This guest post by Julia Patt appears as part of our theme week on Masculinity.
Full disclosure: I love Jaws.
I’ve loved Jaws since I was about 8 years old. (It was during my marine biologist phase.) Sharks are awesome. The movie that frightened people away from beaches in the summer of 1975 made me want to get my SCUBA certification. My first stop in any aquarium is still the shark exhibit.
As a lifelong member of Team Shark, I’ve never had much regard for the people who populate the movie and Amity Island. Let’s be honest — Chief Martin Brody (beautifully underplayed by Roy Scheider) is hardly an archetypal hero worthy of Homeric simile. He’s a quiet aquaphobe who moved to Amity to escape the upheaval of 1970s New York and raise his children somewhere peaceful. More than anything, in fact, we recognize him as a father. Not a stern authority figure but an affectionate, involved parent who at one point demands of his young son, “Give us a kiss.”
To his credit, Brody seems to understand he’s in way over his head (sure, pun intended) when it becomes apparent their quiet new home has a shark problem. He tries to close Amity’s beaches, is met with public uproar, and ultimately gets overruled by the island’s mayor, a consummate politician, who explains blandly: “We rely on the summer people.” (It’s just economics.) Later, after a particularly grisly attack involving a young boy, Brody accepts a harsh slap from the child’s mother for leaving the beaches open. From his perspective, he deserves it. He would do more, but he lacks standing, authority, and power. In fact, he doesn’t even know that much about sharks, only what he’s picked up by self-educating. Given our hero and his limitations, it seems like Amity Island will remain an open buffet for many years to come.
Then, 50 minutes into Spielberg’s carefully paced film, we meet Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), the young, wealthy scientist and shark enthusiast who comes to assess Amity’s shark problem based on the remains of the first victim. Hooper provides a stark contrast to Brody: he’s confident, fast-talking, and assertive. When the pair try to convince the mayor that it’s a Great White they’re dealing with, Hooper gives up, exasperated, and spits, “ I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a man who’s lining up to be a hot lunch.”
While Hooper and Brody immediately form a friendly connection, their differences are readily apparent. They belong to different generations; they belong to different socioeconomic classes. “How much?” Brody asks after Hooper admits his high-tech setup in self-funded.
“Me or the whole family?”
And although he is hardier and — in some ways — braver than Brody, Hooper likewise cannot solve the problem of the shark. Like Brody, he is an outsider on the island. The mayor dismisses him out of hand as a fame-seeker. And his bluster primarily serves to cover up his own fears. E.g., during the film’s two autopsies, Hooper recoils, fighting the urge to vomit, and, in one case, shakily asks for a glass of water. In investigating a wrecked fishing boat, he is startled by a floating corpse and drops the massive shark tooth that would make their case. In a way, he creates no more momentum and has no more agency than Brody.
It’s only after the Fourth of July, when the beaches are open and Brody’s own son is nearly a victim of an attack, that the story can advance and our would-be heroes take real action. This begins when Brody, more aggressive than we’ve seen him all film, forces the mayor to hire local shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) to kill the animal.
Ah, Quint. Salty, idiosyncratic, shanty-singing Quint. He makes an initial appearance at a town hall meeting, announcing his presence by dragging his fingernails down a chalkboard and launches into one of his quintessential (I’m not sorry) monologues, concluding, “I don’t want no volunteers, I don’t want no mates, there’s just too many captains on this island. $10,000 for me by myself. For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.”
Quint is our monster-hunter. Our Ahab, sans whalebone leg. He is, in fact, what we expect out of our hyper-masculine Hollywood heroes. He belongs to another era entirely, one far removed from the radar and shark darts and cages Hooper brings to the table. And unlike Brody, he has no family, no obligations, and no qualms doing what he believes must be done. Despite his statement about needing no volunteers and no mates, he acquiesces and allows Brody and Hooper to accompany him on his quest, but he is undeniably in charge.
Onboard the Orca, we see the ways in which the power dynamics among the three men develop. Although there is a clear conflict between Hooper and Quint — “You’ve got silly hands, Mr. Hooper” — Hooper’s established skills save him from the worst of the chores, such as ladling chum into the water. Instead, these fall to Brody, whose status as a novice places him at the bottom of the social hierarchy. This even leads to conflict between Brody and Hooper, who chastises him for mishandling equipment.
Of course, they’re not alone out there. The shark’s appearance both divides and unites them. They work together to bring it to surface and yet Quint — in a moment of psychosis? desperation? — destroys their radio equipment with a baseball bat, preventing them from seeking help, and then kills the Orca’s engine by running it too hard. In the dark, they sit below deck in the galley, not sleeping, but drinking and trading stories about old scars.
Or rather, Hooper and Quint trade stories. This one from a moray eel. That one from a thresher shark. Brody has nothing to contribute to the conversation, although he considers sharing his appendectomy scar before deciding against it. Here we have the ultimate distinction between the three men. The life Brody has lived is utterly different, if not entirely sheltered. What dangers or dilemmas he’s faced in his life simply haven’t left the kind of marks Hooper and Quint bear. And their lack prevents him from engaging in any stereotypical masculine posturing. He is, by that criteria anyway, untested.
