Determined to catch the shark by hook or by crook, Quint has brought along a "special treat", which he keeps stored in a green plastic garbage can. Invited to take a look, Hooper flips open the lid and sees the unborn corpse of a "tiny bottle-nosed dolphin", mutilated with "a huge shark hook". Just as a character in a melodrama will
kick a dog (or do something even worse) to advertise their villainy, anyone maltreating a dolphin in a sea-faring drama is likely to be up to no good.
If sharks have got a consistently bad rap from Hollywood, dolphins have always been portrayed in a positive light, and their image as a faithful companion to man - rather like a marine Lassie - was firmly established with the Sixties TV show
Flipper. Dolphin intelligence reached a new level in 1973 with the release of
The Day of the Dolphin in which two "talking" dolphins are trained to become political assassins.
Quint's choice of bait and the manner in which he acquired it prompts Hooper to take the moral high ground ("... these dolphins are in danger of being wiped out, extinguished. And what you're doing speeds up the process."), which sparks a confrontation between the two men. Quint takes a swipe at Hooper's privileged upbringing ("If you had to work for a living ..."), which will find an echo in the movie's dialogue ("I'm talking about working for a living. I'm talking about sharking."). Brody steps in to break up the argument, but Hooper, all riled up, turns on him with a condescending blue collar putdown. Brody snaps back with another line ("I don't need any of your two-bit, rich-kid bullshit.") that - in a transmogrified state - will also find its way into the movie ("I don't need this working class hero crap!"). The seething tensions between the two men finally boil over in the chapter's penultimate paragraph.
