“Pirates of the Caribbean” is a trilogy, now, and I am still amazed at just how mythically DEEP the thing is; it rivals, and may even surpass, “The Lord of the Rings”. Of course my prejudices influence that statement; LotR has strong Christian underpinnings, and PotC very much does NOT; LotR ignores the concept of Trickster, and PotC is a Trickster tale first and foremost. It must also be admitted that PotC isn’t really a trilogy, it’s a film with a duology as a sequel. But the sequel was VERY careful not to overwrite the original, and while characters change between “Black Pearl” and “Dead Man’s Chest”, they do so logically.

The one point at which PotC utterly eclipses LotR is the underworld sequences; everything about Jack’s sojourn in “The Locker” and the voyage to rescue him, from the moment the rescue ship leaves the mortal world through the polar gate, to the moment the Black Pearl pops back into the sunrise, is both visually and magically stunning. I had been very much afraid they would populate the underworld with monsters, and instead they created a wonderfully alien-but-not-quite environment. And of course the moment when the Black Pearl arrives at the farthest shore is breathtaking.

There follows is an analysis of various characters with an eye to mythic overtones.

1) Jack
Jack is a Trickster, pure and simple. He humbles the mighty, elevates the humble, causes chaos for its own sake, and gets distracted by shiny things. He can’t be kept down, and he can’t stay on top. This isn’t readily apparent in “Black Pearl”, because we really only see part of one arc of the oscillations of Jack’s fortunes; he starts low, and ends high. But we HEAR about other things; we know he has been captured repeatedly and escaped, and we know he HAD the Pearl, once upon a time. It isn’t until “Dead Man’s Chest” that we begin to see just how wild Jack’s fortunes are; Jack, in command of the second deadliest ship on the seas, manages to run afoul of something he can’t deal with, and ends up abandoning the Pearl on a beach. And the ride continues: Jack becomes king of the cannibals… except the cannibals periodically kill and eat their king. He gets sucked into hell, but even hell can’t hold him. I will even consider arguing that Jack is already not quite mortal; certainly the implication of his sexual relationship with Tia Dalma suggests it.

2) Will
Will is the true Warrior of the sequence, very nearly a paladin. He begins as a commoner with aspirations to heroism, and by the end of “Black Pearl” he has had his grand adventure, won the fair maiden, and is ready to sail into the sunset. Unfortunately, Destiny (and Tia Dalma) has other plans. His happy ending is shattered by Beckett and EICo, and before long he learns of his father’s fate and has another quest to deal with.

Will is consistently too noble for his own good, even when he is committing acts of betrayal; he always has his eye on the greater good at his own expense. He joins the journey to the underworld not because he wants to rescue Jack, but because he thinks rescuing Jack will make Elizabeth happy, and because he has no direct way to approach his father’s problem. It is critical to note that whenever he has anything that resembles a clear path toward freeing his father, that is the route he takes; it is clear that Bootstrap’s mournful pronouncement, “He won’t choose me,” is just wrong. Given a choice between love and honor, Will will choose honor every time; it is who he is. Since he is one of the few characters in the story who is really CAPABLE of love, he has “tragic ending” written all over him. It is pretty much inevitable that he will end up in command of the Dutchman; he is the only character in the story who can be counted on to do the job RIGHT.

3) Elizabeth
Elizabeth is a rogue, two parts Trickster to one part Warrior. She didn’t fare well in “Black Pearl”; she started as the princess in the tower who dreamed of adventure, then she had an adventure and ended up back in the tower under significantly reduced financial circumstances. Her infatuation with Will was based on her perception of him as a pirate, which of course he was not. Beckett and his death sentence was Elizabeth’s salvation; it forced her to abandon the path she had been born to, and become herself: A slightly more principled, slightly braver, slightly more thoughtful version of Jack: A Trickster hero rather than a Trickster avatar. In the wonderful “reciprocal temptation” scene with Jack in “Dead Man’s Chest”, Jack is far more disturbed by Elizabeth than she is by him; she is, by nature, more self aware than Jack could ever be. Over the course of the “Dead Man’s Chest”/”World’s End” duology, Elizabeth progresses from the maiden in the tower to the Pirate King, and the “widow” of a Death demigod. Not too shabby. (By the way, on reflection, I HATE the “World’s End” credit cookie; it pretty much implies that Elizabeth allowed herself to be locked back into the damned tower. This is just OFFENSIVE.) And while I found the wedding sequence wonderfully amusing, there is no question that Elizabeth is better off as a widow than as a wife; she is just too much the Trickster and rogue to be any good at fidelity, particularly over ten year stretches…

4) Barbossa
Barbossa is Elizabeth’s counterpart, two parts Warrior to one part Trickster. He would be the pirate’s pirate if he didn’t keep getting tangled up with the supernatural. In “Black Pearl” he has that pesky curse; throughout most of “World’s End” he is working to free Calypso, probably under some sort of magical compulsion. (Really: Would Barbossa be dumb enough to do the stuff he does on spec, even with the hope of a divine payoff?) He is the one person who consistently comes off even, or perhaps a bit better, in encounters with Jack (Ok, he died once. Stuff goes wrong…) It should be noted that Barbossa must have become one of the Nine Lords, and a captain in his own right, prior to signing on with Jack on the Pearl. This means that Barbossa was planning to steal the Pearl from Jack from the very moment he first stepped on board, and adds some extra depth to their animosity. It it worth noting that in the end, while Jack has the magic chart and the magic compass, Barbossa once again has the Black Pearl.

5) Norrington
Norrington had a thankless place as spurned lover and stuffed shirt in “Black Pearl”. In “Dead Man’s Chest” he picked up the slack left by Barbossa’s absence, filling the character balance with a two parts Warrior, one part Trickster portrayal. With Barbossa’s return, though, he got bumped back to a diminished version of his original place, though he did have a chance to choose between the criminals and the corrupt system, and died well.

6) Dalma
I need to say SOMETHING about Auntie Dalma. She irritated me in “Dead Man’s Chest”, because the casting was so awful for the part as she existed at that point. The wise woman of the swamp is, by definition, a crone, and filling the part with a young and beautiful woman was just WRONG. In hindsight, that objection has gone up in smoke; Dalma was NOT young, she just didn’t age. And of course the matter of freeing the bound goddess was delightful, at least conceptually; I didn’t care much for the graphic presentation of the release. Still, it was a well executed bit of epic magic on a scale that hasn’t been attempted outside of films based on classic myth.

7) Davy Jones
Jones was cool and logically bizarre in “Dead Man’s Chest”; with a more complete description as a delinquent demigod in “World’s End”, he stopped being a monster-for-monster’s-sake and became a legitimate (or at least rational) part of the world. It is important to keep in mind that this is not rationalization or retro-editing; “Dead Man’s Chest” and “World’s End” are a true duology, and Bill Nighy knew he was playing a delinquent demigod before the first time he put on the makeup.

8) The Black Pearl
The Black Pearl has been resurrected TWICE. That makes it a magic item at an Excalibur level; it DRAWS weirdness. It also makes the Pearl a real counterpart of the more eldritch Flying Dutchman. When the Pearl and the Dutchman bracket and shred the Endeavor, it is not just a triumph of pirates of EICo, or of personal freedom over oppressive order; it is nothing less than the triumph of the numinous over the mundane.

“The immaterial is… immaterial.” Sure thing, bucko…

Uncle Hyena
5/28/2007