Trickster Part 3
Jan. 16th, 2004 02:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanza"The romance genre gives to ambition the boundless field, to courage the high moment, to love the ideal logic." ~Anthony Hope (author of The Prisoner of Zenda), quoted by the screenwriters of Pirates of the Caribbean on the DVD commentary.
No particular connection to Trickster, but with all the nice chat on LJ these days about genre romance types, I thought I'd toss it out for yall.
PotC spoilers all over the place.
Reallyreallyboring for anyone who didn't like PotC.
Insanely long.
Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who wrote the PotC screenplay, speak quite directly about some of this stuff in their commentary on the DVD. They have also discussed Jack's character a bit on their screenwriting website, WordPlay:
"Sergio Leone westerns take the Western conventions and add a layer of mythology. There's the idea that some of the characters are basically gods, they are more than mere mortals; they walk among mortals and they get involved in their lives but the issues of the gods belong to the gods. And that idea is played out with Jack and Barbossa: they are the light and dark [sides] of the same Trickster archetype. Here is Barbossa--the tricks he plays with language, with not understanding language, the deals he makes, the loopholes he finds--that's the dark side of the Trickster concept."
Trickster is sometimes a seer. He is a shape-changer, a mask-wearer, slippery, ambiguous; hence, often androgynous. This is the first point to bear in mind.
* * *
Here are some of the signs that Jack is a form of Harlequin, or Trickster:
Physical appearance: Motley wear, like Harlequin. The particolored dress, the rags and tatters, have several meanings. Harlequin's clothes are made of patches because he is a servant, and a poor man. Like many commedia clowns (including Chaplin's Little Tramp), Harlequin takes great pleasure in making the rich and powerful uncomfortable. He sympathizes with the poor, though his aim is to become rich himself.
The extravagant hair, eyeliner & gold teeth turn Jack's face into a mask, like that of a commedia actor. It's a blatant signal that he is a) an artificer; and b) a performer (liar, actor).
The odd swishy walk, which conveys sexual ambiguity, also shows us a natural dancer (consider how he tests Will's footwork in their early swordfight). Harlequin is an acrobat, a juggler; so is Jack. And that sexual ambiguity--like Jack's moral ambiguity--is a Trickster trait. In fact, ambiguity is Jack's hallmark--"Jack has always to be a morally ambiguous character," say the screenwriters. "The audience should never be sure if he's a good guy or a bad guy what is he exactly up to." Until very late in the story, we are not sure if Jack is a rival to Will and Norrington for Elizabeth
[When Jack does not escape from the Port Royal prison] "My sympathies, friend. You've no manner of luck at all." Jack is the worst escaper of all time. He does not escape from anything on his own. But as Johnny put it--he has that run-between-the-raindrops attitude: he's always trying to get out, and is able to turn the world to his advantage so he gets out, but he actually is incapable of escaping from anything on his own."
Jack's origins are obscure. We know nothing of him, and learn very little about his past in the course of the movie. We are told early on that the Black Pearl has been around for "nearly 10 years." Later we learn that at that time it belonged to Jack. No one has known him for more than 10 years. We hear a couple of different stories--Gibbs has known him for 8 years, after the time when Gibbs was a seaman on the ship that brought Elizabeth to the Caribbean. He tells us that he showed up one day, sailing the Black Pearl. So Jack turned up in the Caribbean just a little before young Will and Elizabeth arrived--before that, nothing is known. We also don't know how long ago Barbossa took the Pearl from Jack. When Jack is finally forced to tell Elizabeth the true explanation, he hates it.
Similarly, there are myriad stories about Jack himself--especially his escape from the desert island--but all are either fantastic or conflicting. Gibbs tells one; at one point we see Jack himself telling two sailors a different version.
So Jack's backstory is unstable, rife with lies and red herrings. The emptiness of the backstory leaves open the possibility that Jack is literally magical--god-born, or ancient, or undead.
Ultimately, the only way to understand Jack's identity is the way he himself does: purely as the physical embodiment of his name. His name tells all we can know about him. "I'm Captain Jack Sparrow," he says, insistently and repeatedly. Which of course tells us very little, provides no insight--although he seems to think it explains everything.
Although one can extract a few ideas from his name.
1) Jack's first statement when he arrives in Port Royal is, more or less: "forget my [real] name." He gives the name Smith. Then, through the rest of the movie he insists over and over on his name: I'm Captain Jack Sparrow. A suggestive contradiction: on the one hand, he knows who he is and he wants to be recognized for who and what he is; on the other, he changes masks whenever it suits him (the sweet innocent mask, the madcap fool mask, the drunk mask, the leering seducer mask, the ruthless betrayer mask), and his name is another mask.
His surname is also suggestive: first, because it is the name of a natural creature, and Jack is a nature-spirit. Sparrow because he needs to be free and fly like a bird. But also a contradiction in that a sparrow is a small, brown, common, insignificant little bird, not a fellow of ribbons and bright plumage like Jack; not a parrot, and not a bird of prey; rather; the raptor's food supply. The name may imply freedom, but it is also the mask of a creature who wishes to pass unidentified through the world, if not unnoticed.
Jack possesses magical objects--the compass that steers to the magical Isle of the Dead, the pistol with one dedicated bullet in it, which finds its destined mark. We don't know how he got these things, but we do know that he is very attached to them. Several times when he is escaping, he takes time to gather his "effects"--compass, pistol, hat--before leaving. Other than the gold coins, the only magical objects in the story are the Pearl itself (which belongs to Jack), Jack's "effects," and the coin stolen by Elizabeth from Will, who got it from his father. We may consider that the cursed gold of Cortez, including Elizabeth's coin, belongs legitimately to Jack--who found it in the first place (as owner of the compass), without treachery. In other words, all magical and supernatural objects in the story are traceable to Jack.
Related to this is the fact that Jack is the only person in the story who voluntarily chooses to become undead, and indeed must to do in order to complete his goal of killing Barbossa.
At one moment, a pirate says to him: "You! You're supposed to be dead!" "Am I not?" Jack responds, faintly puzzled.
So Jack is a liminal character, one who crosses easily between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
Sneaky, unpredictable: Jack is such a skilled pirate because he thinks in unexpected ways. He is never at a loss, and never gives up. He is never afraid--even with a noose around his neck. This may be because he's mad, and foolish, or because he's supremely confident in his own talents--or both. Though it should be noted that he is captured several times and never once escapes without help. (Which is where Jack's luck comes in.)
Here's what the screenwriters say about him: "No matter how badly things go, he's convinced that somehow the universe will come around to his point of view if he can just hang on long enough. Utterly confident, so that he can throw dust in everyone's eyes and create havoc and figure that he can turn it to his own advantage." (From the commentary on the DVD) And this is essential: Jack moves through the world not by adapting to its necessities, but by waiting patiently for the world to adapt itself to his desires. Which it generally does, more or less.
