Sarah tells Mike about her new foray into Dad Studies and, for the second time this week, discusses a horror movie about families from 1975 and sings a little.
Subscribe! https://linktr.ee/whyaredads
Sarah tells Mike about her new foray into Dad Studies and, for the second time this week, discusses a horror movie about families from 1975 and sings a little.
Subscribe! https://linktr.ee/whyaredads
Bonus Episode! Sarah’s New Podcast “Why Are Dads”
Mike: Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast that occasionally does other podcasts and gives them to you.
Sarah: Yeah.
Mike: Is that what we're doing?
Sarah: We do them, and then we give them to you.
Mike: So just a little intro here to tell everybody that Sarah has a fun, new spinoff podcast.
Sarah: Where I talk about all the movies that I'm constantly bringing up here, but that we don't have time to talk about very much.
Mike: And also like dad issues, which are also really interesting.
Sarah: Thank you. Yeah. I sent you the pilot episode to listen to, and you listened to it while you were riding your bike. Which I'm very honored by it because bike riding time is sacred.
Mike: Sacred bike riding time. Yes. But yeah, it's really good. I mean, it's a podcast where Sarah and her friend, Alex, talk about movies and the depiction of dads in movies. I mean, I've only heard one episode, but it's extremely entertaining and extremely insightful and thoughtful and exactly what we would expect from Sarah Marshall.
Sarah: Thanks, Mike!
Mike: Who's working on a book about the Satanic Panic.
Sarah: Oh yeah. Well, I just, you know, first of all, if you don't feel like listening to a different show, I understand that because I am like deeply, deeply, deeply a creature of habit and familiarity. So if this feels like it would be uncanny, I get that.
Mike: Sure.
Sarah: And if it doesn't feel like it would be uncanny than I applaud you for being more receptive to change than I am. And yeah, I guess this is a fun project that Alex and I started working on in July. We originally started a different project that we were calling apocalypse friends, where we were like watching movies about the apocalypse. But in the end, we were like, you know, I feel like we're out of the apocalypse phase, we're into the like…
Mike: Dad phase.
Sarah: And we're into the dad phase. It's like the first phase of an epidemic is an apocalypse. And then dads. It felt like something that made sense in the context of the relationship because Alex and I have been friends for 10 years, and like one of the big themes and the things that we talk about and come back to is like our relationships with our dads, you know, and as an aspect of masculinity, too. And I feel like it has a lot in common with You're Wrong About, because these are both shows where like, for me, the main point is being able to find a structured way to talk to someone who matters to me about things that matter to me. So it's another one of those. And so we did the first episode of our Jaws, and Alex's wife, Carolyn, is doing the editing and a lot of the music for the show and it's like very beautiful and dreamy.
Mike: Yeah, the music is great.
Sarah: The music is amazing. Yeah. It's just, it's a, another thing I want to make for you. And I think that it's going to be funny sometimes and comforting sometimes and uncomfortable sometimes. And yeah, just adding on to the You're Wrong About cinematic universe.
Mike: Yes. And it's good and fun, and people should subscribe and put in their earbuds and get on their bicycles right now as they listen to your first episode. It's very good.
Sarah: Get on your bike and ride.
Mike: Yeah.
Sarah: Oh, hello. I'm Sarah Marshall. I have a podcast called You’re Wrong About, and this is a new podcast I'm doing with my friend, Alex Steed. Yeah. We're going to talk about dads.
Alex: Hello everybody. I am the Alex Steed Sarah mentioned. I have a podcast called Nashville Demystified. I am so excited to co-host a Why Are Dad's with her. Like she said, we're going to dive into all things dad, particularly our, and maybe your complex relationship with fathers by spending time with some of our favorite media and taking it in through the dad lens.
Sarah: We are not dads ourselves. We have known many dads. We were raised by dads and we're interested in dads. We want to talk about dads as a cultural institution which is a really boring and stressful phrase. And so we're exploring dads through movies, movies that we grew up with, movies that are painful to watch, movies that are joyful to watch, movies that are both.
Alex: And of course, in trying to understand the dads in our lives, the good ones, the bad ones.
Sarah: Rusty dads, sensitive dads.
Alex: Present ones, the absent ones.
Sarah: Big dads, little dads.
Alex: That's the shitty ones. The mean ones, the exceptional ones, however.
Sarah: All kinds of dads.
