americanpirate

Earlier this week I went into the local geek store for some comics (um, and then I saw that big shiny new Conan book...)
Anyway, they had a TV running and showing one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, I think it was Dead Man's Chest. So I got to thinking. I differ from some people's opinions (hi, Sra) in that I find DMC the best of the three. Beneath the PG-13 fantasy adventure movie Disney let them actually make, there's the structure of a really vivid and dark fantasy horror movie that I find very compelling. The movie is full of devil's bargains, occasionally literal but more interesting when figurative. All the characters find themselves putting their souls (if you will) at stake, having to risk something precious, having to compromise their sense of what good people they think they are, in order to stay alive and out of prison with even the slightest hope of life, love, and happiness still being at the end of the tunnel. It can be quite interesting and chilling, and it's much more than I expected from a followup to the fun magic action yarn of the first movie.

The third movie does an interesting thing in making a tale of pirates versus the British seafaring interests into a war of freedom versus authority. Real world pirates might have been relatively cosmopolitan and socially loose compared with the societies of the time, but theirs is hardly a story of freedom. Pirates were still all about domination and their social structure had its own kind of authoritarian hierarchy, though the rule-by-the-strong was a little more obvious.
Still, an American movie will infuse itself with American (or more properly, Western Liberal) values, myths, and metaphors. And so we see the story of a diverse bunch of rag-tag freedom-loving good guys overcoming their differences to make a great stand for liberty and justice against the amassed forces of control, privilege, and power. It's a story we love, and we'll tell it again and again with pirates or cowboys or spaceships or gangsters or even stockbrokers.