, as is Lord Cutler Becket) ... this all follows very nicely too THE original dilemma of the "cunning" - for there is a lot of textual-narrative consideration of the order in which the serpent approaches the couple and tempts them (it simply says Eve turned and gave the fruit to Adam ... so was he there the whole time and just being conspicuously quiet?) Barbosa's Cunning (finally Sumara's second question, in case you got bogged down in the answering of question 1 and might be too weary to recognize the change to question 2) Ok, I have to confess something here ... Second only to quoting and quipping like Sparrow, my friend Dominic and I love to quote Barbosa from movie 1. Geoffrey Rush's performance is just so good. Sparrow and Barbosa are really two sides of the same coin; I would call them "fluidity" and "jarring schitzophrenia." Both, as pirates, have the same dichotomy of calculating cunning and free-spiritedness (can I just add here that I love the Ragezzi and Pinel characters? "What is it that vexes all men?" Gibbs: "The Sea?" Pinel: "Sums?" Ragezzi: "the dichotomy of good and evil?") In Sparrow we see a fluid interchange between them though. In Barbosa, on the other hand, we see a jerky shifting back and forth between being the consummate legalist (such as his 3 responses to Elizabeth's demand to be taken back to shore in movie one) and the downright whimsical (the looney way he says "the code is more kind of guidelines than rules really" after which he jerks right back to utterly ruthless and cruel in the way he says "Welcome to the Black Pearl, Miss Turner!") On a side note, I was so stoked at reading Verbiski's comment that led me to believe he is having an eschatological dimension to "World's End" in movie 3 because one of mine and Dom's favorite lines from movie 1 is one that reveals some of this shared identity between Jack and Barbosa, and also takes on a new shade in light the idea of an schatological development: "What then, Jack Sparrow? Are we two to be locked in immortal combat till judgment day and trumpet's sound?" But, back to the question of Barbosa as bad guy in movie 1 and seeming to going to be good guy in movie 2. There are some subtle "hint drops" in the 2 movies that show at least a glint of an answer ("something a little more ... shiny") 1. There is the timing discrepancy in movie 1. For Barbosa to die the sequence should have gone: Jack lets his blood onto the final piece, Jack tosses piece to Will, Will lets his blood on the piece, Will drops piece (that now has both his and Jack's blood on it) into the chest, THEN Jack shoots Barbosa. In fact what happened is: Jack and Will let their blood onto the piece, then Jack fires the shot, Barbosa taunts him about waiting 10 years only to waste the shot, Will retorts and THEN drops the piece in the chest. So there is something funky going on. Some of it may be that it would have been difficult to "explain" to the audience with an immediate impact what has happened without doing it that way, but I think there is more behind it ... I think Verbinski himself is clever enough to have figured out a way to do it with the right sequence if he had wanted to. 2. I didn't fully get this one till viewing 4 of DMC. In spite of the question of # 1 just now (the timing discrepancy in movie 1), I think Barbosa really did undergo some type of death and resurrection in the form of a "better guy." Notice when they are in Tia's hut the first time and she lets the monkey out of the cage - Ragezzi leans to the right of a post, looking interestedly, and there is a quick shot of the monkey looking longingly up past a pair of boots that is sticking out. I think that is Barbosa dead - I watched it carefully this last time and I think I am pretty sure that the monkey looks sad. Barbosa and Jack the monkey always had a special bond in movie 1. I think it takes something more for Barbosa to resurrect - in fact, my theory is that what it takes ... is Jack going down with the Pearl. That's just my personal theory though, my hunch. If I'm right, though, then you have a pretty neat picture of Christian history as one in which the work of Christ (death on the Cross, just as Jack goes down just off the shores of the Ille Cruces) brings about the redemption of what CS Lewis referred to (in The Abolition of Man) as the "seeds of truth" in barbarian paganism. Why the Rum is Always Gone Well, speaking of barbarians ... that leads pretty neatly to my obsession with the rum as symbolic of paganism, eh? All right, here is my jar of dirt ... and you can be the judge of whether you think it has any "thump thump" in it. :) But first, let me just say that I think this relates to the present discussion on Christ symbolism because cowardice is not the only way for Jack to fail to live up to becoming the Christ symbol ... there is also the possibility of the free-spirit going the pagan direction - in Biblical terms, opting for Baal rather than Christ, as the "dying and rising god." So, here is some of my original argument for seeing the rum as symbolic of paganism (which raised some eyebrows in suspicion of my sanity :) ). You ready for this? My argument is/was ... the rum is always gone. ("Top That!" for brevity LOL). But seriously - rum and other hard alcohol are always referred to as "spirits" and there is more than one place in movie one where you have it noted that "the rum is gone," that the "spirits" have gone out of something - I say the "spiritual value" has gone out of paganism (GK Chesterton made the argument that, whatever else you can say, Christianity changed things ... it maid it entirely much more difficult to be the "noble pagan," like Cicero and Virgil). Particularly I think "piracy"(what Gibbs refers to as " spec of honest pirating" ... and Gibbs will come into play in a second here) symbolizes pagan leanings with regard to imagination and the free-spirit (ie, myth). What do you notice about Gibbs flask