When the Deep Rises-Telangana Today

Our planet is 71% water, and yet is called ‘earth’. The depths of the oceans remain the last frontier because we still do not know what lives there

By Pramod K Nayar 

In the 19^th century, an American author staged an epic battle between a human and a whale in MobyDick. In the 20^th, another American pitted man against fish in Old Man and the Sea. But the work that changed the way humans look at the oceans was a thriller published fifty years ago, whose movie version drew millions into theatres and made them scream in horror. The age of eco-horror begins with Peter Benchley’s Jaws(1974).

The oceans have fascinated humans forever, perhaps because, as Blue/Oceanic Humanities scholars remind us, life came from the oceans and so the oceans call to us. The ocean is the subject of myth, fantasy and nightmares because it is a realm in which humans cannot live without apparatuses. The ocean destabilises our cognition and leavesus terrans disoriented.

• PeterBenchley’s novel Jawsunderscores the American culture of spectacle where profits trump safety, and where even shark attacks can be an economic opportunity

But sea tourism flourished despite these features.In the 19^th century,Europeexperienced a ‘hydromania’, from sea-side bathing to swimming. Diving equipment enabled an exploration of the depths and in the late 20^th century, with even filmmakers like James Cameron descending into the Mariana Trench. The deep was always the final frontier on the planet, travelling into the most inhospitable realm humans have ever seen.

Then out of the deep, something rises.

Peter Benchley turned the fascination for and horror of the oceanic depths into a plot. In a small town, Amity, in New England, the summer tourists constitute the main economy. Just when the season begins, a shark appears. First a tourist girl goes missing, and then more and more are taken by the shark. The deaths occur because the local businessmen will not close the beach and risk becoming spoilers of the local economy.

The local chief of police, Martin Brody, the visiting oceanographer, MattHooper, and a fisherman, Quint, set out to catch the marauding fish. Hooper gets into a cage hoping to get a shot at the shark, but the shark breaks through the bars and eats him. At the end, Brody is the only survivor from the devastating expedition. The Steven Spielberg movie version, complete with John Williams’ eerie score that heralds the arrival of the shark on the screen, makes some changes to the script. It went on to become the highest grossing Hollywood film of all time, and the term ‘blockbuster’ was first used, apparently, to describe the film, until George Lucas’Star Wars beat it to top spot.

• The horror of Jaws has to do with the very nature of the environment in which humans are disoriented and in which they cannot live, and to which the shark adds a high degree of menace.

Benchley would go on to write The Deep (also a successful film), The Beast and others. He was so appalled at the fear he had whipped up against the shark in Jaws that he became an eco-activist for the animal, and in honour of his work, had a species of shark named after him, the Etmopterusbenchleyi.

Oikos and Disaster

While the movie does address the economic crisis that may affect Amity if the beaches do not remain open, Benchley’s novel is far more rigorous in drawing together the debate around the two terms, economy and home, that stem from the same root, oikos.What is interesting is that the movie version focused principally on the man versus beast theme, but the book undergirds this with an attention to social anxieties, class tensions and small-town dynamics.

When Brody insists that the beaches must be closed in the interest of public safety, the Mayor, Larry Vaughn, tells him

The town is dying. People are out of work. Stores that were going to open aren’t. People aren’t renting houses, let alone buying them. And every day we keep the beaches closed, we drive another nail into our own coffin. We’re saying, officially, this town is unsafe: stay away from here. And people are listening

Vaughn with multiple business interests, debts and connections with the mafia has only one aim: ensure the beaches remain open so that profits come in. His focus is on the privileged out-of-towners who come in to enjoy the beaches. Here Benchley paints an American society of crass individualism and arrogant privilege:

their eyes were blue or brown, so their tastes and consciences were determined by other generations. They had no vitamin deficiencies, no sickle-cell anaemia. …Their bodies were lean, their muscles toned by boxing lessons at age nine, riding lessons at twelve, and tennis lessons ever since. They had no body odour. When they sweated, the girls smelled faintly of perfume; the boys smelled simply clean.

• Quint’s change of attitude towards the shark suggests a slow human recognition that other life forms may also possess will, intelligence and intentions

At one point, an entire family comes down from New York with the explicit intention of seeing the shark. Benchley calls attention to the ‘society of spectacle’, as the theorist Guy Debord called it, where even a killer shark can be transformed into a spectacle. When Brody tries to turn them back, the father ‘snarled, “You mean we drove all the way out here to see this shark and he’s gone? That’s not what the TV said…I thought at least we’d get a look at the shark. That’s what we come all the way out here for”’.

That even shark attacks have a profit possibility is reinforced by the sale, Brody discovers, of special tickets: ‘“Shark Beach. Admit One. Two-fifty.” All I can figure is some sharpie is making a pretty fine killing selling people tickets they don’t need’.

Spectacle and economy over safety, individual gain and pleasure over community — theseprinciples of American life are the objects of Benchley’s critique. In other words, it is not just the shark that makes a killing!

The Aquatic Gothic

The Gothic traditionally has been about castles, labyrinths and cemeteries. It is about madness, secrecy, violence and hauntings. Benchley initiates what the critic Margaret Cohen has termed ‘undersea Gothic’. Cohen notes in her reading of such texts starting with Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870) that in this Gothic, which often includes shipwrecks, ‘the menace comes not only from the ghostly residues of the past but also from the physical qualities of the environment’.

