The Shallows: Aloneness and Surviving the Jaws of an Impending Doom

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JUNE 28, 2016

“The weak die out and the strong will survive, and will live on forever.”  

- Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank

 

There are some minor spoilers so tread lightly, as if in shallow waters, if you haven’t seen the film.  Some of what is said below could bite you, which is not the intentions of this writer.

The Shallows is a survival horror thriller where a young medical student is stranded a couple hundred meters off the shore of a remote beach in Mexico.  The reason for this is because of a massive great white shark that is circling the shallow waters waiting her out.

The film is Jaws meets Alien meets 127 Hours and ends up not being as great as the DNA that birthed it.  That said, The Shallows is a thrilling film that engages its audience while struggling to not follow typical teenage thriller troupes that are themselves…shallow. 

The Shallows wanted to be more then it ended up becoming.  The music video slow motion scenes in the beginning were to entertain and to draw in the short-attention-span crowd of the audience.  The opening twenty minutes of the masterpiece sci-fi horror thriller Alien would never work today with all the media addicted, ‘we want it now’, movie-going audience.  Alien was a slow burner and that was the point, you had to wait patiently for the Alien to become a true threat to the seven ‘truck drivers in space’ before the screams and violence started to happen.

The Shallows attempted to create this claustrophobic place, even in the openness of a beach shore, where a survivor is forced to come to terms with her calamity and either fight or flight.  Flight for her wasn’t really an option so fighting was something she had to accept, that or just dying from the bite she suffered from the shark while surfing.

Nancy is a medical student that travelled to a specific secluded beach where her mother use to surf off the coast of Mexico, when she found out she was pregnant with Nancy many year ago.  Her mother had passed away prior to the events of the film.  Nancy trekked off to this beach to, in a sense, make sense of who her mother was.  Nancy wanted to find some other connection with her mother after her death resulting from some form of cancer.

The problem with the film was a battle with a genuine story of survival and a corporate studio driven thriller that only wanted to shock its audience with a pretentious music video.  The conflict between honest movie making and studio, sponsor friendly, lowest common denominator-type product analyzing, is palpable, certainly in the first half of the film and at the last pay-off of the movie.

The Shallows is about survival which makes this story ancient.  Certainly The Revenant was equally a story of survival.  Was it a better film than The Shallows?  It was in pretty well every way possible but even though The Revenant has thriller aspects throughout it, it’s not the thriller that The Shallows is.  The Revenant aimed far deeper into the human condition and pushed the innate drive to survive far, far more than The Shallows.  The point here is The Shallows is meant to be taken lightly, even within its high stakes of survival. 

The shark in The Shallows is the shark in Jaws, it’s the Xenomorph in Alien, it’s not quite the bear in The Revenant because the bear in that film never becomes an ongoing threat to its survivor.  There have been some criticism regarding The Shallows about logistics, ‘the rock where she’s on is this distance from there, and the whale is this distance but when you look over head it’s different, the shore looks closer sometimes in shots from her point of view then in others’.  The logistical nightmare that Dante’s Inferno would have on the innovation and mathematically, finely tuned, internet savoy, movie going audience would be a nightmare beyond even Dante’s nightmares.

The point of The Shallows, if this needs to sadly be spelt out, is the shark is a metaphor for a traumatic impact Nancy sustained while just recently loosing the woman who gave birth to her.  Psychologically, these events needed to happen, ‘in her mind’, so she could live her life.  This impact and trauma is at least half of the story of philosophy, which is the story of not only what it means to be alive but what it means to survive living while being alive.  The idea of how far Nancy is from the shore, how far the shark is from her at any given moment is not really the point, it’s the thrill, but not the point.

“The theoretical understanding of the world, which is the aim of philosophy, is not a matter of great practical importance to animals, or to savages, or even to most civilized men.”  

- Bertrand Russell

The Shallows was about systematically breaking down the control that civilization and language itself holds heavily on each and every one of us.  In the beginning, Nancy had the safety of her cell phone, her technology, her connection to the ‘ordered’ world, but then it all went away.  All she was left with was, certainly one of the great fears that permeates society like the biggest unseen plague, reality, in all its nakedness.

Nancy was no longer safe within the Symbolic Order, language and her sexualized femininity wasn’t going to help her, just as it wouldn’t help a man on that rock while the shark waited to be fed.  The shark, like the Xenomorph in Alien, holds now value on what we call human life, all our dreams of the future and what we think the value of our life means.  It wants to eat, that’s it.  It doesn’t care about who we leave behind if we die because the shark’s brain is instinct driven.  Shopping, what car we own, what status we believe we belong to in society and whatever god, that our particular region of birth worships means nothing outside the structure of language and the natural world.

As human beings, our second greatest fear is anything that could harm us without ever caring who we are.  We are ‘special’, we are singled out, we are often celebrated for our desirability, the fantasy here is we believe we are not food and we also believe we are too important to be killed.  The Shallows effectively exploits this fear, if we didn’t actually have this fear, this film would be meaningless.  Alien, The Revenant and The Shallows wouldn’t work without our narcissism.  Why, because all that would be left is indifference, but it isn’t, we care because we want to survive in our own lives and we fear, which is our first great fear, death, the end of whoever or whatever we think we are.   

The Shallows is exciting in its slow burn to the end, it is a reminder that nature doesn’t give a fuck about you and how many friends you have on Facebook.  Nature doesn’t care about your family and who you say you love, The Shallows is an eye opener, it’s an awakening to the sleep, that Nancy and millions of people like her in first world need.  Sadly, given some of the not-so favorable reviews the film has got, metaphor itself is looking like it needs to be put on the endangered species list.  In the end if we can survive this monster of technological control, this governmental and corporate suffocation we too may survive, because as Nietzsche said, “Whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.”

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.  It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.”  

- Charles Darwin