Instead of participating in this proverbial measuring contest, Brody asks Quint about a removed tattoo on his arm. Quint relays the story in his final speech of the film — the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II and the death of its many crewmen in shark-invested waters. It’s a chilling story, brilliantly delivered by Shaw and beautifully reflected by the reactions of Scheider and Dreyfuss, whose respective characters are both too young to have fought (and we can imagine both have missed Vietnam for other reasons). They are simply in awe of Quint as he speaks. “You know that was the time I was most frightened?” he muses. “Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again.”
This instance of admitted vulnerability is, I’d argue, what bonds the three of them in this brief moment. After a silence, Hooper starts singing “Show Me the Way to Go Home” and the other two join in, smiling. This feeling of camaraderie is, of course, immediately cut short when the shark attacks the boat for the penultimate time.
This is the lead-up to the final showdown the next morning. They have settled on a final attempt to kill the shark: by sending Hooper down in the cage with a dose of strychnine. This could be a heroic moment for Hooper, but the shark gets the better of him and all but destroys the cage. From the surface, Brody and Quint can’t know he escaped and hid; they assume the attack was fatal. Meanwhile, the Orca is sinking and the shark remains undeterred. It launches itself onto the boat, tilting the deck and thus forcing a screaming Quint into his open mouth. It’s the goriest, longest death scene in the whole movie, which up this point has frightened us largely through suggestion and perspective.
This, of course, leaves Brody alone to deal with the shark. Although he’s our protagonist, the audience doesn’t necessarily see this moment coming. Isn’t he doomed? Ingeniously, when the shark strikes next, Brody manages to get an oxygen tank into its open mouth. Rifle in hand, he climbs up the mast of the near-submerged Orca. The shark advances. Brody fires and misses. Again. “Blow up,” he mutters. “Blow up.” Then, another iconic line: “Smile, you son of a bitch.”
That’s the lucky shot — the shark does indeed blow up. Of course, our hero doesn’t settle for some stoic, gunslinger pose at the end of this struggle. He cheers and whoops, celebrating his victory in open relief. When Hooper reappears, he is startled, then the two laugh together, all of their tension gone. “Quint?” Hooper asks.
“No,” Brody replies. Both fall silent. Then, they begin the long swim home.
What does it mean that Brody is finally successful in killing the shark? He is the last man standing, not necessarily because of his own survival skills, but because the men around him willingly put themselves into danger. They have done it before and succeeded — that they fail indicates the shark’s power rather than their lack of ability. However, it is Brody’s last desperate attempts that fend off the indomitable representation of danger. He kills the shark not to display any prowess or make any point, but simply because he wants to live.
Ultimately, it is the family man who hates the water and has never been to war who lives to tell the tale and saves the day. The grizzled ex-Navy shark-hunter, who survived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis dies screaming and terrified in the jaws of the beast he assured everyone he could defeat. The era for such men has passed, the film seems to tell us. And it is not quite the era of Matt Hoopers either. He survives, but it seems unlikely he would have made it back to shore if not for Brody’s success. His technology likewise does not save him. Rather, the film seems to aim for the middle. We are in a time of soft-spoken fathers who don’t have anything to prove and would just rather not go swimming, thank you very much.
At first glance, Jaws appears to be a consummate man’s man type of movie — almost stereotypically masculine. After all, it’s about our struggle against nature. Women play a limited role in the drama, either as wives and mothers or victims. Our three male protagonists, different thought they may be, venture into the wild to protect the homestead. However, the film repeatedly asks us to reconsider our view of masculinity by presenting such disparate characterizations. We require all three men to overcome the deadly animal in the water. None of them in isolation likely could have accomplished it, despite Brody’s singular victory in the end.
Thus, in many respects, Jaws seems to deal more with the question of male helplessness. Remember how the film begins: a young woman asks a young man at a bonfire to go swimming with her. He is too intoxicated to make it off the beach; the shark attacks her and she disappears. Throughout the film, we see innumerable nods to male fragility, from Brody’s deputy vomiting when he discovers the young woman’s remains, to the elderly men wading into the water with their pasty bodies, to Quint’s undignified end. While Brody seems a more capable man at the end of the film, he is still at his most vulnerable as he fires that last shot from his position on a sinking boat.
How Jaws was and remains an incredibly successful horror film is how it masterfully evokes those feelings of helplessness and dread in the audience as well. The shark continues to frighten us because we recognize its power. And it matters very little how strong or capable the people around us are — they will always pale in comparison.
Recommended reading: “The men, monsters, and troubled waters of Jaws”
Julia Patt is a writer from Maryland. She also edits 7×20, a journal of Twitter literature, and is a regular contributor to VProud.tv and tatestreet.org. Follow her on Twitter at @chidorme.