Yo, errone knows that Steven "Perpetually Bar Mitzvah Age" Spielberg is not metal at all, but that Jaws rules hardcore. Just ask Marci; she's like the most metal dude ever. Not only does Jaws feature a dude getting eaten in half followed by an explosion of guts by the gestator, and, you know, a wealth of canonical lines and interesting shots blib blab, but fuckin' Roy Scheider is awesome and even more importantly, seabeasts have a well-documented history of metalosity. "The Thing That Should Not Be"? Seabeast. The Mastodon album Leviathan, which includes a song called "Seabeast"? Also a seabeast. From krakkens to the Loch Ness monster to angler fish and Godzilla, pretty much all of the creatures dwelling in the ocean's unexploreable bottom reaches rock ridiculously hard. It may be because at such depths they are closer to Hell than other animal dudes and can thus more easily chill with Satan. Also, Ronnie James Dio, though officially from New Hampshire or some crummy New England state, has dual citizenship to the ocean's floor, mutually enhancing the extreme heaviness of both parties. And you didn't even think that was possible! ___________________________________________________ Moreover, Jaws comes from a novel by the one and only Peter "The Bench" Benchley, a dude who rocks harder than pretty much any other five or six dudes who aren't Lemmy or the Phillie Phanatic combined bitches. Comparatively, an otherwise "tough"-seeming writer like Cormac McCarthy or Deuteronymous rates a little bit below "Party of Muhfucking Five" on the Rockhter scale. When I was waiting in line outside the Mann Center (yucks) to get first dibs on Morrissey tickets (perhaps the least metal sitch ever, but whatever! Steven Patick is an exception to most life standards) I passed the time by reading Bench's Beast, which is basically Jaws except that there's a freaking GIANT SQUID instead of a squallus. Architeuthis always wins, Benchley is awesome, Beast rules and the dude also has a book, much discussed but never actually read by Sean and I, called Q Clearance, which is apparently a political thriller jawn. Whakky! And for some reason I can't separate one paragraph from another! Wack. The bad one. __________________________________________________________________The best thing about all this, though, is effin Quint. He's ultra grumpy and hardcore, as evinced by the whole U.S.S. Indianapolis deal, and knows how to run his vessel. But my favorite aspect of his character, and this is what makes him, and, by extension, the film as a whole, so metal, is his unreasonable class discomfort manifesting itself as a severe dislike of punkass Hooper. Fucking Hooper. No one who is cool likes Richard Dreyfuss unless he's talking about things biting other, unsuspecting things in the ass. Even then he wears with the thinness. But Quint's hatred of him seems to not be based on how much of a dorkmeyer the dude is, it's because he's rich and went to college and stuff. Way to get kinda innappropriately defensive, homes. I mean, I hate soft hands as much as anybody (duh, lie number one. Who moisturizes more than me? You can't shred if your arms are all ashy) but I don't think I'd necessarily base my opinion of a shipmate on that fact. ___________________________________________________________________When Hooper is all, "Gwah, I don't need this working class hero crap" it's one of the few moments where he's not being a whinyass robobaby for life. He's just genuinely perplexed as to why this crusty MFer is harshing on him so harshly. SO HARSH. This unruly displacement of class anxiety is pretty freaking heavy in my book because Q man is just throwing aside the surface tensions atwixt Hooper and him and getting right down to the subtext, like a Corrosion of Conformity song or something. Interpersonal minutiae is clearly the province of hardcore, where the "you" address is usually directed at a specific person (typically a TOTALLY UNFAIR MOM WHO WON'T LET ME CUT MY HAIR HOW I WANT GOD!!1 or former friend who, snort, is still totes into, plurgh, Green Day but more importantly is a liar). Metal, as we've discussed before, thrives on generalizations, both functioning as and lashing out at a collective entity. Like in "Crazy, Crazy Nights," where the army of rock unites to destroy the army of... not rock/people who refuse to crank it. Quint contextualizes himself in the history of class struggle, positioning himself as a representative of the labor class that functions in direct opposition to Hooper's moneyed landowners and intellectuals. And then he gets rocked by the shark. Sepatow!
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