14

The Pirates of the Silver Screen

DESPITE THE MANY EXCITING tales of the exceptional lives of so many women pirates, movies showcasing their adventures are not available. Of the hundreds of pirate movies made over the years, there have been a mere handful that profile female pirates, and even fewer of those portray characters based on real pirates from history. The most accurate example of a movie chronicling a female pirate is Anne of the Indies, which is very loosely based on the life of Anne Bonny. This movie premiered in 1951; it has been over half a century since the silver screen has been graced with a pirate movie starring one of the women from this book.

Why? The women’s stories are very cinematic, and there’s no doubt that stories about pirates can perform well at the box office. One of the earliest pirate films, Captain Blood, made $2.5 million at the box office in 1935 and cost only $1 million to make. Disney’s animated classic Peter Pan, prominently featuring Captain Hook and his pirate band, was the highest-grossing film of 1953, earning a reported $7 million and multiple cinematic rereleases. The Princess Bride, also featuring a pirate as a major plot point, was a box office success and made millions more in VHS and DVD sales as the film became a cult classic. Disney’s juggernaut Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has, to date, grossed over $1 billion with four films (and a fifth in the works). Pirates are bankable—but Hollywood has refused to cash in when it comes to women pirates, even fictional women pirates. Why? Surely A-list women are lining up to make these swashbuckling superhits?

A brief aside—pirates appear in all forms of media, including books, plays, operas, and novels, as well as films. However, there have been virtually no bestselling books written about women pirates, although quite a few romances exist, which sell very well but lack critical acclaim; only one opera, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, in which the lone female pirate, Ruth, is well outnumbered by Frederick, the Pirate King, and a crew of male pirates; and one Broadway musical about a woman pirate, Boublil and Schönberg’s The Pirate Queen, based on the life of Grace O’Malley, which closed amid boos from critics and audiences alike after a measly eighty-five performances. As rare as women pirates are in Hollywood films, they appear more often there than in any other major medium, and for that purpose this chapter will focus on movies.

The first major Hollywood film featuring a female pirate, Anne of the Indies (directed by Jacques Tourneur, 1951), is allegedly based on the life of Anne Bonny. (Bonny appears as a character in the 1945 film The Spanish Main, but the movie is not about her.) The character is named Anne, but beyond that there are few similarities to the real Anne Bonny. Captain Anne Providence, played by a future wife of Howard Hughes, Jean Peters, enters the film brandishing a sword. She and her crew have just captured an English ship and are forcing the hapless prisoners to walk the plank. Anne’s backstory is explained by clunky exposition: her brother was killed by the English and now she is avenging him by wreaking havoc on every English ship she encounters. In this, she resembles Sayyida al-Hurra or Jacquotte Delahaye more than Anne Bonny. The real Anne Bonny had no such noble motivation for turning pirate; she simply liked causing mayhem. Captain Providence spares a French prisoner’s life—after smacking him across the face for calling her “Mademoiselle”—by offering him a spot on the crew. This act of mercy proves to be the first step in her undoing.

Later that night, the pirates are dividing up the loot from the English ship, every man and woman getting his or her fair share as outlined in the articles. Anne offers the Frenchman, Pierre, a piece of the treasure. The crew learns that Pierre has a map to Captain Morgan’s legendary treasure haul from the sack of Panama City. (Henry Morgan did sack Panama City in 1671, but most of the treasure was snuck out on a ship before his arrival, so the loot gained from the sacking was disappointingly small.) Anne decides to pursue the treasure, but she wants to gather some resources from her mentor and surrogate father Blackbeard first.

Despite Blackbeard’s warning that Pierre is possibly a shady character, Anne and Pierre fall in love. She tries on the fancy dress from the treasure stock, and Pierre has to lace the corset up for her. Anne asks him to show her how a Frenchman makes love to a lady. What follows is a scintillating love scene, with Anne’s normal bravado only barely masking her fear of rejection and her inexperience in the art of love. Her desire and curiosity have outpaced her knowledge, and despite her copious power in other arenas, it’s clear that in this particular area she is powerless. Pierre has awakened a womanly side of her she has denied all her life, and she is compelled to explore it, in spite of herself.

