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Michael McLeod
OK one more newsfeed but then I'll chill for a bit.
However you stand on this reopening the country issue - really scared for my girlfriend, who has to go back to teaching grade school kids in a month - I love how this woman noticed a parallel in the strangest of places and fleshed it out in a lively and engaging and somewhat even nostalgic essay.
The Real Horror of ‘Jaws’ Isn’t the Shark
It’s the leader who initially values capitalism over saving lives.
By Jennifer Weiner
Contributing Opinion Writer
Looking back, I can see it was the definition of overkill. But a few weeks ago, I decided that what my family needed, in the summer of 2020, was a horror movie. So my husband and daughters and I headed to the drive-in movie theater in Wellfleet, Mass., to watch a 45th anniversary rerelease of “Jaws.”
In the past, the drive-in — the same one my parents took me to when I was a child — was a reliably good time. The kids would wear pajamas and visit the playground and usually run into a friend from day camp or from the beach. Adults would bring sweatshirts and blankets and set up folding chairs on the pavement outside of their parked cars, the better to enjoy the night air. The national anthem would play at the start of the show, and the scent of rose hip blossoms and popcorn would be borne by a stiff ocean breeze. When twilight finally deepened to dark, you could see thousands of stars in the sky.
This year was different, in a dozen ways large and small. We bought our tickets online. The woman inspecting the receipt on my phone wore gloves and a mask and handed me a list of rules: No moviegoers allowed outside of their cars. The playground was closed. Only two people per group allowed at the snack bar.
I hadn’t planned on attempting the snack bar. We brought our own popcorn and, after some fumbling with the speakers, we arranged ourselves in the back of the minivan and got ready for blood on the water.
“Is this going to be too scary for me?” my 12-year-old asked. I told her I thought she’d be fine. The truth was, my memories of “Jaws” were limited to the theme song, the gore and the line, “We’re going to need a bigger boat.”
I didn’t recall the real horror of the movie. Or maybe, the last time I saw it, I was too young to understand that the shark was simply doing what a shark is built to do, and that the true villain is not the coldblooded predator — it’s the warm-blooded mayor.
“All I’m saying is that Amity is a summer town — we need summer dollars,” Mayor Larry Vaughn argues after the first attack, when the chief of police wants to close the beaches. It was a phrase that could have been ripped off for a speech by one of the Republican officials who initially refused to shut down his state’s beaches or insisted on reopening the bars.
Even in the face of the gruesome evidence, Mayor Vaughn decides that the victim had been killed by a fishing boat. He tells the police chief that he’s being too hasty — “You yell ‘shark,’ we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”
The beaches stay open. The shark kills again, its victim, this time, a young boy.
On the dock, the boy’s grieving mother gives the chief of police — the one man who had been trying to do the right thing — a hard slap across his face. “You knew there was a shark out there,” she says. “You knew it was dangerous. But you let people go swimming anyway. You knew all those things. But still my boy is dead now.”
I found myself bracing for a Trumpian response — for the police chief to say that he didn’t take responsibility, or to talk up Amity’s great job numbers, or to point out that most swimmers will not get bitten by a shark, and that almost all young people who do get attacked make complete recoveries. I prepared for fringe theories or culture-war distractions, maybe a rant about how the hippies were the real threat to Amity’s way of life.
But the chief, Martin Brody, doesn’t bluster, doesn’t counterpunch or pass the buck or stage a photo op. When the mayor apologizes after the mother’s outburst, saying, “I’m sorry, Martin. She’s wrong,” Chief Brody responds, “No, she’s not.” His shoulders slump, as if he’s taken on the weight of the mother’s grief and sorrow, and he walks away without another word.
By that point, my 12-year-old was dozing. I woke her up. I wanted her to see a story about a leader doing the right thing in the face of a deadly outbreak (of shark attacks) — even if it took one more death, with the police chief’s own son imperiled, to finally prod him into action. So we watched the chastened mayor release funds for a shark hunt, and the police chief, in the company of a nerdy scientist and a grizzled old salt, goes off to vanquish the underwater enemy. There is tension. There’s tragedy. Finally, there is triumph. The police chief blows up the shark and dog-paddles home.
In Wellfleet, the audience cheered as the credits rolled. But it was hard not to think about our real-life, real-time horror: a pandemic that continues to disproportionately affect the poor, Black people and Latinos (and that has taken the life of the actress who played that mourning mother in “Jaws”).
Masks have been politicized to the point that donning one is akin to sporting a “Biden for President” bumper sticker on your face. And instead of a leader who steps up to do the right thing, we’ve got a president who delights in divisiveness and wallows in woe-is-me, while too many of his fellow Republicans, loath to cross him, seem to care more about those summer dollars than dead citizens or grieving families. Instead of a boat on the water, we’ve got heads in the sand.
That night, driving home in the dark, I imagined our country as the first girl to die in every horror movie, the pretty one who falls victim to the monster or the serial killer. The one who is blithely certain of her own invincibility, or maybe just bored with taking precautions. The one who goes down to the basement or up to the attic as the audience screams that she shouldn’t, knowing what will happen to her if she does.
This shouldn’t be so hard. It shouldn’t be so hard for the government to support workers. It shouldn’t be so hard for citizens to stay home as much as possible, to wear a cloth mask, to postpone birthday parties and barbecues. From the Ozarks to Fire Island to the Jersey Shore, we’ve all seen pictures of Americans who won’t deny themselves their summer pleasures, insisting they happen just as they always have.
But how can we be surprised? Our leader is standing knee-deep in the shallows, smiling and beckoning and telling us that the water’s fine.
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