Almost everyone who saw it knew there was something special about the film—which is why the producers went on to make four more of them (so far)—but for an adventure based on a theme-park ride, Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean has proved a rather enduring cultural product. That something special was more than Johnny Depp’s unforgettable turn as Captain Jack Sparrow. What looks like an easy moral relativism in Curse of the Black Pearl (dir. Verbinkski 2003), with the bad guys actually the good guys, and the possibility that a character can be “a scallywag” and “a good man” at the same time, is made possible by the film’s upending of dominant value systems, built, I think quite intentionally, on a Christian model. A bridge too far? Perhaps. But imagine how incredulous a pitch this movie must once have been. It’s a feature-length film from a children’s water-park attraction that opened in the 1960s, and to make it, they wanted huge financing, A-list actors, and boats-full of special effects. Every producer, financier, director, or editor who heard the pitch must’ve stared with the same look of disbelief and then some version of “yes, it sounds fun, but what will it be about?” In the end, they made it about that look of incredulity, and therefore about belief. And to do that, they made Pirates a supernatural story set in the “real world” that helps us to grasp the spiritual realities that those drowning in the real tend to deny.
Simply, Captain Jack Sparrow is Jesus Christ, which viewers of the film’s latter franchises may have gathered when he dies, goes to a netherworld and rises again, but his typology is secure and devotionally inspiring in this first installment. There are many reasons for thinking of Sparrow as a Christ: his hanging out with drunkards and thieves, his assembling a rag-tag crew of followers, his crossing the authorities, and, after a series of wily escapes, being caught at last and sentenced to death.
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Originally published in Christ and Pop Culture, 2017-10.
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