If the sum of Spielberg’s work is about how men live in the world, Jaws is his most particular point on the subject, a film centered with almost fantastical totality on how men carry themselves. Even the shark is animated by Quint from his need to turn it into a competitor, his quest to fear a stronger rival. Quint makes the shark a character that contributes to the viewer’s definition of him, even revealing him to be the greater threat to their little expedition than the shark.
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Men in the films of Steven Spielberg wear their beliefs on their rolled-up sleeves. They are devoted to their personal visions and naturally reject conscripted truths. In his early films, they were played by slices of blue-collar life – Roy Scheider, Dennis Weaver, Richard Dreyfuss. Harrison Ford was hired for Star Wars while on a break from fixing Francis Ford Coppola’s cabinets as a hired carpenter. Spielberg uses him as Indiana Jones like the carpenter never left. Spielberg seeks out men with the ambitions of little boys but the faces of a “hard day’s work.” In his older age, he has switched to less sun-beaten personalities – Tom Hanks is his current favorite – but the principle is the same.
His films often evoke the fearful intensity of living in a world driven by masculinity. But as Spielbergian men, his protagonists respond to it like cheaters in a fixed game, driven to overcome it. In Duel, his debut film, Dennis Weaver is relentlessly stalked by a truck that is no less than the spirit of the worst in cinematic masculine behavior, which hopes to drive him to death, to make him feel weak, to steal his sanity, because he honked him on the road. In E.T., a young boy without a father faces a world of authority figures, materialized as a faceless army of GI men scouring the earth to imprison his best friend. In Jurassic Park, the weathered softy Dr. Grant has to secure his manly territory in verbal terms. Peter Banning has to rediscover the nerve to adventure like a proper boy in Hook. Soldiers give their lives to save the last of four sons in Saving Private Ryan. Roy Neary has to give up his wife to pursue his dreams of boyhood in Close Encounters. Frank Abagnale Jr. listens to his sleazy father’s worldview like the word of god in Catch Me If You Can. Indiana Jones thrashes his loyal follower Short Round with the whip he uses to control his universe in The Temple of Doom. Even the protagonist of Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds, a story not specifically about being a man, is on a quest to deserve fatherhood with far greater intensity than a quest to defeat aliens.
The implications of the protagonist’s manhood are central to any impression of a Spielberg film. And of all his films, Jaws is the most detailed blueprint for how he assigns value to the spectrum of masculinity, with each character placed squarely on a “type” that Spielberg identifies (or identifies with) – Chief Brody (Scheider), the rational yet cautious goody, Hooper (Dreyfuss), the adventurous nerd, and Quint (Robert Shaw), the ultimate man’s man. He’s the perverse paragon of how heroes act in movies, and on the stage – he leans naturally into the fiery dramatics of the older art. His face resurrects a kind of barbaric charisma, the grotesque power of the one-man show. Pauline Kael pointed out in certain terms how she felt about Quint, an analysis that Spielberg himself verified by telling her in a telegram that she was the only one who got it. She called the captain’s musing pathetic and his death the climax of his hilarious ineptitude (“He’s so manly he’s homicidal”).
Yet Spielberg’s cumulative work does not support a purely punitive reading of Quint, regardless of his then-timely approval of Kael’s rebuff of him (or her idea of him). Spielberg may be a critic of the archetypical masculine hero, but he is also a lover of war stories, one of the great cinematic patrons of soldier’s honor (a great portion of his work boils down to this one quality). The moment he turned Quint into a soldier, even assigning him a historical tragic experience, complicates the purely critical reading of the film’s masculinity narrative. It begins to emerge as a twist on the Spielberg masculine, by asking the question that chips its granite chin: if this is what drives him to act this way, is there a part of it that we can understand? The film makes no secret of how Quint behaves, but this is the moment it asks why that might be, and what it means to end it like that. That’s what makes it such an essential piece, even 47 years later, in a cinematic sea of man-eating.
