Another in my sporadic but ongoing analysis of movies based on the concept of five primary character archetypes: Protagonist, Nemesis, Attractor, Mentor, Trickster. Some movies lay out perfectly with these five archetypes. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (screenplay by Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio, screen story by Elliott & Rossio and Stuart Beattie and Jay Wolpert) is one such example... with a caveat I'll get to later.
PROTAGONIST: Will Turner (Orlando Bloom)
Jack Sparrow may be the most colorful and entertaining character in the movie, but it is Will's goal -- to rescue Elizabeth who has been kidnapped by Barbossa -- that spins the story out of Act I into Act II and provides the spine of the Plotline. Moreover it's Will's 'psychological' journey from Disunity (trying to lead a life that conforms to societal norms while literally having pirate's blood coursing through his veins) to Unity (accepting his pirate 'self') that represents the most significant personal transformation of any character in the movie, therefore, constituting (in my view) the story's Themeline.
In terms of his transformation, compare Will and his interactions with Elizabeth early in Act I:
ELIZABETHWill is so committed to behaving properly -- "a boy who understands propriety" -- that he won't allow himself to call Elizabeth by her first name. Now compare that to what Will does when he rescues Jack at the end of the movie:
Will, how many times must I ask you
to call me 'Elizabeth'?
WILL
At least once more, Miss Swann. As
always.
Elizabeth is disappointed and a little hurt by his response.
SWANN
Well said! There's a boy who
understands propriety.
* Will publicly proclaims his love for Elizabeth (calling her by her first name)
WILL
Governor Swann. Commodore.
They glance at him. Elizabeth does not.
WILL
Elizabeth.
She looks at him, surprised.
WILL
I should have told you every day from the
moment I met you …
(just says it)
I love you.
* Breaks the law by helping Jack Sparrow escape.
* Joins with Jack to fight the British soldiers.
* Declares Jack to be "a good man" when Jack is, after all, a pirate.
* And receives this benediction from Elizabeth:
ON THE PARAPET, Elizabeth and Will lock eyes, and then move together into
each other’s arms. At last --
SWANN
So this is the path you’ve chosen, is it? After all,
he is a blacksmith…
ELIZABETH
No …
(smiles, takes off Will’s hat)
He’s a pirate.
NEMESIS: Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush)
If Will's goal is to rescue Elizabeth, then clearly the person imprisoning her represents the biggest obstacle to Will achieving that goal -- and that character is Barbossa. Plus once in Barbossa's clutches, Will becomes the object of Barbossa's plan to kill Will, shedding his blood to break the curse upon Barbossa and all his men.
ATTRACTOR: Elizabeth (Keira Knightley)
From the standpoint of narrative function, Elizabeth's character draws Will toward herself as part of Will's pull to open up to his pirate's 'heart.'
MENTOR: Pirate's code
Time and time again in the story, various characters including Will rely upon the wisdom of the pirate's code to steer their decision-making process.
TRICKSTER: Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp)
Jack constantly switches from ally-to-enemy and back again in his relationship with Will, and in so doing provides a series of tests for the Protagonist to prepare him for the Final Struggle on the Isla de Muerta. In my view, Jack Sparrow is one of the clearest Trickster characters in recent movie history.
I mentioned a caveat. If you have the DVD of the movie and listen to screenwriters Elliott & Rossio talk about the story, they state that Elizabeth is the story's Protagonist. Now far be it for me to critique the story's creators, especially for my money the best screenwriters in the business today at creating successful commercial projects, both financially and artistically. And I will grant that Elizabeth is absolutely crucial to the story's set-up, specifically related to her taking the gold coin from Will when he's rescued from the sea as a boy, years later wearing the coin as a necklace, then falling into the sea so this can happen:
Elizabeth struggles to keep above water, gasping for air --Without this moment, which serves as a signal to Barbossa, the Black Pearl never comes to Port Royal, the pirates never kidnap Elizabeth, and the entire plot of rescuing her never arises -- so again, I acknowledge how critically important Elizabeth is to the story. But:
then a swell rolls over her, and she is submerged --
UNDERWATER, Elizabeth drifts down, unconscious. The current
turns her, and the MEDALLION slips loose from her bodice.
The MEDALLION turns slowly, until the SKULL is fully visible.
A shaft of filtered sunlight hits it, and it GLINTS --
* Once she is kidnapped, she is a more passive character than Will and even Jack who steal a ship, put together a crew, sail across the sea, and locate Elizabeth. Being proactive like that is more typical of a Protagonist character.
* Elizabeth does transition from a character who is forced to consider Norrington as a future husband to someone who rejects Norrington in favor of Will, but in my view that change is less significant than Will's transformation into a pirate.
* Elizabeth's goal -- to gain her freedom from Barbossa -- is less defined and less personal than Will's (to rescue Elizabeth).
So I would still contend that there is a stronger analysis of the movie with Will as the Protagonist than Elizabeth. But, as I've noted previously, archetypes like three act structure and all the other screenwriting elements that typically get bantied about are finally nothing more than artifacts, while the story is an organic breathing entity. In other words, it's not worth getting hot-and-bothered about semantics.
How about you? Who do you think is the Protagonist in The Pirates of the Caribbean? Will? Elizabeth? How about Jack - I suppose an argument can be made for him, too.
For more information on character archetypes, check out this post here
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4 comments:
The thing about THE CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL (that's missing from the other two) is that ALL five main characters are also Shapeshifters.
The movie has a sort of "appearances can be deceiving" or "everything's not as it seems" theme which plays well with all the characters being shapeshifters.
