Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End
2007 · Gore Verbinski · Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End on Sightlines
White ground, white sky, and Jack Sparrow standing in between, talking to himself. To several of himself. Davy Jones's Locker is the strangest thing in any of these movies: a pirate picture that arrives, deep into its third installment, at a salt flat under a hard colorless sky. Nothing to sail. Nobody to lie to. Dariusz Wolski shoots it as a bleached void, and the film, a machine assembled out of a theme-park ride and two summers of accumulated double-crossing, simply stops moving for a while.
Deleuze has a name for that place: an any-space-whatever, espace quelconque. A space that has quit its job. In adventure cinema space is something you do things with; you cross it, you take the high ground of it, you outrun the man behind you. The Locker offers none of those handles, and the variant Deleuze singles out here is emptiness, the white field, space drained of every coordinate action could get purchase on. Worth saying plainly why this lens is worth having: the standard verdict on At World's End is that it has too much plot and too little sense, which is fair, and which leaves you nothing to say about the passages where plot stops entirely. Deleuze is unusually good on exactly those. What happens in them is that a man of action becomes a man who can only look. Jack Sparrow is the purest action-machine in modern popular film — perceive a situation, move, situation altered — a body that resolves everything by sliding through it sideways. Strand him where movement means nothing and he doesn't go still. He splits.
He hallucinates copies of himself, and the sequence is played as farce. Its structure is not farcical at all. Deleuze calls this a crystal-image: a moment where a thing and its reflection can no longer be told apart, so you lose the ability to say which one you are watching. The saturated version, the perfect crystal, is an enclosed world of mirrors with no outside, the hall of mirrors Welles built for people who had run out of exits. The Locker is that, in a comic register, with a rococo drunk in place of a doomed one. The franchise's biggest star spends his own resurrection sharing the frame with forgeries of himself.
Which is the right introduction to Jack, because Deleuze would file him under the forger, le faussaire: not a liar exactly, but a character whose mode of existence is making truth rather than reporting it, and who does it by never holding still long enough to be one person. Every alliance in this film is a double-cross already underway. Sao Feng, Barbossa, Beckett, Jones, Elizabeth, Will: the plot is a weather system of provisional loyalties, and the famous complaint that nobody can follow it is really a complaint that the film has stopped being about who wins and become about who is currently pretending what. Deleuze called this the powers of the false and insisted it was productive rather than merely tricky. Once truth is undecidable, something has to be created instead of discovered. The Brethren Court is a parliament of liars that has to produce a decision anyway, and does, and the person it raises up is Elizabeth. The sharpest joke about any of this is a casting choice. Depp built Jack Sparrow on Keith Richards. The film then hires Keith Richards to play Jack's father. The copy is handed an ancestor who is its own source.
Then there is the face. Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up, feeling registered and not yet discharged into action, and the fine node here is the intensive face, the potisign, where micro-movements accumulate toward a threshold the character never crosses. Davy Jones's face is nothing but micro-movement, and none of it is Bill Nighy's face. ILM took his captured performance and ran it through a tentacled mask. What makes it a landmark, and it is routinely named as the benchmark of that era's effects craft, isn't the photorealism. It's that the smallest units of feeling survived the translation. Jones has wanted Calypso for centuries and never gets to want it out loud. The affection-image had always been assumed to need a human face in front of a lens. Here it doesn't, and it still lands.
His crew belongs to a different concept and an older tradition. Barnacled, coralled, each one individually designed and half-absorbed into the ship, they are Deleuze's expressionism: matter charged with a life that isn't organic, things alive in the wrong way. Wolski's near-monochrome grading and hard silhouettes, carried straight over from the gothic he shot for Dark City, are the same instinct at the level of light. The craft ancestor is named in the film's own lineage: Harryhausen's skeleton warriors in Jason and the Argonauts, which worked out how to put an articulated impossible crew into a live-action sword fight and make the blades connect.
Underneath all of it sits Calypso. The East India Trading Company runs the visible world by ledger and warrant and gallows; the film opens cold and bleached on a hanging. Deleuze would call that a derived milieu, a setting that presents itself as the whole of reality. Naturalism's move is to expose it as a crust over an originary world of raw force. There is a goddess folded into a human body down there, and when the crust breaks she comes through as weather. The maelstrom is the originary world arriving.
