Of Sharks And Men

So as many of you may have heard, it's Shark Week on the Discovery Channel.

The whole thing aggravates me, mostly because every year I look forward to it and it never lives up to the hype, disappointing in predictable ways year after year. Their host is generally annoying, often they have some supermodel or other celebrity bimbo who puts on a thong and jumps into a tank with baby sharks, you rarely get more than ten hours of new programming a year, there's a distinct emphasis on great whites, and really, the whole week is probably best described as Shark Attack Week.

Sharks are beautiful and diverse creatures, more than 350 species not including rays and skates. The average size of these sharks is about a foot and a half to three feet. While all of them are carnivores, the biggest, whale, basking, and megamouth sharks, are near exclusively filter feeders and in far more danger from humans trying to swim with them than humans are in danger of being attacked by them.

Something like twenty species have been known to attack humans aside from idiotic incidents where they bite some careless home aquarium owner, and fewer than ten have killed humans, only about four of them have done so repeatedly and without provocation. For the most part, a shark attack, incredibly rare as it is to begin with, is really more of a shark incident, and generally approaches the level of a pelagic squirrel mauling. You are more likely to be killed by a peanut allergy, or a dog, or a lightning strike, or falling in the shower, or tetanus. They kill five to ten people a year, they attack fewer than a hundred.

Meanwhile we're killing, according to many estimates, between forty to seventy million sharks a year, mostly for their fins but also because the occasional random teenager breaks into a public aquarium and stabs and beats juveniles to death with plastic pipes. And this is a heavy toll on a group of animals that mature slowly, live a long time, and pup in small numbers, not to mention shark fin soup and shark cartilage pills do nothing for humans, and we're not even sure how the things are reacting to global warming but apex predators tend to take the loss of the food chain badly.

The list of things we don't know about sharks is incredibly long and includes stuff like why don't they get cancer much, how do they navigate oceans, and, just as a basic thing, how many of them there are and whether various identified species are actually different populations of the same species or, come to that, just a bunch of individuals that travel farther and faster than we ever imagined.

All of these facts are duly recited by the Shark Week host every year, during breaks in the four of the seven or eight new shows each year that recount actual stories of great white attacks on humans or allow celebrities to prove how brave they are by swimming with great whites.

Now, I'm not the world's biggest fan of humans. I freely admit this. And I love sharks, though I'm going to have to say flat out that I'd prefer an annual Mola Mola Week or an Octopus Week or a Riftia Worm Week, or probably a lot of other things. And at least one program a year is pretty good, one year they had Ray Troll talking to paleontologists about extinct sharks. Another year they had Mike DeGruy show us his favorite ten or so sharks under five feet. We got a Mythbusters Jaws special one year, and another year the guy from Dirty Jobs did a couple of hours of shark-related jobs. And I could watch some of these guys all day, though I'd be happier if they'd ditch the supermodels and the actor celebs.

Nonetheless, despite all these incredibly predictable annoyances, I look forward to this every year. This year started off at heights of creepy unreached since the year they programmed exclusively re-enactments of shark attacks on humans.

And this too was predictable, and yet they surpassed my every expectation.

Night One began with a two hour show called Ocean Of Fear, about the Indianapolis. You can probably guess that they would begin this show with the boat scene from Jaws in which Quinn tells the story of the Indianapolis, and you're right, that's exactly what they did. For an added element of flippancy, they let Richard Dreyfuss, who played marine biologist Matt Hooper in Jaws, narrate.

In brief, if you don't know, what happened is this: At the end of July in 1945, the cruiser USS Indianapolis was sunk by a Japanese submarine in the Philippine Sea. About 1200 men on board, three hundred died in the attack and the sinking. As they say in Jaws, nine hundred men went into the water, three hundred came out.

The details are interesting, and as it turns out very few were killed by the sharks as they floated at sea for four days or so, mostly they died of dehydration and drowning and drinking salt water and exposure and their original injuries. They were at sea so long, as the program is at pains to point out, because the Navy, while realizing that the ship was late and having heard chatter about a sub captain sinking a US ship, concluded that in war these things happen, the sub captain was either lying to look good or maybe it was a trap to ambush rescue ships, and the Indianapolis was probably just delayed somewhere, so nobody bothered to go looking. The ones who survived were really only rescued after one of them managed to get the attention of one of a series of planes they'd seen fly over them for days.

The program also takes time to note that the life rafts contributed to their problems, since to save space on ship, they were basically just inner tubes with grated floors hung from them by ropes. This means they were low in the water and harder to spot, it also means they were submersed in water the whole time, even those few lucky enough to get to a life raft, and the sharks could basically nose their way between the ropes and attack pretty much anybody.

The program goes on to note that the Navy court-martialed the Indianapolis' captain against the protests of the survivors, and that he eventually committed suicide, only to be cleared years later.

Other relevant details are brought up, the central point of which is that this was basically a clusterfuck in which at least some of the dead were eaten by oceanic whitetip sharks. The first point is made in recognition of the obvious, the second in deference to the fact that this is, after all, Shark Week.

Bored yet? Well, I'm getting around to my point. As I've mentioned, I find the emphasis on sharks eating people to be annoying, and I find this program to be particularly questionable. I own literally dozens of movies in which sharks eat people. I enjoy even the truly awful ones, and okay, most of them are.

