What Quint Teaches Us About Bravery

THE SCAR GAME

It’s a lull between attacks. Quint, Hooper and Brody are sitting around the table in the tiny mess of the Orca. It’s just after the golden hour, that deep blue period when the sky is the same color as the ocean and you feel like you're suspended in sapphire. In the distance, we hear whale song.

Nothing better to do, they start comparing scars. It’s the 70s, you’ve got three men in a boat, and the subtle games of masculinity are inevitable. Hooper’s got a long, photogenic scar running down his leg: manta ray. Brody, embarrassed, examines a small scar on his abdomen, then pulls his shirt down over it.

Then, it’s Quint’s turn.

He rolls up his pant leg, revealing a hefty chunk taken out of his calf. He lays it over Hooper’s bared leg, one-upping him both conceptually and physically. (He's the alpha here, not Hooper)

Brody spots another scar on Quint’s arm, and asks what it is. Quint says it was a tattoo he’d had removed. Hooper laughs. “Let me guess. ‘Mother.’”

“Hooper, that was the USS Indianapolis.”

Hooper’s smile vanishes. “You were on the Indianapolis?”

THE FATE OF THE USS INDIANAPOLIS

It’s 12:27 in the morning, on July 30th, 1945.

Twelve minutes ago the ship was hit with two torpedoes. The Imperial Japanese Navy submarine I-58 is already miles away.

300 men are already dead, pulled under water with the ship. A little over 900 are bobbing up and down in the sea, with no food, no clean water, few lifeboats, and insufficient life vests.

It will be four days before the US Navy even knows they’re there.

Quint is with them. We don’t know if he has a life preserver. Since he will survive, it’s likely that he does. Maybe he is huddled up with a group of other men for safety and camaraderie. Maybe he is adrift, far from any friend.

After a day extreme thirst sets in. Hunger too, but that fades quickly. Quint is resisting the temptation to wet his mouth with sea water. It will only worsen his thirst. The salt content of the water is already making the exposed parts of his skin fester and blister and sluff off (a process gruesomely termed “desquamation”). Oil spilling out in the water from the wreck is making this worse.

We know that Quint is a resilient man. Although he’s fighting hard to stay alert and alive, he’s watching his shipmates succumb to hypothermia in the night, heat stroke during the day. Some men begin to suffer delirium; they kill themselves, or try to murder the people around them. Some begin to commit suicide.

Maybe Quint finds a can of SPAM floating in the water. Eating this restores some of his morale. He tries to only consume a little each hour; inducing vomiting would be disastrous.

Then the shark attacks begin.

Someone close by Quint jerks a little in the water. Confusedly, the sailor looks around, and finally down below the waves. Before he can scream, something pulls him under. He doesn’t come back up.

One by one, more men get pulled under the water. Some lose legs, feet, and are left bobbing in the reddening wake.

Probably most of the shark attacks are from sharks feeding on the already-dead. It’s not easy, after all, for Quint to tell who’s alive, listlessly bobbing up and down in the sea, and who’s already dead but kept afloat by a life-vest. But the sharks know.

Another day passes. Another. More and more men die of thirst, cold, suicide, or sharks. The worst part is that no one seems to be coming for them. No one seems to know. All kinds of thoughts go through Quint’s mind during these 96 hours. Maybe the US Navy does know, and they just don’t care. Maybe the Japanese have somehow won the war, and have decided to leave the shipwrecked Americans where they are, to die one by one until no one’s left.

Somehow, out of dumb luck, or staying alert and hanging on, Quint manages to stay alive until the fourth day, when a US airman flying overhead happens to spot some of the survivors. Soon, the Navy will come en masse to rescue whomever’s left, including Quint.

Of the Indianapolis’s nearly 1,200 men, 300 would survive.

QUINT’S COURAGE

When I first watched Jaws, I thought that the message I was supposed to take away from the story of the USS Indianapolis was simply that Quint, for all his foibles, is a badass. He ain’t afraid of anything, let alone sharks.

On a recent rewatch, I had to pause the film after the scene, rewind, and watch again. This time, I studied Robert Shaw’s face carefully.

When Hooper, suddenly sober and serious, asks him, “You were on the Indianapolis?” Quint nods reluctantly, wards off the story with a smile. When Brody prompts him, only with reluctance does he tell the story.

Then, it hits me.

Holy shit. Quint is afraid of sharks.

Deathly afraid of sharks. As in full on, PTSD-related phobia.

So why is he, a guy who lived through probably the most traumatic shark-related experience any human has ever had to endure, actively racing after the biggest, deadliest shark you could imagine?

Quint is after it because to him, this is the shark. The one shark. The one that killed his shipmates. Over those long thirty years, all those sharks, tiger and thresher, white and hammerhead, fused under the water to become one. The one that haunts him in his dreams.

That’s what he’s going after. And that’s what makes him even more courageous than the simple, brutish badass that I assumed he was. He’s not pursuing out of hatred, like Captain Ahab, with whom he is most often compared.

He’s pursuing out of fear.

This realization has the effect of making his demise all the more horrifying. And it’s a master stroke on the part of the storytellers. This can’t be Quint’s victory. Like Captain Ahab, his monomania must take him to his watery grave. But Ahab dies with hate in his heart, and in a way, exorcises that hate with his own death. “Towards thee I roll,” Ahab screams like a madman, “thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee.” And, tangled up with the whale in the harpoon line, down Ahab goes to a drowning death.

Quint has no catharsis, no poetic end. Just the final culmination of a long, drawn out horror, a horror, and a life, that ends in a terrifying wail of pain that is the consummation and exorcism of a decades-long survivor's guilt.

The thing that should have got him in 1945 finally came back for him in 1975.

Quint is what brought the whale to Amity Island. Quint once again feels responsible for these deaths. And that is why Quint had to face the shark.

Despite his death, it is in Quint’s indomitable courage that we find his victory. And it’s what elevates him over Captain Ahab. With all that hate in his heart, Ahab had no option but to chase the whale. Quint on the other hand could have easily stayed at home and wallowed in fear. But he didn’t. He accepted responsibility over dread.

And that’s courage.