Containment and Play in “Jaws”

We’re never told exactly how Martin Brody ended up as sheriff of a small beach community, despite his fear of the water. But his ultimate confrontation with the water, and the shark that inhabits it, have a fateful character that seems to implicate his own internal conflicts. Oceanographer Matt Hooper tells Martin that sharks are attracted to the “exact kind of splashing” human beings produce when at play in the water, and Martin himself seems to be distinctively lacking in the capacity for relaxing and letting go. What is it about the activity of play that might be dangerous? How do we accommodate our impulses, relationships, and communal strivings, without being consumed by them? Wes & Erin discuss Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 classic “Jaws.” Upcoming Episodes: Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” “There Will Be Blood,” “As You Like It,” “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.” Pre-order Erin’s forthcoming book “Avail” here: http://subtextpodcast.com/avail For bonus content, become a paid subscriber at Patreon or directly on the Apple Podcasts app. Patreon subscribers also get early access to ad-free regular episodes. This podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Visit AirwaveMedia.com to listen and subscribe to other Airwave shows like Good Job, Brain and Big Picture Science. Email [email protected] to enquire about advertising on the podcast. Follow: Twitter | Facebook | Website Transcript 0:19 Erin: or patreon.com/subtextpodcast. 0:31 Wes: We never told exactly how Martin Brody ended up as sheriff of a small beach community despite his fear of the water. But his ultimate confrontation with the water and the shark that inhabits it have a fateful character that seemed to implicate his own internal conflicts. Oceanographer Matt Hooper tells Martin that sharks are attracted to the exact kind of splashing human beings produce when at play in the water. And Martin himself seems to be distinctively lacking in the capacity for relaxing and letting go. What is it about play that might be dangerous? How do we accommodate our impulses, relationships and communal strivings without being consumed by them? Today we discuss Steven Spielberg's 1975 classic, Jaws. This is Wes Alwan. 1:24 Erin: This is Erin O'Luanaigh. 1:25 Wes: This is. And you're listening to Subtext. So, Erin, I thought I'd ask you a question which may sound like it's not really to the point, but it's something that was on my mind from the beginning of the film, which is, what is Martin Brody doing in Amity in light of his. If you had to speculate, what is it that brought them there from New York City, from the big city? 1:51 Erin: That's a really good question because he talks about the fact that there's such a low crime rate in the town that it seems this town really isn't in need of a cop. And one wonders, yeah. What he does expect to do there and why. Why does this shark need a cop to kill it? I don't. I'm not really sure what. That's. 2:09 Wes: Suicide by cop. That's a new angle. Yeah. When he's, when he's walking out to go to work, she says, you know, be safe or something like that. And he's like, in this town, as in, there's no crime. And then we find out, right, he's just beset with all these petty complaints. And he is the person who's there to resolve all these minor grievances and nuisances, vandalism, the kids are karate chopping the white picket fences or people parking in the wrong place or something like that. We can imagine his job in New York was a lot more exciting. 2:42 Erin: Yeah, I found a quote from his conversation with Hooper, he says the crime rate in New York will kill you. There's so many problems, you never feel like you're accomplishing anything. Violence, ripoffs, muggings. The kids can't leave the house, you gotta walk them to school. But it Amity, one man can make a difference. In 25 years, there's never been a shooting or a murder in this town. 3:02 Wes: Wow, I didn't remember that. 3:03 Erin: It's strange. One man can make a difference in terms of. How do you make a difference when there's no crime at all? I know, yeah. What's he saving the town from? The shark, I guess. So they have to import their crime. 3:17 Wes: Right. And it's, you know, arguably it's imported from his imagination or something. It's like he, he willed it into being or something, you know. You know, given his fears, including fear of the water, Hooper at one point says, well, it doesn't make much sense for a guy who hates the water to live on an island either. And Martin. Yeah, I'm sure you're already nodding. It's only an island if you look at it from the water. One of the great funny lines in this film. 3:43 Erin: Yeah, that's the ultimate fenced in property. Yeah, an island. And that seems to be his children are his motivation. It seems to move away from New York and get them away from crime and then they're sort of his investment in the shark. So this is his picket fence. 4:02 Wes: Right. I think we can definitely speculate that the children are part of it. Right. So the first scene in the movie involves the young woman being killed by the shark. By the way, I'm sorry for lying to you. This is a lot gorier this movie than I said it was. It's been so long since I've seen it. This time was like seeing it the first time. But as usual, every time I watched one of these scenes, like shaking my head, seeing it through you, through your eyes. 4:29 Erin: No, I really enjoyed it. I haven't seen all of the film. I will say that the scene when Quint gets murdered by the shark, I had never seen. So I don't think they showed that in its entirety. They must not have. Right. If I saw it on TV, then I never saw that scene before. I thought it was kind of awesome. I don't know. 4:48 Wes: It's cool. Wow, cool. 4:51 Erin: It helps that the shark is so fake looking. 