Anne’s love for Pierre is, tragically, all for naught. Blackbeard reveals that Pierre is a spy for the English and has killed many pirates, perhaps even Anne’s brother. Pierre’s smooth talking convinces Anne that it’s a lie, and she draws her sword against Blackbeard, turning her back on her family to defend her love. Blackbeard leaves, vowing not to forget this insult. Later, we learn that Pierre is not only a spy—he’s married. His assignment was to lead the English to Anne and her ship, the Sheba Queen, in exchange for the return of his own ship. When Anne finds out, she immediately hatches a plan to kidnap Pierre’s wife and sell her as a slave, because hell hath no fury like a pirate woman scorned.

Anne captures Pierre’s wife, and Pierre shortly thereafter, and plans to maroon them on an isolated island, where they (and their love) will slowly starve to death and wither in the hot Caribbean sun. It is some seriously cold revenge, but there’s something delicious about watching a woman become so completely unhinged on-screen. After watching a million wilting, retiring women acquiescing to men’s demands, it’s electric to watch a woman call the shots, especially in such a heartless way. To wish her success would be cruel, but it’s hard to deny that watching her scheme is a treat.

Anne relents at the last minute and decides to spare Pierre and his wife. As she is setting them free, Blackbeard arrives. Anne knows that if he sees them, he will kill them, so she puts herself between the fleeing lovers and Blackbeard to give them a chance to escape. Despite his reluctance to fight his adopted daughter, Blackbeard, because of his promise to avenge his insult by Anne, fires on the Sheba Queen. Anne is killed in the ensuing battle, leaving the movie as she entered it—waving her sword defiantly in the midst of battle.

Is it disappointing to watch a badass pirate die for the love of a man who will never love her back? Yes. But Anne is no fading flower Camille. She doesn’t die for love in a cloud of perfume and dainty handkerchiefs; she dies in a blaze of gunfire. It’s refreshing to watch a nuanced portrayal of a woman battling between what is ultimately her love of career versus her love of a man. Despite being made in 1951, the themes of this film still resonate today.

Director Tourneur is best known as a B-horror-film director for RKO Pictures. Anne of the Indies was one of the earlier features he made as a freelance director. It did marginally well at the box office domestically but was a huge hit abroad, inspiring a string of Italian lady-pirate movies, such as Queen of the Pirates and Queen of the Seas. Italian cinema apparently does not share Hollywood’s fears of female pirates.

Anne of the Indies gave the pirate woman film such a promising start that it appeared likely that Hollywood would make at least a few more. The fictional female swashbuckler Spitfire Stevens did appear in the 1952 blockbuster Against All Flags (in the 1967 remake The King’s Pirate, the character was downgraded to a love interest), albeit in a supporting role to Errol Flynn’s Brian Hawke, but it would be almost fifty years before a female pirate in the lead role graced the silver screen again.

Anne of the Indies might not have been made at all if it had been pitched ten years earlier or later. There was a run of big-budget Hollywood films in the late 1940s and early 1950s that featured women headliners. Movies such as 1945’s Mildred Pierce and 1950’s All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard all starred women in stories primarily about women. These leading women, however, despite being complex characters, all come to tragic ends. Critic Molly Haskell says in From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies that in the 1950s, a director might use women as “the repository of certain repellent qualities which he would like to disavow. He projects onto her the narcissism, the vanity, the fear of growing old which he is horrified to find festering within himself.” Anne, who dies for love, belongs in this group of strong women who are crippled by the woes of their directors. They are pictured as grotesque for doing what the director fears he himself will do. In mid-twentieth-century Hollywood, women could be strong or happy, but not both. In many ways, this premise is alive and well in the present day (see Blue Jasmine, Inception, and even the Twilight franchise).

