Last month, rtpoe was crowned one of the winners in our Clichemageddon context. As his prize, he got to suggest a topic for a future post. When he mentioned that Jaws is one of his all-time favorite movies, I just couldn’t resist an excuse to watch it again. Richard, this one’s for you.
Jaws was a trailblazer here, as in so many things. Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) begins the movie as the epitome of American manhood, almost to the point of cliche. He’s a loving husband, a devoted father, and a solitary lawman protecting his community. When confronted by the shark, however, everything spirals out of control. He watches a little boy get chewed up in front of his eyes, and is publicly berated by the grieving mother. Then the shark strikes again, despite the security measures he puts in place… and this time, his own child is nearly taken. If the first two-thirds of the movie is about anything, it’s revealing the impotence of male stereotypes.
And then something interesting happens. Brody stops being a man and goes back to being a child. He’s taken out of the context of his family and community, and put on the Orca, where he’s completely out of his element. Quint teaches him to tie a knot, which he struggles with (“It’s not too good, is it Chief! Well nothin’s easy is it? One more time.”). Hooper scolds him for bumping the oxygen (“You screw around with these tanks and they’re going to blow up!”). Brody sulks about doing his chores (tossing the chum), and sits awkwardly in the shadows while the “grown-ups” compare scars (they barely remember he’s there).
On the Orca, Brody is utterly useless. But because he is willing to be useless–to regress–he earns himself the chance to become a man again.
The Emperor Has No Bathing Suit
Why must the promiscuous ones always go first?
The movie sets up the theme of male impotence right off the bat, in literal fashion. A group of teenagers sit around a fire on the beach. An attractive blond, Crissie, leads a boy, Cassidy, over the dune. As she runs, she strips off her clothes gracefully and dives nude into the water. However, this isn’t Cassidy’s finest hour. He not only doesn’t score with Crissie, he doesn’t even get his pants off before he passes out in the sand. It’s funny… until suddenly it isn’t. Something attacks Crissie. For an excruciatingly long time, she cries out to the boy for help, and finally disappears beneath the waves. Cassidy stays on the sand and does nothing. It’s a microcosm of the next hour and fifteen minutes. (Bonus impotence: what kind of a boys name is Cassidy?)
We first see Brody waking up next to his wife, with his cute little children barging through the door. It’s a traditional family unit, almost a retro one. Brody wears a gray t-shirt and white boxers in the first shot. This modest sleepwear stands in contrast to the radical dress and sexual promiscuity of the teenagers on the beach. His police uniform is a similarly conservative beige.
The most conservative thing about Brody, however, is his job. He’s not just a policeman, he’s the only policeman for the community (he has a deputy, but the kid is dopey and useless, like all deputies in movies are). You can’t help thinking about the Old West: one sheriff single-handedly holding back anarchy. Mid-way through the movie, Brody explains why he came to Amity:
I’m telling you, 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, kids can’t leave the house, you gotta walk ‘em to school. But in Amity, one man can make a difference. In twenty five years, there’s never been a shooting or murder in this town.
Be gentle with him; it's his first summer.
Brody thinks of himself as John Wayne. “I can do anything,” he tells his wife. “I’m the Chief of Police.” He loves the idea that he, by himself, can keep everyone safe. But almost immediately, the movie starts to poke holes in that self-image. When his child, Michael, enters the movie for the first time, he’s bleeding… and it’s Brody’s fault. “You guys were playing on those swings,” he scolds. “Stay off them, I haven’t fixed them yet!” Much later in the movie, right before he leaves on the Orca, Brody tells his wife: “Don’t use the fireplace in the den because I haven’t fixed the flu yet.” Can this guy fix anything? If the shark doesn’t get his family, carbon monoxide will.
Back in the first Act, Brody walks down the street to buy the materials for his “Beach Closed” signs. We hear a military drumbeat playing in the background, suggesting male determination and vigor. But when he turns the corner, it turns out there’s a marching band nearby (and not a very good one at that). In the general store, he clumsily knocks over a whole jar of paintbrushes. Typing up the report on Crissie’s death, he misspells “Coroner” as “corner.”
These are little details, but Brody also has a huge, symbolic flaw that hints at his impending failure: he’s afraid of water. He’s the Chief of Police of an island that makes most of its money from the beach, but as Bad Hat Harry observes, “We know all about you, Chief. You don’t go in the water at all do ya?” He’s a transplant to the island (a change from Peter Benchley’s novel), and his fear keeps him one step removed from the community he is supposed to be protecting. The first shot he appears in begins with the ocean filling the frame, and then pulls back to reveal the water is safely on the other side of the window. Brody’s job is to keep the people of Amity safe from the shark, but he’s even more afraid of it than they are.
Biting Where It Hurts
He's the Mayor of Fashiontown.
