The Shallows was a spectacular movie, it's such an awesome movie, I honestly don't even want to remotely ruin the movie for you if you're here reading this and haven't seen it yet, but I did want to comment on the content and context of both JAWS and The Shallows, do a basic compare and contrast of the two.
JAWS was based on Peter Benchley's 1974 novel of the same tittle, a book I've actually read and here's a shocker from the book that wasn't included in the 1975 film: Police Chief Martin Brody's wife was totally having an affair with oceanographer Matt Hooper. Interesting how the sexuality of an adulteress got axed from the original plot-line, huh? *
JAWS was an exceedingly male focused film and prior to the days of on-demand streaming content and binge watching on Netflix, people of my generation grew-up with re-runs. JAWS used to run non-stop on television, seemingly almost constantly while growing up. The opening scene of the hapless skinny-dipper getting chomped proved to be as iconic as it was titillating. The imagery of her dead discarded hand on the beach being discovered crawling with ants was a horror displayed on the boob tube, over and over and over and over and over and over and over again - what information was impressed upon the developing minds of children of both genders growing-up being not only exposed to such imagery, but excessively repeated exposure?--sex and violence were intertwined in that one block-buster movie scene but immortalized in the American collective psyche via re-runs.
JAWS is about three men who come up against a force of nature that they cannot control and fear. It is from this odyssey that male bonding occurs, the true focus of the film.
Three men go up against the great white, but only two survive and the illusion of their blooming male bonding would not have been believable, had the affair with the sheriff's wife been included in the movie.
The fearsome aspect of the shark in JAWS was amplified by the inclusion of the music score! Even Spielberg later said that without [Williams's] score the film would have been only half as successful. A painfully true observation. Thus the Jaws soundtrack is nothing more than a parlor trick to incite fear, the alternation of the "F and F sharp" keys - it wasn't necessarily a good or scary film. No doubt with the removal of the soundtrack it would be a far less intensive or horrific film. Noise as gimmick.
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| Not so scary now, is he?
The actual message of JAWS is that men matter more than women. It lacked any presence of a strong female lead and relied too heavily on 'humor' to get past the 'horror'.
Even to the point of immaturity.
Let me reiterate: the main message of JAWS was that women matter not in the land of men. It's not a new message and it shouldn't be a shock for me to point out that 1975 America was even more patriarchal then it is now. The start of Second Wave Feminism had started in the early 1960s and continued through the early 1980s. Stephen King's Danse Macabre is an excellent book to read on the deconstruction of film content as a deconstruction of culture. The 1975 male was not so much fighting against a giant great white, he was fighting against Second Wave Feminism.
I don't really have the time or desire to deconstruct the entire film of JAWS right now, chances are you don't have the time or desire to even read all that, but in a nutshell, the woman on the beach was sacrificed for exposing her sexual prowess in such an unabashed manner, she was violently killed (repressed) in an unexpected fashion for daring to do so, and then was even further reduced from sexual object to discarded disembodied body part. It was this initial action that served as the movie poster, later the book cover, and was the opening sequence of the terror haunting Amity Island. The body part discarded and found was her hand, riddled with ants. Ant colonies are matriarchal. So we see the powerless hand of a woman, killed for her sex. It's a reoccurring recycled theme in horror movies, it's why a virgin is typically the survivor. But hands make your world. Women are time and time again denied this ability to create and fashion their world, we are forced to participate in the world that has been majority spearheaded by the deeds, decrees, and desires of men. Where are women's hands kept?--they're kept in the kitchen, in interior design, in motherhood, in care-giving. Our hands are not permitted to sculpt and fashion the zeitgeist of the times or war.
Then in JAWS the alcoholic Quint smashes the radio--why?--it's the antithesis of survival, it's reckless and nihilistic, myopic and just plain dumb. What's a radio symbolic of?--communication, what are men terrible at?--communication. How'd they kill the shark?--they blew it to smithereens! Talk about over the top emotionalism.
Yet JAWS was required to lay the groundwork for the development of the film The Shallows. JAWS was the skeleton and The Shallows was its skin.
 
Even comparing the movie posters, you immediately get a very different vibe of each film. In JAWS you get a scraggly toothed monster coming up from the deep to kill a swimming naked woman. As the depicted character is clearly nude. Reduced to nothing more than a blip prop in a male fueled story arch. Whereas in The Shallows, the female character Nancy is depicted as appropriately clothed for her environment and as foreshadowed by the actual movie poster - is the bigger threat to the shark. As she ultimately single handedly killed this shark by purely outwitting it. She didn't have to blow the shark up, she tricked it with its own hungry reckless greed.
Nancy did it without being sexualized or objectified.
Nancy did it while remaining fierce, calm, cool, collected, and fearless.
Nancy always had a plan.
I also don't know why people apparently are having a problem with the seagull? The seagull is a metaphor for Nancy's capacity for kindness and care. It shows that she's able to nurture and soothe, just as well as outsmart and kill. It is a counterbalance to her cutthroat courageousness. It shows how Nancy doesn't so much fear nature as she does death itself. Nothing more.
It's also a touching display of her altruistic nature.
These two idiots above would've probably lived had they just listened to her warnings. But guess a little woman brain couldn't possibly be correct on any thought, especially when it's combating the opinion of a man. Right?--the factual female observation is nothing compared to the anecdotal opinion of a man.
Right.
*a bit of coding got messed up here, sorry. |
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