The relationship between women and Hollywood has always been a fraught one. In its early days, Hollywood was content to cast women as prostitutes, mothers, femme fatales, and love interests, but seldom as leads. The best a woman could hope for was to become one-half of a power couple, like Astaire and Rogers. Rarely was the success of a film laid solely across a woman’s shoulders. Films about women with complicated personalities, who were unlikable, or who gained fulfillment from an unconventional lifestyle were (and sometimes still are) seen as box office poison, something audiences would not shell out good money to see. Male characters could be conflicted, multifaceted, or even antiheroes; portrayals of women were limited to either pretty virgins or sexual temptresses. Even offscreen, actresses (and actors too) were expected to adhere rigidly to social norms based on their studio’s idea of what their image ought to be. Women were often expected to behave as doting wives and/or loving mothers. There were exceptions, such as Katharine Hepburn and Mary Pickford, women who turned their star power into money power and were able to command some autonomy over their careers, but by and large, women in classic Hollywood were objects for men to fall in love with or be hurt by, not characters worthy of stories themselves.

The New Hollywood period (roughly late 1960s to early 1980s) did bring an improvement in the availability of compelling roles for women. Free from the censors of the old Hollywood production code and studio system, movies could now talk about and depict subjects previously forbidden—including female sexual desire. However, the collapse of the studio star system was a double-edged sword for women; the actresses had greater freedom but less power as the director, not the film star, became the major attraction. Two examples from the beginning and the end of this period demonstrate the evolution experienced in the New Hollywood. The women’s liberation movement, which was also happening at this time, brought the idea of women’s issues to the forefront of the nation’s consciousness. The idea that women might want to see their own stories on-screen began to take hold in the popular imagination.

Bonnie and Clyde (1967) begins with a close-up of Bonnie’s red lips. Bonnie, played by Faye Dunaway, is a waitress from a small town who escapes her boring life by taking up with the gangster Clyde. She’s sexually aroused by the violence and danger in their lives and is frustrated when Clyde cannot perform sexually. Bonnie busts the molds of traditional female roles in cinema by being a sexual, “bad” woman who nevertheless is sympathetically portrayed. She does not take a backseat in the violence but participates fully, and she is not spared the gory gangster’s death. Bonnie, with her bad-girl antics yet secretly soft heart that yearns for love, is clearly a descendant of Anne of the Indies’s Anne Bonny. Due to the later period in which Bonnie and Clyde was made, Bonnie is allowed to express her sexual desire more explicitly, a luxury not allowed Anne, whose desire must be read between the lines. This film, in no small part due to Bonnie’s unconventional depiction and Dunaway’s performance, shocked audiences but went on to be a major box office success and was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning two.

Much later in the New Hollywood period, brave divorcée Erica in An Unmarried Woman (1978) brought a simple yet revelatory story to the silver screen: regaining one’s life after being left by one’s husband. It’s a common tale, yet it had never before been given such fully realized cinematic treatment. Viewers follow Erica from her idyllic existence in Manhattan with her stockbroker husband and gorgeous apartment down to rock bottom as the husband leaves her for a younger woman. Erica claws her way back to happiness with the help of her girlfriends, long lunches with bottles of wine, a female therapist, and a series of blind dates. She falls in love again, this time with a painter, but she ultimately decides to embrace her single life and put herself first rather than following the painter to Vermont. The idea of an everyday woman’s trials and tribulations being worthy film fodder was groundbreaking. Here was a character whom mainstream audiences could identify with, freed from any partnership of validation from a man. Bonnie, fierce as she was, needed Clyde. Erica needs only herself (and maybe her girlfriends). Actress Jill Clayburgh was nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for her work in this film. Although Erica does not seem like she would last ten minutes on a pirate ship, she is nevertheless a more progressive character than either Anne or Bonnie due to her rich emotional life. Rather than her emotions making her “weak” or cluttering the narrative, they are the narrative—much to the delight of the women who flocked to this movie over and over again.

