Category Archives: Jaws

Day 76 9/9/13: Mourning, Millennials & Melodrama in “Jaws”

by in Activism, Animal Rights, Education, Humor, Inner Turmoil, Jaws, Marine Conservation, Pop Culture and tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

I had to remind myself to take a deep cleansing breath when I noticed a few of my students texting during “Jaws” today. Later, one of the guilty boys confessed the movie was “just too scary” and with the acute senses of a predatory fish (or a fellow neurotic), I detected residual fear in the shuffling way he gathered his books and hid his eyes behind a lank of  dark hair.

Several people laughed when the bereaved Mrs. Kintner slaps Chief Brody in the face for keeping the beaches open and letting her son Alex get chomped. Is this a kitschy moment? Perhaps. But I always found the scene too odd or mysterious to be pure melodrama. The black-veiled Mrs. Kintner is accompanied by a silent old man who might be her father or grandfather and the two of them progress in some odd inversion of a  wedding march toward Brody.

As Antonia Quirke noted in her BFI essay on “Jaws”: “She’s much older than the other mothers at the waterfront. This child was her last chance” (35). Quirke also notes that a slap in the movies normally stands in for sex, but “[t]o be slapped by Mrs. Kintner in mourning is like being kissed by a skeleton, it has that disquieting taboo mixed in” (36).

The book store ran out of my shark texts which may have explained this group’s lack of enthusiasm for uterine cannibalism or the ampullae of Lorenzini. So other than typing up a quick shark biology quiz, I’ve been checking in with the STOP OCEARCH activists. Sad to hear that the New Yorker did a story about OCEARCH (thanks for the tip, Connie), but pleased to know that a film exposing these charlatans (Price of Existence) and other marine exploitation is in the works. I’ll try to do what I can to help with the fundraising/consciousness raising for this project.

Day 60: 8/24/13: Channeling Richard Dreyfuss

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It’s no wonder I dreamed of Richard Dreyfuss the night before my first dive lesson. The weirder details of the dream escape me, but I remember Richard Dreyfuss saying how tired he was of people yelling out lines from “Jaws” when they saw him on the street. This prompted me to say something helpful like, “Maybe if they said more obscure bits of dialogue it wouldn’t be so bad.” I then recited  a few fragments from the autopsy scene like “partially denuded bone remaining” or something like that, but this didn’t seem to improve his mood.

Today I channeled Hooper/Richard when we learned how to handle our air tanks. “If you screw around with these things they’re gonna blow up!” etc. When I spit in my mask, I remembered Hooper descending in the shark cage, with a nervous dry mouth, “I got no spit!”  Trying to adjust to the weight of the tanks and controlling my buoyancy, meant that  I tumbled ass over tea kettle (as they say in New England) in the deep end trying to achieve that elusive floating sensation.  Breathing underwater sometimes felt natural, and other times, as when I tried to clear my mask and ended up with water up my nose, I had to surface and gather my wits.

Above the pool, framed by an old rusted brass porthole hung a picture of a great white’s gaping jaws.

I don’t know why, but the image comforted me.

Day 56: 8/20/13: Art House Sharks

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Spent the first half of the day dutifully studying dive manual and watching short YouTube films about positive buoyancy, proper fin selection, and how to clear a  flooded mask. In the afternoon I attended two movies: Museum Hours at the Royal and Cutie and the Boxer at the Nuart with my dear friend Helen. Both were great–Cutie and the Boxer is a documentary about two married artists—Ushio and Noriko Shinohara–and depicts the art life with all its perils, poverty and messy devotion. At one point, Ushio and Noriko are eating supper in their chaotic loft, talking about “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and 80-year-old Ushio, an action-pop artist who paints with boxing gloves,  notes that  “Jaws” was Spielberg’s best film. While Noriko chastises her husband for his reactionary early work=best work credo, I had to agree with Ushio that Spielberg never topped “Jaws.”

Museum Hours is a meditation. It’s a movie about loneliness, life, death and relatable to anyone who has wandered around a strange city with very little money and become privy to all the ordinary alien miracles of empty urban spaces, the detritus of street markets, the odd beauty of trains at certain hours and the sanctuary of museums that both reflect and heighten the ordinary world. I loved seeing paintings fill an entire movie screen–scenes from Brueghel, beheaded Medusas,  ancient statues with sheared off noses.

I started imagining a new kind of shark movie–not a documentary or a silly exploitation film, but an art movie with winter light, museums and coffee.  Maybe a story about two dedicated shark researchers who lived together like artists, each with their own particular obsession–one devoted to lantern sharks and the other only caring about charismatic “man eaters” and their love threatens to illuminate or devour them at different points in the film. But in my art house picture, the sharks wouldn’t exist as  convenient metaphors for human frailty, beauty or power.  They would exist as subjects in their own right, filling the screen, so we might contemplate their mystery and gravity, as we gaze upon the statues of Gods with missing heads or wings.

Day 53: 8/17/13: Ruminations on the Dive Manual

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The good news is Sharksavers has responded to initial inquiries from concerned activists confirming that they don’t have any plans to collaborate with OCEARCH. I have my letters at the ready just in case.