4:55 Wes: Yeah, yeah, that's true. 4:56 Erin: That's. 4:56 Wes: Yeah. But I was gonna say. So after that scene, we start with a very typical Spielbergian. Is that a Word type of beginning, which is a kind of vignette of family life. And it's imperfect in some way or another. Sometimes it's just imperfect in the usual way that families are imperfect. It's chaotic, but it's still very loving. And that's what you have here. And that's kind of a very similar beginning. In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for instance, or in ET Right. Children of Divorce, you get a really kind of touching picture of family life. And maybe family life already had some sort of loss. So in this case, it does seem pretty idyllic, except that we get the smallest hints of conflict, right? So when he wakes up, the first thing that he says to his wife Ellen, or he's looking out the window and he says, it's a beautiful day. Instead of saying, oh, it's a beautiful day, he says, how come the sun didn't used to shine in here? It's almost like a complaint. And that's her opportunity to say, we bought the house in the fall. This is summer. So it's a great little way to deliver backstory. As a technical matter, we learn that they're new to the community. Later on, we learn that they'll never really be part of the community. Right? You have to be born on the island to be an islander. And that seems like that's Ellen's aspiration, right. She's asked, when will we be islanders? She gets that reply. In this first scene. It doesn't seem like it's much really his aspiration to be there. But you had mentioned the kids, and I thought this is. Yeah, this seems to be an important piece of the puzzle because in the Michael Cuts his hand, right? And then Ellen is very casually washing it off and telling him to go get a band aid, right? She doesn't put the band aid on for him. In the 70s, you got your own band aid. Just like you got to go play in the ocean without anyone watching you or, you know, the five year old on the swing, Right. I think one of the most horrifying things to a contemporary audience is probably like, the lack of child supervision. 7:03 Erin: I know. 7:03 Wes: And that's like one of the first things they ask when Ellen's like, see the K, right? The kids are already outside. They're asleep. And he's like, they must be in the backyard. So going back to the safety of the kids, right? There's this direct parallel between the young woman getting eaten by the shark and why? Because of typical horror movie trope, because of sexuality, right. There were adolescents at play and then she's running off to skinny dip with this guy. And then, of course, gets punished for it. But in the case of the children, it's a child at play, right? Child at play hurts himself. Play can be dangerous, but it's minor. And he's going to get patched up and he's going to go right back out to the ocean. And that's happening in the background while Brody is taking a call about this missing woman. So we immediately, you know, we're alerted to the idea that the safety of the children is something that's at stake here. And it's going to become more and more pressing. Right. It's why, in the end, Brody is going to have to take action when, I mean, it's part of it when, you know, Michael ends up in the hospital. 8:04 Erin: Right, yeah. That seems crucial because Quint and Hooper don't have stakes the way that Brody has stakes. So Brody is, you know, the fact of his whole family being relocated to the island gives him more of, I don't know, more of a sense of belonging in a way even than Quint, who is sort of so islander that he's, you know, Quint is this caricature of an islander who seems to have ingested all of the island's quirks and the things about it which make it a community with its own rules. A sort of exclusive place in a sort of lower middle class kind of way, but still a place where one has to break in. Quint's sort of so broken in that he's out. He's like a shoe worn through or something. 8:56 Wes: Good old Robert Shaw. He is almost worn through at that point. Right. He has a couple of years to live. 9:01 Erin: Yeah, exactly. 9:02 Wes: A couple more years of hard living to do. 9:05 Erin: Right. I know. I was thinking, like all the people in this movie I associate with other movies, like Roy Scheider. I associate with all that jazz, frankly. And that's my background talking. And Robert Shaw. I'm like, Henry, King Henry viii. Yeah, I'm like that. This is what would happen to Henry VIII if he was not a kid. 9:27 Wes: He's amazing in that. Yeah. Talk about a force of nature. I mean, he should have played the shark. 9:31 Erin: Well, he is the. I mean, yeah, they're all, all three of them is the shark. Right. Like, there's a reading where. Where each of the main trio is the shark. Roy Scheider looks like the shark in a bunch of shots. Did you notice that he has the, like the black eyes? 9:45 Wes: I never thought of that. Yeah, he is, you know, But I. I thought he is quite passive compared to Hooper and Quint, though he's often on the sideline. I mean, he. You know, the. He doesn't really come into his own until the shark is blowing up at the very end and then he paddles back. 10:01 Erin: Yeah, he doesn't speak very much. 10:03 Wes: That doesn't speak very much. And it doesn't shark, like, immediately stand up to the council people and the mayor. Right. Eventually he does. You know, he's forced to. Right. And let me hire Quint. Reluctantly goes out on the boat, is not happy about doing the chumming, is kind of getting ordered around. Hooper is making much more of a resistance to putting up much more of a fight with Quint in the movie and outside of the movie, him and. 10:29 Erin: Yeah, that's right. 