Despite An Unmarried Woman’s giant leap forward in the portrayal of women, Hollywood did not suddenly unleash a torrent of women-centered films, pirate themed or otherwise, after its release. Women had continued to show up in pirate films after Anne of the Indies as love interests, kidnapping victims, prostitutes, and even (rarely) as pirates—Anne Bonny had a minor role in 1954’s Captain Kidd and the Slave Girl, for example—but not until 1995 would Hollywood produce another film starring a female pirate. This film was an infamous flop that once held the Guinness Book of World Records title for largest box office loss. Given that it sink not just the careers of two of its stars but a production company as well, it’s hard to overstate just how big of a disaster this movie was. This epic flop was 1995’s Cutthroat Island, starring Geena Davis as a pirate named Morgan.

The plot is part of the reason the movie was such a colossal failure, so don’t try too hard to follow it. Basically, a woman named Morgan Adams who offers such bons mots as “I took your balls,” referring to the musket balls she pinched from a would-be attacker, lives as a carefree scoundrel until she witnesses her father’s murder at the hands of his brother, her uncle Mad Dawg Brown. (Yes, it’s spelled D-a-w-g.) Following his final instructions, she scalps her still-warm dad to obtain the treasure map, which is, inexplicably, tattooed on his scalp. She learns that this scalp tattoo is only one-third of the treasure map and that her father’s two brothers (Dawg included) have the other two-thirds. She convinces her father’s crew that she ought to take over as captain and lead them to the treasure stashed on the eponymous Cutthroat Island. Reluctantly, they agree to give her a chance at being captain of the Morning Star.

The map is, unfortunately, in Latin, and so the pirates must obtain a Latin reader to begin to parse the map. One is found at a slave market, the doctor/scholar/fencer/petty thief/slave Will Shaw, played by Matthew Modine. Morgan wins him at auction in a pretty unconventional way: by stabbing her fellow bidder in the leg and threatening to stab him somewhere more private if he doesn’t give up. As with watching Anne Providence’s cold-blooded revenge plot, it is pleasurable to watch a woman take what she wants on her own terms, propriety be damned, even if her actions aren’t exactly commendable.

Despite being a liar, Will does in fact read Latin, so the crew sails on to get part two of three from the nonvillainous brother Mordechai. However, Dawg has beaten them to it, and there’s a violent tavern brawl in which Morgan gets to show off some amazing fighting skills, and gets shot by her Uncle Dawg, while Will somehow obtains Mordechai’s piece of the map and hides this fact from Morgan. Back onboard the Morning Star, Will, in his role as “doctor,” removes the musket ball from Morgan’s hip and puts the moves on her. For some reason, they kiss, but he ends up in the brig for some offense that’s not important to the plot.

Things start to get really convoluted at this point. Morgan’s crew mutinies, the Morning Star gets caught in a huge storm, and Dawg is still chasing them but somehow Morgan and the loyal part of her crew end up washed up on Cutthroat Island—lucky, no? They trek into the jungle to locate the treasure, still without a complete map. Dawg also arrives on Cutthroat Island but is robbed of his piece by Will, who is not part of Morgan’s entourage at this point. Morgan stumbles upon Will, who is neck deep in quicksand but in possession of the map. She rescues him, they make up for whatever they were fighting about, and they set off for the treasure. Morgan and Will find the incredibly fake-looking treasure only to have it immediately stolen by Dawg, who forces them to jump off a cliff into the raging sea below.

Will is captured by Dawg and the English navy, which made a brief appearance in the beginning of the film but has been totally forgotten by now. They have teamed up to bring Morgan down. Morgan, however, has no intention of being kidnapped and has swum back to the Morning Star and recaptured it from the treacherous mutineers. They attack Dawg’s ship, where Will is now a prisoner. The obligatory sea battle is actually really impressive; it’s not hard to see where the film’s budget was spent. There are some sufficiently heart-pounding moments, and not all of them are ruined by the wooden dialogue. Morgan and Dawg square off in a climactic final battle that spans the entirety of the ship. Watch this section on mute for best results. Morgan manages to best Dawg, sink his ship, and even cleverly steal the treasure back from him. In the final moments before Dawg’s ship sinks, she ties a barrel to the treasure haul so that, even when the ship goes down, she will have a marker to follow to the sunken treasure’s location. In the end, the Morning Star’s crew rejoices over their victory and sets sail for Madagascar, while Morgan and Will kiss.

