In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (Gore Verbinski, 2006), the survivors of a ship wrecked by the Kraken kneel on deck while Davy Jones walks past them and asks each one whether he fears death. Whoever accepts his bargain faces a hundred years of service aboard the Flying Dutchman; the man who refuses, a cross in his hand, is thrown overboard. Will Turner, who is neither dead nor dying, he keeps as a good-faith payment on Jack Sparrow’s debt. Jones has an octopus for a face and a crew that is slowly merging with the ship and with the creatures of the sea. His story is revealed little by little: Calypso, goddess of the sea, charged him with ferrying to the other world those who died at sea, and in return he could come ashore one day every ten years to be with her. After the first decade, she did not appear. Jones taught the pirates how to bind her in human form, abandoned his duty and cut out his heart, which he keeps in a chest. Lord Beckett, of the East India Company, seizes that heart and turns it into his weapon, and in At World’s End (2007) Jack helps the mortally wounded Will stab it; Will takes his place as captain. One missed meeting and a whole ocean paying for it: the frustration-aggression hypothesis rarely finds such a large displacement for such a specific cause.
// The theoryFrom frustration to aggression
In Frustration and Aggression (1939), a group of Yale University researchers led by John Dollard, with Leonard Doob, Neal Miller, Orval Mowrer and Robert Sears, formulated an influential hypothesis: frustration, the blocking of an expected goal, always produces an instigation to aggression, and aggression is always a consequence of frustration. When it is not possible to attack the source of the frustration, aggression is displaced onto other, more accessible targets. In 1989, Leonard Berkowitz reformulated the theory: it is not frustration itself that produces aggression but the negative emotion it causes.
A rage without an addressee
Few characters illustrate displaced aggression as well as Davy Jones. His frustration has a precise origin: Calypso did not keep their appointment. But he cannot take revenge on a goddess, at least not directly, and his rage pours out onto everything that represents her: the sea, the sailors, the ships. Every sailor to whom he offers his deal is, in a way, a victim of his spite. The frustration, moreover, is never resolved: by tearing out his heart he has given up the possibility of overcoming it. It is aggression that finds no rest because its cause remains.
// The subjectA heart in a chest
Bill Nighy plays Davy Jones as a tragic character beneath his monstrous appearance. He plays on the organ with his tentacles a melody he shares with Calypso, keeps a locket with her portrait and, despite everything, still loves her. His cruelty is that of someone who has decided never to suffer again. The film turns the torn-out heart into a literal image of what has happened to him: to stop feeling pain, he has stopped feeling anything, and with that he has lost his humanity.
The scene on the wrecked ship shows what his trade has become. Calypso charged him with guiding the dead; Jones recruits them. His question to the dying, whether they fear death, whether they fear their deeds laid bare and their sins punished, turns other people’s fear into labor. Dollard would call it displacement: the goddess is out of reach, but drowning sailors are close at hand, and each one who accepts is a small revenge against the duty she gave him.
The line comes in At World’s End, when he finally stands before Calypso again, and it speaks not of rage but of service: ten years of work and nobody waiting at the end. Elsewhere in the film he shouts that she pretended to love him and that it was she who betrayed him. His last word, with his heart pierced, is her name. After a century of displaced aggression, the original frustration is untouched, which is what Brad Bushman’s studies on catharsis show: venting anger on third parties does not exhaust it, it feeds it.
Davy Jones
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// The crackNot all frustration ends in aggression
Dollard’s original formulation was criticized almost immediately for being too absolute. Not all frustration produces aggression: it can produce sadness, resignation or a search for solutions. And not all aggression springs from frustration: there is instrumental, cold aggression used to obtain something. Neal Miller himself corrected the hypothesis in 1941.
Moreover, Davy Jones does not act out of rage alone. His pact with the sailors is also a business: they give him a hundred years of work. And his alliance with Beckett shows that frustration mixes with calculation and coercion. Jones’s aggression is emotional in origin but instrumental in its workings.
Managing frustration
Anger-management and intimate-partner violence prevention programs, inspired in part by Berkowitz’s theory, teach people to recognize the distress frustration causes and to respond differently. Research shows they work best when they also address the beliefs that legitimize aggression, such as the idea that another person’s rejection gives one the right to revenge. Jones never questioned that idea: Calypso’s snub gave him the right to everything.
Three key ideas
- Dollard’s frustration-aggression (1939) holds that aggression always springs from frustration and that, if it cannot be directed at its cause, it is displaced onto other targets.
- Davy Jones, spurned because Calypso did not keep their appointment, tears out his heart and pours his rage onto sailors and the whole sea.
- The crack: not all frustration produces aggression, and Jones’s is emotional in origin but instrumental in its workings.
Sources · further reading
- Dollard, J., Doob, L. W., Miller, N. E., Mowrer, O. H. and Sears, R. R. (1939). Frustration and Aggression. Yale University Press.
- Miller, N. E. (1941). “The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis”. Psychological Review, 48(4), 337-342.
- Berkowitz, L. (1989). “Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: Examination and Reformulation”. Psychological Bulletin, 106(1), 59-73.
- Marcus-Newhall, A., Pedersen, W. C., Carlson, M. and Miller, N. (2000). “Displaced Aggression Is Alive and Well: A Meta-Analytic Review”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(4), 670-689.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Davy Jones?
Davy Jones is a villain from Pirates of the Caribbean, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He waited ten years to spend a day with the woman he loved.
Why does Davy Jones become a villain?
The frustration-aggression hypothesis explains Davy Jones better than his octopus face: one meeting Calypso never kept, and a whole ocean paying for her absence.
Which criminological theory explains Davy Jones?
Davy Jones's case is analysed through Frustration–aggression. The frustration-aggression theory of John Dollard and his Yale colleagues (1939) holds that aggression is always a consequence of frustration, and that frustration always produces some form of aggression, though it is often displaced onto targets other than its cause. Davy Jones, of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) and At World’s End (2007), was charged by the sea goddess Calypso with guiding the souls of the drowned. When she failed to keep their appointment, he tore out his heart, betrayed the goddess and turned the Flying Dutchman into a ship of the damned that offers dying sailors a hundred years of service in exchange for not dying.
