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GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: When Hollywood Did It Right: Pirates of the Caribbean.
Will Turner’s fire is lit, his adventure begun, with the help of another classic story trope… the older wiser mentor figure who is at best wildly eccentric and at worst completely insane. This trope too goes back to the very beginning of Western storytelling, but we see it very clearly in many of today’s most popular mass entertainment franchises, some of which are still throwing off sequels, prequels and reboots, from “Star Wars” to “The Matrix” to “Point Break” to “Highlander.” The twist with “Pirates of the Caribbean” is that Johnny Depp did too good a job with Captain Jack Sparrow and accidentally whoopsied himself right into the lead role.
But that was merely a happy accident. Like “Star Wars” and all those other enduring movie examples which we could name, “Pirates of the Caribbean” is a classic male-oriented adventure in both form and function, and that is precisely why it worked so well.
Which brings me to the female lead, Elizabeth Swann, played by Kiera Knightley. Elizabeth is beautiful, of course, but also smart, funny and capable… she is for all intents and purposes a classic Hollywood “modern woman.” But here is the most critical piece, she is a modern woman within the context of the world in which she lives… a world that is a Georgian Era Patriarchy which exists on a distant island colony run with ruthless discipline by the officers and men of the Royal Navy. As such, the men in Elizabeth’s orbit do not cower before her superior intellect, nor are they driven to their knees by her unparalleled strength and wisdom. And she is certainly not a ninety-five pound Scarlett Johansson throwing two hundred and seventy pound men across rooms like they were Jenga blocks.
Elizabeth Swann is simply a woman, emotional and flawed and heroic, in all the ways we used to understand makes a woman, in the days before The Culture decided that being a woman was not enough.
And now I’m going to write something that should not be controversial, but which has become so here in our highly politicized “modern culture.” I’m going to write very clearly and deliberately so that I cannot be misunderstood… and yet I will be misunderstood, deliberately so, because the activists whose grift is based on pretending to misunderstand the most fundamental things about human nature can allow it to be no other way, lest their lucrative grift collapse entirely.
So, here goes… men and women are fundamentally different and often want different things from the entertainment they consume. Generally speaking, women are not as interested in adventure movies like “Pirates of the Caribbean” as men are, and are less likely to pay to see them in theaters. Notice I did not say all women are disinclined to see these kinds of movies, I said that generally speaking, men prefer them more than women do.
By the same token, the audiences for movies like “Hamnet” and “Wuthering Heights” are overwhelmingly female, something I have never heard anyone suggest is a societal problem that needs to be remedied by fundamental industry-wide changes in the way those movies are developed and made. And yet this is precisely what has happened at companies like Marvel, DC and Lucasfilm, where the stubborn refusal of women to attend action-adventure movies in the same numbers as men is treated like some kind of national emergency. When it comes to romantic dramas, on the other hand, we seem to understand that men and women want different things from the movies they consume… and that’s OK.
(Slight pause so that all those readers who have just fainted can be revived)
We good? Everyone still with me?
Keep your fainting couch nearby and read the whole thing.