When I am paranoid about learning something, I tend to over study. I am reading my diving manual like some gripping but arcane novel, whose premise pulls me in but whose language is at times elusive and complex forcing me to backtrack. I tend to remember the morbid facts: that a tight-fitting dive hood can cause a person to faint, or the symptoms that indicate that my lungs have expanded beyond their human capacity.

My lessons start a week from today and my mind is a tumult of childish anxieties: Will I ever look as ecstatic as the toothy, neon-suited dive friends high-fiving each other on the cover of the book? What if my “buddy” hates me?

As I said in a previous post, what I like about diving is the emphasis on breathing–which is what I like about meditation. An activity that keeps me in the moment.  Many people have assured me that the initial anxiety of diving in the ocean for the first time is soon eclipsed by the beauty of the water, the kelp forests.

It’s extraordinary that I am even considering doing this. Kayaking in New Zealand several years ago freaked me out so much that my legs shook and banged inside their plastic prison and I could barely navigate the little lagoon. Everyone laughed at my shark paranoia, but the next morning the cover of the newspaper featured a picture of a giant fin following  a man in a kayak. The picture had been snapped just up the coast from where our group had leisurely paddled.

I loved the ocean as a kid back in the 70s, even in the shadow of “Jaws,” but my paranoia grew as my shark dreams increased. Yet now I see those dreams in a different light–as assertions of kinship, not foreshadowings of my grisly demise.

(BTW: That last sentence would make a bittersweet and ironic addition to my obituary or any news article following my untimely death by shark attack).

Day 52 8/16/13: Strange Bedfellows

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Inner Turmoil, Jaws | Leave a comment

Today’s action: Write to Sharksavers Board of Directors

OCEARCH at work

OCEARCH at work

Ugh. It’s so upsetting to me that Sharksavers (the charity I chose for the JAWS benefit), is supporting OCEARCH, an ultra-shady shark “research” outfit that uses brutal hook and haul methods to tag great whites often inflicting severe damage to the animals in the process. Their mission is suspect, (are they glorified fishermen or actual researchers?) their methods are barbaric and unfortunately they appear  sceince-y enough to be media darlings.

To learn more about OCEARCH’S macho “science” read this. 

(Thanks to Sarah Mucha & the Stop Ocearch FB group for the sample letters!)

Day 46: 8/10/13: “Life is a Great Surprise”

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The title is a quote from the great Vladimir Nabokov. I always think of Nabokov’s words when I have a particularly lovely experience. Today I went on a hike led by my friend Dan, an intrepid urban explorer. These hikes are always a surprise, as Dan has mapped so many forgotten and unseen places—odd urban pathways between hotels, a gorgeous park that smells of mountain sage hidden in the middle of a desolate nameless neighborhood between downtown L.A. and Echo Park. Exploring the unknown heightens the beauty of the familiar city places:  the gorgeous Victorians of Angelino Heights, the lotuses and lilies of the reborn Echo Park Lake.

I met so many bright, interesting people on the hike–professors of Latin and Math, a fellow English instructor and a guy who told me about rescuing a small blue shark from a reactionary mob of Santa Monica bathers during the height of “Jaws” mania/paranoia. Even though the poor shark was only about three-foot long, the hysterical swimmers and even the lifeguards were ready to beat the creature to death when it beached itself until this kind man set the shark free again in the ocean.

This anecdote is a nice transition to the benefit–using “Jaws” as a tool to save sharks rather than argument for their destruction. In Elysian Park, Dan introduced me to the hikers and I gave a brief little spiel about the JAWS benefit for Sharksavers.

Talking about my shark project, I always try to balance the humor with the dire truth about shark extinction, which is sort of tricky. While I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news,  we tend to forget that we are  living through a mass extinction event. As  Derrick Jensen once wrote, “there is no roll call on the nightly news” for the 200 plants and animals that disappear from this planet every day.

But this entry was about joy. Surprise.

I usually write about “forgetting” in the context of human denial and selective memory. But I’m just as guilty of picking and choosing.

It’s easy to remember the angry mob on the beach and forget the solitary guy who saved the little shark.

Day 44: 08/08/13: Cranky Quint & The Horror of Gill Nets

by in Activism, Animal Welfare, Environment, Jaws, Marine Conservation, Pop Culture and tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Here is a rather candid remembrance of Robert Shaw from Jeffrey Vorhees, who played “the doomed Alex Kintner” (a.k.a. boy on the raft) in “Jaws”:

“Everyone filming it here was really nice, except for one guy, the old drunk, Robert Shaw. He ignored the island kids. They would have baseball games and cookouts for all the extras and kids on the island—-all the actors would show up, except for Shaw. He wanted nothing to do  with “The Island People,” as he called us. As a little kid, I would go over and talk to him, “Hi! How are you today?” He would just glare and say, “Just go away.” He was always drunk, just a mess….”   From “Just When You Thought it Was Safe: A Jaws Companion.”

Hopefully a small donation I made to ban gill nets made the ocean a little safer for sharks. Here’s the deal:

Each year, California drift gillnets kill more than 3,500 thresher, mako, and blue sharks as they fish for swordfish. The bycatch rate of sharks – as well as ocean sunfish, marine mammals and sea turtles – in California’s drift gillnets is the highest of any fishery along the US Pacific Coast.