What does a scar tell us about a person? Where they’ve been, what they’ve been through, the style in which they conduct their lives. A scar is a reminder, an inescapable arrow pointing to the past. It can signify a person’s history, their class, their trauma, their triumphs, regrets, mistakes, miscalculations. With each mark and the story behind it, we deepen our understanding of who these men are.
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If the film were remade today – please God, no! – the scene would likely be deemed too slow for modern audiences, too long a stretch without action to keep their attention, and would therefore be severely trimmed – if not cut altogether. Not to mention that the three leads – three character actors with distinctive physical features who we would be generous if we were to call handsome – would certainly have to be recast with chiseled Hollywood movie stars (Channing Tatum as an oceanographer? Zac Efron as a sea captain?).
It’s a well-known – and exhaustively documented – premise that the release of Jaws in 1975, along with Star Wars in ’77, signaled the end of the New Hollywood – a short period that allowed for a more personal, artistic, even avant-garde freedom of approach in moviemaking that also, surprisingly, still received mainstream attention. In the case of Jaws, it also marked the beginning of the big-budget summer blockbuster. Jaws is a transitional film. Of course it’s a perfect action/thriller and a sign of things to come in the 1980s and beyond – there’s no disputing that – but not enough has been said regarding the other side on the coin. One of the things that makes the movie so interesting is the fact that it still has one foot firmly planted in the expressive, character-driven New Hollywood (or American New Wave, if you prefer). Jaws has more in common with its contemporaries – Taxi Driver, The Godfather, Midnight Cowboy, etc. – than given credit for, and this particular scene is a paramount example why.
There’s something within its rhythm, almost improvisational yet tightly choreographed. The way it sweeps from drunken humor to Quint’s chilling monologue to the relief of a barroom sing-along just before the shark knocks, snapping them all out of it, back to the task at hand.
Without a sound from the tracking barrels, evening rolls quietly upon them. The action stops. The narrative momentum slows to a lull, allowing the audience space to breathe. Inside the cabin of Quint’s clunky boat we can almost feel the lazy bob of the ocean as the three men unwind, relaxing, drinking, taking their mind off things. First and foremost, this scene is a supreme piece of character development. Quint (Robert Shaw) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) have been at each other’s throats throughout most of their time together:
“Quint, that doesn’t prove a damn thing!”
“Well it proves one thing, Mr. Hooper. It proves that you wealthy college boys don’t have the education enough to admit when you’re wrong.”
Apparently even behind the scenes Shaw was antagonistic toward Dreyfuss, intending it to provoke a more realistic animosity between them on the screen – which it did. Their enmity throughout the film is one of cinema’s great oppositions. But now, loosening up after a few drinks, laughing, the two of them compare scars. They bond over a game of one-upmanship.
What does a scar tell us about a person? Where they’ve been, what they’ve been through, the style in which they conduct their lives. A scar is a reminder, an inescapable arrow pointing to the past. It can signify a person’s history, their class, their trauma, their triumphs, regrets, mistakes, miscalculations. With each mark and the story behind it, we deepen our understanding of who these men are.
Hooper’s scars are all technical: scraped on the leg by a bull shark while taking samples, a moray eel biting his arm through the wetsuit. And yet the alcohol reveals a lighthearted levity below his scientific surface. “See that?” he says, unbuttoning his shirt to tap the chest. “You see that? Mary Ellen Moffat. She broke my heart.” He erupts into giggly laughter and the others join in.
Most of what Quint shows off has a working-class, rowdy nature. There’s a permanent lump on his forehead from a Boston bar fight on some long-lost St. Patrick’s Day. And a missing tooth, likely from a similar encounter. He tells these stories, bawdy sense of humor on full display. Look: can you see that? He can’t fully extend his arm. Why? An arm-wresting competition in which, during the semifinals, while “celebrating my third wife’s demise – big Chinese fella pulled me right over!” Yes, everything has a joke behind it, and yet he too carries the traces of his long occupation at sea. Rolling up a pant and flopping his leg across the table, he unveils the slash of a thresher’s tail.
“Thresher?” Brody asks.
“It’s a shark,” Hooper groans, annoyed that they even have to explain.
Throughout most of the scene, Brody (Roy Scheider) is held at a distance, physically – by standing off to the side while his two companions lounge around the table – and conversationally – by remaining fairly quiet as they talk. But this silence is accentuated by a beautifully subtle piece of characterization. As Hooper and Quint laugh back and forth over their wounds, Brody shyly lifts up his shirt to examine his own scar, possibly from an appendectomy. In a lesser movie this would be brought to light. The others would see, turning it into a joke over his lack of masculine bragging rights. But in this movie they don’t notice. If not paying attention, the audience might miss it too. He examines the scar, wondering if it’s worthy enough. Insecurely, he decides against it and rolls the shirt back down. This little glimpse shows us more about Brody than any story he could tell.