WILL -- A pirate's son, the apprentice to the blacksmith (actually, really the blacksmith), that pines after a noblelman's daughter.
Which role is he? He's all of them. Which role does he need to play to get the daughter?
On top of that -- he's the story's protagonist, in a traditional sense.
ELIZABETH -- daughter of a nobleman, raised to be "proper", longs for a pirate's life. Almost perfect when she's kidnapped by pirates, isn't it?
JACK -- Is he the villain? The comic relief? The mentor? Jack wears all these masks. Heck, at the end he's even the one who brings about the climatic ending, traditionally the role for the "hero."
There's a lot of plot that helps with this, as well -- Elizabeth being mistaken for Bootstrap's daughter helps propel her story of wanting to be a pirate, while fortifying the theme.
Even the bad guys aren't what they seem. In the moonlight, they are a cursed bunch of skellies.
The Curse of the Black Pearl is a very, very straight for homage to swashbuckling flicks. Pirates seeking a cursed treasure. And yet, the characters, setup in the typical roles, end up fulfilling very atypical roles.
The heroine, becomes the protagonist.
The trickster, the hero.
The main character, a side kick.
James, this is where we could really go down the semantic rabbit hole. While on the one hand I concur that the primary characters in Pirates do play varying roles from scene to scene, I see that as a case of donning a 'mask' -- that is where a character takes on differing functions depending upon what's happening in the story. This reflects real life in the sense that you or I act a certain way with our wives, a different way with a cop who stops us for speeding, a different way with our children, a different way with our coworkers -- those are all examples of one person / one character type donning 'masks' in the course of social interactions. And carried through with our characters in a script, this allows them to become multidimensional, just like 'real' people.
But in my view, that does not get at what I call the 'core essence' of the character. In Pirates, the spine of the A-plot derives from Will Turner (joined by Jack Sparrow) to locate and free Elizabeth. It's Will's goal that twists the story from Port Royal (the ordinary world of Act I) out into the journey to (eventually) Isla de Muerte (that entire trek occurs in the Extraordinary World -- per J. Campbell's language system). Because of that and the other reasons I listed in the original post, I think it's fair to suggest that Will is the story's Protagonist. He may act like a Trickster in some scenes, as when he knocks Jack over the head and goes off on his own, or don other 'masks' along the way, but that doesn't affect his character's core essence.
In the same way, Elizabeth, Jack, Barbossa, and even Norrington don lots of different masks during the story, but I would suggest that, too, doesn't affect what each of their fundamental narrative functions are.
Now I'm not going to say that it's impossible for a character to change from one primary character archetype to another, but I would never teach that. It's hard enough for aspiring screenwriters to figure out everything that's required to pull together a coherent, let alone great script. One of the values of looking at primary characters through the lens of archetypes is that it helps define and shape those characters; to suggest that their core essence (again my language system) could shift from one archetype to another would be the equivalent of opening the floodgates -- and I would be deeply concerned that my students' stories would drown in the pre-writing stage of development.
But that's a bit off-point per your analysis, James. Basically I agree with you that Pirates is in a way an homage to shapeshifting. I just don't choose to think of the primary characters actually changing their fundamental narrative functions, but rather they don 'masks' as the plot dictates.
P.S. Re Jack as the "hero" who "brings about the climactic ending," I don't see that. After the entire Isla de Muerte sequence, Elliott & Rossio took what would be the traditional Denouement sequence and transformed it into a scene where Will saves Jack. Why? Because the story isn't complete without, I would argue, the Protagonist rounding out his transformation, in this case Will fully embracing his pirate's blood / self. I suppose one could say that Jack sets the final sequence into motion by being captured and about to be hanged, but the character who takes the active role in saving Jacks' life (by throwing the sword so Jack can stand on it when the gallows' door swings open) and the first wave of taking on the British soldiers is Will -- and in that sense, it is he who plays the Hero's role.
Hello. I shall add my analysis as well.
Protagonist/hero [and anti hero in episodes 2 and 3] --
Jack Sparrow.
Antagonist/enemy --
Captain Barbossa.
In my opinion the entire love subplot has been taken out from the story, and reassigned to two characters whom the [younger] audience could better identify with, so to cover all the four infamous audience quadrants.
Love subplot --
Elizabeth Swan, Will Turner.
Obviously to beef up and spice up the love story there are "drifts" toward Jack -- in chapter 2 the love drift goes [inexplicably?] beyond the proper boundaries [IMHO].
That's all. Add in the recipe the well established heritage of Disney "Pirates" park theme, and there you go.
I'm talking about the primeval structure here, not about the excellent execution -- that's another universe. A place so far away I cannot even glimpse it from my short-ranged binoculars.
I.E:
I wondered for years about the dog with the keys. How could they only think about that?
It's so simple it could be stupid, if not related to this line of Jack.
JACK
The keys' run off.
This apparently easy, simple line is absolutely amazing. I believe it doesn't just take a master to write it, but I think it also requires a great deal of story/character stratification as well. I venture to say it couldn't be there without that heritage I talked a few lines above.
[Well, I pray it is so -- or else there's a mountain of work for me still to do with my SP]
Then I bought the DVD and in the extra section there's a virtual ride of Disney's Pirates. Guess what? There it is, the dog with the keys.
And the same goes for the ballad:
"Yo-yo. Yo-ho. A pirate's life for me."
Which is muttered by the puppet-pirates.
In the section there are many others "archetypes" for pirates stories in there as well.
It is all in the 2-dvd edition.
M.
I agree with Scott, Will DRIVES the plot. Protagonist always drives the plot. Main characters give us insight into the Protag's world.
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