My Husband Tells Me You're in Sharks?
Three outcasts save the summer by blowing up a Great White in Jaws
Show me the way to go home,
I’m tired and I want to go to bed,
I had a little drink about an hour ago,
And it’s gone right to my head…
My grandfather used to sing this sea shanty to me at night during his semi-regular visits from Dublin. Sitting on the edge of my bed, in the shadow thrown from the hall light, his gravelly baritone made me feel safe and ready for sleep like few other voices could. A teetotaller his whole life, I’ve no idea how he settled on this particular ditty for a lullaby, nor that it was the centrepiece of what would eventually become my one of my favourite movies: Jaws.
Chief Brody, Hooper and Quint break into a near hysterical rendition of Show me the way to go home while getting wildly drunk on hooch a few miles off the coast of Amity island. It’s a brief moment of levity, a tension release, between the first attack made by the Great White shark they’re hunting and the assault that will eventually bring the ORCA down and claim Quint’s life. It’s the first time the three outcasts – the blow-in island police chief with a fear of water, the nerdy trust fund baby who’s given his life over to science and the WWII vet-turned, shark hunter - let their guard down and begin to enjoy each other’s company while the shark circles in the water beneath.
Jaws is a 1975 movie directed by Stephen Spielberg based on the novel by Peter Benchley, where the 4th of July celebrations in a New England holiday town of Amity Island are jeopardised by the arrival of a man-eating shark who feeds on revellers, beginning with a ‘summer girl’ Chrissy. As the attacks increase Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) pressures for the beaches to be closed but the Mayor (Murray Hamilton) insists they remain open, despite the rising death toll. The mother of a boy killed by the shark offers a bounty for its capture and hordes of would-be shark hunters descend on the town. None of them manages to kill the shark, which becomes ever more brazen, targeting swimmers midday. In the end the job is given to Quint (Robert Shaw) who takes off with Brody and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) to hunt the shark down aboard the Orca.
Another Abiding Obsession
By the time I saw Jaws on TV, at 11 or 12, I was already obsessed with sharks. I had watched all the BBC wildlife and Discovery channel documentaries ever broadcast and tracked down every single reference to sharks from my local library to complete an epic (well, I thought so) 6th class research project entitled simply, ‘Sharks.’ I remember meticulously tracing pictures of shark anatomy directly from encyclopaedias into my project book, colouring in the organs and describing, in my best cursive (computers and photocopiers were not readily available in 1997), the life-cycle of the Great White. The project was ‘highly commended’ in the end of year awards - I even got a little trophy!
Sharks terrified me but I was comforted by the fact that the only sharks regularly spotted off the coast of Ireland were filter-feeding Basking Sharks, huge but toothless and therefore harmless. I wanted desperately to see one but contented myself with collecting their egg sacks, known as mermaids’ purses, that littered Ireland’s beaches and watching Jaws. A terrifying delight from beginning to end, Jaws was way to experience the awesome power of the Great White, without ever having to get close.
It took me longer than most children to ‘grow out’ of my childhood interests, and often it wasn’t so much growing, as being dragged, out. My mother, returning from her first and only trip to the US, brought back Twinkies and a special a special T-shirt from San Francisco emblazoned with a Great White surging out of the ocean in a spray of blood. I loved that t-shirt (and still do) and was deeply touched by the gesture from my mother. As much as my behaviour could frustrate and confound her the gift told me she was, at least vaguely, aware of my passions and did not wholly discourage them. I thought it was the coolest thing ever, my shark t-shirt from America, but when I wore it for PE class during my first year in high-school all I received were stares and outright ridicule. I put it in my closet and it has stayed there ever since.
In a world where teenage girls were supposed to be obsessed with boy bands, clothes, hair and make-up, Jaws became the socially acceptable way to maintain my interest in sharks well into my teens. There are no heart-throbs, arguably no conventionally attractive people at all except for Chrissy, the ‘summer girl’ who immediately dies. Though I did harbour a little crush on Hooper it was more out of identification with a fellow nerd, than anything else. No, Jaws was an acceptable preference because it was a horror movie of sorts, delightfully scary. And though mainstream Hollywood, it was also a cinematic classic by the nineties, when Spielberg was still at the height of his story-telling powers (in my opinion) and still with considerable cred (AI had yet to come along).