But watching this show, I am creeped out beyond belief by a number of factors, the most prominent of which is the serious blurring of reality and fiction. Quinn did not survive the Indianapolis. Quinn was not real. He was a character in a book and a movie, but one they decided to start off this account of real survivors with, and which they keep echoing with their choice of narrator. Dreyfuss is a fine man, I'm sure, nothing against him. But his presence seemed to raise the whole thing out of the realm of a tragic, horrible incident that killed nine hundred young men and into a work of storytelling art.

And I'm not comfortable with that. I'm even less comfortable with the fact that they did the majority of the thing as re-enactments. Young men--young actors--pretending to die as men much their age did sixty years ago in a time of war partially at the hands of a Navy that didn't want to be distracted by their absence. It's worth noting that these young actors are all of service age, and I wonder if any of them as they pretended to be these dying sailors considered that they could just as easily be dying in Iraq instead of on a Discovery Channel show with the prospect of safely going home and drying off and having maybe a drink and a nice dinner and a good night's sleep at the end of the day. I'm not suggesting that I'd be happier if these guys were dying in a desert, and I'm absolutely not calling them cowards since I don't actually think anybody should be dying in Iraq, including Iraqis. But I have to wonder if it was at all as surreal an experience for them as it seemed to me, just watching.

To blur matters even further, the actors' lines came, in many cases, directly from the statements given by the survivors long ago. Their shark expert interviewed a couple of the survivors who remain, and then went to the Memorial, again these are real people, not just a script.

And maybe it's my schizophrenia which admittedly makes this kind of line-blurring quite common for me, but this all seemed profoundly surreal and in some hard-to-pin-down way disrespectful. It was at best a vicarious experience for the education of viewers, and at worst a voyeuristic little peep show for the entertainment of viewers.

I'd like to pretend that I'm different from the rest of the viewers who more or less were invited to regard the whole thing as two hours of wild animal snuff, but I watched it all with a deep fascination, like it was a car wreck, though I do have to say I deliberately don't watch those because probably the last thing the victims need is an audience. But in the privacy of my own home I could, and did, gawk like everybody else, and I'm not proud of that.

But it even got worse than that, and more to my mind disrespectful of the actual victims of this tragedy. This year's host is the man who does the Discovery Channel's Survivorman series. He's a guy who goes out into the middle of nowhere with a camera and eats live animals as he tries to stay alive, which would be fine except that it's voluntary subsistence living. He could be sitting in his living room eating a TV dinner, he doesn't have to be biting the feet off toads, and someday I expect to see his ass hauled before a judge for polishing off an endangered species for dinner in front of his camera. This show too is profoundly voyeuristic, more so when you consider that half the commercials during airings of it on The Science Channel are for diet pills and programs, mobility devices, and high tech beds for a more comfortable night's sleep. These are not people--and I say this as one of them--who are ever going to need this information, and if they ever did they'd be dead of a dozen less controllable factors long before they found a turtle to dash its brains out and boil in its own shell. This show too is no more real than a prime time drama, except for the animals killed, for whom it's pretty real albeit briefly.

But, hey, he's been dumped at sea and forced to fend off oceanic whitetips or something, so hell, he's practically empathetic here, except that he's not a nineteen year old Iowa farm boy, and he's got a choice in the matter, and also he lives.

So in breaks in the show, we'd watch Les step in to tell us all of the facts cited above and urge us to do our part to save the lives of sharks and also not to be scared of them. It was beyond weird.

But not as weird as some of the actual commercials. The US Military wants you to go to Iraq, it seems, though they didn't put it quite that way. Mostly what they said was that they wanted to teach your teenage son how to fly cool planes and look you in the eye when he talks to you. I find the appealing-to-the-parents recruitment commercials to be in poor taste to begin with, as to my mind a parent is probably often the only sort of safeguard a kid dazzled by a recruiter's lies has. How many high school boys do you know who understand global politics, or who think there's a possibility they will ever die? So where there actually are parents in place with the wisdom and inclination to display some judgment, I would like to see them do so in the absence of hard sell propaganda.

In particular, though, I wonder about this marketing niche. "Hey, moms and dads, even though you're spending a couple of hours watching us abandon young men to the elements and the sharks because, you know, we were busy, and just because we scapegoated the admittedly heroic captain into suicide, and just because we are more than capable of turning a disaster into an overwhelming tragedy, we promise if you give us your kids we'll just, you know, teach 'em to stand up straight and stuff and then send them off to college. We promise we'll... take... good... care... of them. Really."

And that strikes me as not only creepy and disrespectful, but also as astoundingly stupid. And I imagine that at least one parent got the picture and is spending the week convincing their kid there might be better ways to pay for college. And I have to wonder if any of those dead men would consider the possibility that this may have inadvertently saved another kid over half a century away to be in some small way a fitting tribute.

And I'd like to end this on an uplifting note by saying I think they might, but that's probably fiction too. I say probably, because at least some of these men were heroes in the ways they were able to be, and because they had signed up to go to a war rather than, say, taking up acting, it's not unreasonable to guess that some of them understood they might be sacrificing themselves for the lives of others. On the other hand, they were scared kids, left to fend for themselves, and they died. Whether or not there's anything after this, they're still dead. And we who didn't know them, over half a century away, have no place saying what they might feel about anything.