Corporate Pirates (A Review of Captain Phillips)

This isn’t the first time that a character played by Tom Hanks has been stranded. A little over ten years ago, he starred in the film Cast Away from the year 2000, about a FedEx employee who lives through a plane crash and ended up on a deserted island somewhere in the vast Pacific Ocean, forced to survive on his own for several years. And in 2004, he starred in the Steve Speilberg film Terminal, in which he played a visitor from the fictional Eastern European country of Krakozhia stranded in an airport because his visa is no longer valid. The tenor of both of these films was vastly different, even though they both dealt with transformations and abandonment. The first one demonstrated a change of tone, where the confidence and airiness of the opening was transformed by a descent into silence and despair. The latter film was a light-hearted and uplifting story colored by comedic touches and an overall optimism.  What is comedy if it doesn’t involve a type of restoration of balance, a type of reunion and reaffirmation of the bonds that hold societies together even in the face of momentary destabilization?

In the film Captain Phillips, released in 2013, we have another instance of a stranded character. This time Tom Hanks plays the eponymous protagonist who is in charge of a cargo ship following a dangerous route past the eastern coast of Africa. It is a route that begins in the port of Oman and ends in Kenya, but in a more general and allegorical sense, it is a psychic voyage that strips the protagonist of his certainties and his sense of safety. What had seemed so far away and so exotic, something safely contained, erupts suddenly to overwhelm and challenge them.  The chief danger is posed by the Somali pirates, a woeful band of desperate and illiterate men who are forced to venture out to sea to capture ships and demand ransoms, but they are only a catalyst. The danger is, or course, is a constitutive part of a system, one that doesn’t have to do only with conditions in the developing world and the horn of Africa specifically. It has to do with an entire worldwide economic system.

There are various themes that become apparent in this film. One of these is the similarity between the developing and developed world. The underlying worldwide economy, after all, has become increasingly globalized during the past decades, and it has displaced and distorted economic practices everywhere. There are no longer localized and self-reliant economies, everything is tied together, and the instabilities are quickly manifested everywhere. Such as the case, for example, in the global economic meltdown of 2008, which caused a global economic contraction.  In an era of transnational capital and distributed production, we have an erosion of fundamental protections that had been achieved even in industrialized countries such as the United States. As the character of Captain Phillips notes in the beginning of the film, on a bleak and cloudy morning as he prepares once again to leave on another job assignment, competitive pressures are become more and more pronounced and workers are become more and more vulnerable.  He states that, once, a worker could “hunker down quietly” and have a career, without having to face the continual threat of downsizing and displacement, but now they have to constantly struggle to work harder and faster, to upgrade their qualifications in order just to tread water. Of course this is a global phenomenon, and the common theme is that workers have become more and more vulnerable, exploited and discarded by a directing class that holds all the cards.

This is echoed in the plight of the Somali men, whose livelihood, the film seems to assert, has also suffered in the fact of these worldwide pressures. They can’t make a living from fishing anymore, because there are too few opportunities and, fundamentally, too few fish. The trawlers prowl in international waters, gathering up vast catches and leaving nothing to local workers, who are left scrambling while they impotently watch the giant cargo and tanker ships streaming along their coasts. It is a symbol of a economy that is leaving them behind.

These illiterate and desperate Somalis are also controlled by bosses, who take advantage of their desperation. These “bosses” hold all the cards, and find them easy prey for schemes which involve participating in the new economy of extortion, one in which desperation finds hope in risky schemes. They go out into the ocean and capture these ships that stream by so indifferently, then demand ransom, a windfall of millions of dollars. The profits, of course, only accrue to the bosses, never to the workers. It is easy to see that one of the themes of this film, then, is a critique of the current economic order, where destabilization wears many changes of color.

But this is also a film that reaffirms the seductions of the center, of the American way of life, of consumer culture and the idea of making a trip to the big city, to New York.  The chief pirate proclaims over and over that he is also “American”, for isn’t that a state of expectation and a hope for improvement, and not just a nationality? It is a matter of those on the outside who wish desperately to join the party, because long before the era of globalization there was already a cultural shift in evidence, where the people living in the developed world were exposed to the seductions of the developed world and the consumer economy. The Somalis are no different from the working classes in the United States, no different than the peasants from rural China who stream into the big cities, no different from the protestors of the Arab Spring who wanted to topple long-ruling autarchs and take control of their societies.  They wish to desperately gain a leg up and storm into the middle classes. The film seems to argue, thus, that there is a fundamental convergence between the two, between the illiterate fishermen of Africa and the undereducated workers of America, in a system that thrives on just this type of disjuncture because it propels the expansion of this system. It reminds me, then, of the thesis presented in the film The Reluctant Fundamentalist, where fundamentalism thrives on extremism and these ideological dysjunctures that involve treating people as means and not ends.