If the sum of Spielberg’s work is about how men live in the world, Jaws is his most particular point on the subject, a film centered with almost fantastical totality on how men carry themselves. Even the shark is animated by Quint from his need to turn it into a competitor, his quest to fear a stronger rival. Quint makes the shark a character that contributes to the viewer’s definition of him, even revealing him to be the greater threat to their little expedition than the shark.
In Scheider’s Chief Brody (despite being only five years younger than Shaw), the film finds a rational yet less assertive working man, perhaps the first classic Spielbergian do-gooder, who is not an outward hero yet contains the bone structure of one. He’s willing to be allowed to do the right thing. His wife (Lorraine Gary) likes that about him. On Spielberg’s part, she seems like wishful thinking, the kind of woman who prefers a man in beach shorts and glasses, as though he’ll pick fewer fights if he can see less far, the kind who will teach their kids the art of worrying rather than the art of war. Of his second wife, Kate Capshaw (Willie in Temple of Doom), Spielberg said she was “a different kind of woman – supporting, loving, and present. What Amy was not.” Amy Irving was Spielberg’s girlfriend in the mid-70s, his wife, then ex-wife.
Hooper (Dreyfuss) swaggers into the film, advisable but not always admirable, walking with a pack slung over his shoulder even when he doesn’t have one. He’s a different form of Brody, one that has accomplished more bravery with less material. He has the fuzzy face of a coward, but in Spielberg’s lens seems to be puffed up into an impression of a conqueror. The film is equally reverent of the two, unable to kill or demote either. They could be read without reservation as role models, who survive the film based on their ability to make the most of survival. Spielberg put a piece of his soul in each.
The introduction of Quint causes the symbols in Jaws to draw more power than first implied by its cautionary tale of bureaucratic negligence, wrapped up in a 50s B-movie like Gojira with sunshine. He laughs as Brody’s wife does his packing checklist with him and kisses him goodbye (you get the sense that Quint hasn’t been kissed since his mother wished him well). Even Hooper’s high-tech fishing equipment isn’t manly enough for him. His idea of “sharking” is dumping blood in the sea, strapping himself to a chair with a giant pole, and waiting to be tested. The impression is “either I get him, or he gets me.” It’s the whole concept boiled down to a single task, a DIY adventure. It’s movie heroism summed up in three square feet, turned to a counterargument of victory by his wild parody of heroic cheekbones and sly grinning.
There’s never a suggestion that the shark might be female, even though that’s technically more likely – this is key to his worldview. To Quint, it is inescapably “him,” a rival male fighting for spiritual territory. Spielberg translates this instinct for competition to comedy when Quint crushes a beer can (in 1975, that would be like crushing a can of peas), to which Hooper responds with intellectual certainty by crushing his water cup. Even Quint’s drinking song, “Farewell and Adieu,” invokes that spiritual sailing air that puts women at a huge distance from the consequences of the adventure, as far as a shoreline from an open sea. He can’t even handle the radio working in their cabin, if it brings a feminine voice too close to their toil.
The film’s key scene is one of manly bonding, when they trade scars below deck. They’re all ideally personified by their war wounds. Quint shows off his well-earned lashings, which include not only shark punctures but missing teeth from brawls in foreign bars, such as one with a “Chinaman” (the more permanent the wound, the better). Hooper presents slightly more academic versions, including a shark laceration from a research voyage. Brody looks wistfully at his appendectomy scar in a clever cutaway, a wound without a conquest. Hooper finishes with a scar “right there,” where “Mary Anne Moffat broke my heart.” The greatest scar of all! They laugh equally from completely different experience, united by the shared instinct of the joke.
When Brody points out Quint’s tattoo scar, the air drains from the room. Quint has that power over it (if he didn’t, he wouldn’t be in the room). The story he tells of the USS Indianapolis is dramatized from facts but not implausible and certainly not fiction. The sinking of that ship represents the most shark attacks in human history, resulting in as many as 150 survivors being picked off in the water in their days stranded at sea before being rescued. The numbers Quint quotes (“1,100 men went into the water, 316 come out, the sharks got the rest”) are an accurate population and death count, but they discount the non-shark deaths, including 200 from the actual sinking and hundreds more from dehydration and suicide. This may not be the film’s attempt at exaggeration, however – it may be Quint’s exaggerated perspective, accentuated by the details that are true. To him, none of those men died by anything as dishonorable as thirst. They were all taken in combat. “June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb.”