At the same time, Jack is not a mastermind. His plans frequently fail and must be revised; he is not in control of the situation very often. He relies on chance and accident and makes the most of both "Wait for the opportune moment" is his watchword. Chance is his friend.
Jack explaining to Gibbs how he will recapture the Black Pearl: "It's a matter of leverage." Gibbs and everyone else take this to mean that Jack will use Will Turner as a pawn to get what he wants. And Jack does use Will, but never with the intention of really letting him die. Rather, leverage = a means of lifting a weight through cunning rather than strength. See below, re codes. "Leverage" is a Jack code word.
Homelessness. The liminal figure who crosses between Underworld and living world, the Trickster who lives "on the road," at the edge of town, inhabiting the periphery, is himself homeless. He is a wanderer, a traveler (tinker, gypsy). Jack comes from nowhere and has no home. Instead of a home, he has the Black Pearl and his great speech--the core moment of the story--is his explanation to Elizabeth about why he wants his ship back: "That's what a ship is, you know: It's not just a keel and a hold and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is, what the Black Pearl really is, is freedom."
This is the one moment in the story when we can be sure Jack is telling the truth, and it is the moment we have been waiting for since the beginning. It explains Jack as no backstory ever could. Freedom, the open road, is Jack's OTP.
Storyteller. Jack loves to tell stories, and to hear stories told about him. And they are usually the same story: his own origins, but each time, the version is different. So much does he love to tell and hear stories about himself that he enjoys hearing the list of his crimes read as he is about to be hanged, and is dismayed when the hangman doesn't share his pleasure. This is Trickster's egoism, and Trickster's utter inability to focus on bad news, his impossible optimism, his absolute self-absorption.
Jack is something of a griot--he tells stories to everyone he meets, and they listen. Jack to Murtagh & Mulroy, in his very first scene "And then they made me their chief..." This is the tail end of a story--apparently yet another version of the Jack-escapes-from-desert-island story.
Not sure if the following is from the screenwriters' commentary or my own notes: Jack is aware of the notion of storytelling while he's in the story. He mocks the story that Will is in. Will is trying to be the hero of his own tale and go off and rescue the fair maiden, & at various points Jack shows that he is aware of how it will play in the legends. He understands cliches very well.
And consider this moment:
Prisoner: "The Black Pearl! I've heard stories. She's been preying on ships and settlements for nearly ten years. Never leaves any survivors."
Jack: "No survivors? Then where do the stories come from, I wonder?"
Either the ship and Jack are not so bloodthirsty as their reputation suggests, or Jack himself has told all the stories. Or, of course, both. It's interesting that, as far as I can tell, Jack kills only one person in the whole movie, and that's Barbossa.
Gibbs has heard stories of the Black Pearl. Murtagh has heard stories... the Black Pearl is surrounded by stories; Jack is the source of stories.
Here's the version of Jack's backstory told by Gibbs:
"Not a lot's known about Jack Sparrow before he showed up in Tortuga with a mind to have the treasure of the Isla de Muerta... captain of the Black Pearl." Jack showed up in the Caribbean in his supernatural ship (surrounded by fog, sailing with shredded sails) one day , with his magic compass.
He lost the Black Pearl because he was innocent (rather as Will is in the present story) and believed in fair play--equal shares with the crew. So he gave away his secret knowledge and was mutinied: "They marooned Jack on an island and left him to die, but not before he'd gone mad with the heat."
This is another false story about Jack, who was only marooned for 3 days. Is Gibbs trying to scare Will, or does he believe it himself? Gibbs then mentions 3 weeks (not 3 days) of starvation, and provides a false explanation for the "one shot" in Jack's pistol. "He waited there three days and three nights... all manner of sea creatures came aclimbing into his presence." This is a blatant fable. Will (beginning to learn some of Jack's wit): "What did he use for rope?" (Will is beginning to sound like Jack himself: "Where did the stories come from, I wonder?") And Jack's answer, "Human hair from my back," is both icky and funny & obviously a lie. Yet it manages to suggest, however faintly, that he thinks of himself as a shape-shifter, an animagus (as it were), someone who might well call sea turtles to him and make a raft of them.
Relationship to nature. If Trickster is sometimes divine or semi-divine, one of the attributes of divine or divinely inspired beings (besides magic) is a heightened sensitivity to nature and the natural elements. In one scene we see Jack and his motley crew of pirates preparing to sail for the Isla de la Muerta under a blazing cloudless summer sky. Although they are seasoned mariners, only Jack can tell that the mother and father of a storm is brewing. Jack knows there's a storm coming because he's larger than life, he's tied into things differently than the other, mortal characters in the story. (Again, not sure if this last bit is a comment from the screenwriters or not.)
Even so, Jack's relationship to nature is not, er, a natural one. His final statement in the movie is, "Now, bring me that horizon." Jack sees the world as working according to laws not of physics but of his own making. So the lovely line "bring me the horizon" is not only a metaphor for sailing freely, and (finally!) a statement of what Jack's real goal is (his treasure is not silver and gold, but the horizon); it is also the command a god makes, one who makes the world turn and shapes the universe to his own purposes and pleasure.
Typically, the Fool or village idiot is called a Natural, and by tradition is thought to be touched by the gods and exceptionally close to nature. Throughout the movie, other characters continually wonder if Jack is drunk, mad, an idiot, only mad Nor' Norwest ("daft like Jack" = crazy like a fox), or faking it entirely. And it is not possible to know the answer to this. Jack sometimes seems to be exaggerating his own lunacy, as when he is in prison and hears Will Turner coming, and so lies down in the straw to present a nonchalant appearance. Presumably he thinks he is sane, and faking it. But most of the time he seems genuinely flaky. This does not prevent him from also being crafty.
Similarly, Jack has an uncanny ability to recognize the arrival of the Black Pearl by the sound of her guns. He hears better, or perhaps differently, from everyone else. And of course, the Black Pearl is his beloved.
Jack turns out to be a good planner, and the plan he creates in jail (once he knows who Will is, and learns that the curse is real) is essentially the plan that he executes. It's not a particularly sound plan, though. It involves getting Will, Barbossa and himself all in the cave with the gold at once, turning himself temporarily immortal, getting Barbossa out of the moonlight, shooting him, and getting Will to cut his hand and return the final coin. The timing of this is nearly impossible (Will does not drop the coin until Jack's special bullet is already lodged in Barbossa's still-immortal heart), and it requires that Jack have Will on his side. Further, it nearly goes awry a dozen times, and each time chance, luck, and the goodwill of others bail Jack out--rather than his own cleverness. But it pleases Jack because it relies utterly on the idea of the Opportune Moment: that one perfect point in time where chance, luck, and design intersect. Not for nothing is Trickster the god of the crossroads. And this perfect moment pleases the artist in Jack. Which is why he only has one bullet: not for him a backup plan.