Alex: We're going to try to better understand ourselves and you know, get to the bottom of who and how and why we are. Sometimes we'll have guests and sometimes we won't, whenever we can, we'll try to incorporate original music from our friends and their interpretations of music from whatever it is we're discussing today, we talk about Jaws.
Jaws of course is Steven Spielberg's wildly popular 1975 adaptation of Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel. The film stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, who has moved from New York City to the small beach town of Amity with his wife, Ellen, and their two sons. Richard Dreyfus plays Matt Hooper, a wealthy and charming self-funded Marine biologist, which was evidently a thing with an interest in sharks. And the great Robert Shaw stars as Quint, a veteran of the second World War and a colorful courier fisherman. When a shark begins killing residents of the tourist town, the surviving residents, many of whom depend on the tourist economy, are resistant to acknowledge how bad the situation before them really is. Brody, Hooper, and Quint eventually team up to confront the shark and each other out on the water. As Sarah and I discussed, the film is about at least one literal dad, Brody, and it's about other men who remind us of our respective dads, sorting through their egos and masculinity while in pursuit of this shark. Okay. That's all the intrigue you need. Let's do this.
Alex: And this movie exists in your heart, but you revisit it.
Sarah: It's my summer movie. And I actually think that I keep it as a summer movie so that it stays special. Like Jurassic Park, you can watch any time of year. Jaws is like, to me, so specifically attached to the experience of summer. And I, that reminds me of like, where did we go? There was a beach that you and I went to a couple of years ago where I was like, being here is telling me that summer is happening.
Alex: Was it in Maine? I feel like I must've been Maine.
Sarah: Oh yeah, it was, it was. Yeah. Cause the only other state where we have hung out is Tennessee.
Alex: No beaches.
Sarah: This was a beachy beach with a boardwalk. And like those t-shirts about how you hate your wife.
Alex: Oh, it was Old Orchard Beach. Yeah, that’s all you needed to say.
Sarah: But, yeah, I just, I feel, watching Jaws feels to me, like going someplace like Old Orchard Beach. The iconic summer things are happening and also where the plot is so totally used to that timeline of summer. And then we have, you know, all this explicit language about, we can't have a panic on the 4th of July. Like we are in, as we record this, like the Jaws micro season. Which I’m just always aware of when it happens. I'm like, Ooh, it's Jaws time. Yeah.
Alex: We're also in the Jaws macro season. It struck me that we have talked a lot about Trump's response to coronavirus in the context of the mayor from Jaws. But it's been, it's been a while since I watched the movie. So I didn't fully realize that that's not the only parallel. It's like literally everything about this emergency and the way people respond to it. You know, people are trying to preserve their economic prosperity. At the risk of everyone's lives around them. I didn't realize that it's from top to bottom, actually, a parallel. In, when we talked about doing this, Jaws was obviously at the top of the list. And when we talked about doing the first, you had insisted upon doing Jaws because it's July, but also because the vibes are strong. Can you, can you say why that is for you?
Sarah: I mean, for me, it's just because Jaws is a movie where the heroic figures in it are three men from kind of different worlds with different personality types who have to struggle how to collaborate and get along. And then are able to do, because they all are able to accept the reality of the shark and to care about stopping the shark more than they care about believing that there is no shark because it would be comforting. Believing that that other shark that the fishermen got is the shark and everything's fine now. Believing that the shark, that the money that people have to make off of the tourist economy is more important than the shark. Which is an uncomfortable parallel to real life. And also something that is uncomfortable to think about in the world of the movie, because you're like, you know, yeah, we need to confront this shark head on, but like, what do you do in a place that is dependent on a tourist economy? And that's something that the book goes into a lot more detail about because the book has a lot less fun. What made me want to watch this movie and feel like it would be a comforting experience is the fact that it's about characters dealing with a problem.
Alex: Why are we doing a podcast about dads?
Sarah: I feel like our friendship, which is a decade old, is built on a foundation of old dads, you know, and also a Nightmare on Elm Street, because our origin story is that we met on Tumblr because we were both fans of A Nightmare on Elm Street. I can't remember exactly why, but like, that was the main thing that I was talking about on Tumblr at the time. And you were like, yeah, this is, these are important films. And I was like, yes, thank you.
