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How to watch Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

2006 · Gore Verbinski · Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on Sightlines

5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.

On a first viewing

  1. Watch the mill wheel roll while the sword fight continues inside. (staging)

    Verbinski turns settings into machines: a bone cage becomes a climbing frame, a wheel becomes a floor that rearranges underfoot. Three men want three different things on the same moving object.

    Payoff: Nothing anyone does changes the wheel. The set piece exists for itself, closer to a fairground turn than to a plot beat. In the reading: attraction-image. The reading calls this an attraction-image: action staged as a figure offered for its own sake instead of serving an outcome.

  2. Watch Davy Jones's face when the heart is mentioned. (performance)

    Nighy performed in a marked suit on location, in the real light and inside the other actors' eyelines, and ILM built the face on top. The beard writhes, the eye weeps, the claw flexes.

    Payoff: A wholly digital face holds a close-up and carries feeling. That was new, and the film leans a great deal of weight on it. In the reading: reflexive-vs-intensive-face. The reading calls Jones an intensive face: tiny movements crossing a threshold, feeling registered and never spent in an act.

  3. Look at the gold of Port Royal against the green sea. (light)

    Wolski keeps the human world warm and saturated and the Dutchman's world cold, storm-lit and drained. The film tells you which side of its cosmology a scene belongs to by temperature alone.

    Payoff: The color marks where one world opens into another. Ordinary places keep giving onto something older and hungrier.

  4. Listen to Davy Jones's face: wet clicks and breathing. (sound)

    The Dutchman carries its own sonic identity: a groaning living ship, the suction and roar of the Kraken, the clicking of tentacles. Zimmer's music-box motif runs underneath whenever Jones is alone.

    Payoff: You could tell which world a scene belongs to with your eyes shut. The creature sounds are doing character work.

  5. Count how many separate goals one set piece juggles. (cutting)

    Wood and Rivkin cross-cut Jack, Will and Elizabeth as their aims pull apart and cross again. Each sequence carries several objectives and a run of reversals while you still always know where everyone is.

    Payoff: The density is the design rather than the problem. Follow who wants what and the chaos reads as choreography.

Once you have seen it

  1. Watch the Dutchman crew fused into the ship: coral, shells, claws. (setting)

    Heinrichs designs the vessel and its men as one organism. Bootstrap Bill is further along than most. The longer a sailor serves, the more reef he becomes, and the process runs one way.

    Payoff: The curse is filmed as decay with a direction. You can measure how long a man has been aboard just by looking at him. In the reading: entropy / degradation. The reading calls this a line of slope: an irreversible degradation, sailors turning into reef with no way back up.

  2. Watch who is holding the chest at any given moment. (setting)

    The plot is a relay of possession: key, then chest, then heart. Beckett wants the heart because owning it owns Jones. Everyone else wants it to cancel a debt of their own.

    Payoff: One object concentrates every compulsion in the film. Whoever holds it owns a man, which turns the story into a ledger.

  3. Notice how little is resolved when the film stops. (structure)

    Every set piece finishes cleanly and the story finishes not at all. Elliott and Rossio wrote this and At World's End as one arc, and the two films were shot back to back.

    Payoff: The hand-off was the invention everyone copied. A blockbuster ending became a door into the next film.

Carry this in: Watch how often the environment starts moving on its own. The set is the machine and the people are caught inside it.

A Deleuzian reading of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest →

How Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was received →