JAWS: About that shark
Our topic today will be the film Jaws. An American classic. The original summer blockbuster. The film that made countless people (including my childhood self) afraid to swim in the ocean. I have loved this movie since I first saw it at, probably seven years old. Yeah that sounds young, but it was the ‘80s so don’t judge. Many things can be said about this film, but I’m not going to say them all. I will say that the performances of Robert Shaw, Roy Scheider, and Richard Dreyfuss never get old (at least for me). The most memorable is Robert Shaw, but honestly I think all three are great. Okay, enough of the retrospective praise. Let’s get down to brass tacks.
For me, there is an argument about this movie going back to childhood. An argument which I will never let rest. And that is this – the shark is NOT CALLED JAWS!! THE SHARK DOESN’T HAVE A FUCKING NAME!! SO STOP CALLING IT JAWS!! I’ve always thought that it’s colossally stupid to call the shark Jaws. It’s a killer shark, not a pet, and IT DOESN’T HAVE A FUCKING NAME!! Why the hell would anyone name a shark that’s terrorizing an island by eating people alive? They wouldn’t, because that would be fucking stupid!
Needless to say, this is a hill I am willing to die on, but let me lay out my reasoning.
Let’s start with the book. It’s a lousy read and this is one of the rare cases where the film is vastly superior to the book. In the book, the Chief’s wife, Ellen, is a bored, unhappy housewife who feels that she married beneath her station and regrets the way her life turned out. Hooper’s kind of a spoiled rich brat who ends up banging Mrs. Brody, but he gets his just desserts for it when the shark eats him. Also, instead of Quint being eaten alive and Brody blowing up the shark, we get an ending where Quint drowns, Hooper gets eaten, the shark dies from all its wounds just before it’s about to eat Chief Brody. And there’s more to the mayor’s reluctance to close the beaches, too. It has to do with mob-funded real estate and the need for summer renters to make it turn a profit for the mafia. All that and more happens in that god-awful turd of a novel. However, one thing that doesn’t ever happen is the shark being called “Jaws”. It’s always “the shark” or “the great white” or “the man-eating motherfucker”. Okay, I may have made that last one up. Suffice it to say, since the shark is never called Jaws in the novel entitled Jaws it probably wasn’t ever meant to have a name. The title is a reference to the fact that this goliath man-eating shark has humongous JAWS that will chomp down on you and bite your sorry ass in half.
Now – the film. Ironically enough, one of the biggest similarities it has with the book is that no one calls the shark Jaws. I’m not going to get into singing the praises of the film since I already did that at the start of this, just in case you started suffering from amnesia since you started reading. In reviewing the screenplay, the word “jaws” is only used in the title or to refer to ACTUAL jaws. And the word is not uttered once in the film. Now, behind the scenes they actually did name the shark, and it wasn’t Jaws. It was called Bruce, named after Spielberg’s lawyer. Now, I’m not saying you should actually call the shark Bruce. You shouldn’t, because in case you’ve forgotten THE SHARK DOESN’T HAVE A FUCKING NAME!!
Now, I’ve noticed that there are video games that officially call the shark Jaws. I suppose some dumbshits people might say that this proves that the shark is named Jaws. My answer to this is — I don’t care about these games or any of their details. Them calling the shark Jaws means exactly nothing. Because all these video games are is an exercise in stupidity and a waste of time, maybe like this blog.
Now, I haven’t really argued this point with anyone since I was a kid, but I’ve written this in order to lay out my position clearly—and maybe to provoke some reactions to folks who have too much time on their hands. And if you’d say that I’m one of those folks – well, shit. You might be right.
