I have decided to revise my Jaws essay for republication in 3 Quarks Daily. As I won’t be publishing it for two more weeks or so, the rewrite isn’t urgent. Instead, I’m making notes about possible revisions and I’m thinking.
One of the things I’m thinking about is the film’s “religious” dimension. I have the scare quotes from my friend David Porush. We’ve known one another since graduate school in the Jurassic era. David knows Girard’s work much better than I do, so I sent the essay to him and he liked it. But he thought the ending was a bit weak (I agree) and remarked in a later note: “I’m more interested in your reluctance to get ‘religious’ especially because you already are there implicitly. Girard, sacrificial ritual, myth-logic ...” Girard, as you may know, is a devout Catholic.
As it turns out, that issue has been on my mind. So I’m thinking about it. In this post I’m using the following essay as a vehicle:
Olivia Rutigliano, On the Endless Symbolism of the Best Summer Movie Ever Made: Jaws, Literary Hub 2020.
Early on Rutigliano asserts, “Most simply, Jaws is about three men on a boat who hunt a gigantic, ravenous fish.” What happened to the first half of the film? If we dropped it could the rest stand alone? Yet I understand why she focuses on the hunt. That’s where the symbolism likes, if symbolism’s what you want.
After recounting Quint and Hooper sharing their scars and then Quint’s monolog, she goes on:
Quint knows what it’s like to feel that his life is insignificant—forgotten by civilization, and left at the mercy of an unfeeling natural world. But his speech does more than provide the monster movie with tragic gravitas; it ushers in a spiritual dimension. When the shark comes to Amity (on June 28th, 1974) it is almost thirty years since Quint’s life was spared by the sharks while floating in the Philippine Sea. Rather like Moby-Dick’s Captain Ahab, who spent his life chasing the whale that had once bitten off his leg, Quint has squandered the life he was effectively gifted back by the sharks that day. Like Ahab, Quint should have died from his encounter, but he didn’t. Both men do not see this as the blessing that it is.
The film says nothing about Quint having squandered his life. That’s something Rutigliano infers. The inference is reasonable enough. What interests me is her assertion that Quint’s monologue “ushers in a spiritual dimension.” The dictionary on my computer defines “spiritual” as “relating to or affecting the human spirit or soul as opposed to material or physical things.” I note that the word is often used to denote a transcendent dimension to life without reference to any particular religious belief. It is certainly the case that no religious belief or institution shows up in Jaws.
What do we make of the assertion that Quint’s life was “gifted back by the sharks?” What kind of creatures are sharks that they can do such things? What does such a reading presuppose about the world?
Rutigliano continues on:
Both men waste their lives, then, on petty things: (between the two of them) revenge and brawls and divorces and grandiose pursuits to destroy the creatures that haunt them. Ahab hates the whale. Quint hates sharks. When Brody hires him, Quint’s disinfecting full rows of shark teeth, likely from a fresh kill, to mount on his wall along with the rest of his enormous, creepy collection of shark jaws (which foreshadows, in a way, what will happen to him).
Yes, the boundaries of the ceiling in Quint’s loft are hung with rows of shark jaws. When the Orca motors away from the dock the shot is taken through a pair of shark jaws, and is thus framed by them. We could say it symbolizes something, but that’s too explicit. It doesn’t symbolize anything. But it is, it does, something. What?
Moving on:
In light of Quint’s backstory, it is plausible that the massive, highly-intelligent, vaguely-supernatural-seeming shark is, much like Ahab’s White Whale, an angel of death, coming to claim Quint after his wasted and vengeful life, at the dawning of the anniversary of his survival. Or maybe, dovetailing with Moby-Dick’s themes of predestination, there is no free will in Jaws and a shark circles back to claim Quint, because this has always been his fate and he can never escape it.
So, those sharks in the pacific gave Quint his life back, and now this (nameless) great white shark is an angel of death. Not literally, of course, only figuratively. But even that? Fate? Is that what this spiritual dimension consists of, gifting, angel of death, fate? And, if the shark is Quint’s angel of death, what was it for the four people it killed earlier in the film?
Finally, somewhat later:
Reading the shark as a kind of divine agent, and specifically a punisher, allows Jaws to become a film ruled by, of all things, the notion of salvation—which is a highly individualized concept. The fascinating argumentative logic of Jaws enforces that small human problems are inconsequential, but also that humans, small and unimportant though they may be, have individual roles which can bear great meaning. After all, the film’s shark problems technically begin in 1945, when a group of men mobilize to initiate the launch of a planet-destroying bomb—an act controlled by a small number of people, but with enormous consequences for earth. It tracks that the torpedoing of the Indianapolis and the tragic mauling of its sailors by nature itself, is positioned as a kind of punishment for their part in mankind’s hubristic effort to play God. Quint is marked by this event (literally, as the scar-comparison scene shows), and its implications will chase him. He realizes this, too. His destruction of the radio and refusal to put on a life-jacket suggest that he knows there is no point in trying to escape. Like Ahab, the maddened Quint doesn’t care what happens to the others on the ship.
Salvation? In my original essay I’d gone so far as to suggest that Quint’s death was a kind of redemption the town’s failure to close the beaches, a failure that cost three lives. I also talked of Quint’s death as a sacrifice, a sacrifice on behalf of Amity. Sacrifice, redemption, either way, both, there is a connection between Quint’s death and the events in Amity, not simply what the shark did, but how the town responded.
I’ve even gone so far in my thinking, but only now am I writing it down, as to think of the town’s conflicted reaction to the shark as being unavoidable, perhaps even as a kind of original sin. If I do with that idea then I seem committed to think of Quint as a Christ figure.
Do I believe that? No. But I don’t disbelieve it either. It’s a pattern born out of myth-logic.
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I’m collecting my posts about Jaws under that label, Jaws.
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