By Todd Davis
There is a moment late in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, deep in the film’s final act, when the plot has grown so tangled that the audience likely couldn’t say what’s actually at stake anymore, and Elizabeth Swann is standing on a beach while three men she’s entangled with, in one way or another, ignore her completely. Jack, Norrington, and Will are dueling over something — honor, a key, a woman — and Elizabeth is off to the side, tan and radiant and increasingly out of patience that none of them will listen to her. She tries the damsel routine for a moment, wilting theatrically in the heat. It’s clearly a bit. She is too smart and too bored to actually be helpless, and you can see her deciding, in real time, that performing distress isn’t going to get her anywhere with three men too busy swinging swords at each other to notice. So she stops asking and takes matters into her own hands. It lasts three minutes. It is the most purely charming thing in the entire trilogy, and it is also, I think, the last time Elizabeth Swann is entirely herself.
I don’t mean that as film criticism. I mean it as something closer to elegy.
Elizabeth Swann is, if you look at her closely, an almost absurdly American character. She is born British and arrives in the New World as cargo. The governor’s daughter, sent across an ocean to be raised into a role she never chose. She is a lady. She is trapped inside a social order somebody else built. And then, almost without ceremony, she picks up a sword and starts fighting pirates. She can wear the corset and climb out the window. She can curtsy in the parlor and lie without flinching to save a man’s life an hour later. She can be feminine without being helpless, aristocratic without being submissive, civilized without being remotely tamed by it. And, this is the important part, she barely apologizes for any of it. She doesn’t spend the movie agonizing over which Elizabeth is the real one. The fantasy isn’t “I am a pirate.” The fantasy is “I can become one, the moment circumstances demand it.” That a person could contain contradictory identities without having to resolve them, without having to pick — that was never really a claim about pirates. It was a claim about America.
This was the deal America seemed to offer, and mostly believed it was keeping. History could assign you a starting place — a farm, a tenement, a name nobody could pronounce — but it didn’t get the final word. The farm boy became the general. The immigrant, given enough time and enough willingness to reinvent himself, became simply an American, no modifier required. It wasn’t that the past didn’t matter. It was that the past wasn’t supposed to be a life sentence. Identity here was elective, or was at least advertised as elective, and for a long time that advertisement was close enough to true that most people didn’t feel the need to check. Contradiction wasn’t a flaw in the American character. It was the American character. The idea that you could hold two incompatible selves at once and never be asked to resolve them. Elizabeth Swann, governor’s daughter and pirate king, is that idea wearing a corset.
And then September 11th happened, and something about the story stopped being simple, in a way that had nothing to do with becoming “evil” and nothing to do with losing our footing as a country. It’s not that America turned into a different country after that morning. It’s that America discovered it could behave in ways that were incompatible with the character it had always imagined itself to be.
Here is the comparison I keep returning to, and I want to be careful with it, because it is not a metaphor for the day itself. Nothing should be a metaphor for that day. It is a metaphor for what came after. Imagine you are with someone you love, and she is everything you believed her to be: charming, brave, unpredictable, the kind of person who could be a lady at breakfast and a swashbuckler by nightfall and never once seem like she was performing either.
And then she cheats on you.
You stay together. You might even have good years afterward — genuinely good ones. But you cannot go back to loving her the way you did the morning before you knew. Not because she became a worse person. Because you now know she is a person who can do this, and that fact doesn’t erase, but permanently changes the meaning of everything that came before it.
That’s the country we’ve been living in for twenty-five years. Not a worse one, necessarily. A different one, because we found out something about ourselves.
I want to be precise about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing that America was innocent before 2001. No country with our history gets to claim that, and I don’t think Elizabeth Swann was innocent either, not really. I am arguing that we were, for most of the twentieth century, unabashedly the protagonist of our own story, and that being unabashed was itself the fragile, essential thing. We didn’t need the world’s permission for our myths. We had the railroad and the pioneer and the cavalry and the moon landing, and mostly we didn’t ask whether they were true so much as whether they were ours. After 2001, America made choices — some excellent, some defensible but costly, some very likely mistakes, nearly all of them made inside an atmosphere of fear and political unanimity that made real dissent almost physically difficult to produce. I’m not interested in refighting those choices here. I’m interested in what happens to a myth once the person living inside it discovers she is capable of things she didn’t think she was capable of.
Because that’s the trade. Once you know you can cheat, you have to live differently even if you never do it again. And once a country discovers it can act in ways that don’t match its own self-image — even in ways it can defend, even in ways it might do again — it can’t fully return to believing its own fantasy the way it once did. It becomes hyper-aware of its myths instead of simply inhabiting them. Criticism turns into deconstruction. The cowboy becomes a man participating in conquest. The pioneer becomes a settler displacing someone with an older claim. The railroad becomes both marvel and instrument. The cavalry-saves-the-day story gets a footnote, then a second one. None of this makes the old stories fictional. The cowboy really was brave, the pioneer really did endure things almost unimaginable, Elizabeth Swann really did fight pirates and really did love Will Turner — but the stories stop being able to stand on their own anymore. They come with asterisks now. And once you start asking whether one myth was a lie, it becomes very hard to stop asking that question of all the others.
What’s strange, and what I think is easy to miss if you’re only looking at politics, is that we didn’t become less obsessed with America. We became more obsessed with it. Hyper-obsessed, even while simultaneously growing uncomfortable admitting that we still believed in it. We wanted, oddly, to be more like the rest of the world at exactly the moment the rest of the world had never seemed less interested in following our example. The entire premise of Elizabeth Swann was that she wasn’t like the rest of the world. She was something else — an impossible fantasy, sure, in the same way the American myth was always an impossible fantasy, never quite compatible with reality, never meant to survive close inspection. But we believed it anyway. Most of us never expected to be Pirate King. We just liked knowing the door was theoretically open.
It’s worth noticing, and I don’t want to overstate this as anyone’s intention, that the three films Elizabeth Swann appears in were all made after 2001, and that they trace something like this exact arc without seeming to know they’re doing it. The Curse of the Black Pearl, in 2003, is pure swashbuckling appetite — the governor’s daughter discovers she can become a pirate, and the discovery itself is thrilling, almost gleeful, not unlike the country’s own early appetite for decisive, righteous action after being attacked. Dead Man’s Chest, in 2006, is what it feels like to live with the consequences of that discovery — messier, more compromised, full of debts coming due that nobody quite budgeted for. And by At World’s End, in 2007, Elizabeth is no longer the girl who can steal a scene in three minutes on a beach. She’s a Pirate King who has to make impossible choices and sacrifice people to do it. I don’t think Gore Verbinski or the Disney executives who signed off on the sequels were building a 9/11 allegory. I think they were making expensive pirate movies. But movies come out of the water they’re swimming in, and it’s hard to watch that trilogy now and not see a country working something out in the background of its own popcorn entertainment.
So here is where I land, for whatever it’s worth. You can forgive Elizabeth. You can decide she’s still worth loving, that compared to every plausible alternative, she is still the one you would rather spend your life with. I think that’s even the correct decision. But you cannot unknow what you know. The uncomplicated version of her is gone, and no amount of resolve gets it back, because the thing that’s missing isn’t trust exactly. It’s innocence. The specific kind that only exists before you’ve needed to ask the question. America lost that after September 11th: not its goodness, not its capacity for beauty or bravery or genuine sacrifice, all of which remained fully real. It lost its ability to believe, without irony or asterisk, in its own impossible fantasy. We can still love the country. We can still think she’s extraordinary. We just can’t watch her steal a scene on a beach anymore without knowing what comes after.
