The Head, the Tail, the Whole Damn Thing

SHARK WEEK, BITCHES!!

SHARK WEEK!!

… Ahem.

Hello. As you may be aware, Shark Week is once again upon us. Truthfully, I don’t much care for sharks, or even Shark Week itself, but I thought I’d take advantage of the craze anyway, because as luck would have it, one of my favorite movies of all time just so happens to be shark-based.

That’s right, it’s JAWS time.

Cue music.

I love this movie. I think most people love this movie. When one is asked to deal with this movie, loving it seems to be more or less the correct answer. This is a film that does almost everything right, even if its many issues during production led to a few of those things being done right by accident.

In addition to being the definitive shark movie, JAWS is also responsible for the creation of the summer blockbuster, and as much as I am something of an apologist when it comes to today’s blockbusters, modern-day Hollywood stands to learn a lot from this film. I’ve mentioned a few times now that when you’re looking at story structure, simplicity is not a bad thing, and JAWS really is the ultimate demonstration of that concept. To show what I mean, let’s apply our handy-dandy models.

Plot flow: People want to go swimming, BUT there’s a shark. THEREFORE our hero has to get rid of it. The End.

Hero’s journey: Martin Brody is the chief of police, and he NEEDS to kill the shark, so he GOES, FINDS IT, KILLS IT, and RETURNS. The End.

There’s more to both of those outlines, naturally, but the fact is, that’s more or less what we’re looking at. Nobody is going to sit down to watch JAWS and say that they don’t understand what’s going on. Indeed, the real genius of the film lies in the way that its bare-bones synopsis gets fleshed out to exactly the right degree.

From the get-go, JAWS is a film that needs some way to justify itself. After all, does Brody really need to kill the Shark? There’s a pretty easy alternative:

People want to go swimming, BUT there’s a shark. THEREFORE they don’t. The End.

Sharks are scary, there’s no doubt about that, but they also have a much harder time killing you if you simply get out of the water. Any good shark movie has to work around that fact, and while most address the issue by finding a way to strand their characters in open waters, JAWS embraces the hurdle, filling in the potential plot hole with solid character work.

Sharknado, meanwhile, pole-vaults over it by hurling sharks through the air amidst gale-force winds. To each their own.

As chief of police, Brody does of course have the option to close the beaches right away. In fact, doing so would be a perfectly viable course of action; as oceanographer Matt Hooper explains, cutting off the Shark’s food supply will eventually cause it to leave of its own accord. It would also, however, give us a pretty short movie, and therefore the situation is complicated through other means. In the film’s opening scenes, we learn that Amity Island’s economy is fueled almost entirely by summer tourism. If people can’t come and enjoy the beaches, the whole community suffers for the rest of the year, and the town’s mayor isn’t ready to let that happen. For as long as he can maintain plausible deniability, the Mayor continues coaxing people back into the water, forcing Brody to take a more direct approach if he wants to forestall further loss of life.

I find Mayor Larry Vaughan to be a fascinating character, but in discussing JAWS, he rarely gets the attention he deserves. While he does some reprehensible things, and is punchably smug in several of his appearances, there’s no real sinister intent to what he does. Instead, he operates in a combined state of denial and desperation, doing what he feels he needs to do for the sake of the town. His actions may be irresponsible and morally wrong, but at the same time, it's never that hard to see his side of things. It’s a smart choice, one that adds a substantial amount of character conflict to the film without unseating the Shark as the true antagonistic force.

Character conflict is of the utmost importance in this movie, simply due to the fact that it takes over an hour for Brody, Hooper, and Quint to get out on the water. Without something else to focus on, that time could have come across as the film spinning its wheels, but JAWS is smarter than that. We spend the first hour getting to know the characters and their relationships while simultaneously raising the stakes bit by bit, and as a result, not a minute feels wasted.

It’s become a common punchline to remark that something “escalated quickly,” and I can understand why. When a situation jumps immediately from the mundane to the extreme, especially in fiction, we’re just as likely to laugh as we are to be concerned. I know I am, at any rate. That's why attempts at sudden shock, or diving headlong into action, risk falling flat. Once again, almost everything in filmmaking works on a case-by-case basis, but as an abstract concept, escalation at its most effective should be a gradual process. As gradual as you can be within a 2-hour run time, anyway. JAWS escalates at what might just be the perfect rate, and earns bonus points by using the process to simultaneously define Brody’s character.

The Shark’s first victim, Chrissie Watkins, kicks the bucket in the opening scene. That first kill needs to happen – and happen quickly – because really, if the Shark doesn’t eat anyone, how would the people of Amity Island even know it was there? (The correct and boring answer is ‘Someone would see it from a boat or something,’ but shut up, because that’s not how movies work.) It’s over and done with pretty quickly, visceral in what it shows, but leaving most of the details to the imagination. All this sequence needs to do is establish the Shark as a threat, and it succeeds.

Following this attack, we meet Martin Brody, and right away, it’s clear that he's going to be out of his element here. He probably hasn't seen much action, as Amity hardly seems to be plagued by crime. Hell, he's even scared of the water, something that's clearly going to be a problem. The town coroner correctly pegs Chrissie’s cause of death as ‘SHARK!!’ and Brody offers right away to close the beaches. But, because that would be bad for business, he buys into the Mayor’s alternate explanation of a boating accident without much fuss. At this point, he’s getting paid to put up signs, not investigate suspicious deaths.

After Chrissie, the Shark’s next victim is a dog, which serves as a nice stalling tactic. A missing dog isn’t enough to alert the police over, but it is enough to tell the audience that the shark is still out there, even without showing the attack. Also, it makes us sad.