10:31 Wes: He and Robert Shaw are fighting, which is great. I love that backstory where they just hated each other, sort of. 10:37 Erin: Yeah, sort of loved each other. Sort of hated each other. But, yeah, I just. I love this idea of, like, Dreyfuss just never shutting up, just constantly talking and getting on Shaw's nerves. 10:47 Wes: Yeah. 10:48 Erin: It's a totally different dynamic. But it reminds me of in Star wars when Alec Guinness paid Mark Hamill $20 to go away. 10:58 Wes: Here's your sword. Here's $20. Get out. But yeah, so just getting back to the. Because this is on. I mean, we're kind of. Yeah. We've worked our way back to the character Brody. What I think of as his passivity. He seems kind of depressed to me through most of the movie. And this whole first line is kind of part and parcel complaining. The sun is only just showing up. And we even get a hint of the idea that they'll never be part of the community. In this very scene, when he says, the kids must be in the backyard, and she says, an Amity. You say yard. And then he fakes a Boston or New England accent and then. And says, how's that? And she says, like, you're from New York, so there will always be New Yorkers, no matter what. They're never going to fully belong there. So I wanted just to continue a little bit the speculation about what might have brought them there. Right. Because I think in a contemporary Hollywood movie, I don't think they would be able to resist giving us more of this backstory because they would want to heighten the conflict. Right. Is there a conflict between the couple in the original script? Right. She sleeps with Hooper, and that's the way it is in the novel, which would have been disastrous for this movie. And I'm glad Spielberg got rid of that. Like this. 12:10 Erin: Yeah. Who would sleep with Richard Dreyfuss when you're married to Roy Scheider? It doesn't make any sense. 12:15 Wes: Well, in the novel, he's this like six foot two, blonde, buff guy. In the novel, you know, who also just happens to be a scientist. 12:24 Erin: Gotcha. 12:26 Wes: Yeah, no, that would not have worked either. But the contrast between Hooper and Brody and Quint is very, very important. But, you know, you can speculate, right? It could be, hey, this is too much for the kids. New York is unsafe. Let's go to a nice, safe little beach town. It could be being a big city cop is too stressful. It could be. You know, in some movies it would be, I shot that kid in the ass. Is that. What. Is that the Blazing Saddles thing? I shot someone. I had something traumatic in my police job. 13:01 Erin: Right. Well, something did. Something did happen. We know he has. He has scars, too. I mean, we all have scars, but those three have. Have visible ones. 13:11 Wes: This doesn't sound like his choice. It sounds more like what Ellen wanted. So you can imagine, she persuaded him to do this. She thinks being like this is like going, you know, let's go to the Hamptons. Let's do it permanently. 13:24 Erin: I don't know. I don't know. You know, I think in the quote that I read when he's talking to Hooper, he's given up. He's given up on New York. You know, it seems. It seems like a personal decision to have left because he felt it was futile to stay. So he traded one island for another. He's looking for a safe community for his kids. And it is interesting that he's. I think you're right that he's depressed. I never thought of that before. He's also. He's very, you know, he's so tan, which is kind of funny because that implies being out getting sun. Right? And instead he seems like this dark cloud. Like, you know, someone calls the shark the cloud over the seaside community. But he kind of seems like this dark cloud in the middle of this sunshiny beach environment. 14:13 Wes: Sits around in lawn chairs waiting for dolly. Zooms. 14:16 Erin: Exactly. 14:17 Wes: Waiting. 14:18 Erin: What a great shot, right? 14:19 Wes: It's great. Such a great shot. Yeah, yeah. Waiting for something bad to happen. But. 14:24 Erin: Yeah, right. He's so dark, you know, and compared to. What's her name? Lorraine Gray, is it? Or Gary something. Lorraine Gray. Gary, you know, who's so blonde. Like, he seems even darker, you know, like the whole, you know, that kind of like whitewashed look of the town, maybe in more ways than one. It's so bright and he's like this dark spot. 14:48 Wes: Yeah. This could be the town also. To which the black sheriff shows up. That would be a different story. 14:52 Erin: Right, right. 14:54 Wes: The only black person. Speaking of Blazing Saddles, again, I didn't think I would be making so many Blazing Saddles references. 15:04 Erin: Well, you know, the thing I kept thinking of was Alien over and over again. And a little bit of Godzilla, which we could get into, but not that I've seen a full Godzilla film, but Alien is definitely. I know that they pitched Alien as Jaws in space. 15:16 Wes: Right, right. Well, every movie after that became Jaws in something. 15:20 Erin: Jaws in something. Right, right. Yeah. No, but I think that, you know, the Hoopers, you know, another clever way that they work in explication about the shark is the device of Hooper being the expert. And the way that he describes the shark is a perfect. You know, it's like a miracle of evolution or something. It's almost exactly what they say about the eating machine. Eating machine, right. 15:42 Wes: Which just made me think, well, that's just my average Tuesday evening. 15:47 Erin: Boy, me too. 15:50 Wes: He's a mindless eating machine. 15:52 Erin: Mindless eating machine. Yep. 15:53 Wes: Yep. 15:54 Erin: I am Lady Pac Man. Yeah. That it swims, eats, and makes little sharks. That's, I think, like it's almost word for word what they say about the alien, what Ian Holm's character says about the alien. 16:09 Wes: Oh, interesting. 16:10 Erin: Another cyborg, Richard Dreyfuss is anything but. I'm just kidding. 