Florida Man: An Ecology of Despair in Mako, The Jaws of Death

Art & Trash, episode 24
Florida Man: An Ecology of Despair in Mako, The Jaws of Death
Stephen Broomer, January 5, 2024

Made in the wake of Jaws, William Grefé's Mako, The Jaws of Death is a riff on Spielberg's hit but drifts in the more sympathetic direction of other animal exploitation fantasies of the era, in particular, Willard and Grefé's own Stanley, films in which outcast protagonists developed profound bonds with animals. The protagonist of Mako, Sonny Stein (Richard Jaeckel), is a vigilante avenger dedicated to protecting the lives of sharks. Through the course of Mako, Stein is provoked to a rampage by the cruelty and corruption of human society...

In this episode of Art & Trash, Stephen Broomer considers Mako's relation to a broader impulse towards animal welfare and environmental protection, and the parallels between fictional anti-heroes like Sonny Stein, Willard Stiles, Tim Ockapee, and real crusaders for animal welfare, like ill-fated grizzly bear activist Timothy Treadwell, primatologist Dian Fossey, and folksinger-cum-dolphin rescue advocate Fred Neil.

SCRIPT:

This old world may never change the way it’s been. An awareness of environmental degradation grew in the mid-twentieth-century. With the damning evidence of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the conservation movement began to gain momentum in the United States. What was once the cause of social welfare organizations like the Sierra Club became the mission of government, through the Environmental Protection Agency and the invocation of policies and acts that aimed to protect the American wilderness. If humanity was incapable of leaving only footprints, then the purpose of these acts was to soften those footfalls, in order to preserve the beautiful and strange creatures of the earth, and in doing so, to expand the quality of life for humanity, and to luxuriate in the compassion and reason of humankind. An American culture of roadside gator-wrestling and sport hunting was not immune from this culture shift: what had been a brutish and cruel way of life for many came to be recognized and condemned as such by an evolving society. The cause of animal welfare and the cause of environmental protection became inextricable, for there was an immense callousness in the human impact on beasts and badlands. That callousness demanded to be legislated out of human behaviour, lest nature avenge itself by other means.

In the exploitation films of William Grefé, his Florida setting guides theme. The beautiful and threatening biome of Key West is subject to the meddling of science and witchcraft, and bears witness to the smoulder and ruin of his heroes. His films are a natural evolution of that roadside stop. In Sting of Death, The Death Curse of Tartu, and Stanley, Grefé’s focus on amphibian and marine curiosities closes the distance between a naturalist’s appreciation and a carnival barker’s golden goose. As exploitation films, they tapped into a broader sense in the marketplace, that films built around exotic, fantastical encounters with nature would draw audiences. Stanley bears special mention here: it is about a Seminole war veteran who uses his pet snakes to avenge himself on society. It was made in clear homage to Willard, a film in which a misfit commands a rat colony to kill his enemies, which only a year earlier had been a financial success and a cultural phenomenon. Grefé’s model, like that of many exploitation film producers, was to identify trends in cinema and to imitate them, to create variations on stories that had been proven marketable. With the release and massive success of Jaws in 1975, Grefé’s history with filming trained animals was soon put to use with his own version of Jaws, Mako, the Jaws of Death.

While Jaws cast the shark as a pure predatory force of violence, and reserves its compassion for the shark’s hunters and its prey, Grefé drew again from the premise of Willard, using the shark as a vehicle to explore the possibility of a bond between incompatible subjectivities, human reason and animal instinct. Further to the contrary of Jaws, here sharks are admired for their beauty. Even their life cycle becomes part of the plot of the film, as protagonist Sonny Stein acts as a kind of midwife for the sharks in his care. Stein’s connection to the sharks is supernatural, tied to a medallion that he wears that protects him from their hunger and allows him to swim with them and bond with them; but it didn’t have to be supernatural. His character anticipates the controversial, ill-fated, real-life Grizzly Bear conservationist Timothy Treadwell, obsessive devotee to the cause of Grizzly Bears, who lived among them in Alaska before he was, somewhat inevitably, killed by one. Like Treadwell, Stein has forged a deeper connection with his sharks than he has with people, and sees no boundary between himself and his sharks. Where Willard commanded rats to avenge himself and his father, Sonny himself avenges the sharks, as in the opening sequence in which he massacres a boat of shark fisherman, a strange intruder out here in the ocean, more a shark that a resembles a man. In Mako, the Jaws of Death, for the most part, only people do the killing: in this sense Grefé’s film is a work of moral ecological despair, a denunciation of the social contract of nature: eat or be eaten. In this it is an absurd satire of wildlife fantasies of the era.