The fact that Will has figured out what he is supposed to do, and does it, means that he has matriculated as Jack's pupil--has fully undergone the conversion that has been reshaping him since the day he crossed paths with Jack. And Jack knows it.
Here is Jack's declaration of intent, just before the final swordfight with Barbossa:
Barbossa: "I must admit, Jack, I thought I had you figured. But it turns out you're a hard man to predict."
Jack: "I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest, honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly stupid."
And then he does something stupid (ergo honest). And the phrase is one of Jack's two special codes, like the opportune moment, by means of which he signals his plan to Will.
Codes: Trickster often speaks in codes, or in specialized language. He is a master of signs, an interpreter of enigmatic clues, a diviner. He speaks in what appears to be nonsense or mad-talk (e.g., Tom o'Bedlam in Lear, or Hamlet in Act II, sc. ii: "I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw [hernshaw/heron?]." And:
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale." Act III, sc. ii.
These two codes are pure Trickster.
1) Incredibly stupid: Trickster is constantly doing incredibly stupid things--out of curiosity, carelessness, confusion, whimsy, indifference to danger, naive inattention, or (especially) an irresistible urge to create havoc and have fun.
2) The opportune moment: Trickster, for all his wily plotting and planning, is a creature of the spontaneous moment. He will seize the chance, change directions, switch allegiances from one moment to the next. ("Whose side is Jack on?" Elizabeth asks. And Will answers, "At the moment...?")
A third Jack code is That's interesting, a cue that he is thinking about how to turn some new piece of info to his advantage. What's interesting to Jack is any knowledge he can make into a tool for his purposes.
So the idea of the pirates having a Code (in the sense of guidelines) has a second layer of meaning: In Jack's terms, "Stick to the Code" means "Read the world according to the coded language of Jack Sparrow." He has esoteric (hidden) knowledge: ("Haven't you heard the stories? The Black Pearl sails from an island that cannot be found unless you already know where it is." "Savvy" means clever, sly, in-the-know, but it also comes from the French savoir, to know. ("That would be the French," says Jack-the-linguist to poor Pintel, about the word "parlay.")
Connected with codes is wordplay: "The man who did the drinking listens to the man who did the waking..." "I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest, honestly..." Jack's brain-numbing patter.
Androgyny. This is mainly just one of many aspects the ambiguity of Jack's identity. Androgyny and cross-dressing have a large presence in commedia dell'arte. One famous lazzo, or stock scene, involves the Capitano, a bluff soldier, coming to buy a shirt from a linen draper. The merchant is a beautiful woman, and the Captain flirts with her. Harlequin arrives, and also flirts with her. The joke is that both the woman and Harlequin are played by the same actor, whose costume is divided down the middle, half Harlequin motley, half bourgeois shopgirl. The actor must switch from left to right profile to carry out both the flirtation and the subsequent quarrel with the Captain. Another famous lazzo involves Harlequin nursing his children.
In Jack, we see a slurring of words, a foppish (if bizarre) taste in dress, and a tendency to swan when he walks, both of which may be signifiers of either drunkenness or of queerness. He clearly has had any number of entanglements with women, but is uniformly out of luck with all of them. His real passion is his ship, as we see when he sensuously caresses the ridiculously phallic spoke of the Black Pearl's tiller in the closing shot of the movie. Brave of the director to let Depp do that in a family movie.
His sexual ambiguity, like Viola's in Twelfth Night, is part of his many-pathedness (polutropos), his lack of direction, focus, goal. His only goal is to be unshackled. He has no particular plan, goal, or direction in life. He has no known past (like Viola he just appears one day, out of the sea). And like Viola, he is all things to all observers, an empty vessel. To Norrington he is the world's worst pirate, or the best. To the good citizens of Port Royal he is a criminal; to Barbossa's men he is altogether too virtuous.
Eshu at the Crossroads: Jack's action throughout the movie is that of mediator, negotiator between various parties, like Eshu of the Crossroads. He often negotiates in bad faith--or for his own profit. But nevertheless, what he negotiates, in the end, is the happy ending, the changed circumstances of Will and Elizabeth. He negotiates their marriage ("A wedding! I love a wedding!"he says, with apparent sincerity.) When he says later, "Elizabeth, it would never have worked between us, darling, I'm sorry," we (and she) have no way of judging if he means it or not--is he deluded, or joking? ("I want you to know," he says to Norrington, "I was rooting for you." It's clearly not true, but he seems to think it will please Norrington, or else he's trying to irk him--both, probably.) "Nice hat" is about all he has to say to Will. (Of course, really big hats are a thing badass pirates like Barbossa covet.) Then he exits clownishly (but successfully).
At the end, when Jack and Will work as a team, it's because Will has finished going to the Jack Sparrow School of Heroism and is now something of a Trickster himself. Rope tricks, tumbling, clown tricks, somersaults are signs of this change in him. He is therefore worthy to win Elizabeth, to win love, having been transformed by his tutelage under Jack.
Even Norrington shows some smallish degree of change, because of having been entangled with Jack the Trickster. This teaches him to let go of Elizabeth and allow true love to win (Elizabeth/Will, Jack/Black Pearl).
Some random notes:
Jack's "one bullet" ("This bullet is not meant for you," he says to Will Turner when they first meet) has a curious family resemblance to the magical "one shot" in Christopher Walken's gun in The Deer Hunter. I can't really think of two movies with less in common--except that the Walken character is, in his own way, something of a Trickster character. But in a very different mode.
Underworld. In Trickster Part 2 I offered some notes about the origins of Harlequin in the Underworld. The presence of an Underworld in PotC (i.e., the Isla de la Muerta, with its archetypal cave) is what a friend of mine would call a Cluebat: a signal so loud that we cannot ignore it. This is a quest story. Will and Elizabeth are the heroes who are making their journey from innocence to knowledge and from helplessness to power. But the quest is Jack's, and his grail is his ship.
That's it for Jack Sparrow, at least for now.
Herewith some further notes on Trickster, though I may already have posted this bit. I've lost track.
Trickster is does not always win the day; frequently his own flaws wreck him--his waywardness, his lack of focus and goals, his homelessness, love of freedom, and insouciance make him rootless and prone to carelessness. His addiction to jokes and tricks sometimes is his downfall (Loki, Coyote).
But he is veryverysmart; he is sly, clever, witty, furbo, cunning. Harlequin is always smarter than the people around him. He is a servant, but he outwits his master, and usually gets what he aims to have. If he fails, it is usually not for want of intelligence or perceptiveness, but because he is bad-tempered, or distractable, or the thing he wants causes him problems, once he gets it.