Alex: So tying this to old dadism, I thought just for a second while watching the movie and had nothing to back this up but I just had a feeling quickly as I was like, I bet Roy Scheider is exactly the same age as my father. And he's within a year of the same age of my father. So, he was born in ’32, my father was born in ‘31. My father has been dead for 10 years. But I was just watching him and I was like, man, this guy is a lot like my father. A lot like my father and shared a lot of his traits, sort of a lot of his personality. Not similar people by any means, but certainly generationally similar. And I'm so happy we kicked off with this as a result because I've never watched Jaws and thought about the dad theme. And it really sort of shaped my perspective on it, but it also helped me relate to it a lot more that I was like, this guy is a binary for my father.
Sarah: What about him reminds you of your dad?
Alex: Both his like aloofness and tenderness, right. There's a scene where Hooper goes to the house to essentially announce that the shark that they got was not the correct shark and they should go and sort of dissect the shark that they have. And when he arrived, he said, “I'd like to talk to your husband.” And his, his wife says, “Yeah, me too.” You know he has this kind of inability to connect. He's shut off in a pretty major way. And has these like phobias he can't really deal with.
But at the same time, he has a really tender relationship with his youngest son, with both of his sons, really, even though we only get minimal interactions, but we had this beautiful interaction where he interacts with his youngest son who is emulating him, emulating all of his sort of moves and how he has his hands on his face. And he ends the interaction with his son saying, “Give us a kiss.” And the son says “Why?” And he says, “Because I need it.” And it's the only time in the entire movie that he reveals any actual vulnerability.
Sarah: That's true.
Alex: And that's something very much my father would do, is that he would never express explicit vulnerability. But absolutely when he dropped me off to school when I was a little kid, he'd make me kiss him on the cheek. Which is lovely in retrospect, but at the time it felt out of order with him just being a crusty man.
Sarah: Yeah. I think that as like, if you grow up with a crusty dad, you're like, maybe other people are never confused by this, but I definitely spent a lot of time confused and also feeling like there was cultural confusion over, like how can someone be like so crusty and also just like outright mean. Like I had and have a mean dad, um, and then like be suddenly so soft and so woundable and, you know, it takes potentially so long to figure out like, yeah, those two things go together. Like French bread is crusty because it's soft inside. That's why you bake a crusty baguette. If there were nothing to protect, you wouldn't do that.
Alex: Right. That's so good. That's such a good way to put it. Yeah. He's kinda all baguette in this movie. And in context of other characters who we see, he feels less surly because Quint is just next level crust.
Sarah: Quint is classic surly. Yeah.
Alex: But then we also get to see his vulnerability, which we'll talk about. But so we have Brody, who's a New York city cop who relocated to Amity, um, which you're saying is in Martha's- it's around Martha's Vineyard?
Sarah: So the location part is interesting. The movie was filmed on Martha's Vineyard. And then the book, I believe, was set on Long Island, like kind of near Montauk. So it's got this sort of placelessness and I was going to ask you if you consider it to be a New England movie, because it's like not super explicitly set there, I guess, but like it's filmed there. So.
Alex: Yeah. In the same way that I always assumed that Beetlejuice was in Maine, even though it was in Connecticut, I assume Jaws was in Massachusetts. And it may not be, but…
Sarah: It just has that feel, but I mean, you're literally seeing Massachusetts summer people and Massachusetts houses.
Alex: And it refers to Boston a couple of times. So I did sort of assume.
Sarah: It feels like they're acknowledging the setting.
Alex: Okay, so he's relocated his family from New York City where he felt disaffected as a cop because he couldn't make a difference there. And so he's super pensive. His wife calls him uptight. He's terrified of the water and he's never really been on a boat. And then I wrote ‘not a big talker’ because this movie is almost Altman-esque in its overlapping conversations.
Sarah: It is. And also there's a great book called Jaws Log that goes into this that is basically written by the screenwriter, Carl Gottlieb, the summer that they were filming it. But one of the things he talks about is how the team making the movie basically invented looping for this movie, because they had so many scenes with all these, you know, all this overlapping dialogue and where you're hearing, you're listening to a crowd, having a conversation. And they couldn't just use recycled people saying peas and carrots because they, you know, it was too complicated, and they wanted the stuff that you heard to be interesting.
Alex: And they pulled it off.
Sarah: Yeah, they invented looping for this movie.
Alex: Hey, here's a quick note for those of you who are not abject movie-making nerds. Looping, which is otherwise known as ADR, additional dialogue replacement, is the process by which filmmakers work with actors to re-record audio that was imperfectly captured on set or to help create layered sound and dialogue that could not be captured in the initial production.