My Husband Tells Me You’re in Sharks?
As with Jurassic Park, the heroes of Jaws, except for Quint who is a sea-hardy veteran, are among the most unlikely of any action movie. Nobody particularly likes Hooper, he lacks respect for ‘authority’ and insists on speaking truths few people are willing to hear. But just like Drs. Grant, Sattler and Malcolm in Jurassic Park, the movie is respects Hooper for his knowledge and celebrates his obsession. He gets to nerd-out about his love of sharks in many scenes, and rather than being ridiculed, the audience is caught up in his excitement and passion.
In fact, the all-consuming nature of Hooper’s obsession is not unlike the way many autistics feel about our “special interests.” Our passions are the things that drive us, that get us up in the morning, that keep us going even in the face of the considerable quantity of shit the world throws at us and, in many cases, they’re an essential source of emotional regulation. Perhaps sometimes they can cause us harm: Hooper’s body has the scars to show for many shark encounters that were less than amicable. But this isn’t portrayed as something which has held him back and he seems fully aware of the risks he is taking.
Quint is equally obsessed and equally knowledgeable when it comes to sharks, but those qualities are borne of experience and trauma. In one of the most compelling scenes, Quint recalls the five days spent afloat in the Indian ocean following a Japanese submarine attack on the USS Indianapolis, watching his fellow crew being picked off by sharks and waiting for his turn:
Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ’til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and… they rip you to pieces.
Whether it was the trauma, survivors guilt or a way for him to release his own fear, he has dedicated his life to sharking (and drinking). If Hooper sees sharks as creatures which fascinate for their power, Quint sees only enmity in that power. I think deep down he knows this will be his last voyage and he seems ready to face his death in the jaws of a Great White.
Meanwhile Brody is afraid of water, knows nothing and can do nothing, except scatter chum into the sea. I have to admit though, his near paralysing anxiety is the closest to any reaction I would have had if I’d been on that boat. And though Hooper’s equipment proves nearly useless, and Brody’s general uselessness nearly gets them all killed, Brody eventually manages to blow up the shark using an oxygen tank. He and Hooper swim back to shore having saved what remains of the Amity Island summer.
This ending reminds me of an exchange from one of my other favourite movies, The Life Aquatic, when Steve Zissou shares his plans to blow up the recently discovered Jaguar Shark with dynamite:
Audience member: What would be the scientific purpose of killing it?
Zissou: Revenge.
Endangered Species
My brother once chastised me for proclaiming Jaws to be my favourite movie. “Wasn’t I aware that since Jaws came out sharks have been hunted into endangerment?” he said. The implication being that Spielberg, and by extension, my fandom, was to blame. (Family will sometimes try and find anything to blame you for!) And while shark populations have been devastated over the last 50 years, a fact that never ceases to distress me, it is largely due to overfishing specific shark populations and sharks getting caught in commercial nets. Blaming Spielberg is no better than any of the facile arguments that blame the media for any other expression violence. White men were hunting animals into extinction for sport long before Spielberg decided to film Jaws.
Though my shark obsession has waned in recent years, Jaws remains one of my favourite movies of all time and I still love being in the ocean more than anything else. A history of seizures and, frankly, a terror of deep water means I’ve never gone diving but I have tried snorkelling many times. Once I can see the ocean floor I can usually manage the fear. In all that time I’ve never had a close encountered with a shark, even as thoughts of their teeth ripping through my flesh were never far from my mind as I explored reefs in Mexico, Belize or East Timor.
I did eventually get to realise one of my childhood dreams when I went swimming with Whale sharks off the Mexican coast. They were beautiful and terrifying but did not swallow me whole. In fact they barely seemed to notice me nor the other 100 humans being thrown off the 20 boats circling their feeding ground while they went about getting their breakfast. It turned out to be a total tourist trap with a questionable ecological impact, and I was in the water for a grand total of five minutes at most. I’m not sure I’d do it again (because, ethics) but it felt amazing at the time to swim alongside those gentle creatures even just for five minutes.
To wrap up the last two week’s digressions into “special interests” it tickles me to think how Spielberg has nurtured two of my earliest passions through simple story-telling, compelling characters and ground-breaking animatronics in two movies that remain timeless classics: Jurassic Park and Jaws.