How to haplessly catch a shark, and other Jaws thoughts

While New England is being blanketed by snow and even Southern California is experiencing weather that is cold, windy and rainy, what better way to get warm than to transport yourself to the summer of 1975?

That's what we did on Friday night when we watched Jaws, me for only the second time, and the first time in 17 or 18 years I imagine. We still had to bundle up while we watched it, since I borrowed a projector from work and we projected it on the inside of our garage door. We sat on our old couch under blankets, trying to keep our toesies from getting cold.

When you watch a classic that you haven't watched since you were in your early 20s, and you're now in your late 30s, you are bound to have plenty of new observations. I'll repeat what I said in my Dumb and Dumber piece the other day: Just because you see some funny parts that don't quite add up, doesn't mean you love the movie any less.

The first new observation I want to tell you about is the scene where the townspeople come after the shark with torches and pitchforks.

May as well have, anyway.

You know what I'm talking about. It's the scene where the citizens of Amity are mad as hell and they aren't going to take it anymore. They take to the harbor en masse to recklessly board boats, regardless of the boats' maximum occupancy levels or the citizens' ability to pilot them, carrying spears, sticks of dynamite, and whatever rusty implements they found in their garage, ready to have shark meat that night for dinner.

I haven't seen a more unintentionally funny scene in a long time. This motley collection of blowhards, drunkards and other rubes have about a snowball's chance in hell of knowing what to do with this shark if they came across it. They'd as likely start punching it and insulting its mother as penetrating its weak spots.

They get out in the water and steer these ships so haphazardly that people are practically falling out of the boats and the boats are practically colliding with each other. One guy starts randomly throwing M-80s in the water. Two other guys dump chum with such gusto that they nearly overbalance themselves overboard. I think I even saw one guy with a lasso.

Yet they actually do capture and kill a shark.

Think about that.

Other Jaws thoughts ... 

When were video games invented again?

After the town of Amity gains fame for both having a shark and then subsequently killing it, the incident becomes a major advertising thrust for the tourism-conscious town. They're selling all sorts of shark souvenirs and the like.

And for some reason, the local video arcade has a game where you shoot up sharks with a machine gun.

As I was watching this scene, I wondered if Pong had even been invented yet in 1975. 

It turns out it had, but only three years earlier. So 1975 was very, very early in the history of video games. Yet here's this odd first-person shooter game in which you riddle a shark with bullets. 

Was the movie engaging in a little Jules Verne-style forward thinking, or did some similar games actually exist back then? 

"Sure, what the hell, play by the water"

Correct me if I'm wrong, but hadn't three people died already when the shark makes his appearance in the so-called "pond" on the 4th of July? My understanding of "the pond" being a place that's enclosed by netting and buoys and is therefore considered safer. But it's still in the water, people.

And Sheriff Martin Brody still lets his son play there. And doesn't even start moving that much faster when his wife tells him the boy is there. (Okay, maybe it was his wife who let their son play there. Come on, Mrs. Brody: Stand by your man.) 

Speaking of Mrs. Brody ...

Isn't there a moment on the boat when she calls for him on the shipboard phone, yet we don't hear any of their conversation or even see him take the call? What was the plot function of that call?

And when he leaves on what may be a suicide mission to get the shark, meaning they may not ever see each other again, all they can do is manage a rather awkward hug?

Stand very very still

In the 4th of July scene where bathers practically stampede out of the water (one heartless man even overturns two kids on an inflatable raft so he can paddle it in himself), most of the swimmers are singularly devoted to getting out of the water as soon as possible. Then there are a couple shots of poorly directed extras who stop to essentially look at the camera and shriek. 

One woman in particular lets out a cry right out of a soap opera as she hugs her child to her. She doesn't move. Yeah, sharks are attracted to the splashing, but there's no way this woman is making that choice consciously in this situation, especially with a child to protect.

Honestly, she's just blowing it, pure and simple.

Did Quint really need to smash that radio?

Well, did he?  

Not that fake after all

It's almost a given that one of the "complaints" about Jaws is that the shark looks fake. People who love the movie tend not to tolerate that criticism without qualification. They can spin this into a positive, since the story also goes that a technical malfunction kept them from using the shark as much as they wanted to -- making for an accidental case of brilliant minimalism.

But I have to say, I wasn't at all bothered by its artificiality. In fact, only once in the whole movie did I find it the least distracting (the scene where it eats the back of the boat, flailing about on the deck). 

So I'm essentially saying that 1975 FX are good enough for me. Forget all this Avatar stuff. Give me a robotic shark any day of the week. 

Speeches with names

Robert Shaw is so damn good in this movie. Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss are great, but Shaw is a notch better, a notch more legendary.

In fact, he gets to deliver the movie's two best speeches with the perfect dose of macho New England crustiness. One speech is so great that it even gets its own name: "The U.S.S. Indianapolis speech."

Good on ya, screenwriter and novelist Peter Benchley. 

Beauty in death

One of the lovelist shots in the whole movie is the carcass of the shark sinking to shallow ocean floor, its dorsal fin fading into a murky red cloud and then out of view. 

Rectifying my podcast faux pas

I hadn't seen Jaws in many years, but I had recently been put in a very public position to render judgment on it. 

And the judgment I rendered was oh so questionable.

I guested on a film podcast called Flick Fights just about two years ago, the format of which calls for the hosts to debate the merits of two films that come up in a head-to-head duel randomly determined by the Flickchart website. Wash, rinse, repeat.

Early on we got a duel between Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Jaws, and I think you know what I'm going to say here.