Alex: So they invented looping. I mean, I feel like so much interesting sound stuff was happening in the seventies between that and what they were doing with multi-tracking with Allman, it’s crazy.
Sarah: The seventies feeling this amazing, like this adolescent time for American film, like American film is like 13 years old and has like these big braces and these big zits and is like suddenly like, you know, able to do all these, like you know, just developing physically in all these magnificent and also ugly and unvarnished ways. Yeah.
Alex: In everyone, and the thing I love about the movie that speaks to exactly what you just said is everyone is a little ugly, like conventional, and I love that.
Sarah: Well that’s also why It feels like it's set in New England. Everyone looks kind of like weather beaten.
Alex: Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. And you as a native New Englander who has spent a lot of time in LA, I always say, you know, you know, especially if you're taking a flight from LA or the West coast, generally over to New England and you're making stops along the way, you just see people incrementally get more weathered until you get to new England and everyone looks like an extra in Jaws. Like everyone is crusty.
Sarah: Looks like a beautiful salt mangled house on the sea.
Alex: Exactly. The patina is lovely. I mean, that's sort of a lovely thing about it. Everyone's a little sweaty, like I am now. And that's the case. And then, so that's, that's an important distinction because I think the, the most attractive person in the movie is the, is our next character who is Hooper. Who's the son of a rich family. It's kind of all we know, he's from wealth. He's a Marine biologist, like a self-financed Marine biologist with an interest in sharks because of a trauma that he had when he was younger. And he's a scientist who's really frustrated that no one will listen to science.
Sarah: Yes. What a great character.
Alex: It is. It's perfect for, again, so perfect for this moment. He's our Fauci in this situation. And then we have Quint, who's a World War II veteran. He was on the Indianapolis, which is kind of the center of the most famous monologue from the movie. He witnessed 700 of his fellow soldiers get eaten in the water, which ultimately lays the groundwork for his trauma. We'll talk about that, that everyone is kind of operating from, this movie is about traumatized men. This conversation they have about the Indianapolis comes from this conversation that they're all having, where they're literally comparing scars, which is, you know, such an on the nose Spielbergian metaphor. And then he also ,just like my favorite thing about him, uh, as soon as like Quint really gets involved, the movie gets fun because that's kind of when it's a conversation about manhood in one way or another. Um, and as far as I'm concerned, I mean, he gets involved when he announces himself at the town meeting, but he really gets involved when he announces here's to swimming with bow legged women.
Sarah: And he just sings all these like old ribbled like sea shanties. And one of them, I think my single fondest Jaws memories is that I have dear friends who used to live, uh, in Portland, Oregon, the Portland that I live in, who moved away, back to the East coast where they were from one summer. And like the night before they left, we went to see Jaws in a just for one night, summer rerelease at a movie theater in the suburbs. And it was beautiful. I remember saying goodbye to them the next day, as they were about to, you know, as they were packing their car and getting ready to head off and being like, how do I express this feeling. And I expressed it by going farewell and adieu to ye fair Spanish lady, which is like one of Quint’s songs. And it's like, this thing that you hear echoing is the men are about to push off.
I was also looking at the times in the movie, and I think it's like an hour and 15 minutes in. We've had this narrative of shark shows up. Brody's worried about the shark. No one listens. Hooper shows up. They try to warn people about the shark. No one listens. Finally, they'd take the shark seriously. Hooper, Brody, and Quint push off to go find the shark. And from then on the movie is on the Orca, on Quint's boat. And it's like, they're departing for the country of men. We have Rudy's wife saying tearfully goodbye to him and him telling her to tell the boys that he's gone fishing. And then, and she kind of you know, just runs. She just like runs away as her husband… and she like puts him in the custody of the scary old man, he's leaving his children, he's leaving his wife. He's kind of going off on this journey to the heart of masculinity or something like it's, I love it.
