Miracle of Evolution

As a part of my Amazon bounty that I received for my birthday, I received the 30th Anniversary edition of a little film called JAWS. Now, the first time I saw the movie, I couldn't;t have been more than 5 or 6. We bought the movie from a local electronic store that was going out of business and was selling all of their Betamax tapes. Now, as a young child, I really didn't understand a lot of the things that were going on (something I'm sure my parents were counting on when they let me watch the movie). Now, viewing it, with my wealth of experience (cough), I feel better in understanding a bit more about the film.

There are probably a lot of people who might consider Jaws to be fluff, mainly because of the number of sequels and the way the movie has been parodied. I don't. Everytime I see it, I feel like I'm uncovering another layer, or that I have some new thought about what the actions of certain characters. Is also amazing when you realize that so much of what makes the movie great is the fact that the people who designed the shark were idiots and didn't think that they'd be putting it in salt water.

The first thing that changed when I see it as an adult (cough) is the opening title scene. There's not as much as there seemed to be, but the John Williams music still makes things terrifying. Then, of course, when you now understand just Chrissie Watkins and Tom Cassidy are running out to do, or would end up doing, is he didn't pass out, and she didn't, you know, die.

Now that I'm in New England, I understand a bit more about some of Amity's issues. First, since I'm in a summer town, and see how important "summer dollars" are, Mayor Vaughn is a lot more believable. In a lot of ways, Amity and Wolfeboro are exactly alike. Except one is an island, in the ocean, in Massachusetts and has several people killed by a shark. The character that I really hate now is Ben Meadows. He's the editor of the newspaper in the town. One of the things that Mary has emphasized to us is that while we cover the towns we cover, we aren't there to necessarily make friends either. We cover it as news in the stories we cover. We aren't the town's PR agency. In Amity, that's what the paper is. Ben Meadows is essentially the mayor's flunky. He argues with Brody, trying to tell him that a shark couldn't have killed Chrissy, that no such shark had ever been in those waters. Worst of all, in a town of Amity's size, he says that he is going to bury the story about Alex Kitner being eaten by a shark in front of dozens of onlookers which caused a panic on the beach, in the back pages of the paper.

Popular culture history tells us that the first time we see the shark is when Brody is chumming. This isn't true. When the shark goes into the estuary, it attacks the scoutmaster, and the attack puts the Brody's son into shock. When the scoutmaster's rowboat overturns, we see the shark going for his leg, then we see blood, then we see the leg falling to the ground (though my guess is that it's the other leg, that the shark wasn't going for. By the way, the forgotten heroine of the film is the hippie-chick artist who's painting on the other side of the estuary. After the fake shark attack perpetrated by the two teenage boys, all of the shark spotters are busy. She's the one who prevents Michael Brody and his friends from being lunch, by warning everyone where the shark is.

Obviously, of all of the human characters, Quint is the most fascinating (maybe because Robert Shaw was blitzed out of his gourd for most of the shoot). Everyone remembers the nails on the chalkboard, the first time we see him. When we hear that first monologue, we know this is a force of nature. After the estuary attack, you can watch Brody and Hooper basically shrink in his presence. You see that tension between Hooper and Quint, the fisherman and the intellectual, between experience and intelligence.

I've come to believe that what Quint is is essentially a man suffering from survivor's remorse. Everything that he went through, all the friends he saw taken when the Indianapolis went down, and he said he was most frightened when he was waiting for the plane to pick him up. He makes a point of saying that the Indianapolis never made a distress call, then he destroys the radio later on, before Brody can make such a call. If he's not trying to prove his own manhood, I don't know what he's doing.

The performance I enjoy most, though, is Richard Dreyfuss. Roy Scheider is a great everyman. But I find Matt Hooper to be incredibly entertaining and fun. Especially the "I think that you are going to ignore this particular problem, until it swims up behind you and bites you in the ass," scene. For obvious reasons.

This endeth the lesson.

Oh, one more thing, Jude Law, nice work. Very nicely done with the whole pissing off Siena Miller thing