Trickster's character is unchanging. He is the same at the end of the story as at the beginning. Unlike hero and heroine, he does not have a Hero's Journey, he doesn't learn or grow or develop. This is one of the signs of his godhood or partial godhood (Krishna, Odysseus, Oisin). He has his goals, or projects (to get home, to get his ship back, to get into Asgard, to win the Golden Fleece, to kill the Minotaur, to get rich), and his journeys, but he is not subject to change. He doesn't learn because he already knows. Rather, he is the catalyst for the changes in all the people he encounters. Because of Harlequin's machinations to impress Columbine, the high Lovers meet and marry, the miser loses his gold, the quack doctor is unmasked, the avaricious father overthrown. Harlequin may himself get the miser's gold, but he may or may not succeed in impressing Columbine.
He moves through his own story creating havoc and chaos all around him, disorder and incoherence, misrule and confusion; and happy endings and just punishments multiply around him. But he himself moves forward toward his goal relentlessly, and he always knows just what he has in mind. His plans, however mad or disorganized they may seem to others (normal people grounded in reality), are always discovered to be clockwork-efficient, precise to a pin in the end. (That's the reveal: Daft Jack is only mad nor-norwest.) Because he moves on a trajectory different from everyone else's, he appears utterly confused, mad, distracted, aimless.
Even so, it is important to note that Harlequin always remains a servant. No matter how rich he gets, or how much smarter he is than everyone else, he never rises to the next class. Trickster doesn't change; he is an agent of change in others, a messenger of fate and the gods (Mercury/Hermes), a mediator or negotiator between the magical (immortal) realm and the mortal realm.
He is a liminal figure, a translator (an unreliable one), a go-between, constantly in motion. He lives On the Road; he puts himself In the Marketplace. He lurks at the crossroads (Macheath the Highwayman), both because the crossroads is a point where paths split and irreversible decisions are made and because it is a point where paths converge and two discrete, unrelated ideas meet. The accidental confluence of two unrelated ideas is Trickster's stock-in-trade, his hallmark. The collision of those two roads or ideas engenders something utterly new: it's his great creative act. (It's a floor wax and a dessert topping! Hey, if I turn this urinal upside down, it's a fountain. Maybe if I stand in a different part of the universe, the speed of light will change.)
Trickster can hold two contradictory thoughts in his head at once. ("Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast," says the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland, whose author was the foremost Trickster ever to breath real air.) He is not disturbed by paradoxes and logical fallacies.
A final note: those readers who know Dorothy Dunnett's second series of books, The House of Niccolo (which I much prefer to her Lymond books) may wish to think about the character of Nicholas as Trickster. He and Jack Sparrow are brothers under the skin.
No particular connection to Trickster, but with all the nice chat on LJ these days about genre romance types, I thought I'd toss it out for yall.
PotC spoilers all over the place.
Reallyreallyboring for anyone who didn't like PotC.
Insanely long.
Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who wrote the PotC screenplay, speak quite directly about some of this stuff in their commentary on the DVD. They have also discussed Jack's character a bit on their screenwriting website, WordPlay:
"Sergio Leone westerns take the Western conventions and add a layer of mythology. There's the idea that some of the characters are basically gods, they are more than mere mortals; they walk among mortals and they get involved in their lives but the issues of the gods belong to the gods. And that idea is played out with Jack and Barbossa: they are the light and dark [sides] of the same Trickster archetype. Here is Barbossa--the tricks he plays with language, with not understanding language, the deals he makes, the loopholes he finds--that's the dark side of the Trickster concept."
Trickster is sometimes a seer. He is a shape-changer, a mask-wearer, slippery, ambiguous; hence, often androgynous. This is the first point to bear in mind.
* * *
Here are some of the signs that Jack is a form of Harlequin, or Trickster:
Physical appearance: Motley wear, like Harlequin. The particolored dress, the rags and tatters, have several meanings. Harlequin's clothes are made of patches because he is a servant, and a poor man. Like many commedia clowns (including Chaplin's Little Tramp), Harlequin takes great pleasure in making the rich and powerful uncomfortable. He sympathizes with the poor, though his aim is to become rich himself.
The extravagant hair, eyeliner & gold teeth turn Jack's face into a mask, like that of a commedia actor. It's a blatant signal that he is a) an artificer; and b) a performer (liar, actor).
The odd swishy walk, which conveys sexual ambiguity, also shows us a natural dancer (consider how he tests Will's footwork in their early swordfight). Harlequin is an acrobat, a juggler; so is Jack. And that sexual ambiguity--like Jack's moral ambiguity--is a Trickster trait. In fact, ambiguity is Jack's hallmark--"Jack has always to be a morally ambiguous character," say the screenwriters. "The audience should never be sure if he's a good guy or a bad guy what is he exactly up to." Until very late in the story, we are not sure if Jack is a rival to Will and Norrington for Elizabeth
[When Jack does not escape from the Port Royal prison] "My sympathies, friend. You've no manner of luck at all." Jack is the worst escaper of all time. He does not escape from anything on his own. But as Johnny put it--he has that run-between-the-raindrops attitude: he's always trying to get out, and is able to turn the world to his advantage so he gets out, but he actually is incapable of escaping from anything on his own."
Jack's origins are obscure. We know nothing of him, and learn very little about his past in the course of the movie. We are told early on that the Black Pearl has been around for "nearly 10 years." Later we learn that at that time it belonged to Jack. No one has known him for more than 10 years. We hear a couple of different stories--Gibbs has known him for 8 years, after the time when Gibbs was a seaman on the ship that brought Elizabeth to the Caribbean. He tells us that he showed up one day, sailing the Black Pearl. So Jack turned up in the Caribbean just a little before young Will and Elizabeth arrived--before that, nothing is known. We also don't know how long ago Barbossa took the Pearl from Jack. When Jack is finally forced to tell Elizabeth the true explanation, he hates it.
Similarly, there are myriad stories about Jack himself--especially his escape from the desert island--but all are either fantastic or conflicting. Gibbs tells one; at one point we see Jack himself telling two sailors a different version.
So Jack's backstory is unstable, rife with lies and red herrings. The emptiness of the backstory leaves open the possibility that Jack is literally magical--god-born, or ancient, or undead.
Ultimately, the only way to understand Jack's identity is the way he himself does: purely as the physical embodiment of his name. His name tells all we can know about him. "I'm Captain Jack Sparrow," he says, insistently and repeatedly. Which of course tells us very little, provides no insight--although he seems to think it explains everything.
Although one can extract a few ideas from his name.
1) Jack's first statement when he arrives in Port Royal is, more or less: "forget my [real] name." He gives the name Smith. Then, through the rest of the movie he insists over and over on his name: I'm Captain Jack Sparrow. A suggestive contradiction: on the one hand, he knows who he is and he wants to be recognized for who and what he is; on the other, he changes masks whenever it suits him (the sweet innocent mask, the madcap fool mask, the drunk mask, the leering seducer mask, the ruthless betrayer mask), and his name is another mask.
