May 29th, 2007
by
Ariel Wetzel
I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End tonight. As a former Walt Disney World employee, Pirates makes me giddy for all I’m critical of it. My initial thoughts of the third film are behind the cut. Spoilers ahead, ye be warned. For my analysis of the second film in the series, see Pirates of the Caribbean and the Tradition of Racial Oppression.
I’m really disappointed in how the film ended Elizabeth’s growth as a hero. In the first film, she is the distressed subject of Will’s quest, and in Dead Man’s Chest she gets herself around in a world dangerous to women, and explores her attraction to Jack to complicate any blind monogamous love for her fiance Will. By World’s End, Elizabeth is the King of Pirates. The trilogy could have concluded with Elizabeth reigning as a pirate lord or questing for the Fountain of Youth with Barbosa and Jack all the while she is bonded with Will, who is now the Captain of The Flying Dutchman.
Instead, as far as we know, Elizabeth will spend her life waiting for the one day every ten years she can spend with Will. I’d find her marriage to Will, who is now is undead and a lord of the seas, much more appealing if they were equals with Elizabeth as the Pirate King and his equal in power. That’d be hot. Instead, Will serves the Goddess Calypso while Elizabeth’s primary access to power is keeping a man’s heart locked in an iron chest. So much for a union between equals.
Disney makes a point of marrying Elizabeth and Will (during a sword fight in which they worked together, which I did find cute) before they finally do it and have lots of hot sex on the beach. Although she certainly is capable of rescuing herself these days, Elizabeth is again the virtuous English bride in a legitimate, monogamous relationship. The alternative sexuality she explores in Dead Man’s Chest was passing.
For another expression of sexuality, we have the other female character anyone bothered to spend time on in the last two films, Tia Dalma. (Anamaria, the black pirate captain in the first film, is long gone with no mention, alas. Is too much of a stretch of the imagination to have two women of color characterized as diversely as the plethora of white men in these films?) Tia was Davy Jones’ lover, and Jack and Tia apparently had sex. “You enjoyed it at the time,” she tells him. I like that in a Disney film two characters can have an open sexual history and still work together as friends, but I can’t help but feel that Jack’s sexuality is praised at her expense.
Tia Dalma, turns out, is a goddess trapped in the body of a human. Cool, but her release doesn’t amount to much but her emotional wrath turning into a literal maelstrom. I like that she’s open about the pleasure she gets from loving many people, but I never got a sense that the film really thought this was okay. Men describe her as a trickster, and although she loves Davy Jones’ he betrays her because she doesn’t wait for him to come ashore after his ten years of serving her. Elizabeth, however, the white character, isn’t punished for her sexuality like Tia is because in the end she chooses devotion to her more powerful husband. I hear that in a scene cut from the film, it’s implied that if Elizabeth is faithful to Will, as Tia wasn’t faithful to Davy, Will will be freed from his servitude as The Flying Dutchman’s captain. I missed the scene after the end of the credits, but I read online that Elizabeth was indeed were faithful to Will and broke the spell even a goddess couldn’t break because she is a wild woman of color.
Of course, Disney could entirely switch this up if they continue the Pirates story. Perhaps Elizabeth won’t simply wait ashore for Will, and become a goddess herself. And perhaps we’ll see women and men of color ascend to the lovable, memorable characterization of iconic Jack and Barbosa and sidekicks.
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- More blogging by
Ariel Wetzel at
http://www.lake-desire.com
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Filed under TV & Film, female characters | Comments (19)
…the comment previews are going to show spoilers, aren’t they? Maybe with a few more characters of text here….
I loved loved loved that Elizabeth became the Pirate King. But, after her marriage and her one-day honeymoon with Will, I kept waiting for the movie to show something about her life as a pirate afterwards. Some other send-off, like Barbossa’s or Jack’s. But, no. Only the after-credit sequence with the kid, where the only indication that she’s gone anywhere inbetween is that it looks like a different shore.
The other female “characters” in the movie, aside from Tia Dalma and Elizabeth, were Jack’s two girlfriends at the very end, the female Chinese Pirate Lord (who had very few lines), and the women on either side of Sao Feng at the bathhouse (one of whom got a saddenned reaction shot when the other was killed, before getting killed herself).
