I watched Pirates of the Caribbean again recently, and something about the captain of the Flying Dutchman struck me differently this time. Maybe it’s because I’ve grown older, or maybe I’ve learned how heartbreak changes people. But beneath the tentacles, the curses, and the chaos, I saw something I hadn’t noticed before: Davy Jones wasn’t just a villain. He was a hopeless romantic who couldn’t survive the weight of unrequited love.
Before he became a creature of the deep, he was a sailor who fell in love with the sea goddess, Calypso. He gave her his heart, literally and figuratively, and devoted his life to ferrying lost souls to the afterlife. It was noble, selfless even. But when Calypso broke her promise to meet him after ten years at sea, his faith turned to fury. The love that once made him whole became his undoing. And so, in an act of unbearable pain, he cut his heart out and locked it away in a chest, swearing never to feel again.
“I gave you my heart!” That line, shouted in anguish to Calypso, carries all the pain of betrayal and loss.
That moment wasn’t just the start of his curse. It was the death of his softness and his mercy.
There’s a kind of pain that doesn’t fade. It mutates. It hardens the heart and distorts what once was pure. Davy Jones didn’t just lose love; he lost himself. And that, I think, is the tragedy behind most villains; they are made that way by something they could not heal from. A real loss for human kind.
Look around pop culture, and you’ll find this pattern everywhere.
In Joker, we see a man abandoned by society, his laughter becoming a shield against a world that refused to hear his pain.
In Maleficent, betrayal turned love into vengeance. In Killmonger from Black Panther, we saw anger born from inequality, from watching his people suffer while others lived free. Even Anakin Skywalker, before he became Darth Vader, was just a boy who wanted to protect those he loved, and in trying too hard to control fate, he lost everything.
When you trace their stories back far enough, what you find is not evil but grief. Not hatred, but longing.
Davy Jones fits perfectly among them. His story isn’t really about a sea curse or a chest full of hearts; it’s about what happens when love goes unanswered, when we give everything and are met with silence.
We like to imagine we’d handle heartbreak gracefully, that we’d heal and move on, but the truth is, many of us have our own “dead man’s chest.” A secret space inside us where the pain lives quietly, where we say we’re fine but still flinch at memories. The things we bury don’t die; they just find new ways to breathe.
A quiet nod, too, to Bill Nighy, whose performance breathed such sorrowful brilliance into Davy Jones that you could almost feel the heartbreak beneath the motion capture and makeup.
So, here’s to Davy Jones, the sailor who carved out his heart because it hurt too much to keep it. And here’s to the rest of us, still learning that love, even when lost, is better mourned than buried.