Kids These Days Keep Saying We Should Close The Beaches
Jaws, the Other, and the open sea, in 2024
Sharks are super cool. I hope everyone who reads this can agree on that. Sharks are not super cool, however, when they show up in the waters of public beaches and start eating people. Like Bruce the shark in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. What the hell, Bruce.
I was lucky enough to see Jaws for the first time recently on the big screen as part of my local theater’s classic movie series. It’s quite a movie to watch for the first time, especially in that kind of setting. The audience cheered at pivotal lines and moments (“We’re gonna need a bigger boat!”) and jumped and screamed at the scary bits (I threw an empty box of Junior Mints when the corpse fell out of the rotting hull of the abandoned boat). While not a slasher, Jaws is unmistakably a horror movie. Let’s talk about why, and how it holds up.
A list of things I knew going into watching Jaws: 1. The shark dies by being exploded. 2. Hooper gets attacked by the shark when he goes down in the cage, but survives. 3. Quint gets eaten. 4. Quint has a thing about sharks because his whole crew got killed by one and he barely survived. 5. It’s very lucky that I knew number 4, because Quint is pretty much unintelligible. 6. The mayor won’t close the beaches because it’s the fourth of July.
The Mayor of Amity Island was brought up a lot during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, for what I hope are obvious reasons. During a crisis, he valued the profits his town made over the town itself, not to mention the people in it. He thought that closing the beaches on July fourth would ruin the summer more than the growing number of graphic deaths by shark attack would. In many ways, Mayor Larry of Amity Island is scarier than Bruce the shark. Bruce the shark is fully aware that his actions kill people. He is hurting them on purpose. Mayor Larry is killing people through negligence and inaction. Luckily for Amity Island, though, Police Chief Brody will have none of that. And neither will Quint, the island’s unintelligible weird old guy with a Past, or Hooper, the shark scientist who has been called up so that he can be ignored.
Jaws is a pretty classic ‘fear of the other’ style horror movie. The shark isn’t seen for most of the movie, living instead as a mostly invisible and untraceable enemy that could be anywhere in the water at any time. It is just outside the boundaries of the island, there but not there at the same time. The town is scared of it not just because it is dangerous, but because it is something new, something other. But each of the three men that eventually kill it have their own, specific reasons to fear this particular unknown. Brody is a police chief new to both the area and the job, who has special interest in keeping this town safe for the sake of both his family and his career. Quint has a personal vendetta against sharks due to having been attacked by one in the past. Hooper’s boat got eaten by a shark when he was twelve, leading him to a life of studying sharks. Each of these men also develops a close relationship with the other two over the course of the movie.
‘Fear of the Other’ is a very common mechanism in horror. The Other is something that is outside of the norm, but still impacts it. Something that is not understood as it is, but through its actions. Bruce the Shark is a prime example of an Other, but so are Pennywise, Carrie, Regan MacNeil as Pazuzu, Michael Myers, and many more. Others, in the horror sense, are monsters. But many people, namely queer ones and other minorities, find themselves in these Others. Why wouldn’t they? The monsters are representative of them on purpose, after all.
Brody, Hooper, and Quint each have a bit of Other in them. Both Brody and Hooper are newcomers to this town, outsiders, just like Bruce. Quint has been there since anyone can remember, but has seen things none of them can understand, and is therefore an outcast. I am of the opinion that these men all have some Other in them in the queer sense, as well. There is a sort of casual intimacy between all of them that is evident throughout the movie. In particular, I found the scene where Hooper and Quint compare scars to be hinting at something more between them that could have been had Quint not been eaten by Bruce the shark. (Once again, what the hell, Bruce.) Bruce the shark is a force that drives these men both together and apart, Other meeting Other on the open seas to devastating effect.
The fear of the Other is a clear influence in this movie, but there is another trope that has been said to be at work in Jaws: the vagina dentata.
The vagina dentata, or the vagina with teeth, is present in folktales in cultures around the world, and is taken very literally in the movie Teeth (2007). It is the idea, less literally, of the all-consuming feminine. There is an opportunity to take Jaws as a vagina dentata style story, with Bruce at the center, and many have. I however, choose to view Jaws more simply as a story of two Others meeting. The vagina dentata is often treated as an Other, but I believe that Bruce the shark is an Other of a different kind. Bruce is an outsider, a threat, much in the way that Brody, Hooper, and Quint could be if they so chose. In fact, the Mayor begins to see them as such upon their suggestion to close the beaches. But, unlike Bruce, instead of seeking to destroy Amity Island, to let the shark have them if he wants, to just up and leave instead of risking their safety, they sail right out into that unknown ocean to protect it.
The ending of the movie Jaws leaves us with a shot of Brody and Hooper clinging to a piece of driftwood as they swim off into the sunset together. It’s a romantic shot, one that speaks to hope in the future. But the explosion that blew Bruce to bits still rings in their ears, and his guts and blood float around them in the ocean. Their boat is destroyed, and their friend’s life taken. We, the audience, are left to sit with this story and its bloody aftermath, the kind of destruction that only comes when two Others meet still fresh in the water around us.