Pirates
It’almost time for Hallowe’en again. The leaves are crisp, the air is chill and tangy, and there are pumpkins, skeletons, cobwebs, and floating fabric ghosts adorning the front steps of nearly every house on the block. I suspect that, if you are handing out candy at your door, or trailing after a group of ghouls and goblins, up and down the street, you may well spot a fair few pirates among the spooky group. They’ll have a tricorn hat and a parrot on one shoulder, an eye patch and a hook for a hand - or very possibly a peg leg. You might notice a puffy white shirt and a cutlass gleaming in the moonlight - for how indeed can a pirate swindle and swashbuckle without it?
I wonder sometimes how a real-life, honest-to-goodness pirate might feel about having become a costume or a caricature, the sort of person who shows up on screen in films with a West Country accent and a roguish smile? Would they be delighted at being thus memorialized? Or would they struggle to understand how we’ve romanticized them, how we’ve washed away all the reasons a person would choose to live outside the law and risk so much?
The movie theatre is full of these pirates - Peter Pan, Hook, The Pirates of the Caribbean, Muppet Treasure Island. And they have their charms, no doubt about it. Tim Curry is particularly appealing as the pirate with a lust for gold and a secret heart of it, too, playing earnestly alongside his fuzzy Muppet co-stars, decked out in what proves to be extremely accurate 18th century garb. He strikes an excellent balance between terrible criminal, quite happy to threaten, steal, lie, and murder to get what he wants, and moral father figure who sacrifices himself at least once to protect Jim Hawkins. I wonder if, after all that complexity is a better representation of real pirates - people, complicated, multilayered people who longed for a way out of poverty and suffering by any means necessary, but weren’t necessarily the embodiment of evil, either. A tricky thing, being a pirate - unless of course, it’s Hallowe’en night, and when the treasure - or candy - has been gathered and stowed, the costume comes off, and life goes back to normal.
Jennifer