When the mayor confronts Brody early on, he explains that the shark threatens impotence in another way. “Amity is a summer town,” explains Vaughn. “We need summer dollars.” Wage-earning is traditionally the role of the male. The shark threatens to undermine that. Keeping the beaches open preserves the mayor’s masculinity, because businesses will continue to make money. However, it imperils Brody’s masculinity, because it places people in danger. It’s significant that this confrontation takes place on a ferry, where Brody is already nervous because of his fear of the water. In this context, it’s easy to see Brody as a child, bullied and submissive.
In the next scene, Brody sits on the beach nervously, scanning the water. It’s clear that despite his acquiescence to the mayor, he doesn’t believe Crissie died in a boating accident. He’s certainly vigilant; people say hi and he doesn’t even notice them. Yet, the fact that he is fully clothed while everyone else is in swimsuits implies that he’s not really prepared. Worse, he gives permission for his own children to go in the water, despite what he knows.
Then, the Ghost Ship Moment: the raft Alex Kitner is floating on explodes in a geyser of blood. Brody’s reaction is seen in a dolly-zoom camera move, causing the background to seemingly retreat from Brody’s stunned features. This shot has a duel significance. First, having failed as a protector, Brody is in that instant further removed from the community, which literally recoils from him. Second, the shot makes Brody appears to shrink; he becomes smaller than life. (Incidentally, the shot is lifted directly from Hitchcock’s thriller Vertigo, which also deals with a man incapable of protecting his loved ones.)
The speed at which the attack occurs makes a mockery of Brody’s diligence. He is literally right there watching, and he’s still useless. He seems to freeze for a moment, unable to act (reminiscent of Cassidy’s drunken stupor). Finally, Brody runs to the water, screaming for the children to get out, but by the time he springs into action the swimmers are already flocking out anyway. All he succeeds in doing is getting in the way. Despite the chaos, he does not set foot in the water to help anyone.
The ultimate Facebook profile pic.
In the town meeting the follows, Brody could be excused for assuming that the people of Amity would look to him for protection. But his briefing about “shark spotters” is interrupted by business owners with a simple question: “Are you going to close the beaches?” When he says they are, the angry reaction is universal. What the townspeople fear is the economic castration. To them, Brody is the real threat. “Only 24 hours!” the mayor assures them (over the Chief’s objection). So much for John Wayne.
But just as Brody seems to be shrinking into irrelevance, the movie gives us another male figure who seems to have exactly the sort of mythic stature the Chief lacks. Quint silences the crowd with his legendary chalkboard scratch, and then tells them, “Y’all know me.” He’s already a legend, a knight with a castle full of bleached teeth. Quint addresses his speech to “Chief,” but it’s the mayor who answers him, “We’ll take it under advisement.” While Brody seems increasingly out of his element, Quint is confident to the point of nonchalance.
The Rosco P. Coltrane Award for Incompetent Sheriffing
Now we get an interlude where two locals try and catch the shark. The first one is worried they’ll get caught, but his friend says, “Don’t worry, the Chief lives on the other side of the island.” It’s striking how Brody’s authority is flaunted, and it nearly results in another death. When his deputy chuckles over the story the next morning, Brody fumes, “That’s not funny, that’s not funny at all.”
"If only Spielberg hadn't replaced my gun with a walkie-talkie!"
In the aftermath of the Kitner attack, seemingly every fisherman in New England descends to hunt the shark. However, these men are not motivated by any desire to protect, the way Brody is. They just want the $3,000 bounty. Brody desperately tries to uphold law and order at the teeming dock. However, his attempts to keep everyone safe are laughed off. “You gotta get somebody to help us,” he whines into the phone, “because we got more people down here than we can handle.”
But even though the fishermen completely ignore him, he’s overjoyed when they come back with a dead shark. “That’s swell! That’s swell!” he says. “Thanks a lot!” The celebration is cut short by Alex Kitner’s mother, who comes to the pier to give the Chief a good pwning for leaving the beaches open. Brody doesn’t defend himself. He doesn’t even apologize. He just stands there mutely and takes it. The shark may be dead (so they think) but Brody’s career in Amity might be too. In the next scene, he sits alone in his house, his face buried in his hands. But things can always get worse.
He and Hooper learn that the dead shark was not the killer shark, but they fail to convince the mayor. Brody has no choice but to try to protect the community the best he can, on the busiest weekend of the year. Armadas of boats patrol the waters, alert for any sign of the threatening shark. It is no coincidence that these boats are filled entirely by men, wielding phallic riffles. The entire operation is an extension of Brody, who has the ultimate responsibility for its success or failure.
Incidentally, Professor Jane Caputi of the University of New Mexico sees the theme of castration in the symbolism of the shark itself. She points out that the destructive power of the ocean is often portrayed as feminine, and this Terrible Mother often takes the form of the vagina dentata, or “toothed vagina.” A common myth is that the teeth had to be knocked out by some male cultural hero to make it safe for penile penetration (patriarchy). She even goes on to identify Brody, Quint, and Hooper as the Holy Trinity, fighting and ultimately supplanting a pagan female deity. The feminist reading is clever (maybe a little too clever for me to buy it completely), but today I’m less interested in the shark than Brody’s reaction to it.