His surname is also suggestive: first, because it is the name of a natural creature, and Jack is a nature-spirit. Sparrow because he needs to be free and fly like a bird. But also a contradiction in that a sparrow is a small, brown, common, insignificant little bird, not a fellow of ribbons and bright plumage like Jack; not a parrot, and not a bird of prey; rather; the raptor's food supply. The name may imply freedom, but it is also the mask of a creature who wishes to pass unidentified through the world, if not unnoticed.
Jack possesses magical objects--the compass that steers to the magical Isle of the Dead, the pistol with one dedicated bullet in it, which finds its destined mark. We don't know how he got these things, but we do know that he is very attached to them. Several times when he is escaping, he takes time to gather his "effects"--compass, pistol, hat--before leaving. Other than the gold coins, the only magical objects in the story are the Pearl itself (which belongs to Jack), Jack's "effects," and the coin stolen by Elizabeth from Will, who got it from his father. We may consider that the cursed gold of Cortez, including Elizabeth's coin, belongs legitimately to Jack--who found it in the first place (as owner of the compass), without treachery. In other words, all magical and supernatural objects in the story are traceable to Jack.
Related to this is the fact that Jack is the only person in the story who voluntarily chooses to become undead, and indeed must to do in order to complete his goal of killing Barbossa.
At one moment, a pirate says to him: "You! You're supposed to be dead!" "Am I not?" Jack responds, faintly puzzled.
So Jack is a liminal character, one who crosses easily between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
Sneaky, unpredictable: Jack is such a skilled pirate because he thinks in unexpected ways. He is never at a loss, and never gives up. He is never afraid--even with a noose around his neck. This may be because he's mad, and foolish, or because he's supremely confident in his own talents--or both. Though it should be noted that he is captured several times and never once escapes without help. (Which is where Jack's luck comes in.)
Here's what the screenwriters say about him: "No matter how badly things go, he's convinced that somehow the universe will come around to his point of view if he can just hang on long enough. Utterly confident, so that he can throw dust in everyone's eyes and create havoc and figure that he can turn it to his own advantage." (From the commentary on the DVD) And this is essential: Jack moves through the world not by adapting to its necessities, but by waiting patiently for the world to adapt itself to his desires. Which it generally does, more or less.
At the same time, Jack is not a mastermind. His plans frequently fail and must be revised; he is not in control of the situation very often. He relies on chance and accident and makes the most of both "Wait for the opportune moment" is his watchword. Chance is his friend.
Jack explaining to Gibbs how he will recapture the Black Pearl: "It's a matter of leverage." Gibbs and everyone else take this to mean that Jack will use Will Turner as a pawn to get what he wants. And Jack does use Will, but never with the intention of really letting him die. Rather, leverage = a means of lifting a weight through cunning rather than strength. See below, re codes. "Leverage" is a Jack code word.
Homelessness. The liminal figure who crosses between Underworld and living world, the Trickster who lives "on the road," at the edge of town, inhabiting the periphery, is himself homeless. He is a wanderer, a traveler (tinker, gypsy). Jack comes from nowhere and has no home. Instead of a home, he has the Black Pearl and his great speech--the core moment of the story--is his explanation to Elizabeth about why he wants his ship back: "That's what a ship is, you know: It's not just a keel and a hold and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is, what the Black Pearl really is, is freedom."
This is the one moment in the story when we can be sure Jack is telling the truth, and it is the moment we have been waiting for since the beginning. It explains Jack as no backstory ever could. Freedom, the open road, is Jack's OTP.
Storyteller. Jack loves to tell stories, and to hear stories told about him. And they are usually the same story: his own origins, but each time, the version is different. So much does he love to tell and hear stories about himself that he enjoys hearing the list of his crimes read as he is about to be hanged, and is dismayed when the hangman doesn't share his pleasure. This is Trickster's egoism, and Trickster's utter inability to focus on bad news, his impossible optimism, his absolute self-absorption.
Jack is something of a griot--he tells stories to everyone he meets, and they listen. Jack to Murtagh & Mulroy, in his very first scene "And then they made me their chief..." This is the tail end of a story--apparently yet another version of the Jack-escapes-from-desert-island story.
Not sure if the following is from the screenwriters' commentary or my own notes: Jack is aware of the notion of storytelling while he's in the story. He mocks the story that Will is in. Will is trying to be the hero of his own tale and go off and rescue the fair maiden, & at various points Jack shows that he is aware of how it will play in the legends. He understands cliches very well.
And consider this moment:
Prisoner: "The Black Pearl! I've heard stories. She's been preying on ships and settlements for nearly ten years. Never leaves any survivors."
Jack: "No survivors? Then where do the stories come from, I wonder?"
Either the ship and Jack are not so bloodthirsty as their reputation suggests, or Jack himself has told all the stories. Or, of course, both. It's interesting that, as far as I can tell, Jack kills only one person in the whole movie, and that's Barbossa.
Gibbs has heard stories of the Black Pearl. Murtagh has heard stories... the Black Pearl is surrounded by stories; Jack is the source of stories.
Here's the version of Jack's backstory told by Gibbs:
"Not a lot's known about Jack Sparrow before he showed up in Tortuga with a mind to have the treasure of the Isla de Muerta... captain of the Black Pearl." Jack showed up in the Caribbean in his supernatural ship (surrounded by fog, sailing with shredded sails) one day , with his magic compass.
He lost the Black Pearl because he was innocent (rather as Will is in the present story) and believed in fair play--equal shares with the crew. So he gave away his secret knowledge and was mutinied: "They marooned Jack on an island and left him to die, but not before he'd gone mad with the heat."
This is another false story about Jack, who was only marooned for 3 days. Is Gibbs trying to scare Will, or does he believe it himself? Gibbs then mentions 3 weeks (not 3 days) of starvation, and provides a false explanation for the "one shot" in Jack's pistol. "He waited there three days and three nights... all manner of sea creatures came aclimbing into his presence." This is a blatant fable. Will (beginning to learn some of Jack's wit): "What did he use for rope?" (Will is beginning to sound like Jack himself: "Where did the stories come from, I wonder?") And Jack's answer, "Human hair from my back," is both icky and funny & obviously a lie. Yet it manages to suggest, however faintly, that he thinks of himself as a shape-shifter, an animagus (as it were), someone who might well call sea turtles to him and make a raft of them.