Sonny Stein’s inability to communicate with the human world is repeatedly justified in his encounters with corrupt archetypes: the club promoter, the showgirl, the scientist, all of them gleefully and maliciously exploiting his sharks to their own ends. Key West is a hell of animal abuse and exploitation, a gathering spot for tourists with exotic tastes and local fishermen and hunters who live in a fog of cruel joy. Richard Jaeckel plays Stein with an aloof sensitivity, and the film briefly presents itself as a love story, in his preoccupation with showgirl Karen, who performs aquatic dances in a tank in her husband’s dive bar. His attention to Karen leads him to rescue her from a pair of rapists—her club-owner husband’s best customers. Stein takes her back to his stilt-house and shows her his special bond with the tame sharks in his care, presenting her with the supernatural origins of his medallion. He gives her an account of his salvation in the Philippines where working as salvager, he found himself pursued by mercenaries. He is saved thanks to the intervention of sharks and this stirs his devotion to the conservation of sharks. It is an inverse of the scene in Jaws in which fisherman Quint tells his story of sharks massacring men in the waters around the sunken USS Indianapolis: Quint’s story is used to explain the cruelty of nature to man, while Stein has experienced the opposite—rescued from human violence by sharks, he desires to become their saviour in turn. This rare act of bonding is meaningful to Stein. Karen seems taken with Stein, but really she’s just taking him in: she convinces him to allow one of his sharks to join her act, leading to its sonic abuse at the hands of her husband Barney. Neither showgirl nor club-owner have a conscience about their abuse of the shark, or their manipulation of Stein: to them, he’s just a freak and it’s just an animal. The world of aquatic research offers no better options for Stein: a scientist who arranges for the captive birth of a pregnant shark in Stein’s care slaughters it and its pups for the sake of research. This provokes Stein to go on a murderous rampage.

The antipathy between Sonny Stein and the society around him is palpable. His final repudiation of the cruelty of man comes in the final act: having engineered Karen’s death-by-shark in front of a raucous crowd at Barney’s, Stein is recognized and pursued by an angry mob and the police. Cornered in his stilt-house, he removes his medallion and feeds himself to his sharks. This act of suicide-by-shark reinforces the mystical fantasy of the medallion: in doing so, it forfeits the possibility that Stein was not the recipient of Filipino hoodoo, that he might instead have been a lonely man empowered by the suggestion of magic to transgress the line between human and animal. This doesn’t diminish his nobility: Sonny Stein would rather be chum for his sharks than a trophy for humans. It is also a stark contrast to other wildlife films, like Willard and Stanley, in which the anti-heroes are betrayed by the wild nature of their kept beasts and suffer ironic ends. Again, the conservationist perspective of Mako grants it complexity: Stein is an outsider, but he is a selfless outsider in a world of greed.

Grefé’s film bears an essential marker of conscience-driven exploitation films: its marketing takes advantage of the lurid draw of its own daring production. Posters announced that it was filmed without the benefit of cages, mechanical sharks or other protective devices. As a point of pride, it holds a lurid contradiction to the film itself, which regards Stein with compassion and endorses his worldview. It reinforces the threat of the wild and implies that the film imperilled its crew, which is plain to see from the underwater footage, in which stunt performers interact with real sharks in ways that might cause one to wince with tension. The claims of the film underscore the difference between the low budget of Mako and the comparatively massive budget of Jaws, with its famously malfunctioning mechanical shark. But they also suggest something contradictory, that Mako, the Jaws of Death is sold by the realism of its production, even as it presents a mystical fantasy.

In the mid-1960s, the folksinger Fred Neil became fascinated with dolphins. It was the era of conservation, a growing awareness of the finitude of the garden of earth, a desire to tend to that garden so that rampant human selfishness, the consequences of environmental degradation, or even the course of Darwinian fitness, wouldn’t erase the world as-it-was. It was in this same spirit that primatologists evolved from merely studying chimps to adopting and humanizing chimps, and attempting to teach them to communicate, an impulse that reaches an ugly plateau in Dian Fossey’s tragic project, where the worth and suffering of mountain gorillas were weighed against the worth and suffering of the Africans who lived around them. The dolphin was, of all aquatic life, one for which the cause of human support could readily be made, for their acute and proven intelligence. And one finds again, two sides of a coin: Fred Neil, drawn to dolphins as a symbol of a beautiful natural world, and in the same era, Mike Nichols’s absurd thriller The Day of the Dolphin, in which that same intelligence that ennobled the dolphin is employed for political assassination. Fred Neil came to a point in his life where he was no longer interested in making music; he abandoned it and gradually retreated from public life while assisting with the Dolphin Research Project. He wrote a song about Dolphins, this song, in which he asks the only question that truly matters when it comes to interspecies communion: do they ever think of me? One imagines fictional Sonny Stein, real Timothy Treadwell, fictional Willard, real Dian Fossey, in their darkest hours, asking themselves, “do they ever think of me?” Neil, though he was born in Ohio and made his career in New York, settled in the Florida Keys long after his departure from public life. What was it that drew Fred Neil to Florida? It kept him close to the Dolphin Research Center that he had spent decades supporting. But it could also have been the same thing that kept William Grefé there, having a front seat to the wild and unpredictable nature of man under the sun. Maybe it was the weather.