16:15 Wes: Right. 16:16 Erin: Yeah. 16:16 Wes: There's not really much marital conflict. You know, like this small hint of it. Like maybe she wanted to come and he didn't. But as you said, there's. There's evidence as well, but for whatever. Whatever the case, they're in a water community and he doesn't like the water. Other hints, you know, like she says, let's get drunk and fool around. And his response to me seemed pretty tepid. And it's in line in general with his reserve. Right. So he's, you know, he's not just depressive, but a psychoanalyst would call him obsessional and kind of in control and quite reserved, which is to say, you know, he has trouble letting go and he has trouble playing. You know, you could see the whole water thing as trouble with play. Right. Water is the place where we play. This made me think of hanging rock again, too. Like the kind of danger we put ourselves in to enjoy ourselves, to be in recreation. And the way that can go wrong. Right. If you get drunk and go skinny dipping, maybe you'll just Drown, Drowned. Maybe you'll just drown, not get attacked by a shark. Or if you're a child going into the water, obviously that's dangerous. I mean, I felt just a little concerned that the kid's going out to the ocean by himself. You know, that's just my contemporary sensibility. I'm like that 11 year old is running off to the ocean by himself. I wouldn't let a kid do that. Even though when I was 6, I was completely unsupervised 24 hours a day. I walked to school a mile away by myself, did everything by myself. But not in this day and age. I think some of this is about play and the dangers of play and more broadly, the dangers of letting go and giving in to one's impulses. Obviously, if you think of him as obsessional, he's to some extent scared of his impulses and what they can do to others. And I'm not gonna beat this over the head so that the shark becomes representative of that, right? Becomes representative of his own impulses towards others. It's like he's, when he, that dolly take, right, he's watching. It's not just, oh, the thing that I feared is happening now or even the thing that I expected because there's some element of expectation, right. But the thing that I'm somehow causing this, my fear is causing this, or maybe I even wanted this to happen at some level. That's part of the, I think the horror of it, you know, and the island speaks to that insularity. Like he's an island and he's hemmed in by the ocean as a chaotic world of impulse, that he doesn't want to go there. 18:48 Erin: Yeah, well, you know, one of the things I was thinking of as I was watching is what a weird thing going to the beach is. I mean, this is the, you know, there's, there's play which has its dangers. But if you say fall off a, you know, if you fall off the monkey bars, that's not such a terrible thing. Fixable, right. You know, the, the beach is such a strange. I mean, I, I grew up going to the beach. I love going to the beach. It's, it's perfect for my, my weird obsessional thing which is, you know, you get, you lie out and you, you know, so much of the beach is about not going in the water, right? And in fact, you know, I think even if there was a shark in the water, they could just have like, they could just rope it off. I have like all these solutions for how they could have fixed this without killing the shark. You know, like you could still go 19:37 Wes: sunbathing and then you put a sign up. You just go, not allowed. 19:40 Erin: Yeah, no, you just go in up to your. Up to your knees or something and that's it. And then come out. But no, but, like, you know, it's so. It's so strange. It's like you're. Anytime you go to the beach, it's like you're playing at the edge of a. Of a canyon. And it's a strange mix of the elemental because so much of it is about not going in the water. Right. It's about baking in the sun, it's about being out in the air, and then it's about going in the water. It's about the contrast sort of, you know, which is why I like it. So then you go in the water and then you get all freezing cold and wrinkled and pruned, and then you go out and you dry off and you, you know, the air, the hot air dries you and then you get too hot, so you go back in the water. So it's like, you know, there's like perfect ecosystem of, like, contrast stimulations. It's a bizarre thing to do, I think, for that reason which, you know, come to think of it like these, these contrasts, it's like it's as much about the air and about not being in the water as it is about being in the water. And then you have this idea of this confrontation with what could be lurking in there. The shark is as much a member of this community as any of the islanders, if not more so. Right. So as one of the interesting things about the beach is that you are on the edge of an extremely dangerous natural force. All kinds of things could be in the water. And so, you know, that's why the shark could be Brody, because it's sort of foreign to the island, but it also could be Quint because it's a prehistoric resident of the island that has this kind of ancestral belonging, you know, predates whoever considers themselves an islander by hundreds of millions of years. 21:26 Wes: Quint could have pulled off the shark more realistically than the animatronic. 