The post-credits scene shows Elizabeth and her son waiting for Will’s arrival, and the appearance of the Flying Dutchman. There’s no indication that Will is freed, and everything we hear about the situation of the Dutchman’s captain indicates that such a loophole is impossible – several characters say that the Dutchman must, at all times, have a captain (but of course, this is POTC and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that such an inconsistent plot twist had been planned).
Which is not to say that I wasn’t also disappointed by Elizabeth’s depiction in that scene, or that you’re wrong about the film’s problematic treatment of Tia Dalma.
Argh! After Ide Cyan’s comment, I’m kicking myself for not waiting for the after-credit sequence. I hadn’t heard about it, so I figured there wasn’t one. Though I’m annoyed that it shows her on the same island, if indeed it does.
The after-credit sequence is just Elizabeth and her son waiting at the edge of a cliff as Will arrives from his 10-year stint.
Ariel: YES. I was so frustrated by the withdrawal of Elizabeth’s agency at the end of the film. Awesome gender transgression throughout the film turns into conventional monogamous heterosexual relationship. Waiting alone on an island for ten years. For a man.
Furthermore, when Calypso “reclaims” her non-human form, the most terrifying thing they could come up with was to make her gigantic? This, after the Kraken and all? Kind of ridiculous.
I think Jack’s two girl friends at the end are the only time two women speak to each other in the whole film, and they’re fighting over Jack.
The cut scene I read about on Wikipedia that says the spell will be broken if Elizabeth waits for Jack–I’m not sure if that counts as canon since it was deleted, but I read it as indeed Elizabeth broke the spell by being a good wife. Tia Dalma, on the other hand… well, “It’s my nature,” she says, like women of color essentially don’t conform to Western values of good faithful women.
So I’ll just convince myself that I’m paying $10 not for the privilege of my feminist fantasies being thwarted, but for the privilege of being able to dress like a pikin’ pirate en masse in public. YAAAR.
Here is the material about the ending that you may find interesting:
http://kaellana.livejournal.com/47483.html
Huh? I read that last scene with Elizabeth and Will as she’d spent the last ten years still being a pirate king, complete with her pirate baby. You did notice she was still in trousers, right? The mere fact that she’s a mother hardly means she’s been sitting by the seaside pining for a decade.
Also the film never says she has to be sexually faithful to Will for ten years, just that she has to show up when he comes ashore. All that speculation on her (or Tia Dalma’s for that matter) sexual trueness comes from the Flying Dutchman legend and is if anything conspicuously left out of the film! (to the detriment of the plot, btw, which is a great hash of confusion because of all the bits they left out.)
I’m surprised, however, that more attention isn’t paid to the ugly relationship between Davy Jones and Calypso/Tia Dalma.
I think I mention in my post that I haven’t seen the last scene after the credits, so I didn’t know Elizabeth is wearing trousers. The film should have shown Elizabeth heading off to pirate, or something of the sort, like it did for the male characters.
[...] you’re looking for reading to follow up firebird’s post on Pirates III, check out the link on White and Black Sexuality in the film on Feminist SF–The Blog!. Great comics content includes angryrantgirl at Neither [...]
I too was disappointed with Elizabeth’s fate at the end and at first it seemed to be implying that women should just wait around while the men have a job to do. I now think this is an unfair assumption, but that assumption could have been avoided if they’d given Elizabeth the same kind of attention in the epilogue that they gave to Will and Jack.
What changed my mind is a quote that I came across from POTC writer Ted Elliott at the WordPlay Forum regarding Elizabeth’s fate. I mention it in my own article on Elizabeth and I’ll quote him here too:
“And, there’s this: the question regarding Elizabeth in AWE is not ‘Who is Elizabeth going to be with?’ It is ‘Who is Elizabeth going to be?’ Perceiving her choices as nothing more than becoming either ‘Jack’s lover’ or ‘Will’s lover’ — well, that seems a bit diminishing, don’t you think?”
In light of that, I’m going to be optimistic and assume that in those interceding 10 years Elizabeth continued on as captain of the Empress and as the Pirate King.
I totally missed her wearing pants in that last scene though. I watched it on You Tube since I didn’t stay after the credits. I’ll have to watch it again. While extra scenes are nice, this seems like an awfully important one to stick at the end like this. You can see it here.
