Love and Death in Pirates of the Caribbean

In my post yesterday, I sketched out a proposed chiastic structure for Dead Man’s Chest, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied with what I identified as the turning point:

Scene X: The Kraken attacks ship #2; Elizabeth’s dress is blamed for the attack but it’s Will’s fault

The turning point should be a thematically significant moment if it is to be at the heart of a true ring composition. I didn’t think this one scene could carry that much weight. It’s a major action set-piece, but doesn’t have much going for it narratively. Later in the day I talked with Tim Lawrence about it, and he helped me identify that the turning point should actually be two scenes: this one, and the scene preceding it. So here’s a revised theory of the turning point:

Scene X’: Norrington learns how he can get a pardon from Becket; Elizabeth, using Jack’s compass, realizes she has an attraction for Jack

Scene X”: The Kraken attacks ship #2; Elizabeth’s dress is blamed for the attack but it’s Will’s fault

Adding Scene X’ fits with the patterns I’ve already traced. It brings in another key Norrington moment to complement Scenes B’ (arrest warrant) and B” (pardon); it sets up Jack and Elizabeth’s flirtation in Scene G” (which deepens Jack’s betrayal of Will in Scene G’); and it is also relevant to the ring because it involves Jack’s compass, complementing Scenes D’ (compass confused) and D” (compass clear).

But why does the turning point need to include both X’ and X”? It’s because X’ complements A’, and X” complements A”:

Scene A’: A wedding without a groom (teacups filled with rain)

Scene A”: A wake without a body (mugs filled with grog)

The film opens with Will and Elizabeth’s wedding being cancelled because Becket arrests them for treason. Then, in Scene X’, we realize that Jack is another threat to Will and Elizabeth’s ability to marry. Immediately following this, Scene X” gives a preview of how the Kraken will finally destroy the Black Pearl and consume Jack. Then, the final scene of the film shows the survivors grieving that event, a fate they fought throughout the film to avoid. So Scenes X’ and X” really are the twinned turning point scenes of the film because they are also twinned with the film’s bookends.

More than that, this ring composition makes sense for the film—it’s not something I’m imposing on the film arbitrarily—because the whole story, at heart, is about characters who try to avoid marriage, death, or both. The beginning, middle, and end points of the ring only reinforce this. 

The film begins with a wedding without a groom. Something comes in between a man and his commitment to a woman, and all that this commitment would entail: fidelity, stability, fatherhood. In Will’s case, the hindrance was unwanted. But Davy Jones cut his own heart out so he could forsake his beloved, and although Bootstrap Bill stuck around long enough to father Will, he did not stay behind to raise him. Jones and Bootstrap chose the supposed freedom represented by the sea and by piracy over the responsibility of the hearth. In the turning point of the film, Elizabeth realizes she is likewise tempted to bail on her own wedding. For a moment, the desire to be with a pirate (and thus become a pirate herself) is more compelling.

The film ends with a funeral without a body. Yet just as no one can really miss their own wedding, no one can really miss their own funeral. In the film, people keep trying to forestall the inevitable, with disastrous results. Dying sailors sign on to join Davy Jones’ crew so they can delay Judgment Day by one hundred years—and proceed to experience one hundred years of hell on earth. Jack keeps scheming after ways to not have to die in exchange for the extra thirteen years Jones gave him—and how many sailors have to die for his folly before he finally runs out of schemes? The turning point scene in which Will watches the Kraken take down a merchant ship gives Will ideas for how to stop the Kraken from taking down the Black Pearl, but those strategies can only buy Jack a little more time. The Kraken that swallowed Jack’s hat is like the crocodile that swallowed Captain Hook’s clock: a living reminder of the shortness of time and the certainty of death.

But how do these two themes—marriage and death—relate? What’s the connection between the wedding and the funeral, and between Elizabeth’s choice between two men and Jack’s looming appointment with the Kraken? Here’s my theory: marriage is one way of dying to self to serve the good of another, and thus avoid a different and far worse kind of death. Jones, Bootstrap, and Jack each refuse sacrificial love so they can live to serve themselves, and the end result for each of them is death, not just physical but spiritual. A man could skip his wedding, but if that is a harbinger of a life-long pattern of living for himself, the result won’t be a funeral without a body, but a funeral without mourners, and worse, an eternity alone. 

Fortunately for Jack, in the eleventh hour he realizes he cannot abandon his friends and crew, and he willingly risks his own life to save them. This doesn’t keep the Kraken at bay, but it does mean Jack is mourned as “a good man.” In contrast, the heart of Davy Jones locked away in a chest—a refusal of death by love—reminds me of this passage from C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves (HarperOne, 2017): 

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and you heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell” (155-156, italics added).

The choice facing all these characters is the same one facing all of us: Death being inevitable, when and how do we want to die? We can either submit ourselves to small daily deaths now, or we can die eternally later.