What Do the "Jaws" Movie and WWII Have in Common?

Or put differently, what does the Jaws shark symbolize?

This question is worth asking because Jaws taps into troubling questions about stereotypes, war, and culture.

The obvious place to start is the scene where Quint, the fisherman, describes the shark attacks that followed the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis by a Japanese submarine.

Quint says, "Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into our side, Chief. It was comin' back from the island of Tinian Delady. Just delivered the bomb—the Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in twelve minutes. Didn't see the first shark for about a half an hour."

Quint is referring to real events, the actual sinking of the Indianapolis after it delivered the atomic bomb. Moreover, at an unconscious, symbolic level, Quint is creating an equation between sharks and Japanese soldiers. What Quint says about sharks—"he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ‘ya, doesn't seem to be livin'"—could just as well have been describing the WWII American stereotype of the "inscrutable" Japanese soldier with lifeless eyes. Furthermore, through such stereotypes, both the shark and the Japanese soldier were made out to be an enemy that suddenly attacks the nation on its own soil (the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor, like Amityville being attacked on the 4th of July), and a relentless enemy that hides in the water (a Japanese submarine, the shark attacking Amityville).

Japanese Submarine, 1941. Flickr, Marion Doss.

Shark fin. Flickr, Anita363.

Part of the power of Jaws, then, is that it allows some viewers—at least the ones who know about WWII—to reflect on some of the most vexing, confusing aspects of "the Good War."

In particular, when the shark gets blown to pieces at the end of the movie, viewers are encouraged to feel that such destruction was fully justified, whereas in real life polls show that Americans have felt increasingly conflicted and regretful about dropping atomic bombs on Japanese civilians. (In a related generational shift, people today are less likely to be disturbed by a doll's eyes or uncannily-realistic robot face than earlier generations were.) Even those older Americans who felt that dropping the bomb was necessary may have later come to believe that Americans lost the moral high ground when we killed thousands of women and children, violating a basic moral ideal that had been in place throughout our entire history as a nation. Many Americans don't like to talk about these ethical problems—but most do like watching this movie and rooting for the destruction of a shark that was hellbent on killing us, including our children.

Hiroshima bomb cloud, U.S. government photo.

Jaws ending.

Recognizing the Shark
It gets even more complicated when you consider American attitudes toward German soldiers in WWII. For example, here's what one American soldier remembered about a battle on the front lines near Cologne, Germany:

"We were passing the Germans we killed. Looking at the individual German dead, each took on a personality. These were no longer an abstraction. These were no longer the Germans of the brutish faces and the helmets we saw in the newsreels. They were exactly our age. These were boys like us. ...Once the helmet is off, you're looking at a teenager, another kid." —Robert Rasmus, interview reprinted in Studs Terkel's book The Good War: An Oral History of WWII.

This soldier's story sounds like Quint's points about the shark's eyes—how they seem "lifeless," or as this soldier put it, like "an abstraction." German soldiers with helmets that hide their eyes also fit Quint's image of the shark, which is the underlying stereotype of all enemies in modern Western warfare: lifeless, inhuman, animalistic.

U.S. wartime poster, 1942, Office of Emergency Management..

But as noted by the American soldier, all this changes when the enemy helmet comes off, when you get up close and see that the supposed monsters are just teenage boys like you. Quint notes this same type of sudden switch in perspective when he says, "Until he [the shark] bites 'ya and those black eyes roll over white..."

In other words, Jaws and WWII both create confusing, disturbing oscillations between media stereotypes and individual personalities, between abstract concepts and real beings, between death and life. The shark seems dead but then you realize how alive he is...just before he kills you. WWII enemy soldiers seem like abstractions, but then you realize they're humans...just before you kill them.


Hope for Humanity?

I find it comforting to hear the American soldier Rasmus say he eventually recognized the humanity of the German soldiers.

American helping wounded German soldier, 1944. Army Surgeon General, National Archives and Records Administration.

Unfortunately, such recognition of common humanity happened less often between American and Japanese soldiers, apparently due to racial biases and the brutality of the fighting in the Pacific, but I would hope that such prejudices are being left behind by now.

Jaws, on the other hand, will remain popular as long as people continue to wonder and worry about war, death, and stereotypes.





Further Reading:
See also my post on shark attacks, tears, and the USS Indianapolis, and my post asking, Why do good people resent Hooper and scientists like him?


