Synopsis: During
an all-night beach party on Amity Island, Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie) goes for a
swim and is dragged to her death by something beneath the water…. The next morning,
Amity’s police chief, ex-New Yorker Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), goes to the beach
with Chrissie’s boyfriend, who reported her missing. The two men hurry along the
sands upon hearing a frantic signal from Deputy Hendricks (Jeffrey Kramer), who has found
Chrissie’s body – what’s left of it. The medical examiner lists the cause
of death as "shark attack". Upon hearing from Hendricks that Amity has no
"Beach Closed" signs, Brody orders him to make some. Hendricks tells Brody that
a group of scouts are doing a mile swim off the island. Brody rushes to the local ferry in
an attempt to head the boys off, and is cornered by Amity’s mayor, Larry Vaughn
(Murray Hamilton), the medical examiner (Robert Nevin), and some businessmen. Vaughn tells
Brody that he doesn’t have the authority to close the beaches; and that Amity being
"a summer town", anything that might keep visitors from the beaches will damage
the local economy. At the mayor’s prompting, the medical examiner changes his verdict
to "boating accident". The Brodys go to the beach, where the locals twit Martin
over his refusal to enter the water. A boy named Alex Kintner (Jeffrey Voorhees) convinces
his mother (Lee Fierro) to allow him ten minutes more in the water. As he plays on his
raft, he is grabbed from below and dragged beneath the water amidst a plume of blood. A
panic ensues. As parents pull their children from the water, Alex’s mother is left to
stare at her son’s shredded raft…. A town meeting is called, where the business
community reacts angrily to Brody’s insistence on closing the beaches. A fisherman
named Quint (Robert Shaw) interrupts the meeting with an offer to catch and kill the shark
– for a fee. Mrs Kintner offers a bounty on the shark. That night, as Brody reads up
on sharks, two townsmen attach a bait on a chain to the end of a jetty. Sure enough, it is
taken – and with sufficient force to smash the jetty and knock one of the men into
the water, from where he barely escapes with his life. The next day, as swarms of
fisherman take to the water, Brody meets Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), a shark expert
from the Oceanographic Institute. Hooper examines Chrissie Watkins’ remains, and
scornfully dismisses the notion of a "boat accident". Meanwhile, a tiger shark
is killed. The townspeople celebrate, believing their troubles over. Hooper, however, says
that it cannot be the shark that killed Chrissie Watkins. Inviting himself to dinner at
the Brodys’, Hooper convinces Martin to help him cut the shark open. They do so, and
find no human remains. To the terror of the water-fearing Brody, Hooper insists on the two
of them going out to look for the shark. The men locate an abandoned boat. Hooper dives
beneath the boat to examine its hull. He finds a gaping hole in it, with a huge tooth,
that of a Great White shark, embedded in the wood. The next instant, Hooper recoils in
horror, dropping the tooth, as a human head drifts towards him…. Hooper and Brody
make another attempt to convince Vaughn to close the beaches, but in the absence of
further evidence, he refuses. Another fatal attack occurs. Brody forces Vaughn to agree to
the hiring of Quint. The fisherman reluctantly accepts Hooper and Brody as his crew, and
the three men set out to hunt the killer.
Comments: In many
ways, Jaws is a remarkably simplistic movie. It plays out as a classic three-act
drama, moving from A to B to C without digressions, without subplots, and without telling
us anything about the characters that we do not absolutely need to know. And it is this
very simplicity that gives the film so much of its power. As a mean, lean, stripped to the
bone thriller, Jaws provides an object lesson in tension-building that a great many
modern film-makers (the contemporary version of Steven Spielberg included) would do well
to heed. The other lesson that the film provides – another one apparently lost on the
current generation of horror directors – is that good writing and good acting will
carry a film over any deficiencies in its special effects. (Conversely, not even an
effects budget of countless millions can dispel the lingering odour of sloppy writing and
cardboard characterisations.) It is interesting to speculate on what kind of film Jaws
would have turned out to be had Bruce the Mechanical Shark been all that Spielberg hoped,
and if the director had not, by the device’s very limitations, been forced to convey
the shark’s presence by suggestion rather than directly. My opinion is, not half the
film it ended up being. The fear that informs Jaws is that of the unseen, not the
seen. The countless shots at water-level, the views from underneath of those vulnerable,
churning legs, the smashed jetty and the yellow barrels being effortlessly dragged through
the water all drive up the fear levels in a way that an explictly-seen shark would not.