He’s like a child in between these two almost parentally more experienced seafarers. Perhaps Quint is the father and Hooper the mother, although many times it may be vice versa. As the main character, it’s through Brody’s eyes – his fear of water, his timidity in getting the beaches shut down – that we as the audience learn everything we know about the shark. Chief Martin Brody is an everyman that we can relate to. Does he regret trading the danger and excitement of the New York Police Force for the almost Andy Griffith pace of a sleepy summer beach town? On first look, no. He appears to enjoy the laid-back quality of his new job, and yet, below the surface, there lingers the hint of boredom. Possibly he’s a man who hopes to grow accustomed to boredom over time, believing it more suited to his slightly anxious personality. As we meet him in the beginning, he’s a fish out of water – this being his first summer on the island and all.
“What’s that?” Brody chimes in, pointing out a mark on Quint’s arm. Now the mood of the scene swings into darkness. It’s a tattoo commemorating the USS Indianapolis. A tattoo he had removed. Thus begins one of the great speeches in film history. Robert Shaw himself – being not only an actor but a respected novelist of the time – helped to rewrite this section, shaping Quint’s story into a perfectly crafted flash fiction of terror, and delivering a monologue of nuance and depth.
Quickly the setting is established: “We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte,” says Quint, discarding his cap on to the table. “Just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb.” With this, he places his story down concisely, compactly, within a historical context. Without elaboration, all three men aboard that boat know the significance of The Bomb. Any audience watching at the time – any audience today, for that matter – would know it too. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the war to an abrupt, devastating conclusion, but it also can be seen as a marker, a before-and-after point in which all of humanity – every person alive on the planet – now realized the destructive, apocalyptic power we had finally achieved. The Holocaust and the atomic bomb are the two lasting reverberations of the Second World War – two stains imprinted forever on mankind’s collective unconscious. I think of Alain Resnais’ 1959 film Hiroshima mon amour, in which a French woman and a Japanese man come together in a brief affair, both trying to reconcile their own separate haunted memories within the very city that carries the scars of its past.
And so Quint’s story contains the ghost of another story inside it. But all that is merely subtext to the personal horror show he’s about to unveil. Here comes another well-known bit of trivia: the mechanical shark – nicknamed Bruce after the director’s lawyer – was meant to be seen much more often throughout the movie, but the machine was finicky and rarely worked, forcing the filmmakers to make due mostly with suggestion and mood – using a point-of-view underwater camera to pass by dangling legs, or having Brody flip through an illustrated book on sharks to build the tension. In hindsight, of course, they stumbled on the old Hitchcockian dictum: what the audience doesn’t see is more frightening than anything you could show them. The bulk of the monologue can be seen as another tactic by Spielberg to manufacture a foreboding in the audience toward the shark.
“Eleven hundred men went into the water,” says Quint. “Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. Thirteen-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail. What we didn’t know was that our bomb mission had been so secret, no distress signal had been sent.” He smiles, he tries another drink. Finally the face turns grim. “They didn’t even list us overdue for a week.” Now the history lesson is long gone. The War, the Japanese, the Bomb – all of it sinks away to the bottom of our attention. With the rhythm of his cadence, Shaw draws us in. “and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and sometimes that shark he go away . . . but sometimes he wouldn’t go away.”
In the most famous moment he produces a stark image, comparing the lifeless, black eyes of a shark to that of a doll. Hearing this correlation for the first time, out of nowhere, visualizing those doll’s eyes moving through dark waters – it dawns on us how eerie and precise the comparison is. Dolls are unsettling, so goes the theory, because the human mind is caught off guard by a lifelike face that isn’t quite authentic enough. This is called the Uncanny Valley – an uneasy fear in response to humanoid objects (usually robots) that appear far too realistic. And so the shark, in a way, also provokes this phenomenon. The perfect killing machine, as Hooper puts it, can elicit terror even at the subconscious level.
The tension continues to build throughout the story, even up until the moment of rescue. “And a few hours later a big ol’ fat PBY come down and started to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a life jacket again.” Spielberg heightens this tension with a subtle screech of music layered low in the background.
It’s interesting to note that Quint directs his speech almost entirely to Brody, only glancing at Hooper near the very end. If Brody – as our main protagonist, our flawed hero – represents the eyes and ears of the audience, then Quint aims his tale at us. It is the viewer who must learn, who must understand this scar.
From somewhere in the night, somewhere in the dark endless ocean, the song of a whale intrudes on them. Quint has already trailed off into a sort of maudlin introspection, a resigned melancholy that says: that’s the way life is, pain, memories, nothing to be done about it. The whale is like an internal echo of his reflections at this moment. He attempts to avert it with that old familiar tune that’s been his trademark throughout the whole movie – in an earlier scene the soundtrack had even commandeered the song – but the words fall hollow. He lets them dissipate.
The torch passes from the whale, to Quint, and now to Hooper, who tests out a drinking song. The others quickly join in, louder, rowdier, the energy rising. And what is the song about? Exhaustion and sanctuary, drinking away the pain, homeward bound. Frantically the tempo increases. They need to set aside their troubles! They need to be happy! Even Brody finally feels comfortable enough to claim a seat at the table.
It doesn’t last long. A barrel surfaces, smashing the camaraderie to pieces as the three men find themselves rushing back on deck in a wild scramble. Rifles, pistols, a radio, a fire set in sabotage, a shooting star. Back to the action movie we thought we had. The scene we witnessed was like an apparition, a vague dream that we, and they, have been awoken from.
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from the film.
