Badlands Media - Badlands Story Hour Ep. 175: Jaws

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

Chris Paul and Burning Bright drop into the water for a look at Spielberg's 1975 classic, and yes, the animatronic shark holds up better than you'd think. The guys dig into why practical tension still beats modern CGI, trade theories on whether Jaws would scare anyone who first saw it as an adult, and take a hard swing at Spielberg's recent output along the way. Expect real talk about shark encounters, a detour into Moby Dick style "nature doesn't care about your plans" philosophy, and some genuinely funny tangents about beach trips gone wrong. Stick around for listener boosts, chat shoutouts, and the reveal of next week's pick, a 1997 mind bender that's already got the chat buzzing. Grab a snack, maybe stay out of the water.

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You will not regret it. John says you won't regret it, and that means that you will not regret it. John's good at it. in the most convincing tone of voice. He's good at knowing when you're going to regret something or not. But before we get started, we also have a word from Rise Attire, who, by the way, you can see on the sixth episode of America First Stories, right here on Badlands.

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as much as fucking possible at badlandsmedia.tv slash rise. And many compliments to the narration of that one. It's kind of funny how the, uh, the, the auto boys, voice just it's like almost right there and just yeah it's getting it's getting there it's like the in-betweens yeah it's so funny uh before you get started just to let people know someone got mad at us at badlands this week for the automated voice feature on substack oh right i don't like i don't like this voice why do you got why did you guys use this voice and not record it yourselves it's like that's not doing a voice like you just pushed a substack feature that we have nothing to do with

yeah spits out the the automated voice so and sent like a very aggressive email about it like why are you guys being lazy lazy people with this feature that substack has offered us yeah when I write a 5,000 word feature the last thing I'm going to do is read it I mean I've done that before but like those are like standalone episodes it takes a long time to read an hour long thing really well to the point you want to record it and put it out there so yeah the uh the machine does that for us but anyhow all right everybody good evening welcome to bad land story hour i'm chris paul that is burning bright and tonight we are discussing jaws written by peter

benchly and carl gotley or carl gotley wrote the book i believe no sorry peter benchley wrote Right. Directed by Stephen Spielberg starring Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfus, and some others. An absolute classic of a movie that I had not seen until just two days ago. Yeah, this is one of those. Oh, go ahead. No, no, I was going to say a Burning Bright selection. Yeah.

Yeah, obviously, I'm somewhat notorious in these waters for being a shark, a mix of a shark enthusiast. and absolutely terrified of them. And that's a unique thing to shark people, I think. Like, there's people, there's things you're afraid of, and you're like, I'm not interested in this thing I'm afraid of, because I'm afraid of it. Why would I be interested in it? And then there's things you're interested in that you're probably not afraid of,

because otherwise, why would you be interested in them? But I think there's something to sharks, the primeval primordial nature of sharks that for some people like me terrify us and fascinate us and I'm guessing that this comes from watching Jaws as a child and I've seen a ton of people in chat saying this I don't know when I first saw Jaws but I was a little kid so you know of course when you're watching it now, like for you, this is one of those movies for you watching it as a cinephile and, you know, as an adult and the fact that it is 51 years old now, you know, is it even possible for a concept like this to be scary? It's impossible for you to know,

I think, whether or not you would have found it scary, you know, even when you were 15 or something. Of course, kids are going to find something like this scary. Like, no matter what, I I think if you showed a kid now, they'd be scared of this. But I do think it's interesting generationally to think, like, if you had seen it when you were 20, would you have been scared by it or something or not? Or is it, you know, has it kind of, does the fear age out because of the effects and everything? I was pleasantly surprised, you know, I haven't seen this in a long time. I've seen this movie dozens of times from childhood, but haven't.

seen it in quite a long time. And I was pleasantly surprised by how much it held up, I think. The infamous animatronic shark that really doesn't appear in terms of a dramatic out of the water, like, oh, that's an animatronic shark. There's like two scenes, I'd say where it's like, Oh, fake shark. I thought it actually looked pretty good. Yeah. The only one that I think looks ridiculous at this point is the death of Quint. And for me personally, it makes, you know, we can get into that later on.

But just the physics of the scene strikes me as silly now, the way I see it. Just it kind of breaks immersion to me. The whole situation breaks immersion. But Spielberg was known, like one of the way, one of the way, one. of the things this movie was so known for is the use of tension. And, you know, it's kind of funny because just last month, Spielberg came out with his, what, 50th movie in Hollywood Disclosure Day. I have not seen it. I have no interest in seeing it. And that's not even because I don't like Steven Spielberg and he's one of these like Hollywood elites who hates Trump and all that.

It's, I don't think Spielberg has made a good movie in a decade. And I think the irony from what I've heard, I know John saw Disclosure Day, a lot of people I spoke to who saw it, said that like, it was acting like this thriller, but there was nothing thrilling about it. It's, it's kind of sad when you see that happen to a guy who kind of made tension into a mainstream thing. And I think one of the reasons he's so effective with Jaws is he's just sparing. Like it is even an hour and a half into the movie. When they're actively hunting the shark, you kind of see its shape moving through the water. Sometimes you see its fin. There's the greatly staged kind of chase sequence where they're hitting it with the barrels and trying to, you know, and I think Spielberg had this real eye for

not just staging things and filming things, but creating scenarios where he's telling you how dangerous the threat is in kind of clever ways. Many sharks, movies since this. There have been hundreds and hundreds of shark movies since Jaws. It's just that the shark is dangerous and sharks are dangerous. We all know they're dangerous. It's going to eat people in this movie. But with Spielberg shark, you're kind of throughout the movie being like, is this thing really smart or are people being really dumb around it? Is it after people actively or is it just like stuck in this area? The barrel scene is an example of Spielberg sort of showing you high.

how strong and large the shark is when you haven't actually seen the whole thing because it's just pulling these barrels underwater and having no problem doing that. So just the staging of the movie is great. And for, I'm sure Bay Theater Dave knows all the secrets of this movie, but I do remember even as a kid learning a lot about the making of it. It was filmed right near where I live. So there's like a lot of local lore about this movie. It takes place right near where I live, even though they changed the names, I guess,

to conform with what the novel is. The Amity is not a real place, so I think that's just a thing from the novel. But I think a lot of the reason for the lack of seeing the shark in this movie is actually based around the fact that the animatronic shark kept breaking when they were using it in these saltwater bays

that they were filming in on Martha's Vineyard. And it's that age-old thing where it forced Spielberg to pivot it in, you know, and basically use the shark way more sparingly. So, but, you know, it ultimately, it ultimately made history. And, you know, last, last opening thought would be, I'm not positive on this, but I have heard that this was really the first movie that is considered a summer blockbuster. It's, it's the first one where four quadrant movie, everybody was seeing it, everybody was talking about it. And I think it's the rare mix of a very mainstream movie in this era,

in the 70s that was also just a really well done and crafted movie. Yeah, it certainly was that. I didn't actually find the shark to be distracting. Maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention in the scenes where it would come up. But it didn't seem like if you watch, I could watch Conan the Barbarian when it came out and think, oh, this stuff looks really corny. And there are some movies. I think we did the never-ending story.

Like some of that stuff appears really. really dated the shark in this didn't like shock me in terms of um the primitive nature of its special effects that didn't actually bother me um i don't find the movie scary i i find it hard to i want to say i find it hard to understand why people did find it scary but it was a different moviegoing experience at that point i think yeah the music was very powerful the music built tension in a really effective way. The fact that the monster was not on screen that much and you stated a likely, or maybe that's the definite reason, maybe that's the totality of the reason.