And the maelstrom is where the film's old, honest spine shows. Structurally this is the large-form action-image at full power: an encompassing situation, piracy being liquidated by a corporation, pressure, and one enormous act that transforms it. Craig Wood and Stephen Rivkin cut the battle as convergent montage, Griffith's parallel lines racing toward a last-minute rescue, engineered at a scale Griffith could never have costed. The Sea Hawk taught the movies how to block a broadside: grapple, board, rigging, tank. The maelstrom inherits that blocking exactly, then removes the floor. Two ships circling a hole in the ocean. Verbinski's invention is right there and it has two parts. He made the arena itself rotate, so the ground of the fight has no ground. And he drained the color out of the swashbuckler. Captain Blood gave him the roguish outlaw captain; he kept the grammar and inverted the light, shooting Technicolor's bluest genre as a storm-black gothic. A wedding gets performed in the middle of the battle. That isn't restraint and isn't trying to be.
Bazin's case for cinema's credibility was that the thing photographed was really there, so the image carries the object's authority. The maelstrom's ocean was never there. It persuades because the ship sets on their gimbals were, welded to the simulation tightly enough that the indexical half vouches for the forged half. That pipeline runs from ILM's water pseudopod in The Abyss through Titanic's fusion of practical and digital sea, and this is roughly the film where the composite stops being an achievement and becomes the default condition of the blockbuster image. Which is why a movie preoccupied with people who cannot be trusted doesn't read as decoration.
What it did to narrative is easier to see now than in 2007. Shot back-to-back with Dead Man's Chest as one continuous production, it isn't structured as a story so much as a settlement of two films' worth of debt, and it assumes you did the homework. That is serialized cinema landing in the tentpole years before streaming made the assumption normal, and the industrial model around it, sequels shot simultaneously, franchises engineered to anchor a calendar, became standard practice. The trilogy ends here. The series went on without Verbinski.
The real significance is stranger than the grosses. This is where the blockbuster acquired a metaphysics: a bargain with a god, a hero conscripted to eternal service, rules about what death does and doesn't finish. And it's where a machine built to deliver movement, pushed all the way to its limit, started producing things it was not built for. Nobody set out to make a pure optical situation for Disney. They set out to make the largest pirate film ever mounted, and to do it they had to invent a place with no sea and put their most kinetic star in it with nothing whatsoever to do.
So the question to keep: is the illegibility a failure of the script, or the actual subject of the film? Watch it again and let the halves come apart. Take the Locker as an art film. Take the maelstrom as Griffith with a bigger checkbook. And watch Jones's face while nobody is speaking.
Concepts in play
- any-space-whatever: emptiness — Davy Jones's Locker rendered as a salt-flat expanse under a hard, colorless sky, Wolski's bleached white void — a deliberate rupture from tropical genre iconography, a space in which no action is available
- the saturated crystal — Jack, driven half-mad by isolation in the Locker, hallucinates multiple copies of himself — an enclosed world with no outside in which the actual Jack and his doubles share the frame indiscernibly
- le faussaire (the forger) — Jack Sparrow's serially shifting identity and perpetual double-crossing, capped by Keith Richards cast as Captain Teague — the acknowledged source of Depp's performance installed as its fictional father
- puissances du faux — The web of competing agendas among pirates, the East India Trading Company, Jones and Calypso, where loyalties shift continuously and the film's noted difficulty of following it comes from truth of allegiance being undecidable rather than hidden
- icon of power (the intensive face) — Bill Nighy's captured facial performance translated by ILM into Davy Jones's tentacled visage — micro-movement carrying a centuries-long unconsummated desire for Calypso, a tragic-monstrous affect never discharged into action
- expressionism / the non-organic life of things — Jones's barnacle-crusted, individually designed crew half-fused to the Flying Dutchman, plus Wolski's near-monochrome, silhouette-heavy grading carried over from Dark City
- originary world — The East India Trading Company's world of ledgers, warrants and gallows (the bleached, cold-register opening) revealed as a crust over Calypso, the sea goddess imprisoned in human form, whose release arrives as the maelstrom
- action-image, large form — The encompassing situation of piracy's liquidation under Beckett presses until the convocation of the Brethren Court and the single transforming act of the maelstrom battle
- organic (American) montage — Wood and Rivkin cutting the maelstrom as convergent parallel montage — crosscut character beats, practical and digital elements, spectacle built to a sustained crescendo — the Griffith rescue-convergence inherited from The Sea Hawk's broadside blocking and digitized