21:31 Erin: I think so, too. 21:33 Wes: But, yeah, you know, I think this is really spot on. Yeah. My experience of the beach is that there's a certain amount of healthy fear. I'm not particularly fearful. I did, I don't want to call it a near drowning experience. My sister and I definitely got into water that was too deep and we were, you know, as young kids and we were getting Pulled under. And then an adult came and pulled us out. Not. Not our parents or family, of course. That was a scary experience. I. You know, I feel that routinely around nieces and nephews. I feel if we're in a pool situation or water situation, my eye. You know, my eyes are always on the kids. And it reminds me, you know, someone was talking to me recently about the experience of taking a child into the ocean and their level of ecstasy, right, at being in the water if they're a young child. And it's still very new to them, but also mixed with some fear, right, Getting pulled out, pull me back. And the role of the parent in managing that. So it. And it is, again, it does make me think of this world of impulse where parents are also helping children manage those impulses. Right? So you have to have them. You can't simply get rid of them. Although Brody is on his way to doing that to the extent that he's reserved. So you allow for it. You allow for the ecstatic moment and being there in the ocean and enjoying one's impulses, but you also pull them back into shore a little bit, or you manage that experience for them. If you do that successfully, then there is no shark. It's not successful if you just push it all down and avoid the water. That's when the shark. That's when the shark happens. Comes back to bite you, in other words. 23:22 Erin: That's right. Well, you know, the shark is so perfect because I was thinking so much about. I became obsessed with synecdoches watching this film. Did you. Did you feel the same way? Because the title is a synecdoche. And then I was thinking about all the synecdoche in the film, partially because of the way that the film deals in that Hitchcockian suspense kind of grammar as a way of, like, avoiding seeing the shark. So it has to be suggested, and partially because I think, like, this is kind of how horror works, that you just see something that's suggestive of the larger threat. But, you know, I was thinking about the shark as a synecdoche for all of the potential terror of, say, the ocean or even nature. You know, we have the title of the film and the name of the shark, if you want to call it Jaws, as being, you know, so it's representative of that. The shark itself is really a terror of the mouth, though there's also the fin, which is a sort of symbol or synecdoche for the whole shark, which the kids use when they have that, like, little fake fin in the water. And that in itself, I think, kind of, it sort of repeats the curve of, like, the tooth. So the fin to me is very toothy as well. Like, we get the single tooth that Hooper finds. You know, the island could, you know, is sort of synecdoche for an entire, you know, culture. I don't know, like little, Little, little bites of things were. Were occurring to me all over the place. Like the, the mayor's sport jacket that has the anchors on it, the barrels standing in for the. That's not a synecdoche, but, but, but it's a metonym. You know, the barrels standing in for the shark. The images of the bites taken out of the shark victims that, that Brody looks at, which is a sort of like, you know, the photo negative of the shark of its bite, of its mouth. I don't know. All of these things which are replacements or stand ins for. For. For something else. So the shark, I mean, I think it's so polysemous in terms of what we can say it represents, but I think that's because it seems to represent the entire thread of the unknown. So it's so richly symbolic in terms of what is attached to it or what we might attach to it. 25:43 Wes: Yeah, the unknown, including, as I was saying, drive or driven side of our own nature or the instinctual side. So impulse and. And Right. In a way, a shark just looks like drive incarnate. I mean, that's part of the power of. Let's see how Hooper puts it. You know, the thing about a shark, he's got these. Well, is this Hooper speaking? This might be Quint. Yeah, this is Quint. Think about a shark. He's got these. Got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at you, it doesn't seem to be living until he bites you and those black eyes roll over white. Or Hooper's. Again, description of it as a form of mindlessness. And this is the thing that's always threatening to take us over. Right. We manage it with our minds and it becomes represented to our minds. But the impulses themselves are mysterious. They're underneath and they come up, they rise up. And you see a fin at first, and then the next thing you know, you're eating a whole Papa John's pizza. You have no idea where that came from. Something like that. So that's one aspect, but as you point out. Yeah, it's much broader in the sense that anything in the domain of the unknown, or as a, you know, we might say the real the world as it is in its unrepresented state, which we can't really know until it's represented. Until it reaches us and bites us, so to speak. But is there nonetheless. But I was thinking, yeah, the shark is a really good representation of drive in general. The. The fact that it has to keep moving or it dies, as Hooper says. It's just, you know, eating and reproducing. What else is it doing? It does three things. 27:37 Erin: Eats, swims and makes little sharks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this is also a special shark. This is a, you know, we. We get. 27:46 Wes: Because he's. He's a big one. 27:48 Erin: Because he's big and because he's smart. 27:51 Wes: Or she. 27:52 Erin: Or she. Yeah, let's not watch it, Wes. Yeah, no, the. The tiger shark that they catch, that's your garden variety monster, you know, but the. The. The regular old man eater, they're actually 28:06 Wes: way more aggressive, by the way. So let me do the nerdy thing. And the kid. As a kid, I was into sharks. Tiger sharks are responsible for more attacks on human beings and. And cars are way more aggressive in general than white sharks, if I remember correctly. It could be, but. Yeah, but. Yeah, that's. But the. The tiger shark. The what. Meant to represent something ordinary. I love that response. Because all those. All those minor actors, right. They're just all locals on Martha's Vineyard. 