I kind of feel like maybe there was an artistic choice there. Yeah. But that certainly became a convention after that, that there's an anticipatory fear that the audience is prepared to express when they are not. not actually seeing the bad guy. And maybe we can talk about that and relate that to how we perceive a lot of the threats that we are told about in the world. Terrorism threats, for instance, the terrorism threat is always there, whether or not

terrorism rears its ugly head. You know, when it does, it's stories of terrorism and the rest of it. I think maybe that would be something to talk about. So there's the anticipation and the fear that comes. with the anticipation as an audience member there is a bit of gore you see the dismembered limbs at various points the the shark that they killed early you see the the mouth and the teeth and the blood and all of that is is very visceral there are a few jumpy moments like when uh richard Drifus is, I can't remember what the

Cooper. Cooper, there you go. When he's underwater inspecting that boat and finding the tooth and the rest of it. And so there's some of that. And then obviously the chase, as you mentioned, with the barrels, they kind of have their own signal like, hey, this is a problem. But that was the totality of the fear there. Like you really have to have your own separate fear of being in the water and being eaten by sharks to enhance

that beyond that. Maybe I'm just crazy and maybe I'm watching it way too long after this movie came out. So I kind of have, you know, I was kind of already like had this sort of thing built in to my understanding. But an

interesting convention for sure. If that happens totally by the circumstance where the shark just wasn't cooperating and the mechanical shark just wasn't cooperating in the way they needed it to, And so he ended up having to find all these other ways to enhance the fear without actually showing the monster. Well, that would be ultimately groundbreaking because it's been used so many times since then.

So that's very cool if that's what it was. Yeah. I'd watched a lot of making of stuff on this back in the 90s. I mean, it was probably made around this time or around a lot of the documentaries were probably made in the 80s and 90s because this movie was pretty popular right away. but the another thing that I think is personal to me and that it's hard to separate with this movie is you know when you're a kid you just you have this myopic view of things you you just kind of know you know your experience like every child is naturally I think a bit of a solipsist where they're just they're only perceiving things through their own eyes as they start to expand outward

with that awareness they're like oh there's mom and dad and then there's like these other people that I know. There's this place that I know, my house, my yard, my area, my town, my library. And, you know, you have that view. So I think for me, when I then see Jaws, when I'm, I don't know, seven, of course, all my, I think it says a lot about me that any, like, violent movie from the 70s or 80s we watch, I'm like, yeah, I watched that when I was a small child. So, you know, I think it explains a lot. But I knew as a little kid that Jaws was filmed and based where I lived. And there's this conspiracy element. I want to get into the fear stuff too, but kind of adjacent to it. There's this conspiracy element to the movie that I think

is really good. And I don't mean a conspiracy theory in terms of like it's a government conspiracy. But the way that the characters and that the people in this town act about the shark is that they many of them treat it almost as a conspiracy like it's this thing they heard is going on but they don't know if it's going on uh sheriff brodie knows what is going on very early on the mayor the evil mayor knows what's going on early on and again this was filmed right near where i grew up and when i grew up i was terrified of the water and everybody around me was telling me like there's no sharks up here. There's no sharks in Cape Cod waters and everything. And I'm like, I don't know. Like as a little kid, I was always like, isn't the ocean? I was using first principles

reasoning. And I was saying, isn't the ocean pretty big? And like, can't the sharks in that? It's not like gates in it, right? Yeah. Like, can't they just kind of go anywhere they want? Like, I understand that there might be more of them in other places. But I really feel like there could just be a shark right there off the coast of Marshfield or off the coast of Falmouth or whatever. Like there definitely could be. And they'd be like, yeah, yeah, there could be, but they don't live here. And then fast forward to being an adult and starting basically in my late teens, early 20s, and now it's crazy, when I go to the beach in my towns, there are giant great white

signs at every beach you go to telling the tourists. And that was not a thing when I was a little kid. Ironically, the the crunchy granola sciencey people around Cape Cod played very well by Richard Dreyfuss in this movie. Like that guy is everywhere where I live, that kind of scientist guy. Leaving aside their insufferability, the Cape Cod area is widely considered to be one of the greatest examples of a rewilding and natural rehabilitation effort in human history. Um, from the 90s, Cape Cod basically had no codfish left that it was overfished. There was all this pollution. Everything was destroyed.

And instead of focusing on, um, you know, these crass methods of trying to rehabilitate the environment, they basically started from the ground up and started with like plankton reintroductions, algae reintroductions, seaweed. They did all this masterful shit. They brought all these fish species back into the area naturally. then that brought harbor seals back into the area in the 90s and 2000s. And then that brought the Great Whites into the area. And now in my little neck of the woods, outside of South Africa, it's essentially the Great White Highway, especially in the summer.

So they are everywhere down here now and there's signs everywhere. So that's like this weird feedback loop for me with Jaws, where as a kid it terrified me. The Great White is the most iconic looking shark, and that's obviously the type of shark that this movie's all about. And I was told there's none of these around. Like they're in these other places that you think of as a kid, like Australia or something like that. And now as an adult, and I'm like taking my son to the beach, there's the Jaws signs. But it's just actual pictures of Great Whites and saying, hey, don't swim far out there because these are out there.

So, and I think that just lends it, I use the word verisimilitude all the time. And I think the reason for some people like me, this kind of movie and this kind of story hits me way harder on a fear level than anything like any horror movie that really don't bother me is because it's, there's nothing metaphysical happening. It's like, this just exists. this like I've seen real videos of real people getting killed by sharks and it's like that is just as terrifying as it looks in the movie there's no sort of dramatization that needs to be happening and I think because of that when they build this fictional story around just a very reasonable normal natural thing that can occur it kind of adds an element of horror to it of being like people live their daily lives I joke about this all the time on the shows with my shark facts. But people, like, I see it every day down here.

We're in July. So this is like shark buffet time. And I just see people acting like there are not Leviathens with teeth just swimming under them at all times. And it's a wonder that things like in this movie don't happen just every day. Like, we're lucky that doesn't happen. But, you know, I don't know. It threads this primordial fear into me. This movie doesn't scare me anymore, but the circumstance absolutely does.

It's pretty funny, too, because now they have all the signs up. So the major worry in the film was that putting up those signs or letting anybody know about the shark attacks in the water was going to discourage all the tourism and knowing would ever go in the water again. Now they have signs up there, and people are like, yeah, but that doesn't really happen. That's pretty incredible, just on its own. I was wondering while you were talking about the ecological differences that they kind of shoehorned into the area and then dealt with the results. I wonder if maybe the sharks ended up coming there because they watched Jaws and thought that it was an advertisement for a restaurant.

Maybe. I mean, this shark, I believe this shark actually does have a name too. The shark, the animatronic shark, I don't know if it's the original animatronic shark, but an animatronic shark based on Jaws is at Universal Studios and it is named Bruce the shark. So I believe Spielberg named the shark Bruce. It's not fair to Bruce's, but Bruce became kind of a gay name. Oh, did it? You know, I guess Bruce, it should be like a powerful, well, yeah. And I guess Robert the Bruce is not really Bruce, but it's kind of Bruce-ish. Yeah, yeah, it should be a powerful name, but it just kind of got a little gay there like Lance, you know, in the 90s. Those should be... Yeah.

I think Lance has been kind of gay name. I don't know. You have, I take it, never been shark diving or anything like that. No. Yeah, not to do stuff like that. I traveled to Cape Town in 2014. And we went on one of those shark boats

and got the cage. for the record is substantially thicker. I mean, it was probably like two inch solid pipe around for every bit of that cage. And it's an awfully large cage. So you're in there and you basically just hold at the front. And so there's two layers to the cage. There's like the outer layer with these big thick pipes

and then an inner layer that you can kind of hold on and like maneuver yourself around with. And so they chum all the water and get the sharts there. And then you have like a mask and snorkel and you come up and then you go down and like look and you're like, holy moly, this thing is like battering into the cage and opening its mouth and it's swimming by and it's bumping into you. And, you know, if it's just the illusion of safety in that cage, then the illusion works. I feel like it was pretty safe. I don't know that I was in any danger whatsoever. But yeah, that was an interesting experience.

I'd like to dissuade you of those ridiculous notions immediately if you'd like to share my script. So you can, they can bite right through those cages? And nobody dies in this video just as a, so we know. This is, where is this? Well, this is one of those Mexican cages. Yeah. You can't trust. Oh, God.

Is there anybody in there? Nobody's in the cage. Nobody's in the cage. Somebody's in the cage. Is it still going? Richard Dreyfus. Okay. Basically shrank down against the bottom of the cage.

