BWare

I just watched the 50th anniversary showing of Jaws in IMAX at the Chinese in Hollywood, which was great. Spielberg before he completely gave into the saccharine emotional button-pushing of his later films.

I only just twigged to the Moby-Dick allegory on this viewing, for one specific reason; enlightenment hit me upside the head with a marlinspike. In defense of my ignorance, I saw Jaws when it came out, and possibly again at the 25th anniversary. Long before I started reading Moby-Dick at least once a year for the past two decades. I was a teenager the first time, and a newly minted experimental physicist with my mind on other things the second time.

Maybe I had read M-D once when I saw Jaws, as an adolescent, and like most great books I read dutifully then, most of the joy and meaning only came later.

The marlinspike-to-the-head came late in the movie, when the crew of the Orca have managed to attach two buoys to Bruce the shark, and are running full-steam ahead with the wind (the smoke is blowing forward faster than the boat is moving) behind the sounding shark.

Hooper mutters “fast-fish” to himself with bared-teeth, and it all fell into to place.

“Fast-fish”

My mind leapt. The movie reframed itself in an instant. My head swum.

I am sure that I did not catch that in any previous viewing, and I can’t find any reference to it in any of the articles comparing Jaws to Moby-Dick [1]. Plenty of analysis, meta-analysis, deconstruction, close-reading, and navel gazing, but no one calls out that Hooper, a rich, well-educated kid, is explicitly referencing a chapter in Moby-Dick. Spielberg and Gilbert (and Bentley, and one of the numerous other screenwriters) all certainly knew what they were doing.

I’m guessing that the entire audience, in 2025, when they chuckled at that line, were thinking that he was just saying that the shark was fast. Which is what the movie had been building up to, for one of the turning points where Ahab Quint is harpooning the whale shark, and it looks like the Pequod Orca might succeed.

Maybe everyone else knows this. But I’ve never seen it written down before. Let me display my ignorance; worth it for a small ration of enlightenment.

“AND I ONLY AM ESCAPED ALONE TO TELL THEE”
–Job

The drama’s done. Why then here does any one step forth?

 
 
[1] Of course, search sucks now, so this is probably just another AI slop failure rather than the collective minds of the whole universe not having read Moby-Dick and understanding what ‘fast-fish’ was referencing at any time in the last fifty years. This is about me finally getting it.