Few movies have earned such a reputation for being a failure, and few authors who desired to be taken seriously would attempt to mount a defense of Cutthroat Island (although notably Roger Ebert gave it a mostly positive review, calling it “satisfactory”). The leads lack any shred of chemistry, the plot is well worn, at best, and the script is laughably bad. Cutthroat Island spelled ruin for all parties involved. Geena Davis lost her reputation as a bankable lead, Matthew Modine’s career failed to take off as it might have, and director Renny Harlin has had only modest success since the movie. Carolco, the production company on the film that had previously produced such hits as Terminator 2 and Total Recall, went bankrupt, partially as a result of this movie. Cutthroat Island cost a reported $115 million to make and earned $10 million at the box office. By most measurable markers, this film was a mess.

Yet Cutthroat Island, behind the awful jokes and the strange plot, offers something sorely missing in the Hollywood pantheon: a female action hero. Geena Davis reportedly did her own stunts for this film, and there are a lot of them. She fights with swords, swings from chandeliers, jumps through windows, rides horseback, and jumps off cliffs, just to name a few. After watching countless men perform these stunts in countless action films, there is something viscerally positive about watching a long-haired, undisguised woman do the same. Morgan conceals a large collection of weaponry in her garters. She flirts with men to disarm them before she attacks them. She is, in short, a woman who uses every tool in her considerable arsenal. Unlike Anne Providence’s repressed and hated femininity, Morgan’s femininity is just one more asset she uses to win. She is not a particularly well-drawn character or even a good one, but in her there are undeniable sparks of something greater.

Only four years before Geena Davis starred in the biggest woman pirate box office bust ever, she starred in a colossal hit that is also one of the most feminist movies of all time to be produced by a major studio: Thelma & Louise (1991). This film centers around not one but two women, best friends who take off on an impromptu road trip after shooting an attempted rapist. Their exploits as they cross the country become wilder and wilder as they shake off the confines of their small-town lives. Eventually, the women decide to kill themselves rather than turn themselves in, and they drive off a cliff in a blaze of glory. Written by a woman, Callie Khouri, this film communicates truths about what it means to be a woman that resonated with its audience at its premiere and still do today. This movie unapologetically validates women’s experiences of being persecuted and endlessly pursued by men and throws the traditional male buddy road trip movie model on its head. The film was nominated for five Academy Awards and won one. However, the feel-good feminist vibe of this film did not herald a sea change in movies about women any more than Anne of the Indies did. In 2011 author Raina Lipsitz called it “the last great film about women” and claimed it could never get made today, citing the fact that she could name only three movies in 2010 and 2011 that passed the Bechdel-Wallace test (the criteria being that the work must depict at least two women having a conversation that is not about a man) and that none had the substance of Thelma & Louise. Davis, a champion of strong portrayals of woman in film, almost certainly would have gone on to make more movies headlined by strong women had her career not been torpedoed by Cutthroat Island. In 2007 she did go on to found the Geena Davis Institute for Gender in Media, which examines issues such as the ones explored in this chapter.

Cutthroat Island’s resounding defeat would render pirates a box office taboo for the next eight years. Many studios assumed that pirate films had worn out their welcome in the cinemas. In 2003, however, a silver-tongued, crack shot, rum-soaked pirate named Captain Jack Sparrow swaggered onto the silver screen and reignited the public’s love of pirate movies. He brought with him the last (to date) major female pirate, Elizabeth Swann. Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise (consisting so far of 2003’s The Curse of the Black Pearl, 2006’s Dead Man’s Chest, 2007’s At World’s End, and 2011’s On Stranger Tides, the last of which did not feature Elizabeth Swann) has been a colossal success, in no small part due to the complicated gender roles occupied by its leads. The series has quietly but surely uprooted the traditional attributes of male pirates and female captives and presented audiences with something entirely new.

