Otherwise, Why The Tattoos, The Tough Talk And The Strutting Around?Because You Cant Trust Yourselves.

“Otherwise, why the tattoos, the tough talk and the strutting around? Because you can’t trust yourselves.”

TOSHIRŌ MIFUNE in Drunken Angel (1948) dir. Akira Kurosawa

blossom and subterfuge

@posthuman_morulus.art_official

one of the best things david jenkins does with OFMD is that when he fucks with the historicity of 18th century pirate-adventure genre, the effect is not just comedic. it’s not just getting a kick out of leather gang + clipper ships + dramatic capture scene set to fleetwood mac’s the chain + british royalists in their stupid wigs. it’s that the obscuring of that timeline and ours allows u to perceive the setting of imperialism that the characters are playing in as both a past relic and present reality. is this more intentional than just an aesthetic choice? feels like it. why not tbh? the Pirates Dicking Around genre has always been about 1700s western european empire. and in OFMD we get an eerie insistence that there is actually no post-colonial era. there never was. there’s just the iterations of that violent legacy: from the trans-atlantic slave route, the pillaging of asia-pacific, etc. to the current forms of global imperial militarism and armed police states that took its place. on paper the show is based on a true story. in tone it’s present-haunted. and the central motley crew here works bc they’re all dynamic, hilarious, flirty, grimy, etc. but they also work bc they’re all visually, clearly a little united nations survey of colonized peoples whose shit was fucked up by 18th century imperialists. and it isn’t even subtext?? the whole show is about piracy as refuge. yea sure, from everyone’s dicey personal life dramas, sour romantic entanglements, the general banalities of life etc. but also, piracy as escape from the larger ills of societal outcasting and poverty as a result of …. . british/spanish/french/etc colonialism. consider: blackbeard’s voice in the show is just taika’s actual māori accent. and there’s a scene where you find out the kraken isn’t real, that blackbeard is monster and man. and behind his infamy is just some guy who’s traumatized, forlorn as all fuck, with insane daddy issues, etc. but whose tender humanity is brought into question against his own monstrousness. you see the whites of his eyes peering out of a soot smeared face, a mirror of the savage native caricature that all 18th century western europeans held of their colonized pacific islander subjects. blackbeard’s final act is a regression into that mythic dehumanization but rly it’s just him at his most heartbroken and lonely. and yea, this is mainly the angsty climax part of a multi-act love story. but also perhaps a purposeful genre-aware moment among many other similar moments within a show whose historical/present context is very explicit. and is meant to define the parameters of the world these characters are struggling in. ultimately OFMD makes u feel like. the absurd horror and wretchedness of colonialism’s totaling stain on history is in fact the most surreal wasteland valley-of-death setting for a group of outcasts to go and find refuge in love, gay sex, hooligan shit, and jokes. in the 1700s pirate hostile open seas, among their own fellow-othered. u know