Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Foundations: Pirates of the Caribbean


If The Haunted Mansion is archetypal in its themed design, and it set the standard for the themed show, then Pirates of the Caribbean was that in a more common, understandable form.

We enter what looks from the outside like a wax museum- an unassuming structure on the outside, set in the center of the road from Adventureland to New Orleans Square, and boldly announcing that guests are about to enter a new story environment, far different from the last one they encountered. Since the last element of Adventureland is the treehouse, there is a psychological connection made with a point of lookout, in this case over the Rivers of America. There are certain things in America that are associated with water- namely, boats, ships and all manner of mariners and seafarers, including pirates.

This house is situated in a way that not only overlooks the river, but it also could have been a manor house or governor's mansion in its previous life.

The building resembles a museum because that was exactly what it was intended to be. On one end of New Orleans Square, we have a Haunted Mansion, a giant, gothic structure pristine on the outside, but certainly amiss on the interior. Here, we have a building that boldly announces its intentions, but relates thematically to the Mansion because both present false fronts: Inside Pirates’ façade, we will find not a wax museum nor a provincial manor house, but the embarkation point of a live bayou.



Inside the Mansion, we will find not a charming gothic dinner party, but a haunted house filled with references that never pay off- so the theme of the false front is very important to New Orleans Square, a feature that was more or less irrellevant after Walt Disney learned what he did at the World’s Fair of 1964 and 1965.

Inside, we find ourselves immediately in belief of our surroundings. We are deep in a bayou, though we have just come from a quaint New Orleans riverfront sidewalk, and we are also stepping constantly back in time. The riverboats that take us into the bayou are old-fashioned enough, but unassuming. They lead us past fireflies and a shack where a banjo player picks “Deliverance” on his strings. We wind into what appears to be a back-street (Claude Coat’s concept of anonymous background really shines in the final scene before the first waterfall), and here we are presented with yet another shining contradiction.

A decorative skull, hung above a pitch-black archway, begins to speak directly to us. Until this point, the environment we have encountered within the show building has been seamless- now, there is something amiss. The skull serves much the same purpose as the narration in The Haunted Mansion, and combines the narration with the use of the fading portrait; however, where the Mansion sets up our journey through audio only, Pirates uses visual elements and audio to explain, in a thesis statement moment, what is about to occur.

Because of the lighting in this scene, the skull is a focal point that fades away into either blackness or the anonymity of brick surroundings, and we are focused intently on the piece and what it is telling us. These subtle methods of directing our attention have not been adhered to in later attractions there is an impression that the public cannot pay attention to anything that does not demand it. What must be given its due credit is that the skull IS demanding our attention: we simply are not aware that it is doing so, because we are being tricked by the lighting. If we only could pay attention to demanding sets and themes, guests today would not believe they are in the bayou after stepping THROUGH what was essentially an Eisensteinian cut- from a New Orleans sidewalk directly into the Bayou.



Montage has been prevalent in entertainment for so long that it has literally become our second nature, and we no longer notice it. That does not mean we are not paying attention to it, or affected by it being there- we simply accept it as normal and move on.

Down the waterfall we go, and we find ourselves in what amounts to the overture of the attraction. The montage effect shines in the caverns because we are being shown the aftermath of what we are about to experience. Here are the mounds of treasure and the skeletons of the pirates- the aftermath, indeed, of the sacking of the town, so that now we are effectively traveling backwards in time.



Davy Jones is a character invented entirely for cinematic purposes, but actually fits quite well into the structure of the attraction. He is timeless, because he is undead, and has survived an unspecified number of years waiting for his bride to return to him.



He appears in the caverns to tell us that, in fact, Dead Men DO tell tales, which is both in contradiction with what we have just seen in the caverns (the skeletons, NOT telling tales, but being dead) and in tune with what we are seeing because if we are moving backwards through time, then someone must be telling us that tale. That’s what stories do, isn’t it? The thesis of the attraction is that we are seeking “Salty Old Pirates”- the alive or dead piece of the puzzle going unspecified.