That's actually happened in a few videos I've seen. Now, you might have been in a totally different kind of cage, but But they, um, they, and of course, like, I've never seen one where it looks like the great white is trying to get the person in the cage. Uh, that one, they're obviously chum in the waters and they're, you know, they're pulling stuff on a string. They're pulling big hunks of meat. These things start swimming at 25 miles per hour or something like that. They're going to slam into a cage if they find a gap. Um, you know, these are aluminum cages, I think.

But anyway, all of which is to say, no. I think you're actually not in that much danger when you're shark diving in cages. I think it's way more scary, not seeing the shark. And that's just one of the other. It's one of the other things. You know, we talked about the tension that Spielberg builds not showing you the shark for so much of the runtime. But I think in real life, that's one of the great fears that people who are afraid of sharks have is it's this, it somehow makes it feel scarier. even though, of course, if you're in the woods and you happen upon a grizzly bear,

it's just as terrifying, if not more so, than happening upon a great white. But there's something about the fact that you could just be bobbing along in the water, you could be looking out at the beach, and then all of a sudden somebody could just be gone. And, you know, they do that, one of the not opening scenes, but the get out of the water scene is one of the great, now it's a reaction gif in the modern internet age, but the Roy Shider, you know, close up when he thinks his kid is getting grabbed. It turns out it's a different kid that gets grabbed. Just that primordial threat of, you know, there's 300 people in the water, and it doesn't matter.

That's never been the case. You know, if you look into shark attacks or anything like this, I think people have this thing in their head of, yeah, if you're, if you're Chrissy at the beginning of the movie and you're skinny dipping, first of all, you're committing the Cardinal's sins in movies. right away that get you killed by something. But yeah, you're swimming at night. You're out by yourself. I think people, even who aren't terrified of sharks, are like, that's probably not a great thing to do. But many, many shark attacks and fatal ones happen

when there are people all around splashing around because they really don't give a shit. But, yeah, it's weird. One of the things I think of is like, this is the rare kind of horror movies, that's so iconic where the actual scenario happens a few times a year in real life, you know, where so many other horror movies are either supernatural or this serial killer thing that, you know, may or may not be reflective of reality, but is confined to this moment, where when

you, there is something primordial, I keep saying about a great white shark movie where you're like, yeah, just, just Google it. I bet one happened last month in Cape Town. and people are you know it's just like this weird thing where everyone knows about the movie everybody knows about this fear template but to your point about the signs on cape cod beaches and probably cape town beaches people still just do their thing anyway and uh you know they don't care they take their risks yeah the um you talked about the fear level between seeing a grizzly in the wild seeing the sharks. I mean, just the environment alone is more threatening.

You know, you're in the ocean. It is boundless, essentially. So you could drift off. And just drifting off is enough to cost you your life. And then there's the potential for drowning, of course, immediate drowning with the shark. So you've got the drowning combined with having, being eaten alive by,

an uncaring monster of incredible power. I mean, yeah, those are, if you take stock of each part of the fear and add them all up, well, that's absolutely horrifying. There are ways to decrease the possibility of that happening, thank goodness. And, you know, you could even decrease them to add or near zero, depending on how much sharks advance over the course of our lifetime. Right. never know where they might end up uh i saw some brown bears i think they were no the brown bears or

black bears it's weird because black bears kind of look brown and yeah they can look brown or it's or it's maybe the other way around but i saw some bears uh just in the wild like over there last summer and that was pretty wild um but they were they were they were very peaceful it was a mom and a cub And so we just minded our own business and the bears bounded away. And it was actually one of those things where you're like, this is amazing. Look at that nature. Because it's not currently occupied with ripping you apart. That always makes a big difference.

But I don't know. Should we talk about the movie a bit? Yeah, yeah. Let's get into the movie. So first of all, I want to, I love Roy Scheider. I just, I feel like he never did a whole. He was in a bunch. I looked up some of his other movies. Maybe they're just movies I haven't really seen. I haven't seen the French connection. So that seems like one that you would pick at some point. That is on my list, although I've never seen it either. Yeah, I guess he's in that as a major role. But not in that many things. I also knew as a kid, you know, I got into boxing and everything. Roy Scheider, as you can see by looking at him. It's actually a gold glove boxer. I believe in the New Jersey area. Wait, why do you say you can see that by looking at him? Oh, his nose.

looks to me like my nose, even though a lot of people, I guess, don't notice that my nose has been broken many times, but I notice it because it doesn't look the same as it used to. So just certain contours of it the way it is, I could tell. But yeah, he's got a great frame for boxing. He's got that wiry, skinny guy, don't F with me frame. But yeah, I guess he went like 12 and 1 or 111 or something in boxing with like mostly COs. So he was a tough dude. And the thing I love about this, movie getting away from even the shark of it all for for a bit it's the three guys some might call this in literature or an art a triptych of a movie where each of the three men essentially very clearly represents something they rep they kind of represent an archetype

and seeing those three povs bounce off of each other and bounce off of the scenario that I I think is really why Jaws holds up. I think it's the three guys. I think it's the three actors, Richard Dreyfus, Robert Shaw, and Roy Shider. And the thing I like about this, I've said this in some other movies we've done, I think specifically 70s movies.

Maybe we were talking about this last week, or maybe I said it in relation to this movie. There's something about Sheriff Brody in this, where he's a normal guy, Like he comes across as such a normal guy, such a believable guy that you would run into on Martha's Vineyard. You'd be like, yeah, I would believe that would be the sheriff in 1975 on the Vineyard. He seems generally like a likable guy, but kind of mild-mannered, maybe a little bit dickish at times. But he just comes off as a normal guy.

And there's something just, I think, inherently earnest and believable. about the heroes of this movie, where it's like, this threat has come to this town, this Americana, like this is as Americana as it gets. It feels like you're reading a Stephen King novel before it gets bad. Like you're reading the first hundred pages of the stand when they're in New England, like they always are. And you're like, nice summertime, the kids are in the water, the women are, you know, having their pinoculas. And like, the dads are just normal dads. They're just like plaster. and laborers and blue-collar dudes and some of them are cops. And they're all at the beach.

And when this otherworldly demonic entity comes to their island, it's just those guys. You know, they get everybody together in a room right at the beginning of the movie with the mayor and everybody. And there's no, let's call the authorities. It's like, who are the authorities? Well, it's Brody. Brody's the authorities. And then this other guy is a fisherman. And something I also like is even the introduction of Robert Schott.

It's very dramatic. You know, he rakes his hand down the chalkboard because he's the scary fisherman man. But nobody laughs at him. And I feel like if you made that movie, if you made a version of this in the 2000s, my generation has ruined this kind of earnest filmmaking because somebody in the movie, somebody in the scene would have to make a comment. Somebody in the scene would have to be like, oh, look at that scary guy in the corner trying to look cool. You know, they'd have to get meta about it.

They would have to make meta commentary. And in this movie, they're just like, that's a weird, scary fisherman guy. But we all know that weird scary fisherman guy. And we're all really scared of a really big fish right now. So nobody in the scene dismisses him. They don't immediately go begging him for help. But they're like, okay, yeah, I mean, we'll see what Brody can do. And the science boy comes to save the day.

but eventually they're all kind of they all go crawling to the weird fisherman dude so i just like the normal guineas of this movie nobody's trying to be uber macho nobody's trying to take everything over necessarily although maybe we can get into that with quint but otherwise i just like how everyone interacts i think it's very believable all the character you know the vast majority of this movie is not the shark it's just people having conversations and dealing with a couple of people dying on the island. And with the exception of maybe Shider's wife in this, Brody's wife, nobody's acting that unbelievable. And even she's fine. There's just like one scene where she weirdly runs away very dramatically when he gets on a boat. But, you know, besides that,

everybody's kind of acting very normally, very believably. And I use the word verisimilitude in basically every episode of this show. This has it. Take the shark out of it. And you're like, do I believe these are people on an island, you know, having dinner trying to figure out what to do? Yes, I do. I do not feel like I'm watching a movie scene. So that's something I really appreciate about this. So let's talk about Penn for a second. The nails scratching on the blackboard is the most horrifying part of this movie by far for me.

I never, ever, ever, ever want to hear that sound. I don't want to think about what it feels like to do that. I don't want to see chalk. I don't want to touch chalk. I don't want to be anywhere near chalk. I don't even want to know that chalk exists, much less anywhere near a chalkboard. That should never happen. I thought I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever see that ever again in my life.

And then this movie did that to me. And that part was absolutely horrifying. But it was quite effective to make all of the townspeople who would normally not be interested in commentary from this Quintfellow. listened to him very attentively, and it turned out that he was the guy that they would turn to when their very small plans failed, because even Hooper, who had some knowledge of what these beasts were capable of and how they behaved, he had no chance of defeating this thing either. But the strange thing about Quint was that he wanted to die the entire time. Like the last thing you might want to do is put yourself in a life or death situation with someone who wants to die. And it almost cost all of them for making that mistake. But his urge to die was extraordinary, even in points of the real tension and drama as they're actually amidst the battle with this shark.

He's trying to make the ship's engine explode, doing all sorts of crazy shit, like dealing with his personal problems between the people who are supposed to be helping him. He didn't have a whole lot of respect for his life. And hey, maybe he wanted to die by shark so that he could be with his fellow soldiers from, or fellow seaman from the USS Inns. Indianapolis, and we can talk about that separately. But he wanted to die, and I thought that was kind of interesting. Yeah, and I think, you know, they're going for, well, I assume part of what they're going for with that is the survivor's guilt sort of thing.

Maybe accommodate. You could read it, I guess, on either side of it. You know, I think a lot of people read it as a revenge quest. You know, this, this is the shark. This is the one that's going to bring everybody back. This is the one that's going to make everything whole. I'm going to take this shark out and, you know, achieve a catharsis for, for everything I witnessed these things do to all my, all my mates. That's one way of looking at it. And then the other way is, yeah, death wish and a different kind of catharsis, like a survivor's guilt kind of thing.

Yeah, we can get into the USS Indianapolis. but you know, Quint is the, Quint is the infamous role in the movie. One of the great monologue scenes, I think, in movies, and I think it holds up great. I think the USS Indianapolis monologue is fantastically delivered by him. The other character, too, that I think is also, you know, Quinn is the one that maybe comes the closest to jumping the shark,

and I do not intend that pun, even though I shouldn't have even used. it in a review like this. But you know, he's the silly madman fisherman or he could come off that way. And I think he straddles that line. He's right on that line for me in the movie of being unbelievable and then being like, okay, this guy has PTSD and is an odd fisherman. I guess it makes sense that a guy could behave this way. I think his monologue scene is what kind of puts it over the edge and makes you kind of

believe him and root for him. I already went over Brody. The other character, the third of the trio is Richard Dreyfus as Hooper. And I also thought he was really well done because there is a way of doing that archetype of making him obnoxious, you know, of making this sort of science boy who gets humbled, you know, he gets humbled throughout this movie, all the little tricks that he's going to do, all the little plans he has, none of them are working when it comes. to this threat that he's up against.

And on paper, Hooper knows the most about the threat. He literally knows the most about it. But they don't make him a cartoon. The thing I like about the movie is especially I like the relationship between Hooper and Quint, because they're kind of on the other, the two opposite angles. You've got Brody in the middle of them. Brody just wants to save the town. Like, he wants to save his family.

He wants to stop the threat. he is leveraging the power projection capabilities that he perceives in these two experts. One of them in killing the thing and finding the thing, the other one in knowing everything about the thing. And Brody is right in the middle. And of course, those two guys, Hooper and Quint, have all this conflict with each other because they've got opposite approaches. But I think the movie does a good job of like each of them wins and loses in various exchanges. You've got these moments where Hooper tries to do something very scientific. and stupid and Quint knows it's stupid and then it turns out that it was stupid. Then you have other

moments, especially as things get more and more serious, where Hooper has warned over and over not to do certain things and that Quint is playing with fire and Quint ultimately, you know, is proven Hooper is proven right about the way Quinn is behaving. And I would also say that the thing I noticed as a kid. You know, as a kid I didn't know, I didn't understand that Hooper was like supposed to be the the science boy and that they were making this commentary on, you know, intellectual superiority, this kind of thing. I didn't get that as a kid. But what I did think was interesting as a kid was Hooper clearly comes off among the three of them as the least masculine, right? He's wearing a beanie. He's wearing sweaters throughout the thing.

He just, he doesn't, he doesn't come from the same cloth as the sheriff or the fisherman. but Hooper basically is doing the most dangerous stuff throughout the movie like many of the most dangerous things and I would say the bravest things maybe the dumbest things that are done are done by Hooper I mean the night dive to figure out what the hell happened is like what are you doing and then later in the movie I remember as a kid being terrified every time even though I knew he survived of when he gets in the water and is like trying to, you know, finagle his way around and get under the shark and he's hiding on the reef when the shark's going over him and everything. And, you know, you get the other two guys on the boat.

So another character that I don't think he's quite as memorable maybe as the other two guys maybe to most people who watch this. But I think it's a character that could have been a cartoon just like, just like everybody else and was not. Yeah. So he definitely was annoying. There's there was a kind of a strange balance between him and Brody. Brody was, they're both, they're both certain that this threat is absolutely monumental.

And it's, it's weird because Brody was like totally opposed to going in the water and basically kept himself out of the water. and basically kept himself out of the water the entire time. I mean, yes, he was, all of them were very ballsy in their own way, and I'm not trying to say that any of them were not. But he wanted to keep himself out of the water. He didn't, so he didn't have the hands-on kind of practical thing. He couldn't do that. We're talking about, you know, breaking down the roles and the difference between these men.

And so Hooper's got all the knowledge, but he also was really just down to get hands-on. And I mean, theoretically, he totally understood the danger. And maybe he just didn't care. I kind of, I know that he went through his backstory and maybe I just didn't pay enough attention at the time. He had dealt with something like that before some sort of water-based trauma earlier in his life that kind of wasn't there like a formative incident from his childhood that got

him into studying oceanography and all that? I don't remember, actually. I think they mentioned something from his backstory. Oh, yeah, yeah. Hooper is one of the two. What? No, never mind. This was the wrong. Did it just hallucinate you?

No, it was describing the events of the actual movie. So it's like we already know that that traumatizes him. Yeah. So, you know, ultimately they turn out right. Obviously, the shark is a huge threat. but there was something in their interaction with the mayor. It's like if I was that guy and I had these two, these two particular people,

one of them who wouldn't go in the water and has never dealt with sharks and has never been on an island during the summer and the other who has all of this academic background and theoretical background, but is just screaming in my face. I'm like, I don't know that I would take these two people seriously either. And I was,

and I know it's kind of movie convention, and you're making, you know, the whole thing is a dramatic stage play put on film. But like they, these are two grown men, like, freaking out and screaming and whining at the mayor. And something that I found very off-putting. And also I didn't realize that, like, Richard Dreyfus is like five, four. Yeah, he's very small. He's very small. And Roy Scheider is, is not.

and neither is Robert Shaw. And so I was just very conscious of the filmmaking techniques that they would use to the camera angles and whatnot to balance out their height. But that's really neither here or no there. So I had just found actually, and I saw a couple of people in chat saying, so Frederick Leathers said in the book,

the guy Dreyfus played, had an affair with the sheriff's wife. When the shark ate him, you cheered. So that reminds me. So when I found, was in in peter benchley's original novel hooper meets a grisly fate and is killed by the shark while inside of the cage the character's survival in the film was a last-minute script change filmmakers were shooting scenes using a smaller shark cage and a smaller actor and dummy or or dummy to make the great white appear larger during filming with the empty cage a real great white shark thrashed and destroyed the cage

Director Steven Spielberg. Yeah. So then that clip is in the movie. And I noticed that there was a couple clips of a real gray white thrashing around. So this says, Steven Spielberg loved the accidental footage of the shark destroying the cage so much that he rewrote the ending. So Hooper would escape the cage, allowing him to use Hooper's POV shots to look up at the shark thrashing. Which is one of the things Spielberg does throughout this movie from a filmmaking perspective. everything you're seeing for the most part in Jaws is from somebody's direct POV.

