When Peter Benchley was 27, he quit his job as a writer for President Johnson to write a book. He didn’t know then that the book would become a cultural phenomenon and something that drastically affected the public’s perception of sharks. That book, of course, was Jaws. It sold a little more than 10 million copies and was turned into a movie of the same name, and it set him up for life. Years later, though, Benchley regretted it.
“What I now know, which wasn’t known when I wrote Jaws, is that there is no such thing as a rogue shark which develops a taste for human flesh,” Benchley told the Animal Attack Files in 2000. “No one appreciates how vulnerable they are to destruction.”
After Jaws, Benchley devoted his time to shark conservation — but, as you well know, conservation doesn’t sell as well as gore, and sharks still have a very, very bad rep. None of that is to say that sharks are scary creatures — they have evolved, after all, to be an almost-perfect hunter — but numbers don’t lie. Chances of being attacked by a shark are razor-thin.
Researchers know that. Hollywood, however, isn’t often interested in telling a real story. It’s more often interested in telling a story that’s going to break the box office, so when they make a shark movie, it’s not about a shark that’s scared of people. It’s about a killer shark with a lust for human flesh. One particular researcher is a marine biologist named Melissa Cristina Marquez, and GQ recently sat her down in front of a few famous shark movies to break down the scenes. The movies include Jaws, Deep Blue Sea, The Meg, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, Couples Retreat, 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and The Shallows. All of which are exceedingly entertaining, but very, very far from portraying sharks in an honest way.