Yes, I argued that Sarah Marshall hit my sweet spot more than Jaws did. Yes, I was nearly laughed out of the building by the two hosts. And yes, I redeemed myself through a series of solid judgments from there onward. 

But one of the reasons I was eager to see Jaws again was to determine if that funny and highly charming comedy was actually better than the movie that launched the summer blockbuster era.  

You know, they scratch such different itches.

I do think that if I were on that podcast tomorrow, having seen Jaws yesterday rather than 15 years earlier, I would have picked Jaws this time.   
 
Mistakes were made

Updating my various lists (I have three different places I mark seeing a film for the second time), I noticed that my records show that I gave Jaws a thumbs down.

Clearly this was a mistake. I remember being absolutely enthralled the first time I saw it. Clearly I was off one row in my Excel spreadsheet when that "down" was recorded.

Glad I caught it before any more time could pass. If anyone should ever stumble across this list or see at my invitation, just imagine if they thought that I actually disliked Jaws.

The embarrassment.

Confronting what you once heard

I've been wanting to see Anton Corbijn's Control since 1991. Which is funny, because it didn't actually exist until 2007.

The fall of 1991, my freshman year in college, was when I first learned about Ian Curtis, the lead singer of the British new wave (or is it post-punk?) band Joy Division. Control is his biopic.

I was DJing a radio show with a classmate named Todd. No sooner had he introduced Joy Division to me than I learned that Curtis had hanged himself, on the eve of the band's first North American tour in 1980. But it wasn't just that he'd hanged himself. This is what I remember Todd telling me:

"He glued his hands to the side of his head first. He also rigged up the noose so that it had a blade in it. Therefore, when they found him, he was decapitated with his head in his hands."

I guess I was too young and naive back then to consider the logistical flaws in this way of killing yourself. But that gruesome image definitely imprinted itself in my brain. Especially since Joy Division's music had such melancholy to it. Thinking that the guy who wrote, or at least sang, those songs was suicidal gave the music an extra layer of profundity.

So when I finally saw Control on Monday night, it was with the hope of some kind of resolution to this persistent image I had of the probably-apocryphal way that Ian Curtis died. True enough, it didn't happen that way, and Curtis' story was actually a lot more tragic than I'd thought. Any suicide is a tragedy, but part of me assumed Curtis had some kind of narcissistic idea of being made immortal by the very rock-n-roll act of killing yourself.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Not only was the man filled with self-loathing for the way he'd toyed with the emotions of two women (one of whom was his wife and the mother of their newborn), but he was also an epileptic whose fits were getting worse. After a failed attempt to get back together with his wife and a particularly violent fit that left him passed out on the floor all night, he got to his feet, eyeballed some kind of apparatus in his kitchen with rope and pulleys, and impulsively hanged himself. Even though it was an unpremeditated act, it was executed effectively enough to kill him. I've given away the ending of the movie, but it's historical record anyway.

The larger idea Control made me think of is how we all harbor ideas and images that came to us through hearsay or rumor, some of which undoubtedly happened the way they were described. Because this is a film blog, I've chosen to explore the larger issues of spooky things that I'd heard about from certain films. Films which I therefore was excited -- and a little scared -- to see, just as I was excited and a little scared to see Control.

The most obvious one that jumps to mind is The Exorcist. I learned about The Exorcist possibly as many as 15 years before I saw it. But it wasn't any kids in the schoolyard who told me about it; it was my mom. That's right, when I was way too young to be hearing these things, I learned about the projectile vomit, the head spinning around a full rotation, and the devil writing the words "HELP ME" in the stomach of poor young Regan MacNeil. In fact, I remember my mother telling a friend and me about it as we were about to go to sleep, me in the upper bunk, he in the lower. I know this makes my mother sound sadistic, but she isn't. Maybe it was just her ill-considered idea of a spooky bedtime story.

Then there was the time Mom told us (it was the same friend again) about Jaws. I imagine the circumstances -- a sleepover at my house -- being the same as well, but maybe I'm just blending the two incidents in my head. I don't remember the details of what she told us the way I remember the Exorcist details, though I'm pretty sure she mentioned a dead body floating in the water. What I do remember is that she told us that the older brother of one of our friends had to leave the theater. She probably just said "leave the theater," but the way I remember it, it was "leave the theater to throw up."

Finally, there was Dario Argento's Suspiria, a movie I became aware of much more recently. I remember the circumstances here as well. I was watching the short-lived game show Beat the Geeks on Comedy Central. One of the geeks on this week's panel was a self-proclaimed expert in horror films, and he was naturally asked what the scariest film of all time was. Without hesitation, he produced the title Suspiria. Either from what he said or sometime later, I learned that the first 15 minutes of Suspiria are supposed to be the scariest ever committed to film. My reverential fear of this film increased in leaps and bounds until I finally saw it in, I think, 2005. I won't tell you what happens. The fact that I knew those 15 minutes were supposed to be so scary, but not how it would happen, intensified my enjoyment manyfold. And if you haven't seen it, it'll do that for you too.

Ultimately, none of these films was quite as twisted as my mind imagined them to be, though all are terrific films. And so I think there is some value to allowing some things to never be confronted, and just to remain as fragmented scary notions in your brain.

And that's why I will try to preserve Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce as the scariest film I have never seen. From what I understand, it's something about space vampires -- I'm sure the synopsis could give me a more accurate description if I bothered to look it up. And this one no one told me anything about. I simply saw the trailer for it, back when I was about 12, and I don't ever remember being so scared of anything as I was by the potential these images carried with them.

I hear it's terrible anyway.