Like you're basically, you're only seeing the shark as they're seeing the shark. The only other POV is the shark's POV where you are seeing it, you know, you are seeing from its eyes. But yeah, that's an interesting little tidbit of Hoopers. So originally it was supposed to only be Brody who survived this whole thing. Well, that's very interesting. Yeah. Okay, let's take a... I guess there's even more of a dick in the book.

Yeah, I mean, I guess I don't know. I would have to read the book. Maybe somebody in the chat can answer what the relationship was like between Brody and Hooper because they're working together and also this strange college man comes in and just gets on the sheriff's wife. I guess. He is awfully ballsy. Maybe she just was attracted to his savage insolice.

sanity and totally irrational courage. Okay, let's take a little break for a word from the lotion detector himself. No, Chi-G, we can't stop for snacks, and we have to deliver all of these soft disclosure gift cards. He goes by Zach Hay. The lotion detector. Right, so in the chat during that little break, Ross Shark lives. A. suspect's name. Yeah, yeah, for real.

He said Brody did not know until they were out at sea that Hooper slept with his wife. It was a moment where Brody wanted to kill Hooper, but he was in over his head and needed him. The novel, Only Brody Survives and They Do Not Address What Happens After. And I wonder if it was all just about how Brody's wife was the real shark. And this could be maybe Brody is actually a, this. is a prequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and in the next

scene, Brody takes his wife out on that same boat and has a harpoon in his hand. Yeah, there you go. Write that in. Yeah, sure. That's my new head can.

Do you want to take a second and talk about some of this USS Indianapolis stuff? Because, man, as soon as I watch that, I don't know, people who have watched this show many, many times, we did an episode on White Squall, which must be almost a year ago now, if not a year ago.

Maybe long ago. Yeah. But one of the scenes, or a couple of the scenes of that film were centered around what was going on with Cuba, and I think it was the missile crisis or the Bay of Pigs or something

that we were discussing, and it was mentioned in the film, and they were boarded by this Cuban vessel. You know, just, trying to protect the Cuban waters. And there was a whole story, and we went into all of it. And it began sounding like the whole white squall story was kind of some, like, narrative support structure. And this clever little package to make sure that the central narrative was delivered and believed by everybody,

that this movie shows how this event occurred, this event occurred, because of XYZ. And the USS Indianapolis thing, you know, anything that has anything to do with the nuke stuff, especially the end of World War II, we conquered the enemy, Japanese took the bomb, nuke stuff. I immediately think, okay, well,

the base layer story is clearly bullshit. So every story that is layered onto that, It takes the base layer as true and builds on that is going to be some level of bullshit, too. And so I have no idea what happened on this boat. And I'm not pretending to know. And I'm not pretending that I can effectively refute the story as it's been told. Okay. So we can just take all that out of the picture.

But still, if you're telling me that some shit happened about that nuke stuff, and then you give me a story this allows me. and crazy, I'm going to think something's wrong with that and that there's something else going on and that the absolute over-the-topness of that, of this story of the USS Indianapolis is covering something else up. This is like dropping bin Laden off in the ocean. Like, oh, whoops, well, we killed them, but we're never going to have the body to show you. It's in the ocean because we gave them a proper Muslim burial or something.

something. So I if you want to comment on that, go ahead and then we'll get I want to bring up this yeah, an article. Yeah, the, uh, the USS in Indianapolis thing is interesting. I totally agree with your premise of saying that if the premise is something that we should be skeptical of than anything layered atop the premise, you know, you can't start playing shoots and ladders. Um, I would also say that, you know, I don't know if the story is real or not. Um, I think it's real in terms of the physical events. The only reason I say that is because being somebody who's obsessed with this story and obsessed with sharks for a long time,

you know, I've watched like three documentaries on the USS Indianapolis, and of course you can watch documentaries about anything. But in terms of the physical events, there are so many guys of the age who, you know, claim to have been in the water and have all these firsthand accounts of what happened and all this kind of stuff, um,

that I also think that that doesn't refute, you know, your skepticism. In fact, sometimes I think it can enhance it. So this is something that maybe general Flynn would refer to as a sci act is one way of looking at the Indianapolis as well of saying, hey,

the legend of the USS Indianapolis might be entirely true, um, as described. And this incredible trauma event and bombastic, narrative, horrifying narrative is true, but the why is not true. What they were doing, why they were there. And again, we've talked about this so many times in different contexts. Often, I mean, this is, I was just doing, I recorded the blitz early with a ghost for the substack earlier today. And one of the things I was talking about there was this idea that,

you know, it looks like the US and Russia in 2018 were effectively wielding or, waging joint military operations against ISIS in Syria. And yet, I know for a fact from my cousin who was on some of those missions that they do not consider those to be joint missions, meaning the soldiers that were running those missions didn't consider those to be joint missions. Where to me, as an outside observer, it's incredibly obvious, especially with the growing benefit of hindsight, that those were joint military operations. That's just one of those. that's like a good version of this, but that's one of those examples of we've talked about on the show many times, compartmentalization, and not only do the soldiers not necessarily know what they're a part of,

often they are the ones who most strongly believe the central narrative version of what they were a part of, right? And then when you add on to that, let's say, for the sake of argument, a real catastrophic, horrifying ordeal that was the result of the story they've been told about what they were doing on that mission. That's only going to add verisimilitude to the proceedings. You know, it's not just me on Story Hour talking about verisimilitude being important to narrative deployments. The deep state knows this. The people that have been running sciops on everybody forever knows that the best SIE ops or the most effective ones are the ones where you layer a whole bunch of real actual traumatic shit into the maelstrom that is an overall fake narrative.

Yeah. So let's get into this a little bit because some of the details of this and again, this is Smithsonian Magazine. I assume that they are summarizing the central narrative that has been built out now over, I guess this article was written in 2024. So seven, what, eight decades, essentially? So shortly after midnight on July 30th, the Japanese torpedo hit the Indianapolis, ripping off its starboard bow and igniting a tank containing 3,500 gallons of aviation fuel into a pillar of fire.

Then another torpedo from the same submarine struck closer to midship, hitting fuel to power magazines and setting off a chain reaction of explosions that effectively ripped the Indianapolis in two. still traveling at 17 knots the ship began taking on a massive amounts of water it sank in just 12 minutes of the 1196 men aboard about 900 made it into the water alive their ordeal was just beginning i don't know how they know that number um traveling at 17 knots so somebody needs to decode this uh and then so we have the the horrifying story as it goes they said the sharks were drawn in by the sound of explosions thinking of the ship and the thrashing and blood in the water. Let's keep skipping down because some of this story actually gets, in my estimation, pretty insane. All right. As the sharks turned their attention to the living, the survivors sought safety in numbers. They realized they had the best odds in a group, ideally toward its center.

The men on the margins, or even worse, alone, were the most susceptible to attacks. When someone died, the remaining soldiers would push the body away, hoping to sacrifice the corpse, in return for a reprieve from the shark's jaw. Many of the men were paralyzed by fear, unable to even eat or drink from the meager rations they had salvaged from the ship. One group of survivors made the mistake of opening a can of spam, but before they could taste it, the scent of the meat drew a swarm of sharks around them. The sailors got rid of their meat rations rather than risk a second swarming. So apparently the sharks smelled the spam. The spam in the air.

That is a tough one for me, but we'll just keep going. As the days past, the chances of rescue seemingly dimmed, though Navy intelligence had intercepted a message from the Japanese submarine that torpedoed the Indianapolis, describing how it sank an American battleship along the vessel's known route, or sorry, describing how it sank an American battleship along the, the vessel's known route, officials disregarded the dispatch as a trick to lure rescue boats into an ambush. So they received and intercepted a message that the Japanese had torpedoed the ship

and were like, nah, they're just trying to trick us. Okay. I mean, if you wanted every man on that boat to die to kind of finish out the nuclear thing that they were doing, you couldn't have figured out a better way to do it than this and then just to ignore the intercepted signal because you thought it was fake. So let's keep going. Though the specter of sharks looms large in the warship's story, the majority of the sailors died of exposure, lack of food and water, injuries from the explosion, exhaustion, and other causes. Let's keep going. In the aftermath of the rescue, the Navy court

marshaled the Indianapolis's captain Charles McVeigh III for failing to stay the ship. Officials were eager to place the blame on McVeigh instead of acknowledging the series of errors that led to both the wreck and the survivor's ordeal. In addition to denying the Indianapolis an escort, the Navy failed to warn the captain that he was traveling directly into the path of an enemy submarine. When the Indianapolis didn't show up at its intended destination, no one reported the ship missing. It was only by chance that a passing plane found the surviving sailors. At McVease, December of 1945 trial, the Navy convicted the captain of, quote, hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag, end quote, a technique used to avoid torpedoes.

The court arrived at this decision despite the testimony of a surprising witness. Mochitzsura Hashimoto, the commander of the Japanese submarine that sank the Indianapolis. To the prosecutor's chagrin, Hashimoto said that zigzagging would have had little effect in preventing the attack. So whether or not he zigzag would have made no difference. McVe's conviction effectively ended his Navy career and he died by suicide in 16. reportedly while holding a toy sailor gifted to him by his father in his hand. It was only in 2001 that the Navy exonerated McVeigh, adding a congressional resolution clearing the captain's name to his official file.

As for the Indianapolis itself, a research vessel owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, discovered the ship's wreckage at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean in 2017. The wreck site is now under the care of the Navy. which has left it undisturbed as a war grave for the hundreds of soldiers who died in the sinking, and no one will ever get to look at it ever again. That story is absolutely insane. That story is screaming, hey, we had to kill those guys on that ship. And we tried as hard as we could, and some of them ended up surviving.

And so now we've made an incredible story for them. They are all heroes and fondly remembered. That story is nuts. I'm sorry. Maybe it's just me and my skepticism, but that story's crazy. No, I totally agree. And what's, again, the actual horror story of the survivors just adds to the loop. You know, I think this is one of those things where on paper you would think, yeah, they were, ideally they wanted none of those guys to survive, whoever was involved in whatever mission this was, didn't want any of those guys to survive. But when they did, you know, just like we talk about the quote unquote white hats using game theory, the bad guys use game theory. And a lot of what game theory is, is this war gaming different scenarios.

If then, if then scenarios. Okay. If our torpedo hits, if we send this boat into the enemy path, whatever it is, then, you know, these guys are all going to die. Okay, well, that didn't happen. So then, well, we'll leave them out there. And then they'll definitely die. Okay, well, some of them still survived. All right, well, you know, now this has become a scandal and now there's going to be dispatches. There's going to be, you know, this is also one of those things where you've got compartmentalization in the military good and bad, right? So the people who understand that the deep state is a real thing know that it's never been a monolith that has that has controlled all levers of power in the world or everybody in the military. So there are countless stories. of captains or combatant commanders or generals making decisions on their own because they're vested with that authority. So is this a thing where, you know, a commander makes this decision,

finds out where these guys are, state is a rescue mission, that the quote unquote deep state, whoever was behind this attack, couldn't have stopped anyway. And if they did try to stop that, so what do they do then? Like you said, they lionized these guys. They play along with the story. oh, this is so horrible that the Japanese did this to you. And these guys are also heroes because they delivered the bomb. You know, it's a nice tidy loop. It's a nice tidy narrative loop for the deep state or whoever was behind it, even if they had, you know, ideally wanted all these guys to be dead.

But, you know, like I said, in terms of the actual physical events occurring as described, it's uh it's i think it's like a nine eleven type of thing where we all acknowledge that the physical events happened the the towers fell and when i say physical events it doesn't mean that you even have to believe it was the planes it was this it was a it just mean the towers fell down lots of people died when that happened um that that actual event then makes it even easier to layer all these other narratives on top of it so we know that the u s indianapolis sank We know that hundreds and hundreds of guys died. And then, you know, we think we know, like, there's, you can watch documentaries.

I mean, maybe, maybe most of them are dead at this point. But I remember 20 years ago watching documentaries on the Indianapolis and you'd have 80-year-old guys there, like, vividly recounting in detail while shaking what was going on. And, you know, that's why I think that it was a real physical event. but that the last people that the conspirators would fear disclosing anything would be those guys who were ultimately traumatized and have no idea what they were actually a part of. Yeah, I think that that's a great way to describe it. I mean, events can absolutely happen. And the stories about those events can be entirely false. I guess it sucks to just be to have the sort of brain that says oh man this story it really sounds like bullshit

and I'm going to call bullshit on what has been settled official history for 80 years but it's not like the stories what they do with stories has somehow changed they did that shit 80 years ago, too, and people just weren't looking at these stories because that's the official story. The government's telling the truth. The media is telling the truth. The historians have looked at this. The whole story that they're telling us all makes sense. It's coherent internally. So we have no basis on which we can dispute this or even hope to refute it. And I don't get down with that at all. That's not what that's not the burden of evidence. The burden of evidence is to convince somebody that some preposterous story actually

happened in real life. And if the evidence isn't sufficient to prove that story, then doubting that story is something that we should do. It's not out of bounds at all to do that sort of thing. As you said, with 9-11, there is absolutely no doubt those towers came down. There's absolutely no doubt that people die. I know people that die. Okay.

So I don't have any questions about that, but the story ain't true. And to respect the dead, to respect the tragedy, it's actually more respectful to get to the bottom of that story to make sure that it doesn't happen again in my estimation. Now, some people out there would say, you know what the most respectful thing to do is to leave that stuff alone because we're not going to get to the bottom of it. And so to continue questioning, it just keeps dredging this stuff up. Well, what kind of world do we want to live in? And that's a question I think that we actually have to take a lot more seriously than we do. because there really are different answers here. And I think that there's probably some justification and some rationale on both sides of that equation.

To say, hey, you know what? This force that does these things in this world is not just going to be defeated in one fell swoop. We're not going to get them to stop telling stories like this. We're not going to get them to stop plotting and then carrying out and executing these spectacular tragedies that we should never want to see in our world. world, that's going to be something that we're going to have to reconcile and figure out a way to live with one way or another. I don't know that the thing can be defeated. And so if we have to live with it, does it make sense to then invest all of our time in trying to get to the bottom of these stories? Or do we just throw our hands up and say, well, some of this stuff can clearly just

never be solved because the information that we would need to solve it. And I mean, the information we would need to even understand it in the first place is not going to present itself. And so the solutions are not going to present themselves either. And so then, you know, you get to the bottom of this regression or whatever. And you start engaging with some very difficult questions about purpose and meaning in the world. I don't know. I don't want to get too far off on a tangent with this. But I think...

Yeah, I agree with all that. I mean, especially the, the, the, uh, what you said about what, I don't know how you, how you'd put it, but essentially what we, what is a better way to honor, uh, the dead in any of these actual narratives than to try to figure out the truth of what happened to them. And, you know, I, the way I reconcile sort of the end of what you said and why I, I still quote unquote info war and try to figure stuff out is, um, I'm much less concerned, and I think you are much less concerned with what happened with the details of events and more about why. Why are we being told about these events, whether they are real or fake or some mix of the two. People always have an agenda when they are telling you a story. And when a very small number of people are telling a very large number of people stories that can affect the course of that very large number of people's future, it is very important.

Of course, if you can determine if they're lying about the story, then there's a point to info warring. There's a point to trying to figure this stuff out and dig into this stuff. But if you cannot figure out the truth around 9-11, I still don't think it's wasted. You know, we default to your default position,

which is withholding belief, which is not the lack of doing something. or I would say that's not a passive state of beating. No. Being that's an active mindset. That is doing something actively when you are withholding belief from them. What are these people trying to cultivate with mass trauma events or mass trauma stories and narratives? They're trying to traumatize.