Now, we find ourselves in a terrible hurricane. Perhaps the thing that laid the pirates into the treasure caves where they expired, we now see a previous scene in reverse order: perfect anti-chronological montage.



For now, we will skip over a few “scenes” and immerse ourselves directly into a pirate battle, where, apparently, Barbossa is looking for Captain Jack. Not only do we move from the thematic ending to the story, we also jump back physically to the outskirts of the town. This is not a setting we have seen before, but it is one that must exist within the context of the story to give it an anchor.

Plot and story must be kept separate. When we use the word “story” in the context of themed entertainment, we refer to three things: Montage (Eisenstein), Surprise and Suspense (Hitchcock) and visual elements strung together with a common theme (John Ford). Combining these things with a basic through-line will give us our “story” in the context of themed design.

So, in order to anchor our story, our narrative structure, we need this physical place. The Mansion provides its own, because the structure it is housed in contains nearly the entire attraction and its narrative.

Pirates could not contain anything, because the building was designed to house an attraction that was modified heavily from its original intentions. Therefore, within the environment, we must allow several locations to act as coat hangars- places we can string along our narrative. This is where the believability factor really starts to play a key role.



We have come to see pirates. To see them, we must understand that they are no longer alive, and therefore must journey backwards to find them. We must “drop down” into their world, and once we are there, we are absorbed by a typical pirate event: the ransacking of a town. The archetype that makes everyone understand what is happening is the logic of the ransacking in a totally illogical sequence of events.

At home, to get to the kitchen we must walk through the dining room. To get to the dining room, we must enter the house. To enter the house, we must walk up the driveway and through the front door. These are logical sequences of events so built into our lives that we no longer consider them for any length of time.

In a themed environment, we have the ability, much as in film, to move from seemingly unconnected places and events to other places and totally different events without ever feeling as though we have been cheated of something in between. The audience only knows what we give them, and our minds, due to the conditioning of years and years of logical sequences and events fill in the gaps. That was why Claude Coates wanted to fill The Haunted Mansion with all that black nothingness. Our minds hold the possibility of all things, as does all that blackness, and just as with scene transitions in films, we are able to instantly fill in the gaps in a sequence. Because this feels natural to us, we believe that the experiences offered in a designed environment are only presented as linear- certainly they seem that way- but they cannot be linear.

Linear events are also held down by time: we know that pirates and ghosts do not exist in the world we occupy. Because subconsciously we associate linear forms with reality, these things cannot exist within reality, and neither can linear forms. If we started our boat journey at the edge of town and moved into the fort and saw a linear progression of scenes presented as chronological moments in time, we would not only be bored but we would be unable to comprehend what was happening. Here was reality, like a documentary in filmmaking terms, but pirates do not exist in reality.

Though our minds are powerful enough to grasp that we are seeing this happening and its not real, because its in a theme park, the upshot would be us not enjoying the experience for reasons we couldn’t understand, but that our subconscious could not place together into a montage of images. This is the essence of the themed design: we occupy a space but move through it as freely as a film that uses montage.



So, if you think of five places you would expect to find pirates (When they existed), perhaps you would come to similar conclusions: A Bay outside a Spanish town, the bayou, mysterious caverns, a prison and a treasure room. Each of these locations then serves a different thematic purpose within the context of the show, but the narrative structure is similar to that of the Mansion. The main difference being that the latter begins outside, while the narrative of pirates itself begins as soon as we have boarded our vessel.

We float through a bayou, expecting and wanting to see pirates. It seems the place itself has become aware of our intentions, and offers us the chance we seek in the form of a talking skull. We plunge into a dead man’s cavern, filled with pirate treasure and skeletons of passed seafarers. We are informed by Davy Jones that Dead Men DO tell tales, which is of course what we have come to see.

