Remaster Jaws... and other thoughts

I wrote previously about my love of Jaws. I saw it when I was 3-years-old in the theater with my family. I was both terrified and captivated, and I can't thank Steven Spielberg, Carl Gottlieb, John Williams, and Peter Benchley enough for the book and film which gave me a lifelong love of the ocean. Though, dizzam, I'm a Pisces so I might have been born with that! Just kidding, that stuff's bullshit.

I don't consider Jaws a horror film anymore. I consider it an old school Man vs. Nature adventure. Sure there is something going on with the size of that shark and its intelligence, and I've had discussions with friends who claim the shark is demonic or a mutant. Those are fun conversations, and Jaws lends itself to that because it's a beautiful movie that takes you from the overcrowded Amity Island to the sparse minimalism of just three guys on a boat.

My favorite fake fan theory that I like to try to convince people to believe is that Pipit, the friendly black lab that is considered the shark's second victim, is actually the villain of the movie. You never see Pipit and the shark in the same shot do you? It has to make sense.

Part of the reason Jaws works is that famously, the mechanical shark they made for the film, Bruce, never worked. This caused Spielberg to use a less is more approach so when the shark pops up and bares its, uh, jaws, it's truly a spectacular and terrifying moment. They were going to need a bigger boat. And then, 51 year old spoiler alert, the horrifying moment when the shark breaches the stern of the boat pulling the Orca under the water causing Quint to slide right into the shark's mouth.

I lived on an Air Force Base when I was little and it had one twin cinema. For every big event movie that came out while I was living there, the lines for the film would wrap around the theater multiple times. People weren't making it in to see Jaws at the end of the day. Or Star Wars, or believe it or not Star Trek: The Motion Picture. There were toys, games, lunchboxes, and then a whole industry that built up around copycat movies. I remember seeing a movie called Great White in theaters that was such a carbon copy of Jaws that Universal sued and had it removed from theaters.

I say this as a person who loves Jaws: they should remaster it and replace the mechanical shark with CGI, and it is no longer my favorite movie anymore.

I don't say this lightly, but Spielberg should go full George Lucas with a special edition Jaws. Fix the shooting star. Fix the phosphorescence on the barrels. Fix the shark. It would still be the same movie, but that old mechanical shark just looks creaky as hell nowadays. Believe me, I know it has a certain charm. But I think that charm is glued together with nostalgia. Jaws, like Star Wars after it, and then numerous other "event" films during that era were monumental. There was nothing like it, and if you didn't live during that time, you can't know. Unlike, Lucas's Star Wars Special Editions though, the original Jaws should always be available.

So I know and recognize nostalgia, and as a topic for another day, Gen Xers have made a fucking mess of it. There are things I am nostalgic