*Farewell and adieu plays*
Sarah: Hooper, in the movie is played by Richard Dreyfus. And I think this was his breakout role. And he's a short, nerdy, disrespected by all the other men in the movie, nebbish character. And he's very endearing and he seems kind of like a Steven Spielberg stand-in to me. Like he looks exactly like Steven Spielberg looked in 1975. I love him. And he’s undersized, like there’s this wonderful story that Steven Spielberg when he was a kid, he was like coming in second to last in a race. And like the kid behind him was intellectually disabled. And so there became this chant, which you can't feel that angry about given the context, but where all these kids were cheering the kid in last place by going beat Spielberg, beat Spielberg, beat Spielberg. And he did. And Steven Spielberg lost and you're like, well, that was nice for that other kid. I don't know who originally said this, but I think some reviewer said that in the book, like you, it's hard not to root, maybe Steven Spielberg said that. When you read the book, it's hard not to root for the shark, because the people are also unlikable and because the author clearly feels, at best, mild disdain for these characters that he's writing most of the time. And I feel like the Spielberg touch, I mean, this is similar to Jurassic Park, actually. How, like the characters in the book of Jurassic Park are unlikable. Like it's not as bad as Jaws, but like the book is not very focused on, like the journey to accepting the idea of fatherhood. Like that's not one of its themes at all. I'm really interested in looking at what Steven Spielberg did do to make this a movie that to me is so affecting and whose characters I am so invested in.
Alex: What's interesting to me about sort of the way that it unfolds and also touches on sort of who, you know, whose concern has priority is they don't go after the shark until the dads are, are, feel threatened. The first death is a young anonymous woman.
Sarah: She's a summer girl.
Alex: Right and the tension is kind of set up. And I used to think that this was well probably about masculinity and now I think it's more explicitly about, about responsibility in men. Men's sort of relationship to their idea of, of what their responsibility is. And, and so, in an anonymous quote, summer girl is killed by a shark. She would have been killed anyway, but she's also killed in the context that she's with a guy from Hartford, who's too drunk to go swimming.
Sarah: What a New England story that's like Chappaquiddick or something.
Alex: Right, right, right. This wasp is kind of the responsible because he's so ineffectual for this woman's death. Like Ted Kennedy. The next death is, Brody wants to do something, but it's kind of, uh, immediately shown that he doesn't have the political cache to do much yet. And he doesn't push against it because he kind of knows what's good for him by way of job security. The second death, Alex Kenner, the death of this young boy. His mother is present for the death and she comes in while a bunch of fishermen are celebrating, thinking that they've gotten the shark that has gotten Alex Kenner and this young woman comes and kind of publicly humiliates Brody by slapping him in the face and revealing to everyone, you know what everyone already knows, that he knew that there was a shark in the water. And then the third, the third attack is out in the water when everyone is back at the beach, because the mayor has insisted upon it. Brody’s son is put into shock because he has a very close call with the shark. And also later we find out from the mayor that he's kind of having a bit of a nervous breakdown himself because he finally has emotionally grasped the fact that with all of his pushing, he put his own kids at risk cause his kids were on the beach. And then we enter this phase of the movie where they're finally allowed to go get the shark because the men are worried for their families. But an anonymous woman dying doesn't matter. And a woman who's literally so upset she's literally wearing mourning wear, like we used to do.
Sarah: Yeah. And slapping the chief of police in the face.
Alex: So yeah, we have this, we have this first part of the movie where no one's taking it seriously. The first real encounter we have with a competent authority figure is Quint’s introduction.
Sarah: Yeah. Let's talk about that.
Alex: And so, and so what we see happen is the town is having a meeting about this thing. The town is being confronted with the reality that all their shops are going to be closed and their economic well-being is going to be impeded upon by what's going on.
Sarah: So you can hear a voice going, they're talking about closing. The break is for 24 hours. And someone goes 24 hours is like three weeks!
Alex: It's three weeks. Yeah, I noticed that and thought that that was great. So we have this argument that they're having, which is, again, the argument that the United States had been having, starting in March, and then Quint announces himself very dramatically by dragging his nails down the chalkboard and essentially says the thing that we should have been saying the entire time about the pandemic, which is- and by the way, there's a bounty out on the shark for $3,000. And Quint essentially says, this is a bad problem. This shark is a killing machine. It's going to get in the way of all of your businesses. And it's going to keep killing, $3,000 I'll find it for. $10,000 I'll kill it for. This is going to be very expensive, but the exchange is you all won't be on welfare through the winter. Which is so remarkably on the nose about this moment that we're having now. And it's just a grownup man being like. Hey, uh, we have a real fucking problem. And you guys aren't addressing it in a real way. What is your take on that scene?
Sarah: I mean I love that scene, obviously, because it's just so fun. He just like shows up. It's like screeeeech. And he's like, I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him and kill him for 10.
*Recording*
“I’ll catch this bird for ‘ya, but it aint gonna be easy. Bad fish”
Sarah: You know, and he's like, he's eating a cracker the entire time too.
