The Deep (1977)

While it is obviously true that the poster for The Deep rips off the poster for Jaws, and even though The Deep is based on a novel by Peter Benchley, the same novelist who wrote Jaws, and although The Deep stars Robert Shaw, who played the shark hunter Quint in Jaws, and while certainly that means that this 1977 film was attempting to capitalize on the 1975 masterpiece's success, The Deep really has nothing to do with the terror of the deep or the terror of the ocean as such, and it certainly isn't a monster movie like Jaws is.  

The Deep is just an action–adventure film. There are violent criminal villains, to be sure, but The Deep doesn't have any of the existential philosophy or stare-into-the-abyss poignancy of a more serious-minded film. And I don't say that as an insult in the least. This movie is an action movie, and it does its generic work fairly well. Nick Nolte is sexy and fun, and Jacqueline Bissett is more sexy and more fun. There's a terrifying moray eel, a great shark scene, and at least one really good fight sequence. I had a good time. 

It is also worth discussing the two rapes in this film. There are two sequences in The Deep that are filmed like rapes, and I think one of them is worth analyzing. Neither of them is a rape per se, but they both use the filmic language of rape (I analyze this language in my book The Violate Man, which, maybe will be published at some point, who knows – that's another story).

In the first of these sequences, Louis Gossett Jr., the film's villain kidnaps Nolte and Bissett and takes them to some little cabin. They search them for a little piece of glass that contains morphine or something (this is sort of immaterial), but it's a small piece of glass and so they're looking everywhere for this glass. They don't strip-search Nolte but they threaten to strip Bissett, and she is clearly terrified. When Gossett orders his henchmen to strip her, she defiantly says she will do it herself. We watch the sequence with a closeup on her face, a medium shot of her back as her brassiere comes off, and a shot of Nolte as he watches helplessly. In fact, the Nolte shot is a copy of a shot from Deliverance (1972), in which Jon Voight helplessly watches a violent man rape his friend. There is no rape here, but the camera doesn't show Bissett's breasts. In other words, the camera does not take the viewing position of the villain. We are not complicit with him in his activities. So what we see instead is the film's villain forcing Bissett to strip for him. He sees her breasts but we do not, and she is terrified. It's an emotional sequence, and then he tells her to put her clothes back on.

The problem with all of this is that we have already seen Jacqueline Bissett's breasts. They are, in fact, a showcase of the film's very long, silent, underwater opening sequence. We see them clearly through the tight white t-shirt she wears as she swims in the deep. (There was even a poster that featured them! I refuse to link it here, but you're free to Google it.) It's a stunningly sexy moment of near-nudity with which to open the movie, and it was one of the film's notable features upon its release. Producer Peter Guber has said that "that white t-shirt made me a rich man". What I think is interesting here is the way that the film actively frames the baring of breasts as an act of rape – and The Deep's citation of Deliverance makes that intention quite clear – in the context of a black man forcing this white woman to bare her breasts, while in the same film, the same actress bares her breasts for the audience, and this is understood as sexy, as titillation, and most importantly as non-violent. Now, of course, within the context of the movie itself, Bissett's character doesn't know she's being watched in the first sequence and is being treated violently in the second sequence, so all of this is understandable. But in the context of the film's performance it works differently. The narrative functions to make the audience's witnessing of her bare breasts into an innocuous, pleasurable act, and then the narrative functions to avoid identification with the black man who forces Bissett to perform the exact same action. One of these is shown to us as a racialized act of rape; the other one – the one in which we take part – we don't even notice.