The plot of the Pirates series contains more twists and turns than the amusement park ride from which it derives its inspiration, so only the portions of the plot that feature Elizabeth, particularly Elizabeth as a pirate, need be discussed here. In The Curse of the Black Pearl, Elizabeth begins the film not yet a pirate but instead the damsel in distress. A wealthy governor’s daughter, she is kidnapped by pirates as part of a plan to recover some stolen (and cursed) Aztec gold. Near the end of the movie, Elizabeth and the film’s (male) hero kiss as the sun sets behind them. Yet even among these stereotypical feminine trappings, there are clues to the fierce pirate she will become. The first scene of the movie shows her at the bow of a ship, singing a pirate chantey. When she is kidnapped, she demands a parley with the ship’s captain instead of simply allowing herself to be taken. She is well versed in pirate terminology and lore and is able to defend herself as a result. The film also contains a scene of Jack forcibly cutting her out of a corset to save her after she almost drowns. She is literally so constricted by her traditional femininity that she faints, falls into the water, and nearly dies, only to be rescued by a pirate who isn’t afraid to liberate her from her whalebone prison. When her true love, Will, is captured, she offers herself up as a prize to the man who will go and save him. In the end, she uses a fake fainting spell as part of a plan to save her friend Jack from the noose. Like Morgan from Cutthroat Island, Elizabeth is not afraid to use her feminine charms to outwit and overpower men.

Elizabeth is still a respectable woman at the beginning of Dead Man’s Chest; indeed the movie opens at her wedding to blacksmith Will Turner. However, her entry into holy matrimony is thwarted when Lord Beckett arrests the bride and groom for aiding and abetting the escape of one Captain Jack Sparrow. Will is given a chance to pursue Jack in order to persuade him to barter his compass in exchange for their lives while Elizabeth must remain in prison, deprived of her wedding night.

Elizabeth escapes the prison (thus marking her official status as an outlaw) and stows away aboard a ship, convincing the crew to take her to Tortuga to find Captain Sparrow. Once Elizabeth is reunited with Jack, sparks fly between the pair as they search for Will (and Davy Jones, but that’s another story). Elizabeth flirts with Jack to obtain information from him and to coerce him into doing the things she wants. In the end, she kisses him as a distraction while she chains him to the mast as a sacrifice to the kraken, the sea monster that’s been plaguing their journey.

What is to be made of Elizabeth’s behavior in Dead Man’s Chest? As Jack notes, Will was sent to obtain Jack’s compass, but Elizabeth is the one with all the bargaining chips. Her goal is to save her fiancé, but she is not above a little cheating to do it. She ruthlessly leaves Jack to die, but she saves the lives of the rest of the crew in doing so. This woman is miles away from the prim, virginal governor’s daughter from The Curse of the Black Pearl. She is not in command of a ship, but she spends nearly the entire film at sea as part of a crew, she holds her own in battle, and she uses her cool head to calculate optimal outcomes in times of great stress. She is well on her way to becoming a fearsome pirate.

At World’s End finds Elizabeth a full-fledged outlaw, dressed in men’s clothing, infiltrating the enemy’s lair, and wielding a comically large arsenal of weapons on her slight person. Kissing Jack was the kiss of death to her old life; she can never go back to respectability again. She is on a mission to rescue Jack from Davy Jones’s locker and unite the pirates against the encroaching East India Trading Company, which in real life probably contributed to piracy’s growth more than it thwarted it. Once Jack is rescued, she trades herself for the safety of the Black Pearl’s crew by agreeing to become a captive on pirate Sao Feng’s ship, the Empress. Just before Sao Feng’s death, he names Elizabeth the new captain of the Empress. Here, for the first time in a major motion picture since the comically bad Cutthroat Island, a female pirate captain appears on screen.