Relationship to nature. If Trickster is sometimes divine or semi-divine, one of the attributes of divine or divinely inspired beings (besides magic) is a heightened sensitivity to nature and the natural elements. In one scene we see Jack and his motley crew of pirates preparing to sail for the Isla de la Muerta under a blazing cloudless summer sky. Although they are seasoned mariners, only Jack can tell that the mother and father of a storm is brewing. Jack knows there's a storm coming because he's larger than life, he's tied into things differently than the other, mortal characters in the story. (Again, not sure if this last bit is a comment from the screenwriters or not.)
Even so, Jack's relationship to nature is not, er, a natural one. His final statement in the movie is, "Now, bring me that horizon." Jack sees the world as working according to laws not of physics but of his own making. So the lovely line "bring me the horizon" is not only a metaphor for sailing freely, and (finally!) a statement of what Jack's real goal is (his treasure is not silver and gold, but the horizon); it is also the command a god makes, one who makes the world turn and shapes the universe to his own purposes and pleasure.
Typically, the Fool or village idiot is called a Natural, and by tradition is thought to be touched by the gods and exceptionally close to nature. Throughout the movie, other characters continually wonder if Jack is drunk, mad, an idiot, only mad Nor' Norwest ("daft like Jack" = crazy like a fox), or faking it entirely. And it is not possible to know the answer to this. Jack sometimes seems to be exaggerating his own lunacy, as when he is in prison and hears Will Turner coming, and so lies down in the straw to present a nonchalant appearance. Presumably he thinks he is sane, and faking it. But most of the time he seems genuinely flaky. This does not prevent him from also being crafty.
Similarly, Jack has an uncanny ability to recognize the arrival of the Black Pearl by the sound of her guns. He hears better, or perhaps differently, from everyone else. And of course, the Black Pearl is his beloved.
Jack turns out to be a good planner, and the plan he creates in jail (once he knows who Will is, and learns that the curse is real) is essentially the plan that he executes. It's not a particularly sound plan, though. It involves getting Will, Barbossa and himself all in the cave with the gold at once, turning himself temporarily immortal, getting Barbossa out of the moonlight, shooting him, and getting Will to cut his hand and return the final coin. The timing of this is nearly impossible (Will does not drop the coin until Jack's special bullet is already lodged in Barbossa's still-immortal heart), and it requires that Jack have Will on his side. Further, it nearly goes awry a dozen times, and each time chance, luck, and the goodwill of others bail Jack out--rather than his own cleverness. But it pleases Jack because it relies utterly on the idea of the Opportune Moment: that one perfect point in time where chance, luck, and design intersect. Not for nothing is Trickster the god of the crossroads. And this perfect moment pleases the artist in Jack. Which is why he only has one bullet: not for him a backup plan.
The fact that Will has figured out what he is supposed to do, and does it, means that he has matriculated as Jack's pupil--has fully undergone the conversion that has been reshaping him since the day he crossed paths with Jack. And Jack knows it.
Here is Jack's declaration of intent, just before the final swordfight with Barbossa:
Barbossa: "I must admit, Jack, I thought I had you figured. But it turns out you're a hard man to predict."
Jack: "I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest, honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly stupid."
And then he does something stupid (ergo honest). And the phrase is one of Jack's two special codes, like the opportune moment, by means of which he signals his plan to Will.
Codes: Trickster often speaks in codes, or in specialized language. He is a master of signs, an interpreter of enigmatic clues, a diviner. He speaks in what appears to be nonsense or mad-talk (e.g., Tom o'Bedlam in Lear, or Hamlet in Act II, sc. ii: "I am but mad north-northwest. When the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw [hernshaw/heron?]." And:
Hamlet: Methinks it is like a weasel.
Polonius: It is backed like a weasel.
Hamlet: Or like a whale?
Polonius: Very like a whale." Act III, sc. ii.
These two codes are pure Trickster.
1) Incredibly stupid: Trickster is constantly doing incredibly stupid things--out of curiosity, carelessness, confusion, whimsy, indifference to danger, naive inattention, or (especially) an irresistible urge to create havoc and have fun.
2) The opportune moment: Trickster, for all his wily plotting and planning, is a creature of the spontaneous moment. He will seize the chance, change directions, switch allegiances from one moment to the next. ("Whose side is Jack on?" Elizabeth asks. And Will answers, "At the moment...?")
A third Jack code is That's interesting, a cue that he is thinking about how to turn some new piece of info to his advantage. What's interesting to Jack is any knowledge he can make into a tool for his purposes.
So the idea of the pirates having a Code (in the sense of guidelines) has a second layer of meaning: In Jack's terms, "Stick to the Code" means "Read the world according to the coded language of Jack Sparrow." He has esoteric (hidden) knowledge: ("Haven't you heard the stories? The Black Pearl sails from an island that cannot be found unless you already know where it is." "Savvy" means clever, sly, in-the-know, but it also comes from the French savoir, to know. ("That would be the French," says Jack-the-linguist to poor Pintel, about the word "parlay.")
Connected with codes is wordplay: "The man who did the drinking listens to the man who did the waking..." "I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest, honestly..." Jack's brain-numbing patter.
Androgyny. This is mainly just one of many aspects the ambiguity of Jack's identity. Androgyny and cross-dressing have a large presence in commedia dell'arte. One famous lazzo, or stock scene, involves the Capitano, a bluff soldier, coming to buy a shirt from a linen draper. The merchant is a beautiful woman, and the Captain flirts with her. Harlequin arrives, and also flirts with her. The joke is that both the woman and Harlequin are played by the same actor, whose costume is divided down the middle, half Harlequin motley, half bourgeois shopgirl. The actor must switch from left to right profile to carry out both the flirtation and the subsequent quarrel with the Captain. Another famous lazzo involves Harlequin nursing his children.
In Jack, we see a slurring of words, a foppish (if bizarre) taste in dress, and a tendency to swan when he walks, both of which may be signifiers of either drunkenness or of queerness. He clearly has had any number of entanglements with women, but is uniformly out of luck with all of them. His real passion is his ship, as we see when he sensuously caresses the ridiculously phallic spoke of the Black Pearl's tiller in the closing shot of the movie. Brave of the director to let Depp do that in a family movie.
His sexual ambiguity, like Viola's in Twelfth Night, is part of his many-pathedness (polutropos), his lack of direction, focus, goal. His only goal is to be unshackled. He has no particular plan, goal, or direction in life. He has no known past (like Viola he just appears one day, out of the sea). And like Viola, he is all things to all observers, an empty vessel. To Norrington he is the world's worst pirate, or the best. To the good citizens of Port Royal he is a criminal; to Barbossa's men he is altogether too virtuous.