after a certain point in movie 1? (that is, after you notice that he is introduced as a drunkard sleeping with the pigs, like the prodigal son). ... It's usually empty, at least in key scenes. After it has been loaded into the cannon on the Interceptor and fired over to Pearl, Jack finds it, he is looking forward to a good swig, but it is empty. When swings from the Pearl to the Interceptor and meets Gibbs, he hands it back with either some words or some gesture indicating ("revealing" I would say) to Gibbs that it is empty ... that the "spirits" have gone out of it. Now, for the confirmation (and vindication? LOL) in DMC. First you have the Three pagan cult images in the movie. The most interesting is obviously Tia Dalma because she is Jamaica Voodoo, which has ties to mainland Southern and Central America voodoo, where one of the problems the Church encountered was syncretism of Voodoo cult and Christianity. But there is also the "sea - death cult" from whose chambers-o-death Jack retrieves the "much more better" drawing of a key. But for the purpose of my argument the one to notice is the Pella Costa tribe that holds Jack captive as their chief, subsequent to his fleeing Jones and his death-dealing beastie. (Drum roll, please... ) Notice the "bait" they trap Will with ... you guessed it, Gibbs' rum flask. Now, one might raise the objection ... the Pella Costas are conspicuously never seen drinking rum - they are seen wearing wigs and with a store room full of EIC goods (and this really interested me, that the ultra-modern EIC has had dealings with pagan tribes) - but apparently they traded no rum into their stores ... by all appearances it is a "dry island." Well, I am glad you raised this objection (*uh oh ... he's talking to himself ... "not good"*), for the Pella Costas are a very interesting pagan tribe indeed ... in fact, they are Gnostics (a heresy that E. Voegelin and I have accused many modern schools of thought of ... and thus I would say that the "dry island" symbolizes a sort of "neo-paganism," paganism affected by the refined Gnosticism of the Enlightenment and "modern" thought). What Gibbs describes to Will is basically classical Gnosticism ... although the classic Gnostics didn't usually (that I know of) involve cannibalism in it ... they had very elaborate systems worked out of how the specs of the divine in humans were released, upon death, up to the moon and the moon somehow passed them onto the sun, where all the divine specs were being regathered together ... it was pretty intricate. There is one further thing I would like to mention with in regards to the Pella Costas, basically as a springboard to note some things I think are great about these 2 movies thus far. I'm not sure if it is "flashback" from the perspective of movie 2 or flash-forward from the perspective of movie 1 - but either way it was downright hilariously clever. In movie 1, just before Jack jumps in to save Elizabeth, he is on the deck of the Interceptor talking to the 2 English soldiers, and when the hear the splash he has just said, "and then ... they made me their chief." Dominic and I loved this line because it gave you this mysterious back-story that made Jack interesting ... he's a pirate for goodness sake, how would he be made some tribal chief. But the point is it hooked you more onto his character because it was so mysterious (and turned out a great spin in DMC too). We always compared it to the difference between the first Star Wars trilogy and the prequels. In the prequels Lucas left hardly any mystery of back-story, at least in regards to things and characters that appear on screen, no allusions that actually grab you as interesting for a central character (I mean, I suppose you could wonder what Bubba the diner owner in Clones used to do, what scrapes he got into, that he knows so much about kimino darts and that they are made by cloners ... but, seriously, who cares? He simply an "information vehicle" - not an actual character - you could wonder how Jar Jar spent his days before hooking up with the 2 Jedi, or what he got kicked out of Gungan city for but, seriously, I heard somebody did an edit of Phantom Menace with him completely removed, as an experiment, and that that in no way hampered the plot seriously - I think it was an edit out of the Gungans altogether). Han Solo, on the other hand, and his exact relationship to Jabba before, and how it made him so edgy sometimes (I mean was it just the money? Jabba seems to take some greater pleasure in getting Solo) ... now that is something that interests us, especially because it makes his character more mysterious and he is the one we cheer for when he and Leia admit loving each other in Empire Strikes backs. But, enough ranting on the prequels. The other thing that scene (Interceptor deck: "And then they made me their chief") leads to is a consideration of the two English soldiers. Basically I really appreciated those guys. Obviously they are primarily comic relief. But that can be done better or worse. Particularly, it can be combined with either cowardice or courage. When they come up over the rail of the Dauntless in movie 1, and see the reality of the cursed pirates to be faced, if they had jumped back into the water below, we all would have snickered our jaded "worldly-wise" snickers at their cowardice. But they don't. Like Wallace and Hamish in "Braveheart," our boyishly funny duo shake hands in resignation and courageously charge headlong into the battle. I, for one, really appreciated that (and I loved how they were paired off against Pinel and Ragezzi. It is the stout soldier who is always explaining what is going on in the action/plan to the thin one, whereas, on the "mythic" side, it is always the thin Ragezzi who is noting similarities to Greek mythology, and ironies, and Scandinavian etymologies, and delving into the character motivations [during the 3-way sword fight] for the explanation