A quick note: I very much admire the original article I wrote in 2016, and during Trump's first term, I've wanted to update it with more information. However, I found there to be almost too much content to truly condense into the article and make a complete comparison.
As we head into the 2020 election, though, I decided to make some slight revisions to the article to make it more clear and professional, although the content is largely the same.
On Monday, October 10, 2016, Mike Huckabee made an effort to defend Republican
Presidential nominee Donald Trump by comparing him to Quint (Robert
Shaw) from the 1975 movie Jaws.
"He’s vulgar, he’s salty. He might even get drunk. But hold on, here!
He’s the guy who’s gonna save your butt and save your family. And so at
the end of the day, when he kills the shark, you’re happy about it," he
said on the program.
Now true, in most of his screentime, Robert Shaw's Quint is not an easy
character to like. He's crude and blunt ("Here's to swimming with
bowlegged women"). He doesn't hesitate to tell anyone what he thinks of
them, if his speech to the town hall (which
he begins by scraping his fingernails across a chalkboard) and
interactions with Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) ("You got city hands,
Mr. Hooper. You've been countin' money all your life") are anything to
go by.
If the above was what Huckabee was referring to, he may have had a
point. But how exactly does Huckabee's metaphor compare to the film?
Quint Dies
First and foremost, anyone who has ever seen the film Jaws - or read the original novel by Peter Benchley - knows that Quint is killed by the shark.
The scene in question (link).
For anyone who hasn't seen the film or can't follow the link, this is
what happens. The shark leaps out of the water and onto Quint's boat,
the Orca, causing it to begin sinking. Quint tries to hold
himself against a table, only for an air tank to roll onto his hand.
Despite Brody's (Roy Scheider) efforts to save him, Quint slides down
the boat deck toward the shark. Although he manages to
attack it with a machete through the nose as the shark thrashes him
around, Quint is ultimately eaten largely on screen in a prolonged, bloody sequence until the shark
drags him beneath the water to finish him off. Although somewhat tame by
today's standards, the scene is still quite shocking and violent for
the time of its release and first-time viewers.
Clearly, the film makes no effort to hide the outcome of this scene:
Quint is dead. If his sagging back as the shark takes him under or the
copious amount of blood doesn't suggest it, then maybe the remnants of flesh
in the shark's teeth moments later do a better job.
This did not escape even the night of Huckabee's comment. "Captain Quint
got eaten by the shark," Megyn Kelly reminded him. To his credit, Huckabee
appears to remember this before she corrected him, but too late to have
been able to do anything about it.
Quint Did Not Kill The Shark
Most obviously, if Quint is killed by the shark, he cannot have killed the shark. That honor belongs to Brody,
who famously thrusts a compressed air tank into the shark's mouth and
manages a million-to-one shot that blows the shark's head apart. Even Jaws and star Richard Dreyfuss commented on it, tweeting "Quint did not kill Jaws."
Where Huckabee's comment may have had merit, though, lies in Benchley's original novel.
In the scene, the shark leaps onto the Orca's transom, as in the
film. Here, though, Quint goes on the offensive, lunging at the shark
and harpooning it repeatedly while at the same time becoming tangled in
ropes and netting. Eventually, the shark retreats, dragging Quint under
the water with it, where he eventually drowns.
In the novel, Quint's death was meant to resemble the death of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (#24 in the attached link).
For the film, Spielberg felt the shark deserved a more cinematic death, hence the famous action-packed and explosive confrontation between Brody and the shark. In the novel, Brody is left unarmed and floating helplessly in the water as the shark approaches him when it suddenly dies of exhaustion and wounds from Quint's attacks.
If the above is what Huckabee meant or referred to, his comparison may
have had precedent. But Huckabee explicitly brings up the film, not the
novel, which marks this another strike against him.
Quint is Not A Saint
Huckabee seems to be under the impression that Quint is a hero because
has a moral code or stands up where no one else did. "But he died saving
the other people! That’s what he did," he said.
He can't be more mistaken. Early in the film (in the town hall speech linked to above), Quint makes
it clear he has a price as he offers the town an ultimatum:
"I value my neck a lot more than three thousand bucks, Chief. I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten. Now you gotta make up your minds. You want to stay alive and ante up, or want to play it cheap. Be on welfare the whole winter. [...] Ten thousand dollars, for me, by myself. For that, you get the head, the tail... the whole damn thing."
Quint makes good on his promise not to go out and hunt the shark, as
he's not seen taking part in the mass shark hunt that claims the life of
Ben Gardner (Craig Kingsbury)* shortly after. He's later seen laughing
at the proud city folk who have caught a tiger shark in the belief it's
the maneater they're looking for.
Quint only becomes involved afterward when Brody forces Mayor Vaughn
(Murray Hamilton) to sign a voucher hiring him to kill the shark after
the Fourth of July attack in the estuary.