They're trying to affect people. They're trying to affect people's minds and psyches and ultimately compel them either into irrational action or. irrational inaction and paralysis one of the two maybe sometimes both is okay for them what they the engine that they feed on the engine that the Hegelian dialectic feeds on is belief it's buy-in so you don't have to know what actually happened you should endeavor to try to figure it out if it's important to you and I do think that that honors these people more than anything else but yeah you don't you didn't fail if you didn't figure out the truth of what happened with the USS

Indianapolis I think with holding belief from what they, the powers that be told us happened, or why it happened, rather, is already depriving it of whatever power it had. And obviously this is something from, you know, almost 100 years ago that maybe isn't super relevant to our current lived reality. But we're still existing in a very post-9-11 world that, you know, like immediately a paradigm shift occurred with the 9-11 narrative that we are still within. And, you know, many of us have commented on this, especially from a former liberal mindset, of kind of observing a lot of people that call themselves MAGA, and not everybody, but a lot of people, kind of react to Donald Trump running along some of these narrative rails

that were set after 9-11 when it comes to the Middle East and everything and U.S. adventurism and falling right back into those grooves that I would say these fear narratives kind of dug in for us, and that I think Trump has been one of the people trying to get us out of to hop off of those rails. So, you know, you don't have to get on to the right track. Stepping off of the wrong track is a very good thing to do. It's very useful. And if that's all you accomplish in this info war, then I'd say you've accomplished something that very few people do accomplish in their lives.

Yeah, I would agree with that. And, you know, you mentioned this is almost 100 years and maybe it doesn't have a huge effect. And that might be right. But also they tell these stories over and over again. And one of the main reasons to withhold belief about the cause, for instance, of an event like 9-11 is that if you accept the central narrative about the cause of 9-11, even understanding that something obviously happened, something extraordinarily tragic happens, extraordinarily disruptive, there's going to be a lot of real world effects from what happened because it did happen. but if you are able to withhold belief from accepting what you're told the cause of the event was, well, then you have immunized yourself from making further mistakes related to what that event was intended to create in the world. So that event was used immediately to convince people to go along with and put their,

support behind a war effort in the Middle East that was almost certainly unjustified. And the reason people made the mistake of supporting a war that, supporting an unjustified war is a moral mark on one's character. I believe, and I think you believe that. And I would bet that a lot of people in our audience believe that. And I would bet that a lot of Americans believe that, even if they don't really think about that as kind of an operative part of their consideration for these events. If you want to avoid that black mark on your character by supporting totally unjustifiable war, a war of choice,

well, then you need to be sure that you're not adopting beliefs, false beliefs, that would lead you to to do that sort of thing. And a lot of people went down that road. And so if you are able to withhold belief from the underlying explanation for what happened in this obviously very tragic event, well, that's going to prevent you from making, compounding worse decisions that make that tragic event

something far more tragic than the event itself could have ever been on its own. And I would suggest that that's exactly what happened in 9-11. and I would suggest 9-11 was used to create far more traumatic and destabilizing events all around the world for countless hundreds of thousands, millions of people that now span decades. And so we want to avoid stuff like that. Well, who knows how many tragic events have occurred as a result of everybody believing

the nuke story in World War II, the whole Manhattan Project and all that and the nuking Japan story and all that. And stories like this help cement that story. And so the belief that the nuclear threat has existed for these 80 years and watching people talk about it in dramatic terms these days is just so embarrassing. At some point it's going to be embarrassing for them. Right now it's only embarrassing to watch them do it. But that's 80 years of us making absolutely terrible decisions based on events exactly like this, which I think is the importance of withholding belief and because these stories are told in cyclical fashion over time, we would like to be immunized from more of these. And then just one last thing is that we are actually being shown

in our current stories, the reruns of these old stories. And these old stories are being used to say, look, this is the sort of thing that can happen. And so now it's happening again. And it's like, no, we see this story happening now. We should understand this story's not actually happening. And then export this model backwards, not the other way around. Yeah. Well, well said.

And the, the, the button I'd put on it is if your mandate didn't matter and if your belief didn't matter, they wouldn't be trying to cultivate it. Like it's like it's it's it's very obvious but it's it's not I often call it the engine you know mandate mandate is like the engine on which the machine runs it's it's the engine on which the collective story that makes up the collective mind runs it's a feedback loop where the collective mind tells itself a story about itself and then believes that story and then acts in accordance with that story well if you can change the mind of that collective then you can change the story that collective tells itself about it. about itself, which means that you can change reality, which is really why you and I do this show and why we talk about narrative so much because narrative creation, if done well, not always, but if done well, is reality creation. Yes. That's true on the micro. That's true on the macro. That is neither good nor bad. That simply is. And that is definitely something that a very small number of people, Kabbalists, et cetera, have exploited for a long time to wield their magic. I would argue that I think one of the real or the premier skill of one Donald Trump is that he is also one of these wizards. He knows how the enemy's magic works. He understands the power of narrative. And he wields that accordingly.

And, you know, we've talked for years about all the different mechanisms he uses. But I think it is, it is worth remembering just, you know, why they need the physical events. they've got they, the proverbial they, have control over physical events, or they have at these various times, right? They could figure out how to get the USS Indianapolis sank. They could figure out how to get those towers down. They could probably even figure out how to start a war in a certain area. But in order to get people to buy into that, which they need to perpetuate it, they have to have the right story. If they don't have the right story, then they don't get what they want. and the right story, how do you measure what's the right story?

How many people believe it and how many people are emotionally affected by it? Okay, so let's get back to the movie a little bit because we have, you know, we're running low on time, I imagine for both of us. The only other thing that we haven't really talked about, which was one of the major thematic elements of it, was the fact that the political and commercial elements of the community were willing to sacrifice members of the community to keep the business going. And to just give them just the slightest benefit of the doubt here, lives are affected by people losing their jobs and their economic futures collapsing, which could happen in a tourist town. I have no doubt pretty quickly because they make their years income off people being there during tourist season. So yeah. This is a very real thing,

by the way, specifically with regards to sharks and not just sharks, but, you know, if you, there was a, there was a death, there was two deaths at resorts. I believe one of the resorts was a sandals, the other resort. I don't know what it was. But I think these both occurred in 2018, something like that. You know, these things happen every so often. But there were two particularly horrific events that happened at a like very well-known resort in the Bahamas where there was a guy paddleboarding. It's you can see a little bit of what happens to him on a video that's like a security camera at the hotel. You can see the harbor.

You can see the beach. And so you can kind of see the moment he goes into the water. This guy's on a stand-up paddleboard at the dock at the Swiss. swimming dock, feet off of shore, and a tiger shark rams him off of the board and tears him apart under the dock. Same place, the same year, a young girl, I forget her name, but one of the more tragic shark attacks in recent years was she was out on one of these snorkel trips with, you know, these guided snorkel trips with her whole family and everything and got mauled by tiger sharks. while her mother was trying to grab her and fight them off and everything.

And the reason I bring those up in this context is that the resorts not only do not talk about these things, but they actively attempt to get these things suppressed in the media. And the governments of these areas where there are resorts have agreements with the resorts not to put the names of the resorts in the stories about where these things happen, which is something that the families of these victims fanned out after the fact and basically blew blew it all up and said the Bahamas is not talking about that this happened at this famous resort right here. Now, does it matter that it happened at this famous family? Like, it's not their fault that a shark killed you. I mean, it just is what it is.

But I think there's, I can give some, I can understand for people that are not like shark freaks like I am that there is, I think that, you know, for all. all my silliness about the shark topic and people don't understand. I know that it's rare. I know that it's statistically rare and everything. But relevant to what you're talking about and what's what's portrayed in this movie of the town kind of like withholding information from people to make money, that is a very real thing. And I think these families do have a leg to stand on with some of these resorts where it's like, you took my kids into this bay and said that.

there's there's nothing that can happen here nothing's ever happened here and a guy got killed last month at your resort by a shark in the same area and now i just watched my daughter get ripped to shreds um in front of me and you know again people make their choices but it's when there is money involved and the money involved is playing a numbers game the money involved is just saying how much money are we going to make over the course of the next three years until the next vicious and brutal shark attack that we have to settle a lawsuit about. That's what they do. It's just a numbers game.

And, you know, obviously, Sharks is a dramatic and like, you know, it's an elevated kind of narrative. It's sensational when this kind of thing happens. So a lot of people talk about it. But what they portray in the movie is absolutely true. And, you know, you got the grieving mother that does the classic movie slap of the protagonist and slap some sense into him. But she's ultimately right where she says to Brody, you knew that there was a threat.

