Jaws, the USS Indianapolis and Covid-19

My favourite scene in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 film, Jaws, involves no action sequence. In fact, it occurs during a lull in the action.

It features the actors Richard Dreyfus, Robert Shaw, and Roy Scheider. They are on a boat, and have been searching for the man-eating white shark, but now it is night. They are sitting below decks at a table, talking and drinking.

Dreyfus and Shaw start to compete, showing each other vivid scars from previous encounters with hostile sharks. One has stitches on his shin, another a suture on his arm, a welt on his back etc, until Dreyfus claims he can beat all of those. ‘Oh?’ says Shaw.

Dreyfus unbuttons his shirt, flings it open dramatically to reveal his chest, and points at the ultimate injury. ‘I have a broken heart!’ he says. They all burst into drunken laughter.

Then as the laughter subsides, Dreyfus notices a scar that Shaw, who plays the character Quint, has not spoken about. It’s clear that Shaw does not want to talk about this one; but, under pressure from Dreyfus, he starts to tell the story.

It transpires that Shaw’s character was once a member of the USS Indianapolis. The Indianapolis was the warship that transported parts of the atomic bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, that was used on the Japanese city of Hiroshima a few weeks later.

On its journey back – just seven days before the first atomic bomb was dropped – the ship was torpedoed, leaving several hundred men languishing in the waters of the Pacific.

The sinking of The Indianapolis resulted in the greatest single loss of life at sea from a single ship in the history of the US Navy.

Inevitably there are some who claim this as a kind of moral recompense for delivering the atomic bomb.

More gruesome still, up to 150 men were killed and eaten by a school of white sharks before they could be rescued. It remains the biggest shark attack on humans in recorded history.

It seems that ‘Quint’ was a survivor of that horror, one of only 300 from a full complement of around 1200 crew. And now Quint wants revenge on behalf of his butchered comrades.

So the set-up is carefully and movingly established, but in a quietly devastating scene that psychologically underscores the rest of the movie.

Spielberg, of course, knows how to tell a story. He knows you need a sympathetic hero with a goal. He presents us with Shaw’s character, Quint. And he knows you need an antagonist – embodied by the shark.

Spielberg also knew that the action is more suspenseful and the antagonist more frightening if you don’t see it. In fact, you rarely see the shark, but its presence is often suggested.

Just as in Ridley Scott’s Alien, you only get half-glimpses of the Alien - and you never get to meet its gaze, because for the monster to return our gaze would of course serve to humanise it, so diminishing the terror and suspense. And we don’t want that!

There is no movie of Covid-19 just yet, but Covid is also an antagonist made all the more sinister and frightening because it moves and spreads invisibly. We cannot see it. But its presence is suggested everywhere, as in a photographic negative, by mouth masks and hygiene gel and distancing rules.

If John Williams were to conjure a theme tune for Covid-19, as he did so brilliantly and terrifyingly with Jaws, I wonder what he would come up with. (Even now, as Hitchcock taught us, when the violins reach ostinato, we know it’s time to leave the shower.)

I know people who stopped swimming in the sea after they saw Jaws. And I suppose sadly there will be people in the future who might find it difficult to socialise comfortably again after experiencing the phenomenon of Covid-19. The scars will be both real and metaphorical.

Jaws and Covid-19 both make for powerful and frightening narratives. The molecular representation of the Covid-19 virus as a ball with spikes in it even resembles a bobbing naval mine.

Let’s hope that the world finds its equivalent of Dreyfus, Shaw and Scheider to slay the virus so that we might all return to the calm waters of normal life. Before that, and to echo the film’s most famous line: we might need ‘a bigger boat’.

Chris Greenhalgh
Principal & CEO