[On July
30th, 1945, the USS
Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine on its way back from
delivering the components of the atomic bombs. That wartime tragedy became the
basis for one of the great
speeches in American film history, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy that
monologue and four other knockout cinematic orations!]
On two ways
Quint’s iconic speech captures a historic horror.
As I wrote in this
prior post on Jaws (1975), Steven Spielberg’s groundbreaking
summer blockbuster is really a tale of two films: the Amity-set
first half, which is as much about the community on that resort island as the
unseen killer shark terrorizing it; and the ocean-bound second half, which is
as much about the three men aboard the Orca as about the now-seen killer
shark terrorizing them (well, technically they’re hunting it, but we all know
how that goes). All three of those men are compelling characters given
multi-layered life by the very talented actors playing them, but there’s no
doubt that it is Robert
Shaw’s Captain Quint who stands out and from whom the audience can’t look
away. That’s true from the
moment he enters the film until the (far more gruesome) moment he leaves it, but
it’s never more true than in the scene where both the
audience and his two companions finally learn a bit more about what has made
Quint the way he is, both when it comes to sharks and overall: his experience
aboard the doomed USS Indianapolis.
That speech is
interestingly inaccurate on a basic detail about that historic horror (Quint
says in the speech’s closing lines that the Indianapolis
went down on “June the 29th, 1945,” perhaps because that date flows
more poetically than “July the 30th” would have, perhaps because he
just got it wrong but had done such a beautiful long take that Spielberg didn’t
want to re-film), but to my mind captures perfectly two sides to the event in
the intimate and affecting ways that the best historical fiction can. The more
obvious, but certainly crucial, side is the many stages of fear through which
Quint’s masterful storytelling takes his audience, from the most graphic (that “high-pitched
scream” when a shark attacks) to the more mundane (the look of a shark’s eyes, “like
doll’s eyes”) to that ironic final fear as the men wait to be rescued. History
and humanity are not always easy to keep in mind at the same time, and the
numbers associated
with the Indianapolis (which is considered
the single most fatal sinking in US naval history) are a good example: Quint
highlights those staggering numbers of both overall sailors and sailors lost in
his closing lines too, but to my mind they don’t and can’t capture the event’s
horrors and tragedies as well as the speech’s exploration of how
it all felt for just one of those men.
How it all felt
and, in the case of a surviving veteran like Quint, how it all continues to
feel. To my mind, the single best and most important line in Quint’s speech is
another one from that closing section, directly following the line about the
time he was most frightened (while waiting to be rescued): “I’ll never put on a
life jacket again.” 316 of the ship’s 1195 total crew survived the ordeal, and
it’s fair to say that all of them likely suffered from some form or another of
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But PTSD (especially in large cohorts of
veterans) is another of those overarching categories that can at times be
difficult to think about in its most individual, intimate realities. And in
this one line, both the words themselves and how he delivers them, Robert Shaw
captures that human side to the traumas of war and their lingering effects;
indeed, both the line and the speech as a whole force us to rethink the
character in every way, including his seemingly obsessive and certainly self-destructive
pursuit of the film’s titular shark. That’s a pretty darn good film speech!
Last movie
speech tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other movie speeches you’d highlight?
No comments:
Post a Comment