28:37 Erin: Yeah. So great. 28:38 Wes: That's great. 28:39 Erin: I gotta say that the woman who plays. 28:42 Wes: Yes. 28:42 Erin: Yeah. Oh, my gosh. 28:44 Wes: I know. The councilwoman who says, you know, I don't find that funny. 28:47 Erin: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. No, I love her, actually. She's amazing. She reminds me of my grandmother. 28:53 Wes: Oh, really? 28:54 Erin: She's so great. Yeah. Because she's like. So. She's like a super, super dark tan. And the dark. It's very. 29:00 Wes: Yeah. 29:00 Erin: And she has that kind of like, sardonic voice. No, I was thinking of the mother of the boy who's killed in the black veil. She's great. She just has a great look to her that looks like she was someone who came out of a casting session, not a local. 29:17 Wes: Isn't it just. It makes it seem like acting really isn't that hard. They all might as well have been professionals. 29:29 Erin: There's a bell curve, I think. There's really good when you're an amateur and then really, really terrible when you're. When you're actually trying. But you're not that great. 29:40 Wes: Right, right. If they ever start to take it seriously, then they'd go through a phase where. 29:44 Erin: Exactly. Exactly. 29:46 Wes: And then maybe for a long time and maybe Forever. 29:48 Erin: Yes, exactly. 29:48 Wes: Maybe they would eventually come back out. 29:51 Erin: Yeah. 29:51 Wes: The other side. 29:52 Erin: And also the older couple on the beach who the mayor convinces to go in the water. That guy, fabulous actor. That local guy, you know, I'm talking about when he. 30:03 Wes: Yeah, I was thinking the. I was thinking the same thing. 30:05 Erin: Yeah. So many fabulous individual performances, but. So the tiger shark seems like this, the normal, mindless animal. But one of the problems with Jaws, with Bruce, whatever we want to call him, is, is the sort of theory of mind about him or. Or the implication that this is a shark with a. With a vendetta, with a. Eventually he's going to follow them all the way to the Bahamas. Right in like Jaws 4 or something. 30:35 Wes: Oh, really? 30:36 Erin: Okay. One of those. 30:37 Wes: This is Moby Dick meets People. 30:41 Erin: Yeah, exactly, exactly. 30:42 Wes: Which I think is not in this case. I think the movie kind of falters here. The shark doesn't make a good vendetta creature. I think maybe a whale could. But am I wrong about that? I don't. I don't find the second half of the movie as gripping as the first, even though I know for a lot of people it's the opposite. I don't find the chase same. Yeah, I think it breaks down a little bit, in all honesty, but. 31:06 Erin: Yeah, you know, this is so funny. I've. Last night I watched the Sandlot and I always forget that the last. It's almost the. It's almost the entire second half. Much like this film, it's almost the entire second half of the film is just the chase scene. When's the last time you saw the sandlot? You know, they keep hitting those baseballs into the yard of the killer dog. And then the last half of the movie really is Boy Takes a Baseball that Was Signed by Babe Ruth. He doesn't know who Babe Ruth is, so he doesn't know how. That he shouldn't be playing with this ball. They hit it over into the yard with the killer dog and then they try to get the ball back through a series of. You know, then the rest of the movie is them trying to get the ball back, basically, and like a very long chase sequence. Oh, it's fantastic. I watch it every summer. Yeah. So we were just watching that here with my family and big group of people. And the second half of the movie is so boring because it's like, oh, right. Then they're gonna try and get it with the erector set and they're gonna rig up the vacuum cleaners and all this stuff. And then the dog gets out and there's this long chase sequence. So the whole thing is just one big, long set piece of trying to defeat this animal, basically. And I was like, this is exactly like Jaws. It's the same. Exact same ratio of, you know, like, fun plot, great dialogue, lots of characters at the beginning, and then second half entirely just action sequence. All related to the same kind of basic premise. 32:37 Wes: And very dominated also by Quint, by Robert Shaw. He sort of just takes over the movie, which is great in some ways. You know, he's great. But also, it's too much. He's more of a force than the shark is. I think the shark is a little anticlimactic comparison to him especially, you know. And we start seeing the shark more in the second half, which undoes a lot of the movies. You know, what works very well in the first half of the movie is not seeing too much of the shark becomes a little pornographic a little in the second half. And the pornography is, you know, it's. It's a prosthesis, essentially. Essentially. It's not real. It's pretty damn good. I mean, you know, the. You know, especially. And then, you know, factoring in that it's 50 years old. It's amazing, you know, what. What they did with the shark and all that. But we see enough of it that, for me, there's no demonic quality. Well, maybe there's two senses of demonic and, you know, it's demonic in the sense of that mindless, driven thing, but the kind of thing that we can be possessed by. You know, our minds can be taken over by mindlessness, by instincts. But I don't think it's good. A good representative of evil. 33:43 Erin: What are we really talking about here? Evil or. Or threat. Right. Because I think there are two different things. Or. What is it about fear? 33:51 Wes: Yeah. So maybe. Maybe it's not really meant to be. Now that you say that, maybe it's not meant to be