And I think that that is what it gets right. The indignation that it gets right that she has is not it is Sheriff Brody's fault that a shark ate your son. Of course, that's not his fault. It is, however, messed up. And I think he does share blame when it's like you knew, you believed that there was an imminent threat. in this area and you took your son out of the water and you left my son in the water. In that scene, he goes and he tells his son to go and swim in the salt bay, which obviously a guy ends up getting killed there, which is pretty, you know, over the top.

But he pulls his son right out of that beach, whispers to him, don't go swimming here, watches everybody else's kids do it. So there's definitely, you know, we talked about earlier in the show, Quint has a more traditional form of survivors guilt that's portrayed in this movie. But Brody has some guilt too. It's the reason he's sitting in the kitchen table drinking. And it's not just because he saw somebody get killed. It's that he was thinking it could have been his kid. And maybe it should have been his kid since he didn't tell anybody else that the sheriff is here.

It's all okay. But it's not okay for the sheriff's kid. And we see people in positions of power make these decisions all the time. I'm not going to do this. I'm going to tell my kids. not to do this, but for the general public, it's totally safe and fine. Yeah, I guess that's particularly true

when there's inside information that the general public couldn't possibly have, but the possibility of sharks in the ocean is, I don't know if it falls under that category. And the fact that they can put signs that say, there are sharks out there, you better be careful or think about not going in, and people are still gonna go

in and not be careful, what are you, what are you supposed to do? I mean, it is the ocean. Like you can, you shouldn't be able to restrict people from going in the ocean. Like, that's the ocean. It's open territory. You can go in there. So yeah, I mean, that's a tough one because people are going to have to make those decisions for themselves. But if you've already known that someone has recently been eaten like the night before. Yeah, yeah. Right there. Then you just say, hey, Guys, there was an eating here earlier. You might want to take a few days off. Right.

Getting in the water. Just hang out here on the beach and get some sun, throw a frisbee around, and do the things that beach people should do rather than go in the water. And everything will be just fine. I mean, if the beaches are beautiful, I feel like you still would have a lovely tourist time. They're all over the place. And you're right earlier in the show. It does not keep people out of the water.

It keeps me out of the water. I am Brody at every Cape Cod beach I go to. I am just looking. I'm looking in the water like, who's it going to be? Who's going to be that little red-headed kid out there on the floaty that just gets launched at a buoy? It's always got to be the gingers, huh? Yeah, well, it usually is. They're paddling out there.

Got those pasty thighs. Can't be doing that with the Great Whites about. The other little shark tidbit, I get a kick with how much I know about shark. and fear about them now. I got a kick out of the fact that the movie kind of makes light of a tiger shark. Like they catch a tiger shark and they're like, ah, like, we got this. And the whole sort of refrain they're doing is like, that's not the real threat.

The real threat is this great way. But tiger sharks are pretty damn terrifying in of themselves. In fact, they're the ones I would be the most afraid of meeting in the wild because they are just horrifying how they eat people. And yeah, at least most of them, Most stories that I have researched about Great Whites, they're one hit or quitters. Like most of the time, you're done. And you're done pretty quick by one of those things.

And that is not the case with Tiger Sharks. So, yeah. For a second, I thought you were saying they only had a one person appetite. No, they hit you once and you usually don't make it beyond that. Well, that's not surprising considering the size of those things. I think it the one that was coming up to the cage off of Cape Town was like 21 feet. Oh, my God. Yeah. It's pretty big.

Okay. They hit you going up at like, this is one of the things in this movie, of course, just because of the way it's filmed and everything. But when you see videos of Cape Town sharks, hunting seals, these things breach and go, you know, eight, feet in the air. It's like, that's what hits you. That's why the people who survive the attacks usually, like usually recount having no idea what was happening. They're just like, yeah, I was just in the air. And then my leg was gone or something. So not something I want to experience. Yeah, yeah. We don't even, after this, we don't even have to think about it, which is cool. Okay, do you have any, do you have any last notes or should be going to the

what else is there? Yeah, I guess the, let me see, just we sort of covered it already, but just the this is one of those classic man versus nature stories or even man versus God stories where I think there's beautifully simplistic where you've got the system of the town, you know, you've got the economic system, you've got the narratives, you've got even the three guys, the stars of the movie, and you got the expert on this end and the expert on that end. And ultimately, it just, like, the shark doesn't give a shit about your plans. It doesn't care about your society. It doesn't care about your rules or your economy. And there's many different analogs to this,

Moby Dick being, I think, like the big literary analog, but of these classic stories that I think are always archetypal of. Sometimes the natural world and the godly world just does some shit that it doesn't really care what your beliefs are and what your system is and what the rules are supposed to be and how rare a thing is supposed to be. Every once in a while, the world just does some shit. And, you know, this is just personified in a movie like this. All right. And so we will, we will leave it there. I know that Snowcat operator and the final demand both dropped a bunch of subscriptions in the chat on one of them to you. Yes, yes, sadly. Sadly. We've been saying now shame, shame things. Is that is that is that worthy of shame?

We've been saying now when we're gifting subs, it's like the. cone of shame like putting a cone of shame onto different badlanders because you can see who like didn't already have a subscription yeah got it yeah yeah so lizzie boston cofappy with cheese skeptical river mom sin fly i mean ann erc i'm your moderator salbish jeff and lucky dog just the 10 cones of shame tonight but you know it's okay wow yeah we do have a couple of us yeah we do have never going to be the same after this. Yep. A couple boosts, both from Rocky Top Apologist, totaling $50.

The Godfather's, Jaws, you're doing my playlist. I begged my daddy to take me to see Jaws at 10. Thankfully, the yearly family beach trip was over by then. See you tomorrow. And then sent another one. First boob scene for many a late boomer, early Xer, was the Italy honeymoon scene and the Godfather and Chrissy running down the beach in Jaws.

And they both died. That kind of sucks. Yeah. I do remember that as a kid. As a kid, I remember being like, is she naked? Because I kept thinking I was imagining it because it was a PG film. But yeah, she's naked and they just used to show it in movie. Yeah, I feel like I could tell that she was naked,

but I don't think that I actually saw that she was naked. This might have been a different cut. I think it depends on what they used to show that stuff on cable, just letting it all out there. Well, cable's where you have to. Cables where you have to. have to see it, you know, that just makes it feel the right way. Okay, so a movie for next week. I just want to let everybody know that I seriously considered choosing Weekend at Bernies

because of Mitch McConnell and because there's been so many of those examples over the last few years like Diane Feinstein. I think that it's just generally a model. We have, I have taken to calling it the zombie Congress. Like we, there are not only zombies that are members of Congress in the Senate, but the institutions themselves are also zombies. So zombie institutions filled with zombies. And I thought maybe doing Weekend at Bernice would be a fun change of pace.

But I just worry that there's not going to be anything there to take seriously and that it's not a good enough. And it's not a good enough comedy to get us any. further than just the idea of the film itself. So we're instead going to do a much better and more interesting film. And here it is the choice for next week. We actually haven't even, I don't think I have made a selection aside from the Godfather. And it's been like two months since I've had one of these moments.

It's like it's kind of thrilling right now. Yeah, check it out. All right, so 1997's The Game, directed by David Fincher, starring Michael Douglas, Sean N. We're going to see James Rebhorn again. I don't think I've seen this. These other people are, but here is the description. An arrogant, isolated investment banker is targeted by an enigmatic entertainment company plunging into an escalating reality-bending conspiracy

orchestrated by his estranged brother to, now I have to click the link, shatter his emotional detachment. So it's all ultimate. What a summary. Yes, that was a lot. I didn't know how we were going to be able to think our way through that entire summary.

But I feel like the chat is, excited about it and I always love that so I think we're good all right everybody thank you so much for watching we will be back next week to discuss the 1997

film The Game directed by David Fincher thank you all very much for joining thank you for hanging out in the chat please go ahead and hit thumbs up on Rumble if you are watching or listening on there or wherever you might be

saying this. And with that, Burning Bright and I will say good night. Thank you so much for joining us. And don't forget to hit the thumbs up on this video. And a special thank you to all of our advertising partners. Please remember to shift your dollars to support those businesses that support Badlands Media.