[...] SF Blog Carnival article “White and Black Sexuality in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End” by Lake Desire. • • [...]
Well, okay, I’m with Lisa on being optimistic.
But I do find it tweakish that the audience … even a *feminist* audience … sees Elizabeth’s child and immediately assumes … in the most sexist reductionist way possible … that if she’s a mother she’s also stopped being a pirate! Possibly that is what the writers intended, and maybe that’s what we were supposed to think. But honestly I didn’t on the first viewing of the film. (On the second viewing I did sort of see how people saw it that way, but it honestly wasn’t my first reaction.)
But even so … where is this nonsense coming from that a mother is that and nothing else simply because she is a mother? And from feminists yet! (with feminism like this who needs sexism?) That child is 9 years old and change and plenty suggests that he’s raised abord a ship.
Anna, your comment makes me think of a post by Pirates writer Terry Russio, one of the pirates writers, on the Wordplayer forums (quote found on kaellanna’s LJ):
On one hand, I’m pleased in the writers’ minds that Elizabeth continues her adventures, and there is no reason that she can’t be a parent at the same time. But if all our heroes are headed off on equal adventures, it is still problematic that we don’t get an adventuresome sendoff for Elizabeth like we do for Jack and Barbosa and Will.
I don’t mean to say I haven’t internalized sexism, but I think pointing out our own bias in analysis takes away some of the responsibility of filmmakers to treat their female characters with the same respect they do male characters. We’re not the ones, as feminists, responsible for sexism in films by pointing it out. In a trilogy that is problematic in its portrayal of race and gender, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that Elizabeth’s pirating days were over. That’s what it looked like at first glance, and few folks who see the movie will watch the extended scene or read online what the writers intended.
Well, like I said, on a second viewing, I do see why some people did see it that way. But, I do think we need to challenge ourselves on our own internalized sexism when it emerges too. Why *do* we see certain cues and assume there is nothing further to Elizabeth’s story? What forces have trained us to see things that way?
These questions have real life implications that go far beyond our enjoyment of a summer popcorn movie: how do we, as a culture, treat mothers and motherhood? Why are mothers in fiction so often ridiculed and reduced to a negative role?
Speaking of which, I find it curious that there is near silence on the moment that I found the absolute squickiest in the film: the presentation of Jack’s “mother” who turns out to be a shrunken head, silenced in fact. Now I could see a tragic and interesting story emerge about how she died, but the image is of an old woman, silenced and turned into a pocket ornament.
I missed AnnaMaria from the sequels too! Despite the diversity they tried to show with the Pirate Lords, I guess they couldn’t have two black women in one movie.
Here’s something interesting to read since we are talking feminism: quotes by Naomi ‘Tia Dalma” Harris on imdb.com :
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0365140/bio
What I took from the ending (beyond the credits) was that Will returned to Elizabeth with his soul returned (as assumed by the green flash they show on the horizon). That was supposed to signify a soul’s return to the world. I too thought Elizabeth had too much fire in her to settle down. I hope what some people said here is true–if they do anymore movies–that she was Pirate King Mom in the ten years since she and Will were together on land.
I also wish that Davy Jones’ end would have been better. It seemed to me that he still loved Tia/Calypso–since we saw tears in the near human eyes in the last two films. He gets sucked up into her maelstrom. I wish that there was some sort of union or something.
Agreed. Jack’s father carrying around a mutilated piece of his wife’s corpse was very, very disturbing to me. I’m still working on how to articulate it beyond that.
[...] get me wrong, there were plenty of problems with the movie that are worth poking at. Here’s one by Lake Desire that gave me particular food for thought. And I wasn’t very fond of the [...]
But, I do think we need to challenge ourselves on our own internalized sexism when it emerges too. Why *do* we see certain cues and assume there is nothing further to Elizabeth’s story? What forces have trained us to see things that way?
For me, I don’t think it was so much sexism as pessimism. Reading the tone of the scene, I simply didn’t see a woman who has been king of the pirates for the last ten years, kid or no kid. The scene simply showed a faithful wife whose patience was finally being rewarded.
Sure, I can imagine Elizabeth going on adventures, ruling the pirates, kicking butt, and maybe even having a few affairs (though I can’t see that last one not being problematic) but I don’t want to just imagine it, I want to see it!