*Recording*
“Want to stay alive and ante up. You want to play it cheap, be on the welfare the whole winter.”
Sarah: Robert Shaw is just such a delight to me in this role. I feel like he was this like old complex, sad, drunk. And he was given this role where he could, it just seems like he knew how to play that character. And that there's a lot of him potentially in that character.
*Recording*
“I don't want no volunteers. I don't want no mates. There’s too many captains on this Island.”
Sarah: And he also had a hand in writing the Indianapolis speech because he was also a writer. And yeah, that's the scene where we meet this character, and we hear this sort of cacophony of voices and no one knowing what to do. And then he really shows up as a town elder, I think also like he has this kind of presence as someone who's like ,of the sea he's of the island, but he's not accepted by society. Like his knowledge scares people a little bit. You can tell that people recognize his authority because he's like the Island shark hunter. There's also a lot more in the book about kind of the ugliness of the job that he does because there's this absolutely horrifying scene where they catch a smaller shark. They're out, you know, hunting the big shark and they get a smaller shark and Quint’s like, oh, the tourists love this. I'll show you what I do for the tourists. And he cuts the shark open and, you know, throws some of its innards in the water and throws the shark back in the water and then shows how the shark will first eat itself. And then some in a feeding frenzy of other sharks. It’s just this nihilistic vision of like something eating itself, which is a very, you know, apt metaphor for the economics of the story. Um, but he's like, the tourists love this and you're like, dang, Quint, people are terrible, aren't they?
Alex: And you're like, yeah, I bet they do.
Sarah: Quint is set up for us as a character who knows what he knows but is incomplete as a human. I think that Hooper is that too. And then Brody is someone who like doesn't have knowledge, like he doesn't know anything and he's afraid of the water. You know, to me, the argument the movie seems to be making is that like both of these experts need this regular man or this regular, you know, father and pop trying his best in order to do what they end up doing.
Alex: Right. Yeah. And he's kind of a reconciliation, right, is that the tension between Quint and Brody throughout the movie is that, you know, is that Quinn is like a hardened man. He's a veteran. And he keeps making fun of sort of this effete intellectual who's there, who is on the opposite end of the spectrum. But when everything fails in Quint’s, with Quint’s arsenal, he's like, what do you have? You know, how do we use your tools? And the interesting thing, I mean, Carolyn said, we were watching it this morning and Carolyn said, it was so astute and on the nose, it's admirable that this guy has made his life's work about addressing his trauma.
Sarah: Yeah, that's true.
Alex: And it's, it's true right. Absolutely. It’s true and it's such a great observation. It's true right up until his death. He dies by, they’ve essentially caught the shark as much as they can. Right. They've stabbed it somehow and, and tied, tied these barrels to it. So it can't go very far.
Sarah: It really becomes like old man and the shark, like at this point, cause they're just like hand to hand combat with this shark.
Alex: It's essentially tied through suspension to the boat. And the problem with that is he's going full speed with this boat trying to pull the shark.
Sarah: And Hooper's like, I think you should slow down and he's like, “Fuck you, Hooper.”
Alex: He doesn't have to go full speed. And you see that that's where his trauma has bested him. Right. Like he's taken out now. Ultimately, he's eaten by the shark.
Sarah: I never thought of that before, but yeah, I think, yeah, that is it.
Alex: His abilities, his seemingly, up to that point superhuman abilities are undermined by him giving into that trauma. He's going to pull the shark full speed and it ends up being his end.
Sarah: Right. And can we talk about his trauma? Can we talk about the Indianapolis speech?
Alex: Yes, absolutely. This is a point where they're all finally getting along and drinking and hanging out.
Sarah: And they say Quint has been giving Hooper an incredibly hard time when I tell people if they want to know what my dad is like, they should watch the scenes in Jaws between Quint and Hooper. I'm Hooper and Hooper can't do anything right.
Alex: Right, right. And, and in this they've, they've turned and they're having a bonding kind of tender moment where they're sharing and exchanging about their scars.
Sarah: And they're quite drunk.
Alex: Brody asks about one scar in particular, which it's revealed is a removed tattoo that exposes the Indianapolis, I think?
