Women Ruin Everything!

I found myself loudly proclaiming these words tonight, after midnight, which I’m sure everyone in my house appreciated (not that most of them weren’t awake anyway). Upon examination, I thought this a decidedly odd thing for me to say. After all, I’m female. Nearly all of my close friends are female, and I admire them greatly. Obviously I don’t dislike women or I wouldn’t choose to spend such a large percentage of my time with them. So, aside from my general propensity for yelling contrarian opinions in a loud voice and hoping someone responds so I can argue with them, I failed to see what would compel me to proclaim said phrase.

At least I did until I realized that it was not women in general I was disgusted with, but female characters. A particular female character, one whom I’m pretty sure I brushed over in a previous entry. Elizabeth Swann.

Why does Elizabeth Swann disgust me? Well, to begin with, she seems incapable of holding a conversation with a male character that doesn’t involve their faces being less than six inches apart. She’s also fond of speaking in a breathy voice and pretending to faint to get attention.

But she’s a liberated woman! So it would seem. In a time when most women of her class had the same unexciting fate, that of marrying a substantially older man, raising children and throwing lavish dinner parties, Elizabeth Swann is strutting around in pants, fighting with a sword and kissing whoever she wants. Untamed, unfettered, she escapes from under the combined noses of the East India Trading Company and runs away, pretending to be a boy to gain passage to Tortuga. Etc., etc. It all sounds wonderful at first blush— a woman ahead of her time! But I’d argue that the likes of Elizabeth Swann are from a time long before the 1700s. I would refer you to the Book of Genesis.

In Will Turner we have our Adam— our unrealistically well-intentioned and lovesick hero, dashing and clever and willing to go to the ends of the earth to please the one he loves. And Elizabeth is the spitting image of his beloved, Eve. She is, above all things, deceitful. If Will solves conflicts by running at them with a sword, Elizabeth uses her head. She deceives men into dying for her, faints to get attention, pretends to be attracted to man after man, promising them sex or marriage as long as it will get her what she wants at that moment. She is, of course, astonishingly beautiful, and lest we forget the comments of male characters constantly remind us. She has no problem with using this beauty for her own gain— Norrington is promised marriage, Sparrow is sent to his death with a kiss. And she apparently feels no loyalty to Will, as scenes in the second movie demonstrate.

But one cannot make sweeping judgments about a movie series with a sample size of one. What about the second main character, Calypso? Calypso, a woman as wild and untamable as the sea, who told Davey Jones she would see him in ten years and when they could finally be together— Gasp! She wasn’t there! Isn’t that just like a woman?

But what about Sparrow? Isn’t he deceitful?

Actually I would argue, though possibly unsuccessfully, that Jack Sparrow is the most trustworthy character in the entire movie. While characters in the movie certainly don’t always trust him, the audience trusts Jack Sparrow on a deeper level than they’d trust an Elizabeth or a Will. As an audience, they trust him to put on a good show— it’s a different and better movie with Jack Sparrow around. But within the universe of the movie he has their trust at a much more fundamental level. Jack Sparrow is one of those extraordinary characters who are the antithesis of Greek tragedy. Their downfall is unforeseeable. They seem to transcend the universe they’re in, operating under a different set of rules. In short, they make the audience feel safe. Dumbledore is one of these characters. The Marquis de Carabas from Neil Gaiman’s book Neverwhere is another. Authors love to kill off these characters because it shocks the audience on such a profound level. Sometimes they bring them back, sometimes they don’t, but always it takes a while for it to sink in that they’re really dead, and the shockwaves radiate miles around.

And on a completely different level, he’s honest in his interactions with other characters in the series. A self-proclaimed dishonest man, he lies and cheats with a smile on his face and a song in his heart. In contrast to this innocent outlook, Elizabeth Swann loudly trumpets the existence of her moral center, and after she’s done something wrong she sits around with a weepy look on her face.

And on another level, trusting Jack Sparrow usually pays off because things always come out right in the end. Trusting Elizabeth, on the other hand, will lead you to your watery grave, courtesy of the Kraken.