Her captaincy grants her a spot on the pirate Brethren Court (very loosely modeled on Captain Morgan’s Brethren of the Coast), where the eight pirate lords are gathered to discuss how to deal with the threat of the East India Trading Company. Jack wants the pirates to sequester themselves in the hidden fortress of Shipwreck Cove, while Elizabeth thinks they ought to join together and fight. A new pirate king must be elected before the decision can be made. Every pirate votes for him- or herself, causing a deadlocked vote, until Jack votes for Elizabeth and she becomes king. As king, she declares war on the East India Trading Company and rallies the pirate captains to ready their fleets.

The pirate lords and their ships gather for what might be their final battle. Cutler Beckett and the EITC have Davy Jones’s supernatural power on their side, as well as the superiorly trained fighting force. Before they rush into the fray, Elizabeth offers a rousing, passionate speech. She knows that they face almost certain death, but insists that they must fight with all their power against the enemy. “They will see what we can do . . . by the sweat of our brows and the strength of our backs and the courage of our hearts!” She defiantly raises the pirate flag, and the other ships, cheered by her fortitude, do the same. It is a triumphant moment, a climax (in a film admittedly full of climaxes), and a glorious motivational speech that so often is given by male heroes but here is entirely, wholly, Elizabeth’s moment.

The battle rages on. Will, sensing the end is near, asks Elizabeth to marry him midbattle. Barbossa, a fellow pirate, performs the ceremony on deck (pausing occasionally for cannon fire and swordplay by all involved in the rite), and the couple—bloody, filthy, and so different from who they were when they got engaged—fill the screen as the music swells for a kiss. The pirates win the war, defeating the EITC, and Will and Elizabeth eventually sail off into the sunset.

Many quibble with the ending of At World’s End, claiming that in spite of all she’s been through, Elizabeth is now confined to land as a housewife, the very fate she was trying to escape at the start of the film. After becoming the pirate king, she still chooses domesticity and a family over her career. But at least with this marriage, it was Elizabeth’s choice. She chose Will—not just once when they were young and infatuated, but again as the double-crossing, unfaithful, amoral pirates they had become. Their marriage is a marriage of equals. Even if one does not accept this theory, the entire arc of Elizabeth’s character cannot be discounted. In a series rich with twists and turns, Elizabeth is offered the same chance at heroism, redemption, and morally complex choices as her male counterparts. She is not watching the battle safely from shore—she’s the one calling the shots. Elizabeth is more nuanced, more well spoken, and ultimately more powerful than Anne and Morgan combined, and one can only hope that the success of these films will demonstrate to filmmakers that sophisticated women pirates not only can engage audiences, they absolutely do.

Modern Hollywood has come a long way from its beginnings, but the trend of shying away from movies centered on a woman is pervasive. Movies made from the 1980s to the present day still generally avoid focusing on complex female protagonists. There are occasional Oscar-bait biopics featuring physical transformations of attractive female stars (Charlize Theron’s portrayal of serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 2003’s Monster or Nicole Kidman’s nasally enhanced turn as Virginia Woolf in 2002’s The Hours), and some sci-fi badass heroines such as Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley in the Alien franchise and Daisy Ridley’s Rey in The Force Awakens, but everyday women going through everyday life is still not seen as a worthy cinematic enterprise. The quest for female equality in movies, as well as in everyday life, seems to have frustratingly stalled as time goes by, never able to capitalize on any momentum it gets. Meryl Streep’s 1990 speech to the Screen Actors Guild shares many similarities with Cate Blanchett’s 2014 Best Actress acceptance speech: both actors pointed out that women’s films are not niche, women deserve equal pay for equal work, and women’s films can and do make money. Despite the many voices shouting these truths over the years, Hollywood has been slow to listen. Why that is might be due to who is at the top of Hollywood.

