Bound to the Past: Jaws

As a kid, I was really a huge fan of sharks.  Ridiculously so.  They were, after all, "nature's perfect killing machine", which was a quote said or written by everybody.  By the 4th grade, I had accumulated numerous books of the Scholastic variety, and watched every nature program on the subject that was available without the benefit of cable television.  My mom had added to my burgeoning interest by finding copies of Shark: Attacks on Man by George A Llano and Shark Attack by H. David Baldridge at rummage sales. I was, at a young age no less, becoming an oceanographer-level expert on the notorious carcharodon carcharias.

And needless to say, I had seen Jaws about 10 times by the time I was 9.  At that age, I had decided I wanted to take the leap and read Peter Benchley's novel that was the basis for Steven Spielberg's now famous popcorn extravaganza, and likely my favorite movie. In the same basement rec-room that I had stumbled across the book Strange Unsolved Mysteries, I had also found someone's ragged and dog-eared copy of Jaws, emblazoned with the "Now a Major Motion Picture" stamp that has become so famously applied to novels making the leap to the silver screen.

Benchley's book became the first "non-kid" book I ever read.  Sadly, it was nowhere near as exciting as Spielberg's filmed version, and contained a bit too much melodrama for a youngster geared up for blood-and-guts killer fish action.  Who needed all that marital intrigue?  Certainly not this 9 year-old.  Despite that, this was the moment that I fell in love with the concept of the novel.  I've been an avid reader ever since.  Eventually my sister bought me the novelization of Jaws 2 by Hank Searls for Christmas, and this young completionist was thrilled.  I had a mini-library of shark-related material to continually delve into, while that behavior drew shaking heads and rolled eyes from family members.

In the winter of 1979, another sister (see a trend developing here?) bought me Ideal's Jaws "board game" where you need to pluck junk from the great fish's mouth before its jaws clamp down on the plastic hook you use to accomplish this goal. To be honest, the box it comes in is much cooler than the game itself.

Not too much further past that moment in time, sharks lost much of their luster as explained here.  Nonetheless, The Great White Shark, through fiction and fantasy, had become an imagination-piquing device that I, to this day, occasionally still reference.  I've seen Jaws and Jaws 2 many more times since, passed their legendary stories on to my kids, (avoid numbers 3 and 4 at all costs, unless you dig unintended laughter) own a DVD copy of Blue Water, White Death, and have immersed myself in Steve Alten's hyper-speed Meg series with great relish.  Meg, to the uninitiated, is based on the Megaladon species, the prehistoric precursor to the Great White, said to be a 65 foot version of it's descendant.  You can imagine where the imagination can take that concept.  A filmed version of that classic is headed to the big screen this summer, 43 years after Jaws.

I don't know if I would have become the avid reader I am, the lover of suspense and sci-fi that I continue to be, the admirer of the great creatures that only mother nature can provide that I have always been, had it not been for Jaws.  I definitely wouldn't have turned out to be the Roy Scheider enthusiast that I am.  Speaking of which, check out The Seven-ups and Sorcerer today.  I mean it, buy them now.  These films are 70's masterworks.

And again, to a book, I'm grateful.

Say, if you're in the mood for my less-than-insightful look at one of the most blatant rip-offs of Jaws ever made, there's this.

Critical Mass For The Envelope

Since the dawn of music, movies, and film,  people have been trying to get to the extreme edge of expression.  

Society itself usually provides the method of reigning it in, whether it be mild watchfulness or censorship, it doesn’t matter. The outside layers get pushed further and further out over time.

I think we may have reached critical mass.

Maybe I’m talking about the door that was opened by punk in the 70’s and the metal and grind core blacksmiths that wandered through it that have brought us to the brink with black metal. 

Perhaps I mean the dark corners probed by cyberpunk and splatter authors that exacerbated and maybe even blasphemed the pathways laid by Stephen King?

Of course there’s the awful rough edges of film created by filmmakers I won’t mention by name here.  Their stuff is not the material of mass marketing, but I know who they are and what they’ve done and cannot understand them.  It seems as though they want to drag the awful into the light so you can stare at it like Malcolm McDowell at the end of “A Clockwork Orange”, while they grin at the hideousness they have wrought.

What is the purpose of the exposed flesh these musicians, writers, and filmmakers have birthed?

It’s possible to flash the dark angles of the soul to express your anger, your pain, your frustration.  Those pieces of night, when bared, are definitely supposed to let folks know that there’s a layer to you that they should be sad for, feel the anger associated with, perhaps even be wary of. 

Those moments that the author, the creator, allows to flicker, do indeed shock because they are of themselves and by nature limited. It’s painful because its unsustainable. The expression of sadness, anger, sorrow, yes, even hatred can be beautiful when its measured. When you prolong it, it becomes something else. 

It becomes ugly. 

It becomes cruel.

It becomes Evil.

The raw, ripping music of The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Misfits.  The words of Stephen King, Jack Ketchum, and Joe R. Lansdale.  The filmed brush strokes of John Carpenter, Wes Craven, George A. Romero.  These were the extremities of my youth, my roots, where I came from.  These were the hard edges that kept me up at night….

Yes, there are numerous moments in all of their accomplishments that are disturbing, disgusting, and painful to behold.  Those moments are surrounded by great beauty however, even if its just in the way the works are constructed or machined.  When the darkness comes, it tears at your heart, makes you leap, perhaps even reel back on your heels in shock.  The reason for that effect is because they are layered among the existence of other possibilities, and therein lies the art, shining is the beauty. 

I do love how I’ve seen all of these creators of legend being a direct influence on many artists today, so perhaps the apocalypse is not near.  That being said, I also see an outpouring of music that is 100% shock value, with vocals that sound like someone belching into a drive-thru speaker, writers that only merely sprinkle plot among the bloodshed, filmmakers that seek only to exploit the very base vile actions that humanity can perpetrate.  Like Stephen King himself said about one of his own short stories, they have "no redeeming social value".

Yes, it is a sort of critical mass.  Due to the pure monstrous id of what these folks have created, the others with a story to tell, a song to sing, a visual painting to create, can no longer be seen as “the edge”.  It's because the envelope the true artists pushed has been set alight by those who want to only disgust.  The edge hasn’t been pushed, it’s been leapt over, screaming and flailing, without a parachute.

It’s a shame, really.  I’m one of the lucky ones, having done enough research to know where those that dwell in the dark have displayed their work and choose to avoid it.  The world is dark enough on its own. Especially in these awful, multi-level monstrous days.  The true shocks, the startling moments of the soul, are best experienced when what exists around them actually provides them the strength and meaning they possess. 

I choose to take my darkness where it actually accomplishes what it’s supposed to. 

In the light.

And sometimes, in well designed darkness, the light has power too.