Martin Brody is holding his young son Sean in his arms. He’s in the hospital. His older son Michael is wheeled past him on a gurney recovering from the physical shock of nearly being eaten by a shark. Martin’s wife Ellen walks along side the gurney talking to her son. Martin follows. Michael wants his cars. And he wants coffee. She follows until the gurney disappears through a doorway. She stops and stares a mothers stare into the space between them. Martin stands behind her. He pulls at her shoulder. She turns to him. He hands her the sleeping Sean.
“You want to take him home?”
“Home to New York?”
“No…home here…”
She nods and walks off. Her question had a purpose. And so did his answer. The family disappears. We won’t see them again. Martin Brody, the reluctant, naive and helpless outsider vanishes. Chief Martin Brody the hero arrives. He glares across the emergency room at the flustered mayor whose reckoning has come.
That’s my favorite scene in Spielberg’s 1976 masterpiece Jaws. There’s no shark in it. Because Jaws isn’t about a shark. It’s about people. And in that emergency room the drama of people hits its zenith.
I never read Peter Benchley’s book. I’m not really interested in deconstructing what’s on the screen. I grew up on a sleepy east coast island beach town where the traffic lights turned to blinking in the winter and the summers meant everything to the handful of locals that lived there. My father worked on the beach patrol. My mother, a New Yorker who married into the Island and would never be an islander, sounded and looked like Ellen Brody. My older brother’s name was Michael. And I was Sean. I’ve been writing this essay for 40 years.
The shark itself doesn’t really show up until 1:21 minutes into the movie. And it only gets three minutes of screen time in the whole movie. There’s a narrative about its absence in film making lure that the shark would have been more prolific if the mechanical model had worked. But without it, Spielberg was forced into the sort of genius that only comes from an artist’s constraint; the edge of a canvas; the structure of a sonnet; limited availability of a mechanical shark in a shark film. I think the real truth is that the film is not, as I stated earlier, a film about a shark. It’s a film about the human forces that run under our society to move us through the rough parts of our existence. The shark isn’t really a shark. It’s the manifestation of persistent danger. They were here before us. And they will be here after us. They have no reason to be other than to be to swim, eat and make more sharks; more danger.
Against the world’s most dire problems we have Dreyfus’s Hooper. Who is really just knowledge and science. Without Hooper we don’t understand the shark. Martin, the hero, listens to Hooper. He learns. And he understands the nature of the problem. But knowledge and science alone won’t save them. It’s required but not sufficient. It has its limitations. Hooper is an elitist. He’s a rich man with “rich man’s hands made for counting money”. Science has no power over money. And so science has no power over politics. The people will ignore science until the problem swims up and bites them on the ass. The mayor sends his own children into the water despite the danger. Not because he is evil. But because he can’t help himself. Knowledge is useful. But it is not, as we like to say, power. Knowledge alone is weak. It needs something else.
It needs Robert Shaw’s Quint. Quint is violence. While the flock sits in ignorant safety, Quint stalks beyond the edge of the beach campfire standing watch. We don’t want to think about him. But he’s there. He’s seen things. He knows the truth about the danger. And he knows how to stop it. He knows only he knows how to stop it. He has no need for science. Or safety. Or so he thinks. But the truth is that violence is never enough. Not against the true man eaters. The soldier needs the scientist. Quint needs Hooper.
90 minutes into the movie we’ve seen the shark up close just once. Hooper and Quint, on the boat, compare scars. They are from different places. Of different classes. They don’t like each other. But as Cormac McCarthy’s Judge tells us, “What joins men together is not the sharing of bread but the sharing of enemies.” And so it is with Hooper and Quint. As for Brody, there was never any question. The fight was always with the shark. It was the shark that killed. It was that shark that had to be stopped. And someone had to stop it. It wasn’t going to go away, no matter how much the politicians wanted it to.
It won’t be the soldier or the scientist that will save the people of Amity Island though. Not alone at least. When the shark comes to finish the fight, Quint is killed by his hubris. Hooper hides somewhere in the depths. But Chief Martin Brody sits alone, clinging like the storm tossed mariner to a spar at midnight. He fears the boat and the water and the shark. But most of all fears for the safety of those in his charge. And he teaches us the lesson the film was meant to teach. You need to listen to the scientists because ignorance will kill you first. You need to have the will to fight because cowards just die tired. But when the shark comes for you, there’s only one thing to be done. Stare it down and hit that fucker square in the face. It’s the only chance you have.
Great essay. Great insight. Wish I could keep all this in mind as the daily events seem to overwhelm. I appreciate your clarity. Warm regards and may your upcoming Holidays be wonderful. Cheers!