Here's my co-authored book chapter on "Jaws," with more extended analysis

For more on Quint and many others' feelings of revulsion and confusion at dolls' eyes and similarly uncanny, hybrid phenomena, see research on the "uncanny valley in reactions to humanoid robots and "creepy dolls." And for the research cited above on contemporary reactions to uncannily human robot faces, see this short article.

Robert Willson Jump Cut journal article, where he explores the resonance between Jaws and submarine movies.

WWII Shark Attacks: What Survivors' Tears Teach Us

What makes men cry? 

It's hard to say when it comes to World War II veterans, since they grew up at a time when men tried not to talk much about their pain. We can get hints, though, by paying attention to the words and tears of the survivors of the USS Indianapolis, the navy ship torpedoed by a Japanese submarine toward the end of WWII, a disaster that left about 900 U.S. sailors drifting for days in the Phillippine Sea, suffering from shark attacks, dehydration, and salt-water ingestion.

USS Indianapolis, Wikipedia, Navy Photo 80-G-425615

Whenever Dr. Haynes, the ship's doctor, discovered another sailor had died floating in the water, he'd take off the dead sailor's life jacket and give it to another young man struggling to stay alive. In a Discovery Channel interview given at age 89, Dr. Haynes admitted that he still cries whenever he hears the Lord's Prayer because it reminds him of the Indianapolis:

"And that was hard work, getting an oil-soaked life-jacket off. And then we'd say the Lord's Prayer and then let him go. I, I got to stop going into detail, okay? Because I'll start crying. I don't go to church any more. Not that I'm not a Christian. I'm a Christian and I believe there is a God. But they always say the Lord's Prayer. I'm crying, and I can't do that. And I must have known 100 men on that ship very well. And many of my friends died in my arms. Gave me messages to their wives and all that."

In those final moments at sea, Dr. Haynes paid particular attention to the young men's eyes, as author Doug Stanton notes: "Then he [Dr. Haynes] moved quickly to the next boy. He tapped again; this eye was bloodshot and swollen—a sign, Haynes knew, of edema caused by ingestion of salt water. There was no reflex. It was like touching the blank and glassy eye of a stuffed animal. Haynes had to declare the boy dead" (Doug Stanton, In Harm's Way, p. 200).

I can't help noticing the overlap between this arresting description of the "blank and glassy eye of a stuffed animal" and that famous scene in Jaws where the fisherman Quint describes sharks with a similar analogy with a doll's eyes ("he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye"). Of course, a Hollywood movie and a nonfiction book about actual war events are not the same, so I don't take the comparison lightly or intend any disrespect to the real Indianapolis survivors. But given the striking parallels, I have to ask: Why would both compare dying sailors and living sharks with a toy's eyes?

My sense is that it's because all of these beings—dying sailors, sharks, dolls, and stuffed animals—reside on a surreal, unsteady border zone, where it isn't clear if the living are dead or the dead are living. If you'll allow the comparison, it's like when Quint got confused over whether a USS Indianapolis mate floating in the water was still alive. Quint says, "I thought he was asleep. Reached over to wake him up. Bobbed up and down in the water like a kinda' top. Well, he'd been bitten in half below the waist." Surrounded by death, the buddy seems alive, but only half-way, since sleeping is a mini-death that we all experience at night—except this soldier turns out to be truly dead. Similarly, in the actual Indianapolis disaster, Dr. Haynes can't be sure if the men floating in the water around him are dead or alive, and has to check their eyes to find out. This is also like the eyes of dolls and stuffed animals that seem so truly human, yet so disturbingly artificial at the same time. Researchers call this the uncanny valley, the zone where something artificial is so human-looking that it causes feelings of eeriness and revulsion, a common human reaction to certain robot faces and creepy dolls.

At the deepest, most existential level, this uncanny zone may cause Dr. Haynes and Quint to question the solidity of life and death and reality itself.

Flickr, Matt Keifer, Flckr

Not that Dr. Haynes said all this. He didn't have to. In fact, he lets us know that, even when he gave that interview at age 89, he was still holding back ("I got to stop going into detail, okay?"). He was not saying everything he could have about those gruesome days and nights floating with the sharks and dead bodies in the water after delivering the atomic bomb.

