Sightlines · a reading

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

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

A mill wheel tears loose from its housing and starts rolling downhill through the jungle. Jack Sparrow is inside it, running to stay upright. Will Turner and James Norrington are on top of it, still fighting each other over a key, their footing rearranging under them every second. Nobody is steering. The wheel just rolls, and the duel has to keep happening inside a thing that now has its own physics.

That shot is the film's whole method. Gore Verbinski's particular gift is turning an environment into an apparatus. Give him a bone cage hung over a drop and he builds a climbing machine out of it. Give him a church organ and a monster with tentacles for a beard, and the tentacles play it. Give him a ship and the ship becomes a body, grown together with its crew. The set doesn't host the action. The set is a mechanism, and the action is what happens to people caught in its gears.

Deleuze would not call this an action-image, and the distinction is worth having. In his account of classical cinema the action-image is a circuit: a character sees a situation, acts, and the situation changes. Tension into release. The wheel breaks that circuit. Nothing anyone does on the wheel changes the wheel. Deleuze has a better name for what Verbinski is making, borrowed from Eisenstein: the attraction-image. An attraction is a moment where action stops serving an outcome and becomes a figure — a staged thing offered for its own sake, closer to a fairground turn than to a plot beat. Eisenstein used attractions for political shock. Verbinski uses them for mechanical comedy, and he's honest about where that comes from, since the property began as a theme-park ride and still thinks in rides.

This is why the standing complaint about Dead Man's Chest — overstuffed, too many objectives, too much machinery — measures it with the wrong ruler. As an action film, yes, it resolves badly. Read as a sequence of attractions, the density is the design: three men wanting three different things on one rolling wheel isn't congestion, it's the joke. The real craft sits in Craig Wood and Stephen Rivkin's cutting, which sustains three simultaneous objectives and a run of comic reversals while you always know exactly where everyone is. The larger shape follows suit. This is what Deleuze called the small form — not a great situation transformed by a decisive act, but act after act (steal the key, dig up the chest, open it), each one disclosing a little more of a hidden situation of debts that never gets settled. The route itself zig-zags: port, cannibal island, swamp, sandbar, the Dutchman. A line drawn between places that have nothing to do with each other.

Now the other thing, the one that made this film matter past its grosses. Davy Jones at the organ.

Deleuze's affection-image is the close-up, and his claim about it is stranger than it sounds: a close-up isn't a shot of a face, it's a face raised to pure feeling, an emotion registered on a surface and not yet spent in any action. He splits it two ways. There's the reflexive face, a contour holding a single quality — wonder, dread. And there's the intensive face, all features and micro-movements, something crossing a threshold. Jones is the second kind and nothing else: the writhing tentacle beard, the crab claw, the fine muscular tremor around the weeping eye. He never acts on his grief. He plays it.

The technique is inseparable from that. ILM could have put Bill Nighy on an isolated capture stage and composited him in later. Instead they built an image-based, on-set approach that let Nighy work in a marked suit on location, in the real light, inside the other actors' eyelines, his captured performance driving a wholly synthetic cephalopod face. There's an odd Bazinian conscience in that choice. Bazin's realism rested on the photographic trace, the fact that something was actually there in front of the lens. Jones was never there. But Nighy was, and the light was, and the other performers' eyes found him, and the film keeps just enough of that trace to make an impossible face believable. Terminator 2 had proved a digital figure could share a frame with live actors. Dead Man's Chest asked one to hold a close-up and be sad, and got it.

Under the comedy runs a second engine, and Deleuze's ugliest, most useful category names it: the impulse-image. Naturalism in his sense is a world where drives erupt beneath the social surface, and where every drive slopes downhill. Wolski shoots the human world in warm gold and the cursed sea in cold, storm-lit green, and that split is doing more than mood work — it marks where one world opens into another. Port Royal, a jungle village, a swamp: ordinary settings that keep giving onto an originary world of pure appetite. The cannibal island. The Kraken, which is less a villain than a mouth, all suction and roar. And the Flying Dutchman, where the crew have been fused with coral, hammerhead, starfish, hermit crab until vessel and men are literally grown together, Bootstrap Bill among them, going the same way. That's the line of slope precisely: an irreversible degradation, sailors becoming reef. At the center of it sits a perfect fetish — a part-object holding all the film's compulsion — a still-beating heart in a box, and whoever holds it owns a man.