With his own manliness ripped to pieces, Brody practically begs Quint to take over. Certainly, the fisherman’s own manhood doesn’t seem in doubt. He offers the Chief a shot of homemade moonshine, declaring it, “Pretty good stuff.” Brody, of course, can’t handle it. By all logic, Brody should stay at home and let Quint do what he does best. But Brody insists on coming along. It’s worth taking a moment to consider how little sense this makes. Brody knows absolutely nothing about boats or fishing. In fact, he’s afraid of water. Quint doesn’t want him onboard. And of course, he’s the only law enforcement for Amity—it’s crazy for him to leave town indefinitely. But in a psychological sense, Brody isn’t the Chief anymore. He’s just a kid going out to sea. Call him Chief Ishmael.
The third act of the film is as unusual as it is brilliant. For the last 50 minutes (!), we do not see Brody’s wife. We don’t see his children. We don’t see Amity Island at all. Brody, Hooper, and Quint go to sea on the Orca, and the world of the movie narrows to the confines of that boat. Brody’s family and the authority that comes with his job disappear. (When Quint calls him “Chief,” it’s a form of mockery.) Surrounded by things he fears, unable to perform even the simplest task, Brody is reduced to a childlike state.
Who's your daddy?
In one scene, Quint teaches Brody to tie a knot through a silly memory device. Brody mummers the condescending instructions Quint gave him over and over. When he ties the knot, he grins broadly and yells, “I got it!,” causing the shark on Quint’s line to run. Meanwhile, Hooper, who was deferential towards Brody on land, becomes superior on the boat. He spends his time impassively playing solitaire while Brody slaves to keep the chum line fresh. In place of the Chief’s family at the beginning of the movie, we are given a new nuclear family: Quint and Hooper as the bickering parents, and Brody as the son looking for their approval.
You Joseph Campbell fans out there know that in many folktales and cultures, a boy has to leave the community to engage in a dangerous hunting ritual, before he can return as a man. Think about teenaged Leonidas at the beginning of 300, facing down the CGI wolf. Or (and I do not believe I am using this as an example) the young Predators in Alien Vs. Predator, sent to Earth to prove themselves against the most fearsome beast imaginable (Paul W. S. Anderson).
Brody’s famous, initial reaction to seeing the shark suggests that he’s not much of a Predator. He snaps bolt upright, his limp cigarette a comically inadequate phallic symbol. “You’re going to need a bigger boat,” he tells Quint. Naturally, Quint refuses to acknowledge such a “deficiency.”
The Autobiography of Steven Spielberg, Nautical Edition
Perhaps it’s a coincidence. But consider this: when Spielberg’s parents divorced, he and his father barely spoke for years. Now think of the scene where Hooper, the scientist, goes down in the shark cage, and then disappears. He abandons the “family.” This is a change from the novel, in which Hooper is actually killed by the shark. In the film version, he hides on the bottom of the ocean until his “son” takes care of the shark all alone.
Now we get to the movie’s literal castration scene. The shark jumps out of the water onto the deck of the boat. Brody desperately grabs onto Quint’s hand and tries to hold him, but he slips out of his grasp. The shark bites him in the crotch (or close enough to make my points). Brody averts his eyes as the shark thrashes around with his prey. It’s an echo of the opening scene with Cassidy and Crissie: Brody’s right there, and he’s helpless.
On the bright side, there's no way Hooper can top THAT scar.
Remember that Quint was always presented as a real he-man, larger than life. The fact that he dies, leaving Brody to save the day, was one of the movie’s many innovations. I may be conveniently overlooking a lot of great movies from the 60s (please use the comments to smack me down), but I don’t believe Hollywood had much love for the “unlikely hero” before Jaws. Hollywood’s Golden Age heroes tended to be more like Quint, less like Brody. I certainly don’t mean to say that all Blockbusters give us bumbling everyman heroes that have to rise to the occasion—Indiana Jones, Leonidas, and Tony Stark are all very Quint-like. But when the shark takes Quint underwater, it’s pointing the way to one of our most durable pop culture cliches.
It’s time for Brody to grow up, or die trying. Of course, we all know how lil’ Stevie Spielberg emerged from a painful childhood to become a man: he combined the skills of both his parents to become a filmmaker. According to Steven’s sister Sue:
Steven’s love and mastery of technology definitely come from our father. Mom was a classical pianist, artistic and whimsical. She led the way for Steven to be as creative as he wanted to be.
With the destruction of the shark, Brody’s manhood is redeemed. He has fulfilled his role as protector, and suddenly his fear of the water is gone. The thing that made him a flawed hero is now stripped away. He can return to his community redeemed, renewed, and reunited with Hooper, his absent father figure. “I think the tide’s with us,” he notes. Amity is welcoming him back.
Now if only he could do something about that swing set.