Eshu at the Crossroads: Jack's action throughout the movie is that of mediator, negotiator between various parties, like Eshu of the Crossroads. He often negotiates in bad faith--or for his own profit. But nevertheless, what he negotiates, in the end, is the happy ending, the changed circumstances of Will and Elizabeth. He negotiates their marriage ("A wedding! I love a wedding!"he says, with apparent sincerity.) When he says later, "Elizabeth, it would never have worked between us, darling, I'm sorry," we (and she) have no way of judging if he means it or not--is he deluded, or joking? ("I want you to know," he says to Norrington, "I was rooting for you." It's clearly not true, but he seems to think it will please Norrington, or else he's trying to irk him--both, probably.) "Nice hat" is about all he has to say to Will. (Of course, really big hats are a thing badass pirates like Barbossa covet.) Then he exits clownishly (but successfully).
At the end, when Jack and Will work as a team, it's because Will has finished going to the Jack Sparrow School of Heroism and is now something of a Trickster himself. Rope tricks, tumbling, clown tricks, somersaults are signs of this change in him. He is therefore worthy to win Elizabeth, to win love, having been transformed by his tutelage under Jack.
Even Norrington shows some smallish degree of change, because of having been entangled with Jack the Trickster. This teaches him to let go of Elizabeth and allow true love to win (Elizabeth/Will, Jack/Black Pearl).
Some random notes:
Jack's "one bullet" ("This bullet is not meant for you," he says to Will Turner when they first meet) has a curious family resemblance to the magical "one shot" in Christopher Walken's gun in The Deer Hunter. I can't really think of two movies with less in common--except that the Walken character is, in his own way, something of a Trickster character. But in a very different mode.
Underworld. In Trickster Part 2 I offered some notes about the origins of Harlequin in the Underworld. The presence of an Underworld in PotC (i.e., the Isla de la Muerta, with its archetypal cave) is what a friend of mine would call a Cluebat: a signal so loud that we cannot ignore it. This is a quest story. Will and Elizabeth are the heroes who are making their journey from innocence to knowledge and from helplessness to power. But the quest is Jack's, and his grail is his ship.
That's it for Jack Sparrow, at least for now.
Herewith some further notes on Trickster, though I may already have posted this bit. I've lost track.
Trickster is does not always win the day; frequently his own flaws wreck him--his waywardness, his lack of focus and goals, his homelessness, love of freedom, and insouciance make him rootless and prone to carelessness. His addiction to jokes and tricks sometimes is his downfall (Loki, Coyote).
But he is veryverysmart; he is sly, clever, witty, furbo, cunning. Harlequin is always smarter than the people around him. He is a servant, but he outwits his master, and usually gets what he aims to have. If he fails, it is usually not for want of intelligence or perceptiveness, but because he is bad-tempered, or distractable, or the thing he wants causes him problems, once he gets it.
Trickster's character is unchanging. He is the same at the end of the story as at the beginning. Unlike hero and heroine, he does not have a Hero's Journey, he doesn't learn or grow or develop. This is one of the signs of his godhood or partial godhood (Krishna, Odysseus, Oisin). He has his goals, or projects (to get home, to get his ship back, to get into Asgard, to win the Golden Fleece, to kill the Minotaur, to get rich), and his journeys, but he is not subject to change. He doesn't learn because he already knows. Rather, he is the catalyst for the changes in all the people he encounters. Because of Harlequin's machinations to impress Columbine, the high Lovers meet and marry, the miser loses his gold, the quack doctor is unmasked, the avaricious father overthrown. Harlequin may himself get the miser's gold, but he may or may not succeed in impressing Columbine.
He moves through his own story creating havoc and chaos all around him, disorder and incoherence, misrule and confusion; and happy endings and just punishments multiply around him. But he himself moves forward toward his goal relentlessly, and he always knows just what he has in mind. His plans, however mad or disorganized they may seem to others (normal people grounded in reality), are always discovered to be clockwork-efficient, precise to a pin in the end. (That's the reveal: Daft Jack is only mad nor-norwest.) Because he moves on a trajectory different from everyone else's, he appears utterly confused, mad, distracted, aimless.
Even so, it is important to note that Harlequin always remains a servant. No matter how rich he gets, or how much smarter he is than everyone else, he never rises to the next class. Trickster doesn't change; he is an agent of change in others, a messenger of fate and the gods (Mercury/Hermes), a mediator or negotiator between the magical (immortal) realm and the mortal realm.
He is a liminal figure, a translator (an unreliable one), a go-between, constantly in motion. He lives On the Road; he puts himself In the Marketplace. He lurks at the crossroads (Macheath the Highwayman), both because the crossroads is a point where paths split and irreversible decisions are made and because it is a point where paths converge and two discrete, unrelated ideas meet. The accidental confluence of two unrelated ideas is Trickster's stock-in-trade, his hallmark. The collision of those two roads or ideas engenders something utterly new: it's his great creative act. (It's a floor wax and a dessert topping! Hey, if I turn this urinal upside down, it's a fountain. Maybe if I stand in a different part of the universe, the speed of light will change.)
Trickster can hold two contradictory thoughts in his head at once. ("Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast," says the White Queen in Alice in Wonderland, whose author was the foremost Trickster ever to breath real air.) He is not disturbed by paradoxes and logical fallacies.
A final note: those readers who know Dorothy Dunnett's second series of books, The House of Niccolo (which I much prefer to her Lymond books) may wish to think about the character of Nicholas as Trickster. He and Jack Sparrow are brothers under the skin.
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Date: 2004-01-16 08:51 pm (UTC)This is one of these entries I want so much to contribute something intelligent to but just find myself nodding and thinking it's brilliant! In the video store I also noticed "Once Upon A Time In Mexico" was coming out soon, in which Johnny Depp plays, imo, yet another trickster in another story. It made me think of the story you told about Coyote's eyes being lost, since he does, of course, literally lose his eyes in that story because he loved the power he got from seeing and manipulating everyone.
The story of Jack's origins is so at the center of things in the film...it's so fitting he arrives on a boat that literally sinks out of sight as he arrives. It's kind of like burning his bridges, erasing all traces of his previous journey. I wouldn't be surprised if Johnny Depp knew exactly what sort of archetype he was playing...one of the things that struck me about his performance was the constant surprise of it. Like he'd say a line in a way you could never expect--that was the source of a lot of the humor. It would be easy for a character to just be weird if one does that, but I felt like he managed the balance of being totally mysterious but always hinting at some secret underneath that made sense.
His first fight with Will even gives Will his first most important lesson, iirc, when Jack plays dirty. Will says, "You cheated!" He says, "Pirate." It's the most basic thing Will's going to have to learn on this adventure--Pirate, remember? I'm supposed to cheat. His response to Will's noble hours spent in sword-training ("You have GOT to get yourself a girl") are also a lesson, really. He completely undercuts the heroic ideal Will embodies.
This post is also reminding me how much I loved the script of this movie. I have a feeling it gets overlooked because it's funny and often over the top, but it's amazing how often it hits things so perfectly ("Now bring me that horizon!")