His story is both accountable and told without a wink of irony (Hooper is stunned into submitting to Quint’s eccentricity in that moment, made small by his experiences). To Spielberg, I believe it cannot only be a satire of masculinity, which he indirectly suggested by supporting Kael’s reading, who said, “The high point of the humor is in our seeing Shaw get it.” In light of Spielberg’s well-documented love of films about the cost of war (Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives is a big one), the moment that Quint stops being a joke to Hooper and Brody is also the moment when the parody of his behavior stops being purely disciplinary. View the film anywhere, in any reshowing – the audience does not rip with laughter during that speech.
The speech is transformative. Quint becomes an old version of a young man, drafted into horror, whose horrors catch up to him in poetic yet unsatisfying irony. Quint is the ultimate contextualization of Spielberg’s masculinity because he represents what he despises most about men in its most extreme form, yet succumbs to a form of empathy that can only be provided by the context of history, which gives closure if not absolution to the viewer’s idea of him. It is the ultimate example of Spielberg using war as a form of social catharsis, which he applies not to his most advisable man but to his least – the true power of the moment is that it rescues a bully rather than a hero.
Quint completes the spectrum of the masculine perspective of Spielberg’s idea of society (and self) with a moment of unironic storytelling, rooted in truth, evoking a Spielbergian premise echoed throughout his work – that modern society is a declension of the physical and spiritual impact of WWII. From that war, Spielberg has created a generation in the movies that doesn’t know how to be adults because their parents had their childhood taken from them. He eggs his movie kids into rebellion, as they were egged by parents desperate for strictness as a response to global disorder. He lived his life – a Jewish boy with a nerdy penchant for films and an obsession with war machines, tall tales, and monsters – growing up in the mid-century and seeing what those men came back as, or what they came back to become (and tried not to). “I think it is the key – the turning point of the entire century,” he said in an interview with Roger Ebert in 1998. “World War II allowed my generation to exist.”
While the premise of Quint’s horror at his black-and-white (and red) view of the world encouraged Kael to laugh at his posture, Spielberg must have known that it would twinge the average viewer into a form of respect, somewhere between understanding, gratitude, and fear. The irony when he glances at the lifejacket is the horror that he never escaped that day, that he’ll die back in the water meeting that fate no matter how many sharks he took from the earth to pay for surviving. Jake had the same moment when he realized he never left Chinatown. I can’t bring myself to laugh at that one either.
I think if Quint is only regarded with contempt, then he has cause for the posture of an apostate; we would deserve his defiance. If he can be drafted in the open yet traumatized in secret, if he can leave to celebration but come back to the isolation familiar only to survivors, without even the ability to know how to ask for help, if he can be failed by a society’s idea of him that much, he cannot only be laughed at. The cautionary tale of his grotesque personality meeting a fitting end by the horror that drove him to it may be a warning against the Quints of the world to be better. But it’s a warning to everyone else too, to remember who made him Quint. They’re the same ones who benefited from the bomb getting to where it was going. They’re also the same ones who laugh at him now.
Spielberg said once, “I don’t think that anybody in any war thinks of themselves as a hero.” The greatest joke he could have played on Quint for the greatest comeuppance would have been to show him pull himself up around that memory and play the hero. Instead, he created a moment that meant Jaws could not only be a joke on that man, or on Men in the movies. As much as Spielberg may fear or disrespect the actions of such a man, he could not help portraying his soul honestly, giving him a cause for brutality rooted in brutality. It may not have been conscious empathy; he may have intended it as parody, which is why few viewers “got it” like Kael did. But it’s why no movie that openly despises that kind of man has ever been as meaningful as Jaws. The key moment is not in laughing at the irony of Quint’s death. It’s the realization, as near to regret as any death in the movies, of what was really dying in that moment. And what part we might have played in it. And what to do now, with the world that it allowed to exist.
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Note: All images are screenshots from the film.
