Rewatching Jaws
Show Me the Way to Go Home
Nighttime on the Orca. After a full day at sea, after they’ve met the shark and understood what they’re up against, the three men sit in silence, drinking liquor out of mugs. It smells, this scene: the salty air, the pungent sweat of tired men, and fear.
Quint and Hooper will compare scars, try to one-up each other. Each man hoists his leg on the cabin’s table as Brody watches. Boom: scrape from a bull shark. Boom: scrape from a thresher shark. It’s a draw.
“You want a drink? Drink to your leg?” asks Quint. They will drink to their legs, and then Hooper will declare he has the crème de la crème of scars. He’ll point to his chest and say, “Mary Ellen Moffit. She broke my heart.” The men will laugh at the joke despite themselves, and drink some more, and Quint will tell his story about the Indianapolis, and they will sing together – Show me the way to go home / I'm tired and I want to go to bed / I had a little drink about an hour ago / And it's gone right to my head – before the shark comes back to the boat.
This scene is the heart of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Even as a young girl I understood this. I thought: there are secrets here. Secrets about men, about fathers, and what they feel when they’re tired and scared, what they’ll confide when they’re adrift and far from home.
_^_
I was a girl who imagined my way into stories quickly and rapturously. It was a way to grasp the world, even before I could fully understand it. Rewatching films was not such an easy thing to do in the era of cable TV and the early days of VHS, so when a movie hooked me, I reeled it in every chance I could get. Imagine: rewatching Jaws before it was a classic, before there was a Shark Week, before there were any memes. The film was just mine.
It wasn’t hard for me to imagine my father out there on the Orca, drinking with the men. My father, a former Navy man, who loved road trips and pinochle games, and who could spin incredible stories out of hardship. He was far from perfect, but I was fascinated by him, and I adored him, too. I could imagine how he would come alive with purpose as he set out to hunt the shark. My father wasn’t Brody, or Hooper, or Quint, not exactly. But he was that type of man. A good man.
Over time, I stopped imagining my way into stories, and I started to interrogate them. The ability to decode meaning felt powerful and illuminating. Rewatching got so much easier, and rewatching Jaws became a comfort. I spent a lot of time with those men on the Orca, and along the way, I discovered that some of their secrets were my father’s, too.
_^_
Chief Martin Brody: a man who wants to protect his family and matter to his community. He tells Hooper that’s the reason he left New York City. “In Amity, one man can make a difference,” he says, stumbling around Hooper’s boat with a wine bottle in hand.
I always knew that Brody’s fear of water was embarrassing for him. I could hear it in the taunting of the Amity old timer who shamed him for it on the beach, and in the maternal, soothing tone of Brody’s islander wife Ellen as she explained to Hooper, “Martin hates boats. Martin hates water. Martin sits in his car when we go on the ferry to the mainland. I guess it’s a childhood thing.” How can a man who is afraid of water possibly make a difference in Amity?
What I didn’t understand until I got much older is what it meant for Brody to move to an island. To look out on the thing he’s feared since childhood every day. This is the first thing he does in Jaws: he wakes up, opens the bedroom curtains, and looks out at the vast expanse of the thing he’s scared of. Brody, I realize now, is just waiting for the thing that’s important enough to finally get him in the water.
Matt Hooper: a youthful, rich, denim-on-denim-wearing oceanographer with city hands, a perfect foil for Brody and Quint. (Maybe even a foil for Amity itself.) Hooper arrives on the island as both an expert and an enthusiast, a man with a serious education and the money to pursue sharks as a luxury hobby. Hooper is beyond condescending until he meets Quint, when animosity between the men reveals just how insecure Hooper is, how much he desperately needs the respect of the other men on the Orca. Is it any wonder he’s convinced that sharks are territorial?
Unlike Brody, Hooper has turned his childhood terror into an active pursuit. He almost can’t wait to tell Brody and Ellen about his experience with a shark at the age of twelve, and how he watched the shark tear his boat apart. He admits no trauma, but his fixation points to all the ways he’s trapped inside that moment. He restages it, and demonstrates how brave he is to the other men, when he gets in his shark cage with his spear.
