Tantalus

Something left me unsatisfied about The Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. Something in particular, I mean - and it was something about the baddies. The nature of their curse really wasn't clear to me. When Geoffrey Rush has his exposition speech about what's wrong with him, about how all the liquor in the world will not quench their thirst nor all the women slake their lust, I'm not convinced. Isn't he just describing the human condition? I mean - sure, the skeletal thing is disconcerting, but also a not-very-well-veiled metaphor for the shock of true corporeality that you get out of Nausea. Do they have souls? Do they not have souls? The know that they are unsatisfied - they long and desire and ache and perceive a lack even if they don't sensorally feel it. So - they have souls but they can't use them? What? What?

When Geoffrey Rush dies he says, in heartbreaking tones of a wasted actor in an enterprise he's too gifted for; 'I feel - cold.' He dies, he drops the apple - he's got his innocence back, he's miraculously undone his fall and yet what that comprises is actually a return to knowledge itself, a knowledge of the feeling of cold and the taste of apples and so on - the apple symbolology in the film is so confused that it gives more sentimental heat than light. But it's clearly a trope of return to humanity from damnation.

I just think that the problem that the film encounters is that to humanised the damned, as it does, thorough, it to un-damn them: the damned who yet smile and curse and plot and laugh and despair &c &c are not damned. Who is't can say he's at the worst / is not yet at the worst. Maybe it's this tromp l'oueil damnation makes even the most 'occult', 'exotic' etc parts of the film cartoonish - the damned characters are predestined for humanity since that is, really where they start anyway.

The reason that this makes me think of Tantalus is because they are essentially in his position - mythically unable to sate the longings that they are eternally subject to, despite the fact that whilst longing and perceived lack is quintessentially human, an eternity isn't.