Anyway... we delivered the bomb: on Jaws at 50
Friends, Romans, countrypeople... my plans to write an essay about dumb blondes inspired by James Gunn's Superman has been waylaid (for now) by "my job", so instead, here's a little treat: an essay I wrote about 50 years of Jaws for The Big Issue. The edition is not on the street anymore, so/but please be sure to buy the latest edition from your local vendor to support The Big Issue.
Much like John Williams’ infamous double tonic score that announces the mighty shark’s presence, I heard of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws long before I was allowed to see it.
In the film, a giant shark terrorises the fictional New England town of Amity; water-phobic police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) teams up with oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and mysterious shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) to catch and kill the bloodthirsty beast. But growing up in Port Melbourne in the early 1980s, my friends and I were fairly certain that our springs and summers in Port Phillip Bay would be untroubled by gigantic white sharks with teeth the size of meat cleavers. (The biggest “sea creature” we ever dealt with face-to-face was a dog-sized sewer rat that came floating out of the Lagoon Pier stormwater drain in the summer of 1988.) Even so, the “dun-dun, dun-dun” of John Williams’ Jaws theme was such an effective shorthand for “you are about to be eaten by a giant shark” that it was regularly employed to whip fellow swimmers into an absolutely frenzied panic.
Those who had seen Jaws – grownups, mostly, and some cool teens – seemed trained to react with white-knuckled suspicion at the mere hint of a dark shadow beneath the waves, woe betide a patch of seaweed or a hapless snorkeller. Mum would talk breathlessly about having seen it at a seaside drive-in in South Australia. To the rest of us, too young to have been allowed to see the film, Jaws was more of an abstract concept: just how scary could a big shark really be?