In this film we don’t quite see the warm and likeable Tom Hanks that we have come to know from so many previous films. It is undeniable that the actor has a charisma all his own, a warmth that appeals to audience members and binds us to him immediately. Here, he plays a more subdued character, almost dour, who commands the respect of his crew but doesn’t seem to have any real friends. He chides his workers for taking long coffee breaks, and behaves like a corporate hack when he remonstrates with them when they complain about the risks they face in light of a possible attack. When his crew confronts him to complain about these unreasonable risks, he dangles the prospect of unemployment, telling them that they can sign the paperwork at the nearest port of call and have them leave his crew.  He yells at them over and over, “You knew the risks, you signed up knowing the risks”, and this gives him a certain unsympathetic air that foreshadows precisely what will happen to him. As an agent of a crushing and exploitative economic order, of course he will be crushed and traumatized by what will happen next.

As an adventure story, this film is engaging. We see the long odds faced by the band of pirates, serious and frail men almost all of them deathly thin, driven by desperation and fueled by the drug khat (a narcotic found in the leaves of a native plant), traveling on precarious longboats with broken engines that would surely seem to be no match for the gigantic cargo ships. They are challenging Leviathan, of course, and we can understand their motivation even if we don’t agree with their way of achieving their objectives. They are desperate but also enterprising men, pushed by the same values that drive corporate executives, the drive to take risks, and the menacing captain of the Somalis with the overbite, Abduwali Muse (played by a lean and boyish Barkhad Abdi, an actual Somali refugee), bends to the pressures of being a captain. There can be no scope for collective decision-making in such an enterprise (it is a business, after all!), and Adbuwali succumbs to the pressure to become a CEO, a tyrant who has to control his crew and be ruthless, engaging even in violence. He is another cog in the system, of course, and this is their only chance to prove themselves, the only way in which an intrepid band of four pirates wielding automatic weapons will commandeer a mammoth ship.

The film is one long journey in the education of Captain Phillips. Having been unable to sympathize with the plight of his fellow workers, and reacting with hostility to the statement made by one of his crewmembers who states he is a “union” man but never signed up for these risks, he comes to understand their plight and desperation from his close contact with the pirates. Captain Phillips is brave, of course, and is a creative and competent leader who saves many lives, but he trusts too much in the system. He is a cog in a system who refuses to accept this understand, and seems incapable of finding common cause. Can there be any more way of exposing the predatory impulses of this economic order if it doesn’t involve illustrating the violence that it engenders? The science fiction writer H.G. Wells found another way in his classic The Time Machine. He imagined the process of evolution as applied to the capitalist system, wherein workers would eventually become carnivores (the Morlocks), eating the progeny of the effete directorial classes who would grow too used to their life of splendor and luxury and become Eloi.

Are these Somali pirates truly as inhuman and bloodthirsty as they seem? It is easy to portray them as parodies of viciousness and unreasonable third world anger, and they scowl, bicker and yell at each other more so than they do at the American crew. They issue threats and wave guns, administering beatings with maniacal intensity, never acknowledging the crew but evincing all the while that they are out of their element. They bumble through the ship, but they are dangerous precisely in their vulnerability. And the captain seems to recognize this desperation, almost as if they were echoing the complaint of his own crew members, one which they never express to him but which we can visualize in their faces, in their confusion, in their manic intensity: “We never signed on to this!”. They too are injured, they too are incapacitated, they too are wounded, first one by stepping on glass, then the Somali captain himself whose hand is injured when he is captured by the crewmembers. What sort of madness has overtaken them?

