Video Footage Captures What it's Like to Be Eaten by a Shark and What Fresh Hell is This?!?

Jaws is about to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its release this summer. Steven Spielberg's masterpiece isn't one of the most respected and enduring examples of movies ever made just because he's a clever director, the cast is perfect and it's a thrilling adventure yarn. All those things are objectively true. 

But what makes it remain so popular all these decades later is something much more psychological. It touches on a primordial fear buried in our reptilian brains. A bunch of years ago VH1 used to run a series every Halloween season that counted down the best horror scenes in movie history, and Jaws was No. 1. One of the celebrity commentators (I seem to recall it was Rob Reiner, but don't quote me) said the movie affected him so much that on the way home from the theater, his family stopped dinner. And when he went to the bathroom, he realized he was in fear of getting eaten by a shark. In the men's room of a restaurant. Now THAT'S striking a nerve.

With or without this movie though, it's deep in every human's subconscious to wonder what it's like to be eaten by a super predator. Especially this one, since every time you go in the ocean you're essentially placing yourself on the Old Country Buffet for these savage little murder torpedoes. And thanks to some deft camera work by the sorts of people who put air tanks on their backs and go walking into the sharks dining room, we now have a excellent idea of what that would look like:

Yup. Just as I suspected. As Matt Hooper so scientifically and dispassionately put it, "This is what happens. It indicates the non-frenzied feeding of a large squalus - possibly Longimanus or Isurus glauca." And yet, it somehow manages to look even more horrifying than my worst fears imagined it. 

At the risk of going full Jordan Peterson, but this is right out of Jonah and the Whale. Which is an archetype representing a descent into hell itself. The only upside is that a trip down a shark's digestive tract would be over relatively quick. As opposed to, of course, the whole eternity thing. And now that I've seen what it'd be like, if I find myself getting swallowed like a marine biologist's camera this summer, I'm not putting up a fight. I'm swimming right for it's great white butthole and getting it over as fast as sharkly possible. 

So RIP to Chrissie Watkins, the little Kintner boy, that guy in the row boat, Ben Gardner, and of course Quint, all of whom deserved a better fate. I know one thing, I'll never put on a life jacket again.