Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl part 3

At the top of Act III of Curse, Elizabeth has been rescued from the clutches of bad-pirate Barbossa, by declared non-pirate Will Turner (at the top of Act III Will declares, twice in ten seconds, his non-pirate status).  Since Elizabeths’ goal is for Will to be a pirate, she still faces an uphill battle.  As Will tenderly goes to cop a feel off Elizabeth’s breast, she takes out the medallion that started all this craziness, the one she took off Will that day so many years ago.  In the traditional fairy tale, the boy-prince is given a medallion that will one day prove he is royalty — here, the screenwriters have stood the tradition on its head and given the boy a medallion that proves he is a criminal.

Meanwhile, Jack bargains with Barbossa — he will give Barbossa the name he needs to make the gold curse go away in exchange for the Black Pearl.  It doesn’t seem like a very good deal to Barbossa, perhaps because, even if he has the name he needs, he now doesn’t have the goddamned medallion, and he needs both at the same time.  As far as mechanical processes go in magical solutions, I’m not fond of the “You need both pieces of the magical device to make the thing work” — we have it here in Curse, and more recently in Prince of Persia — to me, it makes the narrative into a scavenger hunt, like a level of Tomb Raider — and telegraphs to the audience everything that needs to happen before they can all go home.  I prefer a this-leads-to-that chain of devices, like the “headpiece of the Staff of Ra” that leads to the “Well of Souls” that gets you “The Lost Ark.”  Although I guess I should be grateful — there are 882 pieces of cursed gold, and the narrative of Curse only details the search for one of them.

(Oddly, Barbossa doesn’t merely torture Jack and demand he give him the name he needs — Jack is hugely outnumbered by Barbossa and his cursed crew, all of whom desperately seek to lift the curse, it couldn’t hurt.)

Before Jack can strike his deal with Barbossa, the Black Pearl catches up to The Interceptor, where Barbossa’s medallion now is (as is Will Turner, but Barbossa doesn’t know that yet.  There’s an exciting, well-staged ship-chase and sea-battle set piece, during which Elizabeth discusses strategy with Anamaria.  Anamaria presents a genuine alternative life to Elizabeth — we don’t know much about her past, but here she is now, captaining a pirate ship without a whiff of dissent or mutiny from her crew.  It will take Elizabeth a couple more movies before she comes to realize this potential — for now, she wishes only to be married to a pirate.

To look at Act III another way, we could say that Elizabeth’s wish as a 10-year-old, that a pirate would come and take her away, has borne fruit — Barbossa has come to take her away, but avowed non-pirate Will has taken her back, which makes Elizabeth’s eight-year-old wish, come chasing after her.  That is, Act I is “I wish this thing would happen,” Act II is “I’m sorry I made that wish,” and Act III is, literally, “My past is catching up with me.”

At the end of the conflagration, The Interceptor is blown up, the medallion is back in the hands of Barbossa, and Will Turner shows up to declare himself a pirate, if only by blood.  Now Will has taken another step toward being the pirate Elizabeth wants him to be, but he’s screwed up everything else in Elizabeth’s world, handing to Barbossa the medallion, and the blood, he needs.  Now that Barbossa has both parts of his device, Barbossa doesn’t need Elizabeth — or Jack — any longer, and makes them both walk the plank.  This is our protagonist’s “end of penultimate act low-point” — she wants to be taken away by a pirate, specifically Will-as-pirate, and now she has nothing — not only has she lost Will, but she’s done worse than be taken away by a pirate, she’s been thrown away by one.  Barbossa even takes back his dress, leaving Elizabeth in her slip — free of both her father’s dress and Barbossa’s as well.  On the one hand, now she has nothing, on the other hand, now she can begin again.  What will she choose to do?

Stuck on Rum Island with Jack, Elizabeth finds out that the story of his miraculous escape from the island was a tall tale — it seems that not even Jack Sparrow can be counted on to be a pirate when Elizabeth needs him to be one.

Jack gets drunk, and Elizabeth pretends to.  Elizabeth pulls the oldest trick in the book — pretends to be loose, then lets Jack drink himself unconscious.  Jack may think he’s becoming a sexual threat to Elizabeth, but Elizabeth is in control of the situation from the beginning.  Given the chance to be taken by a more-or-less genuine pirate, Elizabeth flees in the opposite direction — she calls her father and fiancee, Norrington, and enlists their help in going after Will.  Governor Swann and Norrington refuse her, but Jack, playing the only card he has left, tempts Norrington into chasing the Black Pearl, as a feather in his cap.  Jack does a lot of this kind of thing in Curse — he steps in to give Elizabeth what she can’t achieve on her own.  He does it throughout the narrative — he rescues her from her fall in the ocean, then prods Will into action, then brings Will to her on the Isle de la Muerte, then almost talks Norrington into chasing the Black Pearl.  It’s almost as though Jack is the “pirate side” of Elizabeth, without a real agenda of his own, and when Elizabeth no longer needs him, he rides off into the sunset.  Norrington refuses Jack as well, so Elizabeth plays the only card she has left — herself.  She pledges to marry Norrington if he will rescue Will.  That is, she pledges to capitulate to her father and her fiancee, give them what they want — a lifetime of propriety and constrictive dresses.