Furthermore, Quint's death doesn't come about as the result of a noble
sacrifice of any sort. He doesn't give his life to save Brody, Hooper, or anyone else. While shocking and dramatic, his death happens
almost accidentally and has largely no effect on anyone's livelihoods on
the island (that is stated). It is also doubtful that Quint seriously put any consideration into
what the people on Amity Island would think as he faced down the shark in a battle he was clearly losing.
Quint is Out of His Depth
Quint is clearly set up to be an established shark hunter, if his blunt
demeanor, equipment, implied three decades of experience and the massive
number of shark jaws hanging about his home are anything to go by.
Throughout the third act, though, every effort Quint makes to bring the shark in fails.
First, Quint attempts to reel the shark in using a fishing rod. Given
the shark's size as revealed later, this quickly fails when the line
snaps.
Later, Quint's plan is force the shark to the surface by shooting
harpoons attached to flotation barrels to it. The failure of the first
barrel is excusable, since the shark may have had sufficient force to
hold the barrel down long enough to at least escape the general area. Even after he shoots it with (implied to be unprecedented)
three barrels, the shark still manages to dive.
After shooting it with the second barrel, Quint has them tied to the Orca's
transom in order to tow the shark into shore and drown it. Not only
does this fail as the shark manages to break free, the shark manages to
truly demonstrate its strength by dragging the boat backwards, nearly tearing it in half in the process. It's only by sheer luck that it manages to rip the cleats tying it to the Orca off before taking the rest with it.
Quint being in over his head is brought up in this exchange with Hooper:
Hooper: You ever have one do this before?
Quint: No.
Quint's inexperience dealing with the unprecedented behavior of this
shark leads him to make the decisions that lead to the final comparison.
Quint Blunders More Than He Fixes
Although Quint's trip out to sea makes it possible for Brody to
eventually kill the shark, he takes a number of actions that make the
situation worse for himself, Brody and Hooper.
This is foreshadowed during the nighttime scene. When the shark assaults the Orca during
the crew's brief nighttime respite, Quint drops a lantern that bursts
into flame and nonchalantly asks Brody to put out the fire. It's a few minutes later (during the day) that Quint makes his first
directly bad decision. When Brody decides to call in to shore for assistance,
Quint responds by smashing the radio beyond repair.
Quint's third act (as mentioned above) is to try and tow the shark in while tied to the Orca.
While this nearly results in the shark tearing the boat in half (which
it later does anyway), the resulting water intake
floods into the Orca's already damaged engines. This plays a major part in his final mistake, when he decides to lure the shark into shallow water. Against
Hooper's advice, Quint ramps up speed, ultimately overtaxing and
destroying the Orca's engines (if the massive smoke cloud and
small explosion that follows is anything to go by). As the result, Quint
leaves himself, Brody and Hooper stranded out at sea with no safe way
of getting to shore or calling for help.
Ultimately, this was all the result of Quint ignoring Brody's famous warning: he never got a bigger boat.
The Verdict
When I started writing this analysis, I thought Huckabee was a nut for
coming up with this comparison. As I went into this further and deeper,
though, I realized he may have had a point after all.
True, Quint is not a presidential nominee, but look at his character arc.
He's a man who appears to be an expert in his field who is clearly in over his head and makes things harder for his partners.
When the time comes for Quint to come face to face with his opponent - a
version of everything he hates and fears about sharks, given flesh and
teeth - Quint ultimately loses horrifically, and his defenses ultimately amount to nothing.
2020 Thoughts
Trump's responses in light of the COVID-19 epidemic can be seen as comparable to Quint's actions in the film. In particular, Trump's regular insistence on holding "super spreader rallies", putting attendees at risk, parallels Quint's dismissal of Brody and Hooper's concerns. As mentioned before, Quint ignores Hooper's warning about the Orca's damaged engines, taxing it to the point of killing it, while also earlier destroying the radio when Brody attempts to call for assistance. Both actions lead to the group being isolated against the shark.
It is also fitting, if Trump's own COVID diagnosis is true, that, like Quint and the shark, Trump would have come face-to-face with his enemy.
Although Trump triumphed over the Clinton campaign in 2016, it remains to be seen how Trump will fare against Biden, who as of this posting (October 31st, 2020), has been both outperforming Trump and Clinton in nearly all aspects.
Sources
- Huffington Post, The: This ‘Jaws’ Analogy Did Not End Well For Mike Huckabee - Maxwell Strachan, 11 October 2016
- Mental Floss: 25 Incisive Facts About Jaws - Sean Hutchinson, 20 June 2018
- Observer: Twitter Trashes Mike Huckabee’s Terrible ‘Jaws’ Metaphor - John Bonazzo, 11 October 2016
- Vanity Fair: Richard Dreyfuss Calls out Mike Huckabee’s Pro-Trump Jaws Metaphor - Joanna Robinson, 11 October 2016
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