The Benchley novel does not do much with the environment —  water/ocean, although the film’s opening shot is from an underwater camera. But the movie version tries to capture the view from the shark’s perspective, specifically the flapping legs of swimmers in the moments leading to the attack. The novel does give a few visceral accounts of dismembered bodies and violent attacks, but in the main, steers clear of the oceanic as setting. In the description that prefigures the famous film poster of the shark, mouth open, poised right under the swimmer, Benchley writes:

This time the fish attacked from below. It hurtled up under the woman, jaws agape. The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water. The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly. The fish, with the woman’s body in its mouth, smashed down on the water with a thunderous splash, spewing foam and blood and phosphorescence in a gaudy shower.

• Benchley’s shark is a thriller that serves as the anterior moment to numerous texts where the animal world turns against its oldest tormentors: humans

Benchley represents the shark as a smooth killing machine. This is how Hooper in the shark cage, moments before he is eaten, sees the shark:

The top of the immense body was a hard ferrous gray, bluish where dappled with streaks of sun. Beneath the lateral line, all was creamy, ghostly white …

The snout passed first, then the jaw, slack and smiling, armed with row upon row of serrate triangles. And then the black, fathomless eye, seemingly riveted upon him. The gills rippled —  bloodless wounds in the steely skin.

The shark is designed for the ocean, of course, with its sensitivity to vibrations — a point made several times through the novel. Andan emphasis of course on the massive mouth:

The mouth was open not quite halfway, a dim, dark cavern guarded by huge, triangular teeth.

In the alien environment of the subaquatic, the creature only adds to the menace. Humans cannot live under water,nor can they live with the giant predator.

As the critic Stephen Heath points out in his early essay on the film version, there is a play between the unseen and the unseeable. But this play in fact points to the disorientation of cognition that occurs to humans under water. In the book and in the film, those watching the waters find themselves fooled by the light, the shimmer on the surface and the shadows —  or what they think are shadows —  under water. Taken together, this ocular disturbance is central to the horror: what unseen creatures lie below?

Animal Intelligence

While on the one hand, Benchley’s Quint paints the shark as a stupid fish that possesses minimal intelligence to feed when hungry, on the other, he wonders if the fish is more than what humans understand of it.

Quint declares:

They’re pretty stupid fish…No. These things don’t have the brains of a dog. They eat anything. If they’re feeding, you could throw a bare hook down at ’em and they’ll take it if they see it.

But then the novel proposes a different portrait too. Quint, the professional hunter, is first puzzled, then worried and finally scared of this shark’s behaviour, which does not fit the image of the stupid fish he has lived with for decades. Quint says then: ‘Smart or not, I wouldn’t know … But he’s doing things I’ve never seen a fish do before’. Quint seems to develop a greater understanding of the fish, and Brody notes this:

“For a man who says there’s no such thing as a smart fish, you’re making this one out to be a genius.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.” 

The fish is described as a ‘devil’ and as a ‘monster’, and Benchley even anthropomorphises the fish when he says ‘As if in contempt and triumph, the fish hung suspended for an instant, challenging mortal vengeance’.  In the final conflict, Brody and Quint encounter the fish which, the humans understand, ‘was waiting [for them]’. Quint realises this was more than just a stupid fish:

“He means to make a fight of it.”  For the first time, Brody saw a frown of disquiet on Quint’s face. It was not fear, nor true alarm, but rather a look of uneasy concern — as if, in a game, the rules had been changed without warning, or the stakes raised.

Benchley’s novel is responding to developments including underwater photography and the worlds that subsequently opened up. Jacques Cousteau’s The Silent World(1956) and other documentaries did much to reveal the subaquatic which may have inhabitants that we simply do not understand. Thus, the shark’s planned attack and strategy (including waiting) both indicate intelligence and determination, as Quint seems to recognise towards the end.

• The Steven Spielberg movie version, Jaws, went on to become the highest grossing Hollywood film of all time, and the term ‘blockbuster’ was first used

Jaws is the first of a series of eco-horror texts, and at least the cinematic version remains an enduring spectacle. Here, the shark moves into human zones, although the realm — the ocean — is its own. In the novel, Hooper comments, when Quint plans to sacrifice dolphins, a protected species, to bait the shark, in a throwaway nod to animal experimentation and sacrifice: ‘I don’t like to see things die for people’s amusement’.

Jaws foregrounds a key idea: that the beyond-the-human and other-than-human world is not always ours to control. In this,it illustrates the argument made by the critic Jeffrey Jerome Cohen: ‘Only in admitting that the inhuman is not ours to control, possesses desires and even will, can we apprehend the environment disanthropocentrically, in a teetering mode that renders human centrality a problem rather than a starting point’.

Benchley asks: what have we done to the animals? As the tagline for a film that followed close on the heels of Jaws, TheDay of the Animals (1977), put it:

For centuries they were hunted for bounty, fun and food … Now it’s their turn

Benchley’s shark is not the Melville whale or the Hemingway fish. It is a thriller that serves as the anterior moment to numerous texts where, after centuries of oppression, the animal world turns against its oldest tormentors: humans. In these texts, the humans have crossed a line, stepping into animal life-worlds. Sometimes the non-human crosses the line too.

We live in the age of global boiling, and therefore of sea levels rising.

What will happen when the deep rises?

(The author is Senior Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and The English Association, UK)