In a 2013 study, the New York Film Academy examined the top five hundred highest-grossing films from 2007 to 2012. In these films, 30.8 percent of all speaking roles were given to women. Only 10.7 percent of these films had a balanced (half-male, half-female) cast. Roughly one-third of women with speaking roles appeared either in sexually provocative clothes or naked. Despite the fact that women buy movie tickets at equal rates as men, women are clearly not represented in the movies in equal numbers.

Besides not being represented on film in equal numbers, women are still consistently not being paid in equal amounts to their male counterparts. Forbes puts out a yearly highest-paid actor and actress list and keeps the two genders separate. It’s easy to see why when the lists aren’t combined: according to the 2014 rankings, only two women would crack the male top ten. The lowest-paid ranked man, Chris Pratt, would earn a spot in the female top ten. The top female earner, Jennifer Lawrence, made $28 million less than the top male earner, Robert Downey Jr. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, in everyday American jobs in 2015, women earned eighty cents to a man’s dollar, and the amount is even less for women of color. It appears that Hollywood underpays women as well.

And that’s just on-screen. Behind the camera, women writers, directors, and producers are even more scarce. The same New York Film Academy study reported that the ratio of men to women working on a film is five to one. Just two of the five hundred top-grossing films were directed by a woman. The Directors Guild of America Women’s Steering Committee found that from 1949 to 1979, 0.19 percent of major motion pictures were directed by a woman. In eighty-five years, only one woman has ever won a Best Director Academy Award: Kathryn Bigelow for 2008’s male-dominated The Hurt Locker. Academy voters are 77 percent male. Only one film directed by a woman, 2013’s Frozen, has ever grossed $1 billion. Women of color are even less represented than white women. Although many Hollywood executives claim that the best films, regardless of gender of the director or screenwriter, get financing, it strains credulity to believe that in the ratio of best-directed films, male to female is, at the time of this writing, eighty-eight to one.

Confronted with these stark numbers, it is not hard to see why Hollywood has not churned out a number of pirate women blockbusters. It is hard for women to tell stories in Hollywood, and it is hard to get movies made about strange, wild, ungovernable women. Pirate women hardly fit any mold or exist in any easily classifiable role. They are violent, they are sexually liberated, they are women of color, they are queer women, they don’t follow the rules, they don’t apologize, and they do not often get happy endings. They are Thelmas and Louises, Ericas and Bonnies, and there is simply not a lot of room for them in the current cinematic landscape.

This helps to prove why the world needs female pirate stories. As has been demonstrated throughout this book, what gets said about a person is controlled by the person telling the story. When men talk about women, women are not portrayed as fully as they could be. This goes double, of course, for women of color and other minority groups. It is vital for the advancement of tolerance and equality that stories—deceptively simple but a powerful part of what people learn and take to be true—are told by the people who they are about. For this to happen, women and other groups that have long been silenced must be allowed to tell their stories their own way. This will not be an easy feat; inspiration, as well as support, will be needed. Who better to inspire these pioneers than women pirates? After all, women storytellers will be, in essence, stealing something from someone who doesn’t want them to have it, which is essentially piracy.

These pirate legends have endured for so long, on- and offscreen, because people want to hear them. The outlaw’s irresistible appeal is a testament to the hunger for freedom and the desire to get away with things that one ought not get away with. Pirate women deserve a spot next to their more famous male counterparts because yearning to escape the confines of an ordinary life and to live on one’s own terms is not an exclusively male feeling. Indeed, women may have more reason to reach outside of their traditional roles than men do. Women deserve, when they get this feeling, to know that they are not alone, and that they have famous foremothers whom they can look up to and whose footsteps they can follow in. The pirates in this book can inspire any woman who has ever wanted something more and dreamed of finding her own place in the sun. Hopefully their stories will inspire the next generation of explorers, scientists, inventors, politicians, peacemakers, and other innovators and guide them on their journey from “what has always been” into the land of “what can be.”