From an invisible terror to a glimpsed one, from a glimpsed one to one present in
wonderfully choreographed shock shots, the slow build-up to the full revelation of the
story’s monster captures the audience’s imagination to such an extent that when
the shark is finally fully revealed, its somewhat rubbery nature is simply not important.
The other things that make all this work are, firstly, the setting – by the time the
shark really attacks, we, like Martin Brody, are longing for a bigger and more
substantially built vessel – and secondly, that the film has taken so much care in
the development of its three central characters.
Jaws is an interesting
contradiction. It certainly isn’t character-driven, yet without its
characters, it simply wouldn’t have the same impact. Martin Brody is one of
filmdom’s more interesting heroes, inasmuch as he is not, by any of the usual
definitions, particularly heroic. Throughout the film, Brody is a man living in fear
– fear of the water, of boats, above all of the creature he has to destroy; and it
precisely because of this that he becomes one of the screen’s great audience
identification figures. This is no wish-fulfillment he-man, dealing with crisis after
crisis without getting his hair mussed or missing an opportunity for a wisecrack; this is
a real human being confronting his (and perhaps the audience’s) very worst nightmare,
and overcoming it – just barely. Allowing Brody to be so frankly scared (I love not
only the original "bigger boat" line, but Brody’s ensuing, increasingly
desperate pleas of "We’re gunna get a bigger boat now, right? Right?) is a bold
stroke, but it pays off. We know that this man is no coward, and his terror increases ours
ten-fold. Roy Scheider gives a wonderfully detailed yet understated performance as Brody,
one all the more meritorious for the way he manages to hold his own in the face of the
infinitely more flamboyant contributions of Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw. Dreyfuss was
a wise casting choice as Matt Hooper. As the film’s resident shark expert, he has the
unenviable task of delivering most of the expository dialogue, which he does via a string
of rapid-fire speeches, something Dreyfuss’s inherently hyperactive persona makes
seem natural rather than forced. (As for the accuracy of what Hooper tells the
audience, that’s another matter entirely.) Hooper’s growing fascination with the
monstrous shark menacing Amity is also credible, as is his volunteering to go beneath the
water to confront the creature, despite, like Brody, having to battle his terror of the
animal in the process. The third member of the shark-hunting trio is, however – if
you’ll forgive the expression – a very different kettle of fish. Whereas Roy
Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss strive throughout for naturalism, Robert Shaw as Quint gives
new meaning to the expression "old salt", to the extent that for a considerable
time, his performance teeters on the brink of outright caricature. What rescues it is a
scene of stunning power, one of the outstanding set-pieces of modern cinema – one
which, incredibly enough, consists of nothing but dialogue.
Re-watching Jaws, it occurred to me
that one of the film’s great merits is the lack of contrivance amongst the characters
– that is, that they didn’t find it necessary to re-write the story in order to
shoehorn a "female lead" into the proceedings. Too damn many films these days
– particularly action movies - suffer from this sort of thing, generally for no
better reason than to get some breasts onscreen, or give the hero something to rescue, or
fight over. With respect to Jaws, I can think of nothing more obvious – or
lazier – than for the Matt Hooper character to have been turned into a woman,
probably complete with the traditional "Why, you’re a girl!" scene.
("Mattie Hooper", anyone? This is, by the way, one of the very few genre films
out there where the marine biologist isn’t a woman.) Had the writers succumbed
to this temptation, they would have destroyed what is ultimately, perhaps, the film’s
greatest virtue: the dynamic between the three main characters; for Jaws, like Zulu,
or The Great Escape, is one of the cinema’s great exercises in male bonding.
From the moment the Orca pulls out of port (ominously framed in the jaws of a
shark), it is the shifting relationship of the three men on board that is the film’s
most powerful aspect. Once at sea, Brody and Hooper are stripped of their professional
authority. Quint’s open contempt of his companions - particularly of Hooper, who is
jeeringly labelled "college boy" – results in some simply unforgettable
incidents (Hooper’s satirical crushing of his foam cup, for example) as the two shark
experts jostle for the position of alpha male. (Brody is never in the hunt, as evidenced
by his ineffectual attempts to tie the sheepshank knot that Hooper tossed off so casually
– an effort that fixates him to such an extent that he doesn’t even notice that
Quint is strapping himself into the fisherman’s chair….) The ice is not broken
between them until after their initial encounter with the shark, a sequence highlighted by
that first great shock appearance of the creature as it looms out of the water behind
Brody, and by the wonderful moment when Brody simply refuses to go anywhere near
the ship’s "pulpit", despite Hooper’s frantic orders. (How nice that
such sensible behaviour is ultimately rewarded!) As night falls the three men retreat
inside, at which point we get the simply hilarious "I’ll show you mine if you
show me yours" scar-comparison scene, a truce finally being called as Quint offers
Hooper a drink, and Hooper drinks it to Quint’s leg. (Brody, of course, is here more
of an outsider than ever – perhaps because he chooses to keep his scars to himself.