Which folds the theme into the plot. Everyone here owes someone. Jones takes souls by contract; Cutler Beckett, in a good coat, with paperwork, wants the heart because it would make Jones his. That's the plot behind the plot, and it's the film's most modern instinct: the swashbuckler's real antagonist turns out to be a company. Around that the cast scatters — Jack, Will, Elizabeth, Norrington, Tia Dalma, each bargaining separately, loyalties pulling apart while the cross-cutting stretches to hold them.

Then it stops mid-sentence. A death, a cliffhanger, a rescue promised. That's the other invention, and the one everyone copied: two sequels shot back-to-back, written as one story, an ending built as a hand-off. Deleuze located a crisis of the action-image in postwar Europe, where characters could no longer act adequately on what they saw, and out of that came the wanderers of the time-image. Dead Man's Chest got something else from the same broken circuit. Every set piece resolves beautifully; the story resolves not at all. That gap is where the serialized universe was born, and Disney built the next twenty years on it.

The pleasures are old ones, carefully kept. The gentleman-outlaw and the choreographed shipboard duel come from Captain Blood. The saturated palette and athletic fencing come from The Adventures of Robin Hood. The acrobatic slapstick geography, and a hero who knows he's funny, come from The Crimson Pirate. What's new is what Verbinski carried over from The Ring — the same cinematographer, the same production designer, the same command of dread and uncanny bodies — and set churning under the jokes, plus ILM's water, which runs back to the pseudopod in The Abyss.

Watch it again for two things. Notice how often the environment starts moving on its own. And watch Jones's face when someone mentions the heart. A face nobody owns, doing what faces do.

Concepts in play

attraction-image — Verbinski stages action as elaborate mechanical comedy: the sword fight that migrates onto a runaway water-mill wheel, bodies swinging in a suspended bone cage, a church organ played by a monster — set pieces offered as figures rather than as acts that change a situation
action-image-small-form — The quest structure of key → chest → still-beating heart: each act discloses a little more of a hidden web of debts and contracts rather than transforming a global situation, and the film deliberately withholds resolution
line of the universe — The film's zig-zag itinerary across disconnected spaces — Port Royal, the cannibal island (Dominica jungle interiors), Tia Dalma's swamp, the sandbar, the Flying Dutchman
reflexive-vs-intensive-face — Davy Jones is an intensive face made entirely of features rather than contour: the writhing tentacle 'beard,' the crab-claw hand, the weeping eye
icon of power — ILM's iMoCap delivered a synthetic face capable of fine muscular detail — micro-movements carrying Nighy's theatrical bearing and wounded grandeur, pathos held on the face rather than discharged into action
impulse-image — The Kraken as pure appetite (roar and suction), the cannibal-island sequences, and a plot whose engine is moral compromise and self-interested bargaining — drives erupting beneath the adventure surface
originary-world — The Flying Dutchman's encrusted ship-as-organism interior, where vessel and crew appear literally grown together — a savage world of appetite underneath the swashbuckler
derived-milieu — Port Royal, the jungle village and the swamp function as concrete settings that keep opening onto the cursed sea; the warm/cold colour split marks the seam between them
entropy / degradation — Each Dutchman crewman fused with a different sea organism — coral, hammerhead, starfish, hermit crab — an irreversible descent from sailor into reef, with Bootstrap Bill on the same slope
fetish — The still-beating heart in the chest: a part-object charged with compulsive force, possession of which commands a man's soul
expressionism — Wolski's greenish, storm-lit murk around the Dutchman and Heinrichs's rotting hulks and bone cage — things carrying a non-organic life, the register Verbinski brought over from The Ring
affective colour — Warm gold for the mortal world of Port Royal against cold, desaturated tones for the supernatural sea — colour absorbing the scene and its feeling
respiration-space — Sweeping crane and aerial moves over open water alternating with the taut, enclosed line of the mill-wheel duel and the Dutchman's cramped interiors
dispersive-situation — Cross-cutting among Jack, Will and Elizabeth as their goals diverge and converge, inside an expanded ensemble (Beckett, Norrington, Bootstrap, Tia Dalma) bound only by competing debts
condemnation-of-the-plot — The coldly bureaucratic Cutler Beckett and the machinery of souls, curses and contracts: a diffuse plot behind the pirate adventure in which the antagonist is a company

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