I haven't re-watched Fisher King yet, but I'm not sure if Perry falls more on the side of "clown" or "fool" if you take the clown to be more of the everyman and the fool the entertainer of kings, more sharp, that is.
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Date: 2004-01-16 10:23 pm (UTC)I hated "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," but I like your point about Johnny Depp's eyes. It won't make me like the movie, but I can see that buried somewhere in that mess is the kernel of what might have been a really interesting film. (Alas for the pernicious influence of John Woo on less skilled directors.) Certainly Depp's character stood out from the rest of the glop.
Depp seems to alternate between playing Tricksters and Wonderful Fools--Candide characters (Edward Scissorhands, the naive policeman in Sleepy Hollow). He does both very well, and with the sort of intelligence that suggests to me that he has thought through the mythic and archetypal elements of these figures quite consciously. Jack Sparrow is a mature creation by an actor in full command of his instrument.
Elliott and Rossio are swell screenwriters--authors of Shrek, among other things. They have some great stuff about writing myth and pattern and so on on their website. So, yes, I think they had these issues very clearly in mind when they wrote. That they were able to convert a piece of Disney drivel into a story of substance is impressive. But Depp made the most of the material and without him I doubt we'd have noticed.
The story of Jack's origins is so at the center of things in the film...it's so fitting he arrives on a boat that literally sinks out of sight as he arrives.
Very true. And entrances are important--more so in movies even than in books, I think. The screenwriters speak of the Jack's entrance as a series of unexpected reversals, which is a Trickster motif... well, now you own the DVD, you can listen to their remarks yourself. :D
Will says, "You cheated!" He says, "Pirate." It's the most basic thing Will's going to have to learn on this adventure--Pirate, remember? I'm supposed to cheat.
The movie has a lot of fun with the idea that there are rules to cheating--the Pirates' Code, which everyone keeps announcing must be stuck to at all costs, and which everyone repeatedly fails to honor. Jack is the one who sticks to the rules most strictly. He is excessively concerned with fairness, with being square--"I saved your life, you saved mine; we're square," he says to Elizabeth. "Elizabeth is safe, as I promised," he tells Will. He is so committed to his promises that he lets himself be captured rather than shoot Will with a bullet dedicated to Barbossa. He honors all his obligations, usually by breaking every other rule in sight.
I think my favorite of these moments is when he sweeps Will off the deck of the ship by swinging the boom around, and holds him dangling over the water while he takes the time to convince him: "The only rules that really matter are these: what a man can do and what a man can’t do."
Of course, if you think Jack really believes that, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying.
slowly I catch up missed entries
Date: 2004-02-02 12:24 pm (UTC)I, like sisterm, really wish I could contribute something to this, but, you see, all I have been doing is tilting my head to the side and going, Hmmmm, interesting. It makes me think about POTC in a new light. Yes. Good analysis! I like the bit about the Trickster being the manipulator of his own stories. I fully agree about Will only maturing once he has learned to become Jack's pupil. And the way Trickster manipulates the opportune moment, the intersections of unrelated incidents through luck and liminal nature. And how Trickster only seems mad because he operates under a different system, one that doesn't make sense to normal logic, but brings everything together.
"I'm dishonest, and a dishonest man you can always trust to be dishonest, honestly. It's the honest ones you want to watch out for, because you can never predict when they're going to do something incredibly stupid."
I thought this was an interesting quote, because, as you said, Jack is always doing things that are incredibly stupid by normal standards - and yet what he considers incredibly stupid is, well, Will's more traditional hero-type behavior.
I agree that Jack has to seem morally ambiguous, but I am not sure that he really is. He is to some degree, or he is supposed to look that way, to keep suspense, but the goals(consequences?) of Jack's actions all produce good, like Will and Elizabeth's getting together. So he's not morally perfect, because he cheats, breaks rules, steals, etc, but by the end of film we're supposed to understand that he has a morally good center, in the same way we are supposed to find, say, pranksters loveable because they are good at heart while they cause annoyance. I understand what you're saying, but I think it was necessary for the writers to have it revealed that Jack is really good at heart, because then the viewers who have been wondering, is it really okay to like this guy? didn't he kill entire villages? he's a pirate right?, can have their doubts dispelled and get behind him as a character. (I don't know if that makes sense - I tend to view things, I think, in terms of this viewer-reaction, so instead of trying to see whether Jack is really morally foggy, I try to think what reasons the writers have for making it not so. And I think that leaving him entirely ambiguous would leave the viewers unsatisfied and dubious, and, if they thought he was bad at heart, make him into a morally-ambiguous hero who would require a different sort of approach.)
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Date: 2004-02-02 12:25 pm (UTC)I thought that Sparrow was a very good name for him - you say his costume is flamboyant, and it is, but it left me with a mental image of him as, well, very brown. And a sparrow is a little bird that, in a folklore sense, outwits bigger predators, right? *thinks to cartoon!Sword in the Stone*
I think your comments about the Trickster not changing in himself, despite achieving his goals, but changing the people around him, is very true, especially in the case of Jack. I wonder, though, is it true of Odysseus? It has been a while since I read the Odyssey - doesn't he change in the end by learning to give off his stubborness and placate Poseidon? Or at least move gradually away from a hero-type as the story shifts into a homecoming-type?
Have you read any POTC fanfic? I haven't, but I would think that something people would try to do is give Jack backstory, and wouldn't that completely ruin his character? *ponders*
My other thought upon reading this is somewhat tangential. Jack/ship OTP sounds right to me, and the idea of freedom he embodies comes across so vividly that at the end one is left wondering how Elizabeth and Will could stand to get married peacably instead of running off with him. It makes me think of, well, Star Trek, and the rather blatant Kirk/ship that goes on, and Picard/ship as well. And others such. I wonder why - I guess it's this idea of exploration, of newness - that settling down, perhaps with a significant other, and having a nice conclusion, is seen as so emotionally unsatisfying. How terrible and unfulfilling to see, say, Jack/Annamaria with Will/Elizabeth, even without the fact that it doesn't seem to fit with his character. Why? I mean, realistically, hanging around with someone and being in wub is much more pleasant than adventuring around without meaning, just for the sake of it, but the opposite is so ingrained in us that just typing this is bothering me, because my brain is protesting, "Happy wuve is boooring!" And you know, it makes me think of your Reader/Book idea again. If the protagonist goes off to the second star to the right, it doesn't end - the adventures continue, even if we aren't there to see them. Even, as the case may be, if the writers aren't there to mangle the sequels - bad sequels so much more upsetting than none at all. It's somehow satisfying, and why the end of the various Star Treks work so well for me when I dislike most conclusions: they're left open. Why Frodo's conclusion, perhaps, is a little more satisfying than Sam's.
Apologies if any of this pertains to subsequent Trickster/Withheld Hero posts - I'll get through them all eventually! ;D