In one brief, fascinating moment, the police officer lifts the edge of his jumper and
contemplates his lower abdomen, then drops the garment and says nothing. Was there a
specific incident that led the New York cop to leave the big city?) This sequence
culminates in one of the most extraordinary speeches in all cinema, when Quint reveals
that he was a survivor of the sinking of the Indianapolis. Mere words cannot
capture the power of this scene. There is no false emotion here, no explosions, no car
chases, none of the stuff that these days is held to constitute "drama" –
just a man talking, recounting a real-life nightmare beyond the comprehension of most
human beings. It is an absolutely chilling experience.
From this point in the film the action
takes over, as the three men must somehow find a way of killing the monstrous shark before
it can kill them. The character touches continue throughout, however, both in the positive
sense – Quint finally asking Hooper’s help, for instance – and in the
negative, as when Quint stops Brody contacting the Coast Guard by smashing the radio,
revealing that his life experiences have left him, not just eccentric, but (as Brody puts
it) "certifiable". (As with the Spring-Loaded Cat© in Alien,
there is a startling "That’s where they got it from!" moment here: Jaws
would seem to be the origin of the much-abused convention of
there’s-only-one-radio-and-oh-gosh-it’s-broken.) The drama then escalates as
set-piece after unforgettable set-piece unfurls before us – Hooper in the cage (a
real nightmare episode), the shark’s attack on the boat, Quint’s bloody end, and
Brody’s nail-biting last stand. And even if the shark’s demise is somewhat
improbable (not to mention scientifically suspect), it nevertheless makes for a hugely
satisfying conclusion.
Jaws is a film that plays
upon our most primal of fears. It does so through a series of brilliantly orchestrated
scare scenes. The opening sequence of the film is by now the stuff of legend, with Susan
Backlinie swimming her way into motion picture history. (Actually, what struck me upon
re-watching this film [which was, of course, released three years before Halloween,
and five before Friday The 13th] is how much the opening scene, with the
kids drinking and smoking, and then skinny-dipping, looks like it was lifted from a
slasher film; a reminder that, like Alien, Jaws is in many ways just a
superior body count movie.) The terror of sharks goes deeper than just the fear of the
unknown, or of what might be lurking beneath us in the water; it is the randomness
of attack that adds so many extra layers of dread. This aspect of the situation is
brilliantly captured throughout the film, particularly in the death of Alex Kintner. Of
all the people in the water, why him? There is no answer; and somehow this makes
his abrupt and violent death even worse. One of the most effective scenes in the film is
the aftermath of Alex’s death, with panicked parents dragging their children from the
surf – and Mrs Kintner left standing alone, staring at that ripped and bloodied raft
as it nudges the shore. To the human psyche, there is something in all of this infinitely
more horrifying than the prospect of, say, death in a car accident – no matter how
more likely that is to actually happen.
The randomness of the violence in Jaws
also highlights a dramatic deficiency in many of the horror/thriller movies made since
that time. As I pointed out with respect to Alien, creating a situation in which
the audience cannot tell who will be the next to die is a simple yet enormously effective
way of generating tension. Unfortunately, this is something that doesn’t seem to have
sunk in with the current crop of horror directors and writers, most of whom are unable to
create characters who do not, from their very first moments onscreen, divide themselves up
into "Obvious Victims" and "Obvious Survivors". Then again, perhaps
I’m being unfair in blaming the film-makers alone here. The scapegoating of "da
movies" for all of society’s ills has created a climate where the making of
genuinely disturbing films is actively discouraged – leaving us with the absurd
situation of living in an era of reassuring horror movies. Sigh….