Sarah: I think, I think it might be a removal of a tattoo to commemorate him being a soldier. We learned that Quint was on the USS Indianapolis, which was a real ship that I had not heard of before Jaws, and whose legacy is now being carried partly by Jaws, which is interesting. And was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine chief, and, you know, the ship goes down and all of these soldiers, hundreds and hundreds of soldiers are in the water and they had just delivered the Hiroshima bomb, is the other big part of the story. And so you get this also the sense of retribution, I think a little bit in that. Like that they have, you know, it's not just any ship, is it. Like they've taken part in this act of war and then they become prey for the sharks.
So it's interesting that, you know, there's other shark stories that could have been, that it was a World War II and the shark stories. And it's just this long, beautiful monologue where he describes just these days and nights spent in the water with all these other men slowly being picked off by sharks. He plays it so well.
I was just watching Magnolia, which is another movie we have to do an episode about. And then that movie has like a 10 minute long monologue at the end by Jason Robards, who was playing a character who's dying of cancer. And I just, I love a monologue where a character just explains themselves, just lets it all hang out and truly lets someone in, in a very intimate way and lets the audience in in a very intimate way. And when that character is an old man, who are characters in media are often defined by their inability to describe anything or talk about their emotional realities or their trauma at all.
Like, I feel like that's where Quint becomes, it's almost like a musical. I think one of the wonderful things about musicals is that we struggle so much as humans living in a mostly non-musical world, to express ourselves in a way that will convey the emotional reality of what we're going through to the people in our lives. Whether there are people that we're close to, or just humans generally. And musicals kind of allow everyone to have their say. Like if you're watching West Side Story, then you're taken inside the heart and mind of these characters one by one, and you get to experience what it's like to be them and to feel what they're feeling. Because they're giving that to you in this very direct way through music.
And I almost feel like that the Indianapolis speech is kind of like characters bursting into song. You're like, I would like to live in a world where it's believable that this incredibly mean old man who gets threatened by everything, who's threatened by Hooper existing, will suddenly launch into this expository monologue about why he is the way that he is. He's like, “By the way, boys, this is why I am the way that I am”. And we'll explain it so coherently and the trauma will be so bad that like, you cannot help but to be like, oh, okay, of course you’re like this, I get it now. Which is just something, that's the kind of complete communication that I think we don't really tend to get with our parents. Sometimes we do, but I think that it, you know, if you are going to understand the basis of someone's trauma and lashing out that deeply, a lot of the time you're going to get that understanding over the course of like years and years, not like in a, in a couple of minutes. And he has that line that I love about, you know, how the shark has dead black eyes, like a doll's eyes. You know, when they look at you, they don't even seem to be living. And just, they kind of, you know, he's looked into the abyss.
And just, and they have this, you know, this incredible moment of trauma bonding. And then in that Spielbergian way, like the shark stuff gets serious. Like it's almost like it was waiting for that to happen. Like the shark was like there, like with its little shark ear at the bottom of the boat, like waiting for Quint to finish explaining his trauma. And then it's like, okay, they're a team now, they're ready for me.
Alex: I didn’t think about the fact that that's part of why that scene is satisfying. Is you're getting revelations about trauma and why someone does what they do. In a way where most of the life of a living parent, you are rarely afforded the luxury of hearing. But in the context of what you just said, where you hear that speech in such close proximity to his inevitable death. That reminds me of the fact that it's like, as someone who took care of a parent while he was sick and ultimately died, you hear all those truths. If you're lucky and your parent kind of knows that they're on death's door - which my father certainly did - and it seems like maybe Quint knows a little bit in this case. They will start to be vulnerable about their truths, or you hear that a lot when parents are, are close in that way. And I think because I've had that experience, I haven't thought about it through the lens that you're talking about. Which is before that I never heard any of that shit from my father. I heard all these tiny glimmers, you know, like watching the History Channel and seeing his eyes get Misty about a particular conflict or whatever. but I never heard my dad’s Indianapolis speeches until the very, very end. And it seems like Quint knew. Quint knows they're not going to make it out.
Sarah: Yeah. And you feel like he needs to die at the hands of a shark. Like that seems to be a need that he has and a need the story has. And then also, you know, I think it speaks to how you have these difficult father figures, and these moments of bonding are possible. But then even with that, it's like, so when you're not feeling drunk and vulnerable, are you still going to be mean to me all the time? Because I don't want to deal with that. And how, like having a lasting relationship is so much more difficult in some ways than having these moments of intense connection when circumstances force people to get real. Like being honest and vulnerable in daily life is like, you know, something that maybe Quint wasn't up to.