And Quint: so handsome with his side burns and his alcoholic charm, so tethered by memory and guilt to the sharks he hunts. His Indianapolis speech was arresting to me even when I was too young to understand the history it references. Like everyone else, I was always mesmerized by the specter of those doll’s eyes.
With every rewatch, I listened harder to that speech, and understood that it wasn’t just the sharks that haunted Quint:
Noon the fifth day, Mister Hooper, a Lockheed Ventura saw us, he swung in low and he saw us - a young pilot, a lot younger than Mister Hooper. Anyway he saw us and he come in low, and three hours later a big fat PBY comes down and start to pick us up. You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin' for my turn. I'll never put on a lifejacket again.
Why would Quint recall how young the pilot of the patrol bomber was? I’ve realized: the sinking of the Indianapolis was in 1945, and Quint would have been a young man, the pilot was a young man, and there were so many young men left behind to fend for themselves. The most vulnerable Quint felt was on the verge of being rescued, having to surrender his fate to someone else.
Quint turns that fear into control. He becomes the real rogue shark in Amity’s water, smashing his own radio to avoid any chance of being rescued. (That’s the real moment of madness in Jaws, right there.)
Meaning, respect and control. What they lack on land, these good men try to find as protectors out on the water. I must have understood that my father was longing for those things, too. I wouldn’t have imagined him on that boat if he wasn’t.
_^_
The men in Jaws are anchored to the wounds of their younger selves – and for Brody and Hooper, it’s explicitly a childhood thing. This is hardly surprising. Childhood is one of Steven Spielberg’s chief obsessions, and his tendency to sentimentalize it is one of my biggest issues with his films. But the truth is that I share his belief that childhood shapes us profoundly, and we spend much of our adulthood reckoning with it.
In that way, I think Jaws is one of Spielberg’s most interesting films about childhood – not children, but childhood. There’s a quiet, lovely scene a third of the way through the film in which Brody’s youngest son mirrors all of his father’s troubled expressions and gestures across the dinner table. When Brody finally sees what’s happening, he turns it into a humorous moment, and then says, “Give us a kiss” and dismisses his son from the table. Watching this scene now, it feels like a moment that troubles the boundary between adult and child, man and boy. So much of Jaws is about whether the man can put the boy to bed.
_^_
It’s a marvel how much we love the men in this film. Because they were not good men in Peter Benchley’s original novel. In the book, Brody is a mean drunk who wallows in working-class self-pity; Hooper is an unrepentant snob who sleeps with Brody’s wife; and Quint is a mercenary, devoid of charm and backstory. Spielberg and his screenwriters (depending on your source, as many as five men had a hand in that script) utterly transformed these men, and gave them so much grace.
(Amity was not a good place in Benchley’s novel, either. The name itself is pure irony for Benchley’s hard-bitten, gossipy, racist little island. I actually do have a grudging respect for Benchley’s original take on Amity, as offensive as it often is, because at least it offers a view on how racism is woven into the economic uncertainty of the town. It’s an ugly insight, but it rings true, and it’s totally erased in Spielberg’s film. Would we love these men so much if it were present in the film? I don’t think so. But the film elides race altogether, and when I rewatch it now, I can clearly see where the racial anxiety of Benchley’s novel lingers invisibly, shaping the great whiteness of Spielberg’s film even though it never breaks the surface.)
If there’s a critique of masculinity in the film Jaws, it’s an incredibly gentle one. The great gift of this film – to men, to fathers, to daughters and sons – is that it imagines that men can be vulnerable. Even though they can be afraid, and they can be scarred, they can still be good men.
Returning to Jaws time and again as I grew up, and as my father grew old, offered me another, harder-earned gift: the reflective space to see how he fell short because of his fears and flaws and unmet needs, and still believe that he was a good father, too.
_^_
The summer after my father died, I sat down to rewatch Jaws as part of a yearly 4th of July ritual. It felt strange and sad at first, the familiar scenes ushering in waves of grief and recognition of his gone-ness. But it felt wonderful, too, to set sail with the men on the Orca again, feeling that I could still find him there. Feeling, actually, that I could always find him there.
And then it was nighttime, and the men were singing, and if I listened carefully, I thought I could hear my father singing with them, too.
Oh, wherever I may roam / On land or sea a-foam / You will always hear me singing this song / Show me the way to go home.
Thank you for reading.