The shark attack scenes form the thrilling
backbone of Jaws, but it is not those scenes alone that make it work. The film
builds upon them with its acting, its dialogue and its technical achievements. In addition
to the three central performances, valuable contributions are made in all of the
supporting roles. Lorraine Gary is thoroughly credible as the worried Ellen Brody; while
Murray Hamilton’s Larry Vaughn is one of the screen’s great weasels (and just
check out that wardrobe!). The minor parts are filled with wonderful character actors, and
this contributes to Amity’s genuine small-town feel, which in turn makes the debate
over closing the beaches plausible. The screenplay is an excellent piece of work (indeed,
the quality gap between the writing in the novel and that here makes you wonder just how
much Peter Benchley really contributed to the film), full of unexpected humour and
eminently quotable one-liners. Not only has the "bigger boat" line since entered
the general vernacular, but Jaws also contributed a memorable phrase to the B-Movie
glossary – namely, Richard Dreyfuss’s contemptuous "This was no boat
accident!!" - now likely to be flung at pretty much any gross autopsy scene you
might care to mention. (Surprisingly, the one in Jaws itself is quite discreet
– the body is described, not shown.) Then there’s my personal favourite line in
the whole script, Ellen Brody’s hilariously awkward conversation-starter: "My
husband tells me you’re in sharks." The film’s atmosphere is the result of
a careful fusion of cinematography, lighting and production design. The latter is
particularly effective, not just in creating a believable Amity, but upon a much subtler,
even psychological level: there is an almost complete absence throughout the film of the
colour red – except, of course, for the red, red blood of the victims….
However, of all the technical achievements
in this film, two stand out: John Williams’ score, and Verna Fields’ editing -
both Oscar-winners, and rightly so. Is there a more instantly recognisable musical sting
than Williams’ da-dah? I don’t think so. Try playing this movie with the
sound down. None of the big moments have anywhere near the same impact. Nor, for that
matter, do most of the smaller ones. The film is filled with shots of the empty ocean that
are made frightening purely through the use of those chords. That said, the score is
nowhere near flawless; I find the "jolly seafaring music" that accompanies many
of the barrel scenes to be gratingly inappropriate. However, these shortcomings are far
outweighed by the score’s virtues. Verna Fields’ editing, on the other hand, is
well nigh perfect. It is her contribution as much as anything that makes the film work,
building tension with its rhythms, giving significance to the most fleeting of shots, and
above all, disguising the deficiencies in Bruce the Shark for as long as it is humanly
possible.
Alas, poor Bruce! Still, even if it’s
true that he’s not the shark he should be, I honestly believe that in the context of
the film he serves his purpose more than adequately. The only time when his artificial
nature really becomes uncomfortably apparent is when we get our first good look at him as
he attacks the boat – and this is not just because we do see him clearly, but rather
because that scene is juxtaposed with the underwater scenes involving real sharks
– which were, it almost goes without saying, filmed by Ron and Valerie Taylor. (My
objections to Bruce are biological, not artistic: (i) his snout is the wrong shape; and
(ii) he lacks the ability to pull his lips back as he thrusts his teeth and gums forward
– a thoroughly ghastly little trick which I personally believe lies at the root of a
lot of people’s horror of sharks.) But Bruce is not the film’s only technical
shortcoming. Frankly, I can’t remember watching another major studio production that
contains as many continuity errors as Jaws – and they must be blatant, because
that’s not the sort of thing I usually notice. Apart from relatively minor points,
like watches appearing and disappearing, and blood splashes moving around, there are
things you can’t believe weren’t noticed at the time, like the extra rings that
suddenly appear on Chrissie Watkins’ hand after her body is found; or the fact
that the fourth victim sprouts a shoe after having his leg bitten off; or the unbending of
the shark cage’s bars. And then we have the two biggies: the confusion over the dates
of the killings – Alex Kintner is supposed to have died on June 29th, yet
Crissie Watkins’ death is clearly listed as July 1st – and even over
the number of killings! After Matt Hooper’s encounter with the severed head
(it’s a great shock scene, but really, that prosthetic head - ! I’ve
always thought it was a big mistake to give the audience a second look at it), he and
Brody confront Larry Vaughn in another frantic – and of course, unavailing –
attempt to get the beaches closed. In the midst of this, it is claimed that there have
been two victims so far. Well, by my count, Ben Gardner makes three. A flub of this
magnitude draws attention to itself. My feeling is that, initially, the boat scene was
supposed to contain Hooper finding the Great White tooth only; and that after the
event, Spielberg saw the opportunity of including yet another spectacularly nasty scare
scene in his story, and did so without bothering to re-shoot the subsequent confrontation
scene.