representative of evil. 33:57 Erin: Well, because. Because if it's about fear, then I think sharks are a better symbol for fear than whales. Because the fear is that we're getting eaten. The fear is that we're right. That there. No. That, like, we are prey and we are lunch. Is that. I mean, that's not my fear, per se. Like, my fear is getting, like, tortured by this thing. The way that the. You know, it's not necessarily like getting chomped down on in, like, a sudden death kind of scenario. It's the opening scene. That's. The terror is that this thing is. And that's. That's what makes this different from an ordinary shark? Because a shark wouldn't play with you like that. Like, this shark is sadistic. It's playing with this woman and dragging through the water in. In a. 34:42 Wes: In a. I used to read about shark attacks a lot as a kid. Like I said. 34:45 Erin: Okay, don't tell me. 34:46 Wes: They'll. They'll grab you and drag you down at the bottom of the ocean and. 34:50 Erin: Oh, God. Okay. 34:51 Wes: They do that whole side to side thing where they shake you around. And 34:56 Erin: I was. I was comforting myself as I was watching this, like, literally saying out loud, like, this would never happen in real life. This is just making it. Okay, all right. 35:05 Wes: No, it's terrifying. You can't. You can't see what's under there in the water. And then this is gonna ruin. End up in something's stomach all of a sudden. That's. 35:15 Erin: Yeah. 35:15 Wes: No, I find it very terr. That. Very terrifying. I get even. That and jellyfish. I don't want to get hit by a jellyfish. 35:26 Erin: Oh, yeah. Well, I've been stung so many times at this point. That's. 35:32 Wes: You're not afraid enough then? 35:34 Erin: Yeah, no, I'm not. I'm not. And I have to. I have to preserve my ability to go to the beach because that's all I. That's all I have. No, I come from, you know, I come from beach family. You know, my mom was a competitive swimmer. My parents were both super, super into scuba diving, actually. And my mom wouldn't watch Jaws because she was too afraid to, like. They were serious scuba divers. They went scuba diving on their honeymoon. Like, it was a scuba diving trip on their honeymoon. 36:04 Wes: Oh, wow. 36:04 Erin: Yeah. 36:05 Wes: So have you been scuba diving? 36:07 Erin: No, no, I was afraid. I'm. I'm more afraid of the. I've been once pressurized air and getting the bends than I am of anything in the water. 36:16 Wes: Yeah, it's scary. 36:17 Erin: Yeah. So I like just free. Free swimming, snorkeling. 36:22 Wes: Yeah. But. Yeah, so we're. We're thinking about getting Eden versus the devil, maybe. Is that what we're trying to work out? Y. Yeah. Maybe it's not meant really a representative of evil. I think they try to motivate Quint's grudge. Right. By having him be on the Indianapolis, which is a cool speech that he gives. And Robert Shaw helped rewrite that speech and, you know. 36:46 Erin: Yeah, yeah. Pretty good novelist. 36:49 Wes: Yeah. Does a great, great job with it. And I don't think we get there as far as at a visceral level identifying with his grudge against Sharks. And it's not like Ahab. Right? It's not. I don't think there's much emotional impact in all of that. And a grudge, right. I think a grudge only makes sense if you bring in the idea that it represents evil in some way. 37:16 Erin: Well, I'm very moved by the. By the Indianapolis story. 37:19 Wes: Okay. 37:19 Erin: That really works for me. 37:21 Wes: No, I mean, I think it was. I mean, I think it was great, but. 37:23 Erin: Yeah, no, but I agree with you about the grudge thing. Like, I'm not sure that it does make sense as a grudge. This is. I think what makes it so interesting, symbolically, is there's. There's too much fault on Quint's side. Like, there's so much going on on a symbolic level with the story of the Indianapolis, because they're taking little boy, I think it is, to Japan. Right. So there's. There's something about, like, that kind of implication. So if the shark represents the evil in the world or something, and then we have this story about the sharks picking off the men who took a nuclear bomb to Japan, then the sharks are also kind of like payback for evil, too. Right. Like, there's something about. There's something about the culpability, you know, I'm talking on the symbolic level, you know, something about the culpability that these men have that the shark as revenge is about. It's almost about, like, guilt. 38:26 Wes: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. 38:28 Erin: And the working out of that guilt. So I think Quint has survivor's guilt, and I think that that is a big part of his relationship to sharks. Plural. Maybe not this shark in particular. I mean, this shark in particular is a business proposition for him. Like I said, this is why he's kind of like the shark. He's in the community and of the community, but also apart from it, because he doesn't have kids that are at the beach potentially going to be lunch for this particular shark. So it's about a monetary thing for him and kind of about this vendetta, but also maybe he can expiate his survivor's guilt over killing as many sharks as he can. That's, I think, a bit different from a vendetta. Is that right? 