to the stout Pinel). Post-Script In Conclusion: Am I, like Barbosa, schitzo? - yes. So I should apologize for the places where this post makes that overly abundantly clear. I am that particular kind of schitzophrenic who particularly dislikes the Enlightenment era thought, what is known as the "modern era" of thought, and finds myself simultaneously drawn to the pre-modern, medieval thought (standard Christ symbols and figures) and existentialism in post-modern thought (becoming in the sense of a progression of the character to the point where they make choices to fulfill the Christ figure role). I see Jack as both BEING the Christ figure and as in the process of BECOMING the Christ figure. My only hope is that somehow this fits into Chesterton's definition of a "paradox," when he speaks of the "romance of Orthodoxy" in his book Orthodoxy. He speaks of the fact that the Greek column is a very stable balance ... but also very boring. Truth, he says, is more like the balance of an enormous boulder balanced on a fine pinnacle of rock, always in danger of being thrown off balance from the huge (sometimes even seeming "monstrous") weights on both sides, but always keeping balance - the only exciting balance to be found. (The Incarnation not as some midway mixture of humanity and divinity, but as both full-blown in the same person). Kant and Sheler In regards to this "Schitzophrenia" I wanted to say a brief word on what Sumara said about the "yearning for the sea" (and, just for the record, not saying such yearning is schitzophrenic, just that these matters connect ... but then I have already said that I don't think my "schitzophrenia" such a terrible thing, so where does that put the matter? Best not think about that one too much ... best pull one of those Jack Sparrow "quick exit stage right or left " moves LOL) There are two philosophers who's thought is in a direct tension that illustrates this really well. Immanuel Kant was one of the big names of the Enlightenment. One of the things that Kant talked about was "duty." For Kant the highest moral action was that done precisely against desire, strictly out of a sense of duty. A later German philosopher named Max Sheler reacted directly against Kant's concept of duty. Sheler developed what was called "value-philosophy" or "value-ethics," based in the "value response," doing the right thing but doing it because you want to rather than out of duty. The ironic thing is that I have been friends with some whose fathers have been kind of "Scheler crusaders," and for the kids, Sheler's "value-response" became (or so it seemed to me in relating to them) a "Kantian duty." The truth is that both extremes are wrong. We cannot deny that duty is a part of life, and for good reasons - that we do have real duties. But at the same time, we are meant to strive for doing the right thing out of a genuine and vivid love of God and neighbor, as a "value-response," to also be "doing what we want because we want to do it." In short, It is Jack who tempts Elizabeth with "you're going to want to do what you want because you want to do it," BUT, it is Tia Dalma who says, "Ahhhhhh! Jack Sparrow do not know what he want!" And he does not know that until the "opportune moment" finally comes and the compass must show him ... and then he fulfills his role as Christ figure. I myself, as a bachelor in the present cultural setting, feel a little bit too much of "Bootstrap's doom" in my blood, the feeling of being meant to die at sea and cast adrift etc (and, believe me, some days my 1990 Volvo with 220,000 miles on it, as I pilot it between Weirton WV and Grove City, PA, is a lot like that little ship on which we first meet Captain Jack bailing water in movie 1 LOL), and I wonder if I will arrive in NYC stepping off the masthead as it sinks to its final rest, or get there with a pair of sea turtles strapped to my feet, with Jack's voice ringing in my ears, "Not that easy, is it?" But I think that is where we all find ourselves, with Will and Elizabeth trying to find and live in the balance between Jack and Norrington, between Kant and Scheler ... sometimes (at least for me) in the schitzophrenia of being both pre-modern and post-modern. And neither the pirate nor the institution (institutions such as marriage and family) are "the lesser of two evils," both are good (in fact, in the old meaning of the word, they are both "violently good," blazingly and uncontrollably good) ... the trick is finding that Chestertonian balancing act that is the "romance of Orthodoxy." It is all the over-powering music of the spheres present to us in the details of life that seem so mundanely obligatory. To quote Chaim Potok, it is, " a mystery, of the sort theologians have in mind when the talk about concepts like wonder and awe." (and that is the exact quote ... for once I looked it up instead of paraphrasing and saying, "well that was the basic gist ... I'm pretty sure" LOL) The End (finally :) ) And with that I think I have achieved what was once thought impossible - running dry the well of my own extreme verbosity on things concerning Pirates of the Caribbean (which is not to say "don't comment ... I don't have anything more to say" - you know how wells tend to fill up again LOL - just thatI ran myself dry of everything I was going to say or thought of on this post ... and I am hoping that it takes you all a bit to digest it and start asking questions because I think it will take my noggin a bit to recover from writing it ... at least it had better take you a while, I just copied and pasted this out into Word and it is 8,000 words - at college rule that is between 25 and 30 pages ... if you all can read and digest an essay that size by me quickly, I'm in trouble in grad school LOL ... just kidding, this is much different writing venue and style than a graduate argument paper ... much more funner :) ) So, on that note ... I'll see you all at World's End.