(You may be wondering why an actual human female ranks lower on the escalation spectrum than a dog. The harsh truth – aside from the fact that dead dogs are just sadder than dead humans when it comes to film – is that Chrissie Watkins was drunk, possibly high, and very likely about to have sex at the time of her demise: a victim trifecta. The poor girl couldn’t have been more marked for death if she was being played by Sean Bean.)

The third victim, Alex Kintner, is where the turn really happens; if Brody had followed his instincts and accepted the initial coroner’s report, Alex’s life may have been spared. Instead, Brody listens to the Mayor, and a little boy dies. The incident leads to a manhunt – er, sharkhunt – which allows both Hooper and Captain Bartholomew Marion Quint to be brought into the picture. When a shark is caught and the hunt is supposedly over, Mrs. Kintner publicly shames Brody for having known about the Shark all along and doing nothing. That gives the chief a much-needed wake-up call, and Hooper provides him with a chance to make use of it right away when he declares that this isn’t the Shark they’re looking for. The subsequent discovery of a tooth in a wrecked ship proves that not only is the real Shark still at large… it’s a Great Gorram White.

Fun Fact: This head actually screams when it comes onscreen. That, of course, makes absolutely no sense. But boy, does it work as a scare.

Finding out that our Shark is a Great White raises the stakes more than any one victim ever could. A shark terrorizing your beach is bad, but a Great White Shark terrorizing your beach is something you may recognize as being the Worst Thing Ever. This news and Brody's humiliation combine to create a scenario in which the chief has no choice but to take action. Unfortunately, he still isn’t ready to stand up to the Mayor, who is convinced that the Shark has been caught, so the action that Brody ultimately takes is: “Let everyone keep swimming, but be super duper careful about it.”

As Amity’s beachgoers return yet again to the water, the tension hits an all-time high. We all know what’s going to happen, and sure enough, after a few false alarms, the Shark claims its fourth victim. However, the status quo has changed, with both the audience and the protagonists knowing more about what they’re up against. As the shroud of mystery begins to fall away from the Shark, we are finally granted our first real look at the beast, almost an hour into the movie. And boy, is that look a doozy.

It’s cool. You can go change your pants. I’ll wait.

A good rule of thumb for horror is that the monster you can’t see is scarier than the one you can, and JAWS tries to stick to that philosophy (largely by accident, since Bruce the Shark almost never worked). Nonetheless, there comes a certain point where we need a visual simply for frame of reference, and if this first appearance of the Shark says anything at all, it’s ‘Oh God, oh God, we’re all going to die.’

From a plot perspective, what really matters about this kill isn’t the poor guy who gets eaten, but the fact that the Shark very nearly gets Brody’s son instead. Brody stood aside in the past, against his better judgment, and Alex Kintner was killed. When he made the mistake a second time, the child who died was almost his own. I don’t care who you are; that’s gonna be a kick in the pants. Indeed, this is the last straw for Brody, who finally stands up to the Mayor – basically kicking him while he’s down – and takes things into his own hands, hiring Quint to kill the Shark.

What follows from here is one of my favorite hours in the history of film, chock full of amazing sequences, not least among them Quint’s legendary Indianapolis monologue. The balance between character conflict and Sharkitude is maintained, and things continue to escalate, but it's all so brilliant in its simplicity that there's really nothing I can tell you that's better than the experience of seeing it yourself. Suffice it to say that Quint really wants to catch that Shark, like, yesterday. And as the Shark gets scarier and scarier, Quint gets crazier and crazier. In the end, he's more responsible for the events of the climax than the Shark is.

Would JAWS still work as a movie without Quint and the Mayor? Maybe, but it wouldn't be nearly as good, as the plot would likely be stretched too thin. Quint is the less necessary of the two, but he's crucial in the final scenes, and he's also a friggin' amazing character, so I sure as hell wouldn't cut him. As for the Mayor, any attempt to extend the movie's run time without him would require making Brody either a complete idiot or criminally negligent, and thus, extremely unlikable. As it stands, the film sets up a scenario in which there really are no easy answers, and gives us a protagonist with a much more relatable flaw: he's afraid to defy his boss. As with any good hero, though, Brody comes through in the end, and in his moment of desperation, finishes his character arc by graduating to full badass.

Sadly, the one thing he couldn't manage to do was convince Quint to get a bigger boat.

'In the aaaarms of the angels...'

A brief addendum on Sharknado, because really, how could I do a blugpost on shark movies and not talk about it?

It’s bad. I think everyone knows Sharknado is bad. Even Sharknado knows that Sharknado is bad. It was done that way on purpose, a fact that changes the way that we have to look at the movie. Of course the pacing is terrible, of course the characters are undeveloped, and of course the sequence of events is disjointed and unmotivated. We simply can’t judge Sharknado by traditional means. What we have to ask instead is if it’s bad enough to be good again. And my answer is… barely. It’s super silly, but not necessarily fun. It’s so-bad-it’s-passably-entertaining. Watch it once, if you can.

Three things that are unironically fantastic about the film:

1) Around the 90-minute mark, I found myself shouting “Careful! There could be a shark in there!” at the screen with complete sincerity. At the time, the characters were exploring a warehouse, about 15 miles inland.

2) The greatest quote in cinematic history: “We can’t just sit here and wait for sharks to rain down on us again.”

3)   The second greatest quote in cinematic history: “Your son wants to go into a helicopter and drop bombs into the tornado.”