Next, we find ourselves in a bay- that promise immediately fulfilled (Pirates do not exist any longer. Here are pirates!), and the scalliwags are ransacking the town, apparently in search of Captain Jack Sparrow and “the key”- our MacGuffin. The pirates grow increasingly upset and end up burning the town- a tremendous contradiction because they may have burned the key. The surprise is that like the pirates, they key is already in the jail. If they had been more noble and attempted to expunge their own from the cells, they may have found what they wanted.



Now, there is a scene in which the abbreviated Walt Disney World version (more on that momentarily) lacks entirely, but is exceedingly vital in context. The pirates move to the distillery, and engage in a heated gun battle in which we are placed directly in the center. This scene is vital because, much as the hitchhiking ghosts in the mansion, there has yet to be a payoff to the never-ending succession of the narration.



So, we come wanting to see Pirates, we see pirates, and then the pirates place us directly in the center of a battle. The fact that these pirates may or may not have escaped from the prison and the first thing they wanted was rum, while the pirates ransacking the town were so full of rum that they only wanted the key, which was subsequently in the jail with the pirates that wanted the rum- is a wonderful circular gag.

Now, using our montage, we make a jump to a possibly related event: Captain Jack in the treasure room. Now, did the key unlock the treasure room? Or was the key to a box that contained the treasure and Jack has gone off to find it with the key? Are there, in fact, two separate keys: one that Jack holds, with the treasure map, and the other with the dog in the jail*? We may never know, because all are irrelevant. What matters is that the succession has paid off: Captain Jack has gotten the treasure. There is an ironic twist here, too, in that we have already seen what happens to similar treasure rooms, and the visuals from the caverns and the final scene now connect in our minds to form a circle. Jack may have his treasure, but for the narrative to continue endlessly, he must die, in order for there to be a cavern, where dead men like him tell tales, so that the tale of his finding the treasure can be told, so that he can die, and on and on forever.

*In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, the dog actually holds the key in its mouth to the Pirata Codex, being the code of the pirates. Its an interesting though unanswered connection that the reason the pirates may want the key is not to unlock the cell, but to open the book and prove their innocence using the law that they have come to despise due to the actions of the enemy.

And so the narrative of Pirates weaves its web. We are moved with montage through the story in reverse, first seeing the aftermath of the events we will witness later, and the ending actually is the beginning, so that the black space between the end and start of the attraction holds all the answers, much as the void of the mansion holds its answers.



It is interesting to note that between the beginning of the attraction and its end in the original Disneyland version of the show, we actually are given a physical object that does, indeed, hold the answers: a treasure map. This is also the first actual show piece in the attraction, viewed as guests are entering the indoor queue area, which is also the last piece we see.

The metaphoric value of the treasure map is two fold: The first and last image of the attraction are the same, but we see it as the last piece with new knowledge and new experience. This, in many ways, is what prepares us for the next experience within the narrative structure of the entire park: we see an object, experience a story and then see the same object again but with its meaning changed.

The second value of the treasure map is the image itself: what would a pirate story be without one?



Pirates and The Mansion hold the keys to designing such experiences. Interestingly, both play on archetypes of America, which is what Disneyland is really about, and that both employ the same basics as any carnival spookhouse: Come! See the ghosts! Come! See real pirates!

The hook that so many search for in vein is that these radical visions actually exist inside each of the attractions, and that you can actually see them. What isn’t revealed is that you are going to be put through a narrative, much like watching a film, and then you will interact with the very elements you have come to see.

The methods of motion are also vitally important. While it wouldn’t make too much sense to put the mansion on the water or pirates on an omni-mover, it makes sense that both are constant flowing motion-based feelings, and that both have the ability to direct your attention wherever they see fit.

The idea of contradiction is also apparent in both The Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean- and it is what drives our narratives in place of a traditional “plot”, as would be found in film. The contradiction in Pirates being that pirates do not exist any longer- to our child’s mind, they are much as dinosaurs. They are relics of a past long forgotten, and yet here they are, right there in front of us. Some show elements- the water being spit out by the magistrate in the first scene after we enter the town, and the fire during the ransacking- are there because without them, we might believe that we are seeing an illusion. These elements bring us back to the reality of the scene- fire and water, no matter what else is happening around them, are elements and are therefore perceived by us as real regardless of the context.

