As much as I like a good polymorphously perverse pirate [lookin’ at YOU, Captain Jack Sparrow!], the appearance of such a character type in Stardust worries me exceedingly. I wanted to go see this high fantasy fairy tale…until I heard about Robert DeNiro playing the sky pirate as a cross-dressing ham. Well, okay, the presence of a cross-dressing ham doesn’t scare me away so much as does this quote, from a New York Times interview by Charles McGrath (New York Times, August 5th, 2007) with the perpetrators of Stardust:

//…Tristran grows up, falls in love and has a hair and wardrobe makeover under the care of a pirate captain (De Niro) who if he’s not gay nevertheless enjoys dressing up in a tutu in the privacy of his cabin.

“I don’t know where that came from,” Goldman said in a telephone interview. “It was just one of those magic moments. Matthew and I were thinking it might be interesting if the captain was in some ways wrestling with identity issues the way Tristran is.”//

The offending comment, the one that got me anxious, is in bold. Basically Goldman’s statement can be translated as the following: “I have no idea why the sky pirate is a prissy poofter. Someone just got a silly brain fart one day and, since we were all drunk and/or hopped up on drugs, we laughed uprorariously and decided to incorporate this bit of throwaway, sophomoric stereotyping into our film because we’re self-indulgent wankers. Captain Shakespeare’s sartorial interests really have nothing to do with anything, but, since I’m being asked about it, I’ll pull an answer about its relevance out of my butt to give the illusion that we actually really planned it.” 

I’m not amused.