July 02, 2006
pirates of the caribbean: dead man's chest/the libertine
Or: The Empire Strikes Back to the Future
The drab disaster of Pirates Deuce reminds us that an ontology of the blockbuster sequel is not beyond criticism's grasp — one that would not dwell on their failings as such, but would instead compile their shared traits. Clearly the first duty of the sequel is to make the crudest possible assessment of what made the first film more pleasing than it was expected to be, and amplify that so that it loses any structural relation to other elements of the film (one thinks, naturally, of the element of "philosophy" in Matrix: Reloaded).
But perhaps more compelling as an avenue of inquiry is how it's become such a rule of genre that the sequel must put administration on display: a seemingly odd choice for a popcorn film. The requirement seems to involve the making-explicit of political structures that were only implicit in the preceding film. This may strike some readers as an abstract formation: be assured it's quite literal. The council scenes in Reloaded are a comparatively understated (if overdecorated) version of Star Wars' shift from individual dramas to the Galactic Republic between the first and second episodes. But both do the same work: in the modern cinematic epic, all plots lead to bureaucracy. If the bildungsroman integrates the individual into the social body, the sequel explains the hero's place in empire.
It's interesting that this has become understood as an inevitability, a necessary element of the form (a genreme, as any reasonable person would say). It tells us something about the world, and about what Hollywood cinema thinks its role is, both in that world (where the sequel sings back the role of the first movie in Hollywood's global order), and in teaching us how to conduct our own negotiations with reality.
But that doesn't mean it's interesting as such. In fact, if the first movie was well-executed (and it's likely to have been, by local standards, if it has generated an expensive sequel), the implied world system probably doesn't need to be explained. Thus, the introduction of the East India Trading Company as the narrative frame of Pirates Deuce, though comprising a relatively small part of the movie, is not simply heavy-handed but completely unnecessary. That whole thing about white guys in uniform with limey accents in the Carribean from the first movie, fighting it out with pirates against a background of colonialism and new world gold? Again, my good screenwriting dudes: we got it. Stand away from the Final Draft software. We don't need the Company explained to us; don't need its "ruthless pirate hunter" Lord Cutler Beckett; don't need a press packet from the studio rehearsing how "times are changing on the high seas, with businessmen and bureaucrats becoming the true pirates."
But perhaps the verb tense of "are changing" begins to clarify matters. Perhaps the sequel's shift from hero to bureaucrat, repeated summer after summer, is a way of keeping the conversion from action to administration forever in the present — given that we are always between some epic and its echo, the shift is always happening. And thus, somehow, we can pretend that it hasn't entirely and completely happened, ages ago — and moreover, the only imagination of a world before world systems that we are allowed is that of the individual hero.
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Watching Pirates, we were reminded that we never reviewed The Libertine, seen in New York in Spring. Like Pirates, it features a main character who has, because of some curse, something foreign where his nose ought to be. Depp's Wilmot has lost his nose to diseases venereal, and concludes the film while wearing a sort of nasal sham; Pirates' Davy Jones , morphing marine like his crew, has a nervously pullulating cephalopod where his face once was (the remarkable face of Bill Nighy, at that). The former substitution has clear enough phallic suggestion; the latter seems (as well) metonymic for the Kraken that lolls about beneath the sea surface, waiting to wreak Jones' havoc.
The ontology of the tentacle remains to be written...