Which brings me to something else that
occurred to me while re-watching this film. Jaws is not just a first-class
thriller; it is also a salutary reminder of what a good film-maker Steven Spielberg was
before he became obsessed with the image of himself as "Steven Spielberg, The
World’s Greatest Living Director" or "Award-Winning Director Steven
Spielberg", whichever it is. There is stuff in this film that you simply can’t
imagine Spielberg directing today – most obviously, the death of young Alex Kintner.
If that scene were filmed today, the victim would probably be an Evil Businessman, or a
Cold-Hearted Lawyer, taking a break from his usual pursuit of persecuting Widows And
Orphans; and his death would occur only after endless minutes of screentime spent
labouring the fact. (Oh, wait, wasn’t that Jurassic Park?) Certainly,
it’s hard to imagine Spielberg offing a kid these days, least of all with the casual
cruelty that underlies Alex Kintner’s death; still less can you picture him –
gasp! - killing a dog! (A kid and a dog in the same scene!? –
no-one’s pulled that since Hitchcock!) These days, on the contrary, Mr
Spielberg seems to spend most of his spare time digitally air-brushing Anything Nasty out
of his back catalogue. (Apropos, how long will it be, I wonder, until everyone’s
favourite "violence played for laughs" scene, Indy versus the swordsman in Raiders,
is also removed from our screens…?) This hard edge is not the only thing that
Spielberg seems to have lost since his early days; another is his talent for economy in
story-telling. Watching Jaws, the viewer is struck by the lightness of the handling
of Martin Brody’s backstory. We know he’s scared of water, we know he’s
scared of boats – but we’re never told why. And it is not necessary that
we know why; it exists, and that is enough. If that plot thread were to be built into a
modern Spielberg film, in place of Jaws’ beautifully efficient throwaway
explanation ("There’s a clinical term for it, isn’t there, Martin?"
"Yeah, drowning."), we’d probably get a fifteen-minute flashback detailing exactly
what happened to Martin Brody in his childhood to instill him with this fear – the
whole sequence being accompanied, more likely than not, by the strains of "Hearts And
Flowers". The almost total absence of any subtlety or ambiguity in Spielberg’s
later films is the major reason why I’ve gone off him as a film-maker. I suppose it
might be true that he’s "The World’s Greatest Living Director";
personally, I liked him a lot better when he was just a kid having fun.
The legacy of Jaws has been
two-fold, neither aspect being anything to celebrate. Jaws was by no means the
first "rogue animal" film, even as Alien was nowhere near the first
"something on the loose in the dark" film; but like Alien, it used its
various elements so skillfully that it seemed like the first; and there has
scarcely been a rogue animal film made since that doesn’t owe something to The
Adventures Of Bruce. (Some of them owe rather more than others, of course, from the
Italian clone L’Ultimo Squalo, sued out of American cinemas, up to 1999’s
Deep Blue Sea, which proves that it takes more than CGI sharks to make a successful
thriller – a lot more.) Let’s see: apart from the three actual Jaws
sequels, there’s Orca, and Grizzly, and Claws, and Crocodile,
and Killer Fish, and…. Now, admittedly, these films don’t exactly
represent high art; however, most of them are mindlessly entertaining, particularly
if, like me, you get your jollies out of watching stupid people being eaten by big scary
animals; so there’s been no real harm done there. No, it is the second legacy
of Jaws that I regard with an involuntary shudder: for Jaws gave rise to
– the summer blockbuster….
Up to and including the year 1975, the
American summer was regarded as a cinematic dumping-ground, the time of year when
producers got rid of films for which they had no real expectations, the assumption being
that no-one would really want to spend a nice summer day sitting in the dark watching a
movie. Jaws changed all that. Its enormous success sent a clear message to the
studios, firstly, that people would indeed spend their summers in the dark; and secondly,
what they wanted to see there was big splashy action movies. It is this second point that
has had such a detrimental effect upon modern cinema. Over the past twenty-five years,
summer movies have become bigger and bigger, and more and more expensive – and
louder, dumber and emptier. Untold millions – millions that could be spent making
good, interesting, original little films – are blown on advertising campaigns
intended to lure as many people as possible into the cinema on that all-important opening
weekend. Nothing else – not the quality of the film, certainly, and not even how
many people will see it after that first weekend – seems to matter anywhere
near as much. In short, summer films are no longer the result of thoughtful film-making,
but of cynical manipulation; they are not made, but manufactured. This reduction of
film – which can be art, no matter how hard that is to believe these days
– to nothing more than just another product to be marketed (and if Jaws was
the first "summer film", Star Wars instigated something even more
insidious: the "tie-in") is deeply dispiriting; not least because it seems to be
spawning an entire generation of utterly undiscriminating filmgoers, who apparently
neither know nor care that most of what is being put before their eyes is a pile of
steaming garbage. While every now and then we are offered a flicker of hope (the failure
of Pearl Harbor was encouraging, even if it was probably due more to a reaction
against the reduction of such an important historical event to the level of a soap opera,
rather than to the film’s actual, ah, "qualities"), most of the time we
seem to sinking further and further into the cinematic mire. Jaws is not a
particularly profound film, granted, but it is a thoroughly entertaining and exciting one,
scary and funny and nerve-wracking in turns. Unlike most of its progeny, it was made by
people who cared about what they put their names on – and it played to an audience
that no longer seems to exist: one that liked a little steak to go along with its sizzle.