That's why I'm glad that actor Robert Shaw didn't choke up when he delivered Quint's Indianapolis speech. Quint's delivery honors the sense of restraint that many real WWII veterans show.

Yet that restraint makes their tears even more meaningful. At reunions, the Indianapolis survivors often pour affection all over Chuck Gwinn, the PV-1 pilot who first spotted them floating in the water and called for help. The Indianapolis survivors call him their "angel"—and that makes him cry (Stanton, p. 218).

These WWII veterans remind us that tears connect us with each other. Most animals on earth have eyes, but only humans cry.

Further Reading:

What do Jaws and WWII have in common? (a related post).

For research on younger generations' reactions to uncannily human-looking robot faces, with more acceptance of these hybrid mixtures, see this short article.

Further evidence for the extreme emotional and physical toll of the Indianapolis's surreal carnage comes from The Longevity Project (Chapter 14), a book on the effects of WWII combat on the mortality rates of surviving U.S. soldiers. The authors found that veterans who fought in the Pacific died at earlier ages than those who fought in Europe. Their explanation for these mortality differences certainly seems relevant to the USS Indianapolis survivors: "The more alien and disturbing the [war] situation, the worse the later health" (p. 189).

In a poignant 2018 newspaper editorial, author Doug Stanton pays further tribute to the Indianapolis survivors and touches in his own way on questions about reality. He honors the Indianapolis survivors every year by swimming out beyond the buoys in Lake Michigan late at night, getting a modest hint of the terror that comes from floating in deep water at night with no land in sight. As he puts it, "Five minutes floating alone in the dark, unable to touch bottom, is the barest glimpse of the ordeal that those 316 men of the Indianapolis survived. But I recommend it."

Why Do Good People Resent Science? (In "Jaws," For Example)

I want to look at the state of wonder in America, and see what it has to do with widespread resentment toward science. In particular, I want to say a few things about Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), the marine biologist in the movie "Jaws."

"Jaws" is a good test case because it has been extremely popular ever since it came out in 1975, and movies with this sort of ongoing appeal often play on complex cultural tensions or ambivalances. Hooper is also interesting. Rather than a twisted scientist in the mold of Dr. Strangelove, Hooper is portrayed as an ethical, likeable person, using his scientific knowledge to help save the island of Amity. Most importantly, Hooper is a scientist filled with a sense of wonder, as you can tell from his fascination with sharks, which he refers to as a "miracle of evolution." So how could anyone resent a scientist like Hooper?

The biggest clue is Hooper's obsession with measurement. He's constantly trying to measure the exact physical dimensions of the sharks in the film, all while talking about bite radiuses, proportions, and scale.

These measurements might seem unimportant until you remember that Hooper doesn't just study sharks, he also kills them. He fully embraces the mission to kill "Jaws," and, in the end, it's his air tank that gets the job done.

It's not just this one shark that Hooper kills. I would argue that Hooper embodies a popular view of scientists as killers of mystery. In this view, science is a threat to our sense of wonder and awe at the sublime mysteries of the world, from the mysteries of the deep seas to outer space and everything in between. Nothing gets spared from science's relentless measurements and authoritative explanations. Most people appreciate the discoveries and technological applications coming from scientists, but some think scientists have too much power and wish they would leave more to the imagination. Even those somewhere in the middle long for mysteries that haven't been studied to death.

Some readers may object that science actually increases wonder by opening up new questions for investigation. That's fine, but I think it's important to recognize that millions of people don't view science the same way, or at least not all the time. In fact, even committed believers in science often enjoy holding onto a sense of mystery in certain cases, such as when believing a dream predicted the future, sensing the presence of a dead loved one, or throwing a coin in a fountain for good luck. They even feel that those mysteries touch deep parts of their soul.

I just hope more people will recognize that a longing for mystery and wonder plays a part in reservations about science. Maybe doing so will create more understanding of others and ourselves.

That's probably the biggest difference between 1975 and today. Back in the 70s, when "Jaws" first came out, it was still possible to imagine a fisherman, a scientist, and a police chief riding in the same boat, in pursuit of the same goal, despite their major differences. These days they'd probably get separate boats and start yelling at each other before they even got out of the harbor.

We're really in trouble when we can no longer recognize our common interest in both science and mystery. ___________________

Related Reading: For more on awe and social solidarity, check out my short essay titled "Why We Throw Coins in Fountains."