39:14 Wes: Yeah. No, I think this is good. This helps me understand it a little bit more. The way he delivers that speech is really great because it's with a smile, you know, all the way through, and you kind of get a sense of the pain of it, and then he ends it, you know, 1100 men in the water, 316 men can't come out. The sharks took the rest anyway. We delivered the bomb. Guilt over survival and guilt over the bomb, maybe. Right. Those two things. Right. We could broaden the concept of guilt to the idea of guilt over sexuality. So that's why you get stabbed, hacked in the horror picture. One minute you're teenagers having fun. Right. So a lot of slasher pics, Right. Starts out with teen sex and then ends with violence. In this case, skinny dipping or as a child, you're being careless or something like that. But yeah, any. Any of these attacks could be seen as a consequence of something one has done wrong. And then how do you atone? I guess. So if you've survived it, like Quint, what do you do? You work through conscience by attacking it back. 40:26 Erin: Right. And yet. And yet Quint is. All of those men on the Indianapolis were sort of double victims because they're also the victims of the government in terms of following orders. I mean, this is something that. This is something that I think for Spielberg will really come to the fore in Saving Private Ryan, a movie I suspect we'll do eventually. Right. But there's the. There's also this idea of like, you're just a pawn, so strikes are just picking you off. There's nothing you can do about it. You have to deliver this bomb. There's nothing you can do about it. They've decided to make it a top secret mission. Therefore your location is unknown. Right. That's. Part of it, is that they didn't even know it had been wrecked because the mission was top secret. So they couldn't get help early enough. So they were a victim of that kind of. Or they were vulnerable to a Japanese torpedo attack because of the particular way in which this mission was constructed, again, by forces outside of their control. 41:26 Wes: So the concept of helplessness looms large here. 41:29 Erin: The Indianapolis is such a fascinating cipher then, for the way to read the rest of the film. Because I think the connection of a sort of governmental authority, like doing what it needs to do to fulfill its own drive, right. Whatever its own mission is, is very much a part of, like the mayor and what the mayor is doing. And all of these things, I think are extremely. They're even more complicated by the fact that Brody himself is also, as an employee of the city and as a sort of representative of law and order, is also implic in those governmental structures as well. So it's not. It can't be neatly parsed out. I don't think I was reading a really. The one little bit of outside Reading I did on this is this really fascinating Frederick Jameson essay about Jaws. And the idea that Quint represents sort of like small business America and a certain kind of World War II, New Deal kind of individualism, you know, doing it himself, working alone. And, you know, what's the significance of the fact that in the end, he, as this Ahab figure, dies. And then you have Ishmael sort of split into Brody and Hooper, who represent law and order and science and technology, you know, so it's as if an older economy and an older way of looking at, you know, sort of like mom and Pop store is being replaced by the military industrial complex, basically. All of that to say that, you know, I don't think that what the film is saying about, like, government or America as expressed in the Indianapolis story is easily unpacked or simple or even sensical. The film isn't making an explicit statement about the larger, like, the American forces in World War II or anything like that. At least I don't think so, but. 43:23 Wes: Right. 43:24 Erin: No, but it's in there. I mean, it's in there and I think, like, the bomb is in there and the. I see the ending of the film as a recapitulation of the Indianapolis story. So only in scrambled order, deliver the 43:37 Wes: bomb to the shark. Right? Into the shark. 43:38 Erin: Yeah. I mean, like, in the. Like a straightforward reading, the shark is Japan, you know, like this, you know, because the shark both torpedoes the boat and gets blown up. That's the Japanese. Right. 43:51 Wes: Interesting. 43:53 Erin: So, I mean, I kind of mapped everything out. There's the. There are four sort of elements of the Indianapolis story. There's the delivery. So they successfully deliver the components for little boy, including uranium. So that's the delivery. Then they're torpedoed by the Japanese navy. Then they get eaten by the sharks. And then the fourth, you know, sort of unspoken part is the actual detonation of the nuclear bomb. So delivery, torpedo, shark, explosion. That's scrambled. Then in the killing of Jaws, but we have the shark torpedoes the boat, the shark eats Quint. The delivery of the bomb in the shark's mouth, the tank, and then the detonation from afar with the rifle shot, the explosion. So it's just. They map onto each other, just in a slightly shuffled order. 44:40 Wes: Interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. 44:43 Erin: I thought way too hard about that this morning. I was just, like, trying to figure out. I was like, enriched uranium was this, like a tank, this air in the tank? You know, because some of those tanks have. Of compressed air, it's actually enriched Air. 44:56 Wes: Oh, interesting. 44:58 Erin: I was really galaxy braining it while I was out for a walk. So. 45:02 Wes: No, that is. Yeah, that's very interesting. So we're getting the end of part one. What should we talk about in part two? 45:09 Erin: Maybe we should go into Hooper and the class distinction too. That's between. In that conversation between Hooper and Quint. 45:17 Wes: Sounds good. patreon.com subtextpodcast or doing it right on Apple. If you do it right on Apple, then part two will just follow immediately after the end of this part. If not, you can wait until next week. 45:37 Erin: Thank you, thank you. And thanks to everyone who listened. For an easy way to do that, go to subtextpodcast.com patreon.com subtextpodcast please send your questions, feedback and episode requests to [email protected] if we get enough questions, we'll do some bonus Q and A shows for subscribers. 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