The film takes the form of a dream -- a teen girl’s fantasy, in fact -- which is the first clue to its lofty aspirations. By employing fantasy to define its narrative, The Pirate Movie is free to dismantle the “universe of structures and binary oppositions” that French theorist Jean Baudrillard argues are characteristic of the modern era. In this sense, the film operates much like the assaultive work of the Dadaists and other proponents of the surreal. As Baudrillard put it, such a work is like “a projectile” that “plunges in on the spectator,” which does not allow for contemplation. “Film no longer allows you to question,” Baudrillard writes. “It questions you, and directly.” The Pirate Movie does exactly that, asking its audience, “What is expected from musicals? From teen comedies? From mainstream Hollywood movies? In essence, from entertainment itself?”

Kristy McNichol, at the height of her teen stardom, stars as Mabel, a nerdish girl who is left behind on a boating trip and, after trying to catch up on her own, is thrown out of her boat and washes ashore on an island. It is at this point that the film enters the realm of the fantastic, as in her sleep Mabel enacts a pirate fantasy in which she is the youngest daughter of a Major-General (Bill Kerr) and falls in love with a reluctant young pirate named Frederic (Christopher Atkins). Since he was one year old, Frederic has been living with a band of roving cutthroats led by the Pirate King (Ted Hamilton), but now that he is 21, he wants to set off on his own. In Lacanian terms, he wants to throw off the Law of the Father and find his own place in the linguistic order.

This, naturally, implies an investigation of his sexuality, which becomes a recurring motif throughout The Pirate Movie. In fact, the film is so preoccupied with sexuality that it demands a Freudian reading, particularly in terms of Frederic’s relationship to the Pirate King. As he was raised on a ship of men and has only seen one woman (the nurse Ruth, played by Maggie Kirkpatrick), Frederic was not able to work through the Oedipus complex in a normal manner. As the Pirate King is both his mother and his father, Frederic both desires him (in the mother role) and fears that he will castrate him (in the father role). Castration, not surprisingly, is the film’s most oft-recurring sexual trope, enacted both literally (with multiple characters threatening to castrate each other with their phallic weapons) and metaphorically (the film as a whole essentially castrates the high-art pretensions of opera, which will be discussed in more detail below).

Thus, it is not surprising that Frederic would take to Mabel so immediately. However, Mabel is not just a simple object of male desire, which is key to the film’s feminist intentions. As Laura Mulvey noted in her canonical essay “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema,” female characters are most often employed in films as fetishized objects of the male gaze, essentially made powerless because they are threatening to the male characters. Mabel, on the other hand, retains her power throughout the film, firstly because it is her dream-fantasy in which the story takes place. Thus, unlike most female characters, she controls the narrative. For example, near the end, when she declares that she wants “a happy ending,” that is exactly what she gets; she literally wills it into existence.

More subtle and even more effective in this regard is Mabel’s direct connection to the audience. Unlike the other characters, she is self-consciously aware of her positioning within a fabricated narrative and radically breaks the fourth wall by speaking directly to the audience, often deriding the actions on-screen or making subversive asides involving puns and sexual double-entendres. For example, when she sees her older sisters blithely singing a Gilbert and Sullivan tune that lumps them into an undifferentiated female sexual object, Mabel first mocks their singing, then turns to us and asks, “Do you believe this song?” In this way, she willfully breaks free of Gilbert and Sullivan’s offensively patriarchal narrative (one might say she liberates herself), staking her claim to narrative and symbolic empowerment denied the male characters, who must resort to phallic signifiers in a feeble attempt to assert any control.

Mabel also illustrates her power within the narrative during the “Pumpin’ and Blowin’” musical number, which is clearly intended to draw a humorous rhetorical parallel between her physical “work” in pumping air to Frederic’s scuba helmet and the sexual “work” she will surely perform for him later. Yet, twice during the number she stops pumping air to him, which reminds the male protagonist that his very survival is ultimately at her whim. This push-and-pull of gendered power dynamics is underscored in the sequence by the song’s lyrics, which use an alternating male chorus singing “Keep pumpin’” (signifying active male sexual work) with a female chorus singing “Keep blowin’” (signifying passive female sexual work), which is then visualized with animated fish that have decidedly gendered characteristics. Thus, unlike the vast majority of Hollywood films, The Pirate Movie is not only keenly aware of its gender dynamics, but is willing to openly interrogate them.

In its reworking of classical cinematic norms, then, The Pirate Movie is aligned with what Peter Wollen has termed “counter-cinema,” which he describes as struggling against the fantasies, ideologies, and aesthetic devices of “orthodox cinema.” This is where the key importance of The Pirate Movie lies: its postmodern assault on cinematic and cultural orthodoxy.

First and foremost, The Pirate Movie is a self-conscious assault on the arbitrary divisions between high and low art. The film’s negative critical notices at the time of its theatrical release are evidence of the resiliency of this binary, as critics were unwilling (or unable) to comprehend, much less appreciate, the film’s playful, yet purposeful, mixing of the elements of “high” and “low” art. In this way, the film was beset by the same criticisms that have always attended pop art. As cultural scholar Dick Hebdidge has noted, “Pop’s significance resides in the way in which it … lit up the hidden economy which serves to valorize certain objects, certain forms of expression, certain voices to the exclusion of other objects, other forms, other voices by bestowing upon them the mantle of Art.”

In this case, the “Art” with a capital “A” is the work of Gilbert and Sullivan, the popular 19th-century masters of the operetta. By appropriating the basic narrative trajectory, characters, and most well-known songs from Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance and placing them within the context of a modern teen comedy with newly written, synthesized pop tunes, the filmmakers put into relief the essentially populist nature of Gilbert and Sullivan’s work. This is a crucial critique of the highbrow tendency to set opera upon a pedestal, which denies its history as a popular form for the masses. Just as Lawrence Levin showed in his excellent book Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America that the plays of William Shakespeare were popular and familiar to commercial audiences until they were declared “Art” and set aside for the high classes in the late 19th century, The Pirate Movie forcefully reminds us of the crassly commercial, and therefore popular, nature of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most famous works. The film is even more radical in that it purposefully beat to the theaters a “faithful” film adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance starring Kevin Kline, Linda Ronstandt, and Rex Smith, thus enacting in the marketplace as well as on the screen its undercutting of easy cultural distinctions.

The Pirate Movie also rejects easy generic divisions, instead mixing genre-related signifiers in a radical free-for-all. It is both a classical and a pop musical, a teen comedy and an action-adventure story, with both modern-day and historical settings. It is thoroughly cine-literate, as well, freely borrowing and appropriating from other films, including Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), The Wizard of Oz (1939), and The Pink Panther series, both mocking and paying homage to these sources.

Thus, the film is very much in line with what Jim Collins in Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age has referred to as “the permutations of hyperconscious textuality in popular film.” The Pirate Movie’s lightness and cheeky sense of subversion allows it to bounce above preset, codified binaries, which again helps explain why the film was unappreciated by both critics and audiences, who were clearly too fixated on Hollywood-induced hegemonic expectations to see the film for the masterpiece that it is. To quote Collins again, contemporary film criticism has been unable to come to terms with films such as The Pirate Movie “because this hyperconscious eclecticism is measured against nineteenth-century notions of classical narrative and realist representation.” In other words, The Pirate Movie was so far ahead of its time that we are just now beginning to catch up with it.

Either that, or it’s just a wonderfully, jaw-droppingly bad early ’80s guilty pleasure. Take your pick.

Copyright ©2005 James Kendrick

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