There is a convergence once again, and the pirates become slightly more sympathetic to the degree that their order breaks down in the face of an overwhelming show of force. It is a moral descent that assumes hellish proportions, for when the pirates escape the boat in a small lifeboat, holding Captain Phillips hostage, they face increasingly long odds.  The small lifeboat is soon surrounded by the giant naval ships of the Americans, a confrontation that can’t auger well even in the face of the pirate leader’s tired insistence that everything will work out, everything will be okay. Two captains come to the realization that they are both cogs in a system that relies on violence and the threat of force, they are both collateral damage.  For all his clever strategems, for all his “tricks” and his quick thinking, Captain Phillips is still confined in a precarious lifeboat, still in peril of losing his life, still subject to beatings, still forced to deal with what he comes to recognizes are the consequences of a worldwide system. “You are no fishermen”, he tells the captain. No, in such a system, they can’t be.

In the end, one becomes almost seasick by the cresting and falling waves of emotion and tension. The captain is heartened by hope, but the presence of these naval ships seems only to drive his captors to more and more desperate measures, to increased threats and to brutal beatings as the pirates in this futile dynamic where the superior force can’t let the other group go. “Don’t worry, everything will be all right”, the pirate captain tries to reassure his captive, but he knows it won’t, because he has already lost control of his own men, especially of the tall and brutal Somali from a neighboring village who is driven by anger. They are different men, both cogs in this formula that would seem only to auger a bitter end for all the cogs in the system. Is this not what it means to find yourself abandoned, for the average worker to be “let go”, stranded, rendered superfluous and thus expendable?

Finally, after the pirates are killed and the captain is rescued, splattered as he is in the blood of his dead captors and whimpering and howling in despair, we see him taken on board the ship in what in other jingoist films would seem to provide the perfect opportunity for a self-celebratory moment. Such was the case, after all, in the film “Airforce One” from 1997, in which the kidnapped president, played by Harrison Ford, after undergoing a similarly terrifying ordeal with Russian captors, is rescued and he salutes his new crew, as if he were somehow superhuman and unaffected by his experiences (hubris triumphant, a crowd pleasing action film with cardboard one-dimensional villains). In this case, we have no such celebratory moment. We have, instead, the most harrowing and affecting sequence of the film, one in which the captain is attended to by medical personnel and tries to come to grips with this return to a normalcy that seems, somehow, unreal.

He is asked if he can talk, if he can describe what has happened to him, while attended to in a no nonsense way by medical personnel. He is shell-shocked, he can barely answer, he can’t seem to corral his thoughts, and his delayed responses shows all the signs of the trauma he has suffered. We have no heroic superman taking immediate control once again, saluting and returning to his post as if he could shrug off his experiences, maybe even cracking jokes a la Bruce Willis in the die hard movies. What distinguishes this film from other action films is that we see the human side of this suffering, even as the pirate captain is taken into custody and arrested, knocked down as he is on the floor, and told that his friends are all dead. Captain Phillips has been traumatized by his ordeal, and his vulnerability as he whimpers and stammers and struggles to respond as he sits on the table, is a powerful, powerful sequence. One can’t imagine that we have any “winners” here. We whimper along with the captain.

We have, then, an action film that tries to go beyond the formulas that seem to hold sway. We don’t have a reluctant hero, we have a victim who manages to survive. It is a film that offers a thesis, affirming that there is a convergence in the experiences of these two worlds, and that we have workers who are afforded little options, and are forced to submit to an unjust system that is bolstered by force and the condemnation of a moral code that upholds this system. Just as the crew of the ship are unable to assert their just claim that they should not be subjected to these risks (“We didn’t sign up for this”), we have Somali pirates who have no livelihood, and who are forced by their gun-wielding bosses to venture out into the ocean, to risk their lives and bring back ships. It is the system, rather than specific groups, that is piratical, and we see the aftermath, not in a heroic sequence where order is reestablished as if nothing had happened and the characters are unchanged, but in a depressing return to normality. We see a film that end on a more reflective note, a fade to black, rather than fireworks and a heroic reunion with his wife and children.

In an economy in which workers are increasingly “Nickle and Dimed”, to refer to the title of Barbara Ehrenreich’s famous work from 2001 which details the transformation of the economy into an entity which has grown more and more exploitative, more reliant on a vulnerable and subservient workforce, more easy to control and without elementary protections, and where workers are forced to accept ever more dangerous risks, can we be sure that the real pirates were defeated? Aren't they all still cogs in the system?

Copyrights 2014 (C) Oscar G. Romero