12 minutes that will change the way you watch JAWS

JAWS, as we all know, is so much more than a film about a shark.

Watching the Steven Spielberg classic is practically a film school, each viewing unearthing a treasure or moment that you hadn't ever noticed before.

The USS Indianapolis speech by Quint (Robert Shaw) to Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Brody (Roy Scheider) is one of greatest moments in JAWS and is arguably the finest, most powerful monologue committed to film.

In it Quint recounts the sinking of the ship in just 12 minutes after it is struck by a torpedo from a Japanese submarine, the Indianapolis having just delivered its top secret cargo of the Hiroshima bomb. The horrifying tale tells us how the men who entered the water spent days fighting off sharks attracted by the commotion and injured souls in the water.

“Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes.” - Quint, JAWS (1975)

That sinking time is echoed in JAWS once the movie shows three barrels coming towards the Orca, looking exactly like torpedoes before they disappear under the boat. Exactly 12 minutes later Quint is killed.

From that moment the timer to its sinking is set and from here on in it takes precisely 12 minutes for Quint's boat to perish, and with it Quint in the jaws of a shark as he is dragged beneath the surface.

Quint meets his end, in a sinking vessel and in the mouth of a shark, just like his colleagues did almost 30 years earlier. It’s also as if this was always Quint's destiny, the sharks of his past finally catching up with him.

Is that 12-minute duration a coincidence pf serendipity or designed by Spielberg and Oscar-winning editor Verna Fields? Perhaps we'll never know, but it is yet another reason to love JAWS just a little bit more than you did yesterday.

And it also reinforces how – to paraphrase the words of Matt Hooper - that JAWS is the perfect engine of a film, an entertainment machine.

Words by Dean Newman

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