In The Haunted Mansion, the idea of ghosts strikes us much the same as pirates. A skeptic might scoff “Sure, but no one has actually seen a ghost”. True, they have not. They have not seen a dinosaur, a pirate, a ghost, a concert put on by Mickey Mouse, or the inside of a spaceship- yet all of these things, thanks to techniques brought from the cinema, are there and available for us to see. The Mansion’s “Fire & Water” is the house itself: we are all immediately familiar with it, because we understand the idea of an old house as an archetype on the cultural level. We get that the house is real, because it appears real: the set designers have designed it to appear to be a real old house, and (next door) a real Spanish-colonial styled village, or a real cavern, or a real jail of the period. What happens inside leaves room for the fantastic, because if we believe the setting, we can more easily place the events there, no matter how fantastic.

The set design is, in itself, a massive contradiction: WHY on Earth would be believe that ghosts would occupy a house simply due to its appearance or its purported age? Because stories about just such places have become ingrained in our very DNA. The contradiction in place of plot is what drives our story forward through each section of the narrative within these settings.

We come expecting to see Pirates, but pirates do not exist- so, we must travel backwards (by way of a waterborne vessel, which can only travel forwards with the current of the water) to find the pirates. We are moving forward, with the current, but backwards in the sense of time and story. We are riding inside a complete contradiction of natural laws, and yet there it is before us. The idea of elements confirms the contradiction: “But, there’s fire and water there, so it must be real!”, we shout, though the entire thing is nothing more than an illusion, just like all of entertainment.

Walt Disney liked his guests. John Hench, often called the “guru of Disney Design”, remarked, “Liking the guests is the key to everything we do.” Because of the somewhat frightening nature of the pirates show, there was another element that the designers wove into the web of story in order to soften the idea of traveling back in time to witness something as frightening as the sacking of the town.

The treasure, we are told from the very beginning of our experience, is cursed. For some reason, the pirates that have sailed these treacherous waters before us have not made it out, where we pass by. We are observers to their participation, although we are participating ourselves (floating through the middle of the battle between Barbossa’s Wicked Wench and the fort). We are told three times that the treasure is cursed, first upon our entry to the bayou (in the queue, on the sandbar), secondly by the visuals in the ghostly grottos and third (and through audio) in the transition tunnel before the waterfall.
By including all these warnings of cursed treasure, we gain an advantage: Walt and his talented designers have given us information the pirates we are about to see are not yet privy to. They are after the treasure, which (we know, but they do not) will ultimately lead to their demise. It makes us fun for the guests to watch, as the show progresses, the pirates coming increasingly closer to their watery graves- and we have already witnessed their fates. This is perhaps the element that moves the show from merely entertaining to real fun.

The Mansion offers a similar contradiction: We move through a house onboard a carriage? *



*At Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, the narration of Paul Frees as the Ghost Host makes it apparent that the “Doom Buggies” are “Carriages”, approaching “To take us into the boundless realm of the supernatural”. At the Magic Kingdom Park in Florida, no such mention is made, and thus the contradiction must become apparent without aide from the attraction itself.

That is impossible, or at the least a very rare occurrence, and yet here it is, happening, not around us, but actually involving us in it!

In this way, the movement itself- the actual method of transportation- becomes the thing that moves us forward through the story, at once a practical solution to hourly capacity for these major-draw attractions and an indispensable story device!



The idea of the contradiction in these thesis shows is perhaps better titled an “opposite conclusion.” Where reality would make a left, Disneyland makes a right, and combines things that the logical mind would dismiss as being uncombinable. In short, Imagineers often make the “opposite conclusion” of what their logical minds would tell them to do, thus providing a unique experience through allowing the viewer to think as though in a fantasy, or, as it is commonly referred to, “through the eyes of a child.”

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