Shark Crackers

The movie Jaws has been a fan favorite for 30 years. A lot has been written about the impact Jaws had on the movie making business and summer swimming habits but there's one aspect of the movie that's seldom been discussed, the impact Jaws had on the image of the saltine cracker.


Before Robert Shaw's Quint, a cracker was a bland cake of baked flour only good as a surface to hold peanut butter or cheese, but not after. Quint elevated the cracker into the snack of sailors and shark hunters. What man has not wanted to calmly snap chunks of a cracker while saying the words:



Y'all know me. Know how I earn a livin'. I'll catch this bird for you, but it ain't gonna be easy. Bad fish! Not like going down to the pond and chasing bluegills and tommycocks. This shark, swallow you whole. No shakin', no tenderizin', down you go.


Much like the Eucharist is a symbol of Christ in the Catholic tradition, in Jaws, the cracker forms the edible representation of the salty trinity: Quint, the shark and the sea. This metaphor is emphasized both in the cracker eating scene by the having Quint consume the cracker as part of his performance before the 'congregation' of islanders while sitting in front of an effigy of the shark and then finally in Quint's death scene where Quint, arms splayed as on a cross, is half in the sharks mouth as it slide back into the water thus merging the trinity.


Over the coming Fourth of July weekend, enjoy a cracker or two, swim in the ocean (but avoid the sharks) and remember the most influential cracker eater of all time, Robert Shaw.


Happy Fourth everyone.

Comments

Lee Spencer said…
It's amazing to find this. As a kid, I would walk around eating crackers because of Robert Shaw. You forgot the scene where he calmly takes a nibble as the fishing reel clicks a couple times, before strapping in to fight the shark. Epic...
3:05 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Axis, Axes, Axii?

While writing another post (it will probably follow this one) I needed to pluralize axis. None of the guesses I came up with passed the spell checker so I Googled it. The first hit I got was from a drafting company. (Interesting aside: word order matters in Google more than I realized - searching for "plural axis" didn't get the same dictionary oriented results as "axis plural") According to these folks the answer is: Grammatical Note : The plural of axis is axes. Some radical etymologists insist that the plural form of axis is axii, but that is only if there are three or more; One axis, two axes, three axii. The word axii, however, still doesn’t pass the spell checker, so perhaps getting grammar lessons from a drafting company isn’t such a great idea. More legitimate authorities simply list axes as the plural. If you do visit the above link to drafing company, can you answer me a question, what the heck are those diagrams depicting. I
Read more

Running roughshod or ripshod

A common euphamism for political power abuse is saying someone or organization has ' run ripshod ' through the land. I was going to use the phrase myself the other day when I realized I had no idea what ripshod meant. I searched around and found many other users but no place that could define the word. This started me thinking that perhaps every example I found was just a perpetuation of a common mistake. I tried aother variations on the phrase and finnally hit upon a more common usage: run roughshod. The words roughshod and ripshod don't really sound the same but people use them in the same manner in similar contexts. Does anyone know the proper usage?
Read more