Footnote: Perhaps
it’s true that "nobody cry when Jaws die". I have, however, cried over the
years for the thousands of sharks that have died as an indirect result of this movie and
the misinformation it propagates. There is little, if any, limit to human hubris.
Nevertheless, the fact that some people seriously advocate the extermination of the shark
because a couple of people each year die while swimming is breathtaking in its arrogance.
Australia is generally regarded as the shark attack capital of the world, which may well
be true. In practical terms, what this means is that less people usually die each year
from shark attack than do as a result of attacks by the domestic dog. There has been on
average less than one shark fatality per annum in this country over the past two hundred
years. You generally wouldn’t know this from reading the local papers, however, which
never fail to get as much mileage as they can out of the beleaguered creatures. I remember
a headline from a couple of years back: SHARK TERROR! SURVIVOR TELLS – "I
THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE!" A perusal of the article revealed that a medium-sized
shark, probably a young Grey Nurse, nudged the surfer’s board and then swam away. I
guess a more accurate description of the incident – SHARK GOES AWAY WITHOUT DOING ANY
HARM, perhaps – wouldn’t have sold quite as many copies.
No-one who sees Jaws ever forgets
Robert Shaw’s Indianapolis speech. Nevertheless, the bulk of that speech is
historically inaccurate, from the number of people killed, to how they died, to when it
happened. The date, inexplicably, is quoted as June 29th, when in fact
it occurred on July 29th; which is what you’d expect, given that
the Indianapolis was involved in the bombing of Hiroshima. Even stranger in the
context of the film is that June 29th is also the (obviously incorrect) date
given for Alex Kintner’s death. Weird.
While Robert Shaw gets the film’s
"Oscar-clip" moment (although as it happens, he wasn’t even nominated),
I’ve always liked its explanation of how Matt Hooper came to be fascinated by sharks
(as a child, one ate his boat), simply because it accurately portrays how a lot of the
biologists and zoologists that I know came to be in their particular line of work. While
you’d think that a negative experience with an animal would result in a negative
mindset, the reverse is very often true. And I am going to wrap up this exceedingly
rambling outtro by talking about one of my personal heroes: Mr Rodney Fox.
Most of you do know Rodney Fox, even if
you’re not familiar with his name. He’s probably the world’s most famous
shark attack survivor. I’m pretty sure that’s him in the book Martin Brody flips
through – the one with a good chunk of his side missing. In any case, if you’ve
ever watched The Discovery Channel, you’ve seen him: he’s the guy with most of
his intestinal tract showing.
Rodney Fox was attacked by a Great White
shark off the South Australian coast in 1963, at the age of twenty-three. Had he not been
wearing a wetsuit, his body might have fallen to pieces. Apart from having his abdomen
ripped open, his ribs were smashed, his lungs and diaphragm punctured, his shoulder-blade
cracked, his aorta fully exposed, and his right hand and wrist cut to pieces. It took 462
stitches to put him back together.
Incredibly, Fox not only survived, but
three months later he was back in the water. His experience left him not with the horror
of sharks that you might expect, but with a complete fascination for them. He has
subsequently devoted his life to studying and understanding the Great White shark. His
tireless efforts resulted in the species finally being declared protected in Australian
waters (let’s hope it’s not already too late), and today, along with his son, he
runs an Eco-Tour business dedicated to educating other people about the Great White, and
ridding them of their misapprehensions – most of which were acquired, needless to
say, by watching movies like Jaws.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my
kind of human being!
|
Director: Steven
Spielberg