directed by Steven Spielberg
screenplay by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb
after the novel by Peter Benchley (1974)

Yeah, Jaws.

The movies that I’ve already seen a zillion times are sometimes the most interesting to watch. How is it that there are lines in this movie, important lines that explain what’s going on, that I have never really heard and comprehended before today? It’s like I get to examine the way my mind used to work: my old viewing of the movie is the ground against which the figures of these “new” details stand out. I still clearly remember the strange experience of seeing the original Star Wars movies as a teenager, after watching them frequently as a child and then not at all during the crucial adolescent years. Words like “rebellion” and “empire” that had seemed like close companions of “wookie” now had strange, mundane meanings, and lo and behold, the dialogue explained what was going on. To my 7-year-old mind, the plot of The Empire Strikes Back was:

beginning part
part with the snow monster and then with the vision
talking part
part with the giant walking machines in the snow
part with asteroids and eventually with that big worm
part with the swamp and yoda
eventually, the scary cave part
some more talking parts somewhere in there
the part where you can see darth vader’s head sort of
part with the floating city
a bunch of little scenes
part where han solo gets frozen
part where they fight
part when he falls down a big tube
ending stuff

I don’t think that’s particularly cutesified, either; it’s a pretty accurate representation of the way I thought about what was quite possibly my favorite movie at that time. Upon seeing it later and noticing all the connective tissue, the ligaments and tendons and “logic” that had previously been incomprehensible and, furthermore, unnecessary, I felt like I was face to face with my former mind in a strange, bittersweet way. I think the movie sketched above is a little better than the The Empire Strikes Back that I would see if I watched it today. The title, however – this is all a bit Proustian, isn’t it – the title, however, has managed to maintain the particular flavor of the movie as I saw it then. Even today it takes a particular effort of will for me to hear it as a sentence in which the subject is “empire,” a large multi-territorial political entity, and the action is “strikes back,” deals a retaliatory blow. It’s the cadence that preserves the phrase, unburdened of these “generic” significations; as learned from my six-year-old peers, that cadence was and still is “the EM-pi-re STRIKES-back.” I just searched to find out the proper way of indicating that (anapest? dactyl?) but gave up.

Anyway, Jaws offered me a bit of that today. A girlfriend once told me that she didn’t want to watch Jaws because it was a “men at sea” movie, and that I just liked “men at sea.” At the time I thought she was missing the point, that Jaws was just a rollicking Steven Spielberg movie that happened to be in the “men at sea” milieu but which didn’t try to get mileage out of any kind of interest inherent to “men at sea.” Watching it tonight I thought, “Wow, this movie is mostly these guys shuffling around this boat, looking at barrels.” I used to think of it as a monster/adventure movie with cute cardboard characters, but in fact it is a character movie, because the monster has even less of a personality than the truck in Duel, rarely appears, and isn’t even portrayed as “overwhelming” until near to the end. It’s just a shark that’s threatening the beaches, so they’ve got to go kill it. If we the audience have the sense that something ominous is in store, it’s only because we know what kind of movie we’re watching. For the characters, sure it’s a big deal, but not a movie-worthy big deal, not until the very end.

In fact, I was struck by how much the movie seemed like a crowd-pleasing, encouraging portrait of American manhood. These three guys are purportedly a salty man-of-the-sea, a rich young shark expert, and an anxious landlubber, but what they end up doing is coping with a problem that none of them actually knows how to handle. They gamely take it on because, well, the men have to do it, so let’s figure out how to do it. They reminded me of my father figuring out how to fix the whatever, or of any number of other spatula-bearing barbecue-MCs of my youth, men who didn’t necessarily know how to kill this shark, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out. Because look, we know how to use the grill! That’s a good proud manly feeling, just like knowing how to fish. I think the paper-cup-crushing bit sums this all up fairly explicitly.

The movie has only reassuring comfort for the Chief Brodys of the world. It says: men with more experience than you might sing bawdy songs and get drunk and compare their scars – but the songs aren’t that bawdy, and they don’t get that drunk, and nobody really gets angry at anyone. And you might not know how to do anything useful like tie a knot or steer the ship, but in the end, it’s going to be about everyone working in good-natured equal ignorance. The gruff sea captain will just chuckle most of the time, and the nerdy scientist won’t really have any valuable knowledge.

I’m not sure what I’m saying here, but the overlay of suburban barbecue dads was vivid for me.

Of course, I’m talking about the second half of the movie. The first half is more genre-characteristic and, by being so solid, earns our sympathy for the long boat trip that would otherwise probably seem pretty monotonous and repetitive. It still does, sometimes.

But Steven Spielberg knows what he’s doing, is my other thought upon watching this movie.

Here’s the pre-movie cover: