Let’s start with sharks where many of us started: with the film that made millions of people afraid to go in the water. In 1975 the shark had long been a mythic figure, the ultimate terror of the deep, but Stephen Spielberg’s adaptation of Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel captured the popular imagination.
It had everything a summer blockbuster needed. An adventure film set in a resort town in Massachusetts. A police chief from the big city settling in to life in a small town. Family drama. Town drama. Drama on the high seas. And right in the middle of it, a humongous shark.
Spielberg’s shark may not be as straight-up mythical as Godzilla or Smaug, but he’s still more myth than real. We’ll talk about the real thing as we go on with this section of the Bestiary. But for now, sit back, strap in, and let the story carry you along.
Our guide to this world’s version of the shark is marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), though Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) does a fair amount of research on his own before Hooper shows up. First he has to figure out what’s killed a young woman, while fending off the mayor’s insistence that nothing, but nothing, get in the way of the town’s summer tourist season; then, with Hooper’s help, he has to narrow down the list of suspects. There are a whole lot of sharks in the world, but not many who are big enough to shred an adult human.
It doesn’t take them long to zero in on the perpetrator: Carcharodon carcharias (which is a fantasy name if there ever was one), the great white shark. The beauty of the film is that up until the end, we know what the monster does, but we barely see him. Occasionally we’ll get the shark’s POV: zooming through the water, closing in on the legs and feet of swimmers. More often we glimpse a disturbance, see a swimmer disappear, catch sight of a fin—and then suddenly there’s blood in the water. It’s done as much with John Williams’ brilliant musical score as with fast cuts and quick hints.
Even at the end, when we get the scope of the monster and come face to face with all. Those. Teeth, there are still extended sequences in which we don’t see the shark. We see a series of yellow barrels instead, attached to the shark by harpoons. Where the barrels go, that’s where the shark is.
It’s great filmmaking, but it’s mostly an accident of budget and logistics. You can’t train a shark the way you can a whale or a dolphin, so a live shark wasn’t an option. All three versions of Bruce, the mechanical shark designed for the film, were a disaster. They kept breaking down, falling apart, and rusting shut.
Spielberg had to improvise. As he said, “The film went from a Japanese matinee horror flick to more of a Hitchcock, the-less-you-see-the-more-you-get thriller.” And that’s what made it a classic.
So who is Bruce the shark (versus Bruce the glitchy robot) when he’s at home off the beach in Amity? He’s a night feeder (though he seems perfectly happy to go after swimmers in broad daylight). He detects prey by vibrations, tracking rapid, erratic movements in the water—the signs of fish in distress, or humans swimming. Hunters can lure him to their boats by chumming: laying trails of ripe offal.
People don’t know how old sharks can get, says Brody as he reads his way through the literature. They might live for thousands of years. Their digestive system is very slow; a necropsy within a few days will leave no doubt as to whether the shark has eaten a human.
Sharks eat anything and everything. When Hooper opens up the tiger shark that supposedly ate the first two swimmers, he doesn’t find what’s left of them, but he does pull out a whole fish, a partial fish, a crushed tin can, and a Louisiana license plate. That proves, says Hooper, that he’s come up from the south along the Gulf Stream.
Most shark attacks take place in three feet or less of water, within ten feet of shore. Sharks can and will attack en masse, but Bruce is a rogue shark. He hunts alone. Hooper believes in a theory he calls territoriality: that a rogue shark stays in the same area for as long as the food holds out. Bruce won’t leave Amity as long as the beaches are open and there are swimmers to feed on.
Great whites are big, but Bruce is huge. Twenty to twenty-five feet (six to seven and a half meters) long. One of his teeth is the size of a shot glass, says Hooper.
Captain Quint (Robert Shaw) of the Orca knows sharks up close and personal. He was in the crew of a battleship on a top-secret mission in World War II. The ship was torpedoed and sunk with 1100 men aboard, and no help came for days.
What came were sharks, a thousand of them. The thing he remembers most about them is their eyes. Lifeless eyes, black and flat like a doll’s, seeming not to be alive until the shark bites. Then they roll white, and the screaming begins.
A shark is a perfect engine, Hooper says. It’s an eating machine, a miracle of evolution. All it does is swim and eat and make new sharks.
Bruce is more than a simple machine, however perfect. When he feeds on swimmers, he’s just living to eat. But when the Orca comes after him, he retaliates. He chases the boat; he damages it severely. The hunters need a concerted attack and some serious ordnance to take him out.
Bruce is not just a mindless predator. He’s one of the great movie monsters, and he defined an era and a genre. There are multiple sequels and numerous imitators, but none of them quite compares to the original.
It doesn’t take them long to zero in on the perpetrator: Carcharodon carcharias (which is a fantasy name if there ever was one), the great white shark.
I don’t think I ever considered the similarity between Carcharodon carcharias (which, according to Wikipedia, comes from the Ancient Greek for “sharp-toothed shark”) and the name of Carcharoth (“The Red Maw”), the great wolf from J.R.R. Tolkien’s story of Bergen and Luthien. (I don’t know if there is any connection; Tolkien may or may not have known about the shark’s scientific name, but he certainly knew Ancient Greek.)
I would not be surprised if he had known. Let’s not forget the Towers of the Teeth, either.
The USS Indianapolis was a heavy cruiser (not a battleship /pedantry) that was sunk by a Japanese submarine after it delivered the Little Boy atomic bomb to Tinian. It sank before the bridge could get a distress signal off so no one knew it was missing for several days.
Exactly what Quint said.
The difference between Godzilla or Smaug and a shark is that sharks are real and were negatively affected by Jaws depicting them as terrifying monsters rather than just animals. For decades after the movie, humans killed far, far more sharks than the reverse, because the movie sold the fiction that sharks are aggressive man-eaters and that the only way to deal with them is to kill or be killed. I think I read once that Peter Benchley came to regret how much harm he’d done to shark populations by demonizing them the way he did in the book and film.
If animals made monster movies, they’d make them about us.
From the NYT
The Big Bad Wolf Is Afraid of You
I am not done with the topic. This is just the intro. Wait and see.
“Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility” – Ash, commenting on the Xenomorph, Alien.
While I would discount the hostility aspect of a Great White, I would place its scariness-to-humans value right up beside the Xenomorph.
We went in to Kingston one night to catch a movie, and we got the trailer for Jaws. A great mood-setter for our subsequent three kilometre canoe-trip across the St. Lawrence, in the dark, to get back to our island.
“a live shark wasn’t an option.”
Possibly for the best. I remember an actor (David Carradine, I think) talking about a scene in which his character was attacked by wolves. The first time they filmed it, it was clear the dogs playing wolves wanted to play with the actor, not eat him. So without consulting each other, two groups in the crew came up with what they felt were workable solutions. The first was to make the actor tastier, by slathering him with appetizer.
The second was to get real wolves.