Postmodern Storytelling in Traditional Popular Genres: Gore Verbinski’s Movies as Reflections on Narrative Patterns

Abstract

Hollywood in general and Disney in particular are experts in storytelling. Who else would know better how to use narrative patterns and strategies? This is nothing new. But times have changed, and some traditional popular genres have run out of fashion. Or have they not?The adventure novel is a genre that gained its popularity in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, it was replaced by the adventure movie. But at the turn to the twenty-first century no one was interested in pirate movies or the like any more. Their peak had been reached long ago (in the case of the pirate genre around the 1950s with films such as Sea Hawk, Against All Flags, or Crimson Pirate). That is, until Jack Sparrow, Elizabeth Swan, and William Turner came along and conquered the screen! Gore Verbinski's trilogy Pirates of the Caribbean (2003-07) was a huge commercial success. What is more important, it was a modernization of the genre-these movies combined the more or less realistic pirate genre with the fantastic. Apart from the suspense, mystery, comic relief, action, and great actors-Hollywood stars-these blockbusters of the new century provide, they are first and foremost cleverly constructed. They do not simply tell their stories. Instead, they reflect on storytelling at the same time. They reflect on what storytelling is, on its purpose, and on the crucial topics it consists of. Furthermore, they contain considerations about how the narrative is structured, under what circumstances it is being performed, and how other people might already have told a similar story, albeit in a different way.Pirates of the Caribbean can be read in various ways. First, it appears to be a commentary on the rise of globalized capitalism and its consequences. At the same time, it debates pivotal aspects of traditional storytelling (and/or narrative culture) that are used in order to depict the variety of possible perspectives and ways of narrating. For instance, the characters discuss narrative topoi (the damsel in distress) and basic themes (the dichotomy of good and evil, divine providence versus human cleverness, blasphemic use of the Bible); rhetorical devices (tragic irony, literal versus figurative use of speech); the truth of different versions of the same story; the existence of different names for the same mythological beast; and the destructive impact of capitalism on the belief in mythological creatures: The has become ... immaterial (27:50-27:57), says materialist Lord Cutler Beckett of the East India Trading Company to the mythic miscreant Davy Jones, in the third part of the series, At World's End.In this paper, I will concentrate on Verbinski's first reshaping of the western. I focus on his movie Rango (2011) and its particular use of the widespread hero pattern-which has been studied mainly by ethnologists (regarding mythic, legendary, and historical heroes, cf. the survey presented by Katalin Horn and the anthology edited by Robert A. Segal). It is, however, also common in Hollywood movies, not only since Hollywood development executive Christopher Vogler adapted Joseph Campbell's popular mythological inquiry Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) for screenwriters in the mid-1980s (elaborated and published years later, in 1992; cf. also Vogler's analysis of recent Hollywood movies in the third edition, 2007).Rango was produced in the early years of Barack Obama's presidency in the United States of America. Whether this was intentional or purely coincidental, the film can also be read as a commentary to this president and his ambition to be regarded as a savior and a national hero.In the last section I shall discuss Verbinski's Lone Ranger (2013), another western that deals with the concept of the hero and is meant to be read as a postcolonial rewriting of American history. On the one hand, Lone Ranger shows how the Western wilderness was sacrificed to progress, implying ruthless commercial exploitation, and imperial attitudes, implying hegemonic supremacy at all cost. …