Alex: Right. Exactly. Was only capable of being vulnerable again, when he realized the inevitability before him, which I feel like is a trap a lot of us feel about our parents. We’ll be at peace with them when they're dead.
Sarah: God, it's almost like the idea of like the special time of having a baby, where like they're doing so much and they're, they're learning so quickly and it's, you just want to be with them every day. Like, I feel like accompanying someone into death, there is that similar sense of like, you need to be there, like, you need to experience this precious time. Not just because it's all going to be over soon, but because they're going through potentially the stage of development. If they have the presence of mind and, and, you know, not too much pain to be kind of assessing what their life has been about.
Alex: Yeah. Welcome to our podcast where the only time you can find peace with some of your parents is when they're dead.
Sarah: Welcome to the dad show. I mean, my relationship with my dad currently is, you know, he's 76 years old and he loves to talk about how he's going to be dead soon. But he also doesn't really believe in the concept of his own infirmity. And he's not, vulnerability is still not an option for him. Like he's getting increasingly old and frail and is pushing 80 with an increasingly short stick. But like that's still not enough for him to open up, if that's ever going to happen, like he's going to have to be truly looking the shark in the face.
Alex: There's a difference between knowing that inevitability, weaponizing it, and lording it over the people around you. And actually looking into the abyss and feeling small.
Sarah: Yes. I feel like he's in the stage of telling everyone, you know, being mean to people and then being like, there's a shark and it could get me at any time. And it's like, I have been hearing about this shark for my entire life and we're still all here.
*Audio recording from Jaws*
Sarah: Well, we should say how it ends. So if people don't know they are relieved, they do get the shark. The shark gets Quint, and then Hooper and Brody get the shark. And Brody is able, and they do it through kind of a combination of all the new means, which is nice. They have Quint’s barrels, and they have Hooper's oxygen tanks, and they are able to write an ending where in a way that is like probably not super accurate, but very narratively, satisfying. Brody says “Smile, you son of a bitch”, and shoots the shark. And the shark has an oxygen tank and the shark explodes and then Hooper and Brody swim back to shore with no trouble at all. Because I guess they're not that far out anymore and it's going to be okay.
It's a movie about how I think emotional intimacy allows us to become greater than the sum of our parts. I think Jaws is a movie about friendship and how these three incomplete men are able to form this complete task force by hazarding this intimacy with each other.
Alex: Brody is very obviously the father in this movie, but who is the daddy?
Sarah: Oh, hmm. Well, I mean, I think Quint is the obvious answer. But I think Brody actually is. I think that Brody has quiet authority and Quint is really like, sort of a flailing drunk uncle. So if you have a summer romance with Quint, he's gonna throw up on or near you at some point, it's just going to happen. Yeah. You're going to have a moment where you're like, Oh, I don't know. No, no, thank you.
Alex: Hooper’s a fuck boy.
Sarah: Hooper’s a fuck boy. You want to have a finite amount of time with Hooper. You want to meet Hooper in the bar, get Hooper drunk. Not in a sinister way but just so he talks more slowly and then, yeah. And then take him home and then he would have like a nice fumbling experience. And then in the morning you would be slightly hung over and be like, this is too much talking. I think I've had a crush on Roy Scheider since I was like 12 years old.
Alex: I've always found him extraordinarily attractive, since I was a little kid.
Sarah: Brody is a man that you could spend your whole life trying to figure out what he's thinking about and never know. And that's the daddy. And he also looks like he could do some spanking.
Recording: Chief Brody, you are uptight, come on. *Jaws music*
Alex: Quick note: Lee Fierro, the actress who played Alex Kinder's mom, a character who delivers to government officials a reality check about the literally fatal consequences of their inaction in the face of a public health and safety crisis, died of coronavirus in an Aurora, Ohio assisted living facility in May of this year, she was 91. For years, Fierro was a staple in Martha's Vineyard and a beloved proponent of the dramatic arts there. Rest well, Ms. Fierro.
Please join us next time when we will be joined by our great friend, Candice Hopper, for a conversation rich in Jerry Orbach. We will be discussing dads in the context of Dirty Dancing.
We were so fortunate to have production help from Mary Due and additional production support from Carolyn Kendrick. We also had original music by that same Carolyn Kendrick, and we also had some wonderful, additional music from Mozart Nunez, otherwise known as Mozart 212. Check him out, check out Carolyn, and that's it.