| Sunday, May 27, 2007 |
10:53 - Really bad eggs
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I saw Pirates 3 yesterday, and I'd say it was a fitting end to the series: bewilderingly convoluted, full of inexplicable prophecies and rituals, and proof that the 1700s was the most explosion-filled century of them all. It had a ridiculous premise and not even a wink toward historical accuracy, but hey, that's what makes these things fun: that and, apparently, a multicultural Super Best Friends league of Pirate Lords that genuflect before an ancient codified tome of Pirate Laws, followed more slavishly than any mythical race of superbeings—cowboys or Elvis impersonators or carnies—has ever followed their graven-in-stone Code, and kept safe by Keith Richards in a Jack Sparrow Halloween costume. Yeah, it was lots of fun.
But what the hell was up with that first five minutes?
The movie opens with a scene of the hanging of a bunch of pirate scum at the hands of the British Navy, while an officious herald/narrator intones that because of the Pirate Threat, the officer in charge of the Caribbean region has declared a State of Emergency, with the effect that all kinds of "statutes" guaranteeing various freedoms have been rendered inoperative. Uh—"temporarily."
Right to assemble: suspended!
Right to habeas corpus: suspended!
Right to legal counsel: suspended!
Any one found guilty of piracy will be hanged by the neck until dead!
And then we see a sweet and innocent boy singing a woeful piratical dirge as the cruel soldiers put the noose around his neck, and soon the refrain is taken up by all the dozens of honest-eyed condemned (most surely rounded up by the Thought Police on the strength of tips from disgruntled neighbors rather than being actual pirates, even though the kid did have a Piece of Eight and they all do know the pirate song in all its indistinctly defined power) as they shuffle to the gallows, as a sort of arr-me-mateys version of "We Shall Overcome".
Sorry, but where were all these rights enshrined in colonial Imperial England? The Magna Carta? And hey, why stop there—was The right to not have your library records seized or your phones tapped—suspended! a little too much of a historical stretch?
Maybe I'm just a bit oversensitive to these kinds of hamfisted theatrics in movies these days, but the dual messages I got from this sequence were: 1) Terrorists = Pirates; and 2) Pirates are the good guys. Nod nod wink wink. That, plus the fact that the baddies were all agents of the East India Company (dun dun DUNNN) rather than the British Empire, even to the extent of the Evil Officer's body falling in an iconic "Y" onto the branching arms of the EIC flag floating in the water at the end, make me wonder if there is any movie that can conceivably be made these days that's safe from being turned into some kind of adolescent mewling about Guantanamo or WMDs. I confidently wait for the next Harry Potter installment, in which the Order of the Phoenix dons the wizarding equivalent of Che Guevara fatigues and storms the offices of the Ministry of Magic where robed desk clerks hunch over the paperwork for cushy no-bid contracts for Wizardburton.
"It's just good business!" Criminy.
That aside, though: big, dumb, and full of fun. Who knew those Disneyland Imagineers back in the 50s had come up with all this convoluted mythology and heraldry when they were putting together that silly carnival boat ride?
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Brian Tiemann
1. Gordon - 12:49 Sun 5/27/2007
It is really unfortunate that you can be so callous about the erosion of civil liberties. I guess it is a statement of a generation of people raised post star wars. To them storm troopers are merely caricatures, not the scary reflection of SS. But the gestapo was a much more serious reality. It happened in Germany, it happened under Stalin, it happened under Saddam, don't doubt that it can happen here.
It is most important to pay attention to one's own back yard. Your freedom to go and watch bad movies should not be taken for granted. Recognize that there are important constitutional values that make America great, stuff like the rule of law. Not trivialities like abortion or gun control or gay marriage. We are a country that respects the rule of law and cherish freedom. So when someone like Bush comes along and puts that tradition on its head all for the sake of dubious security objectives you can bet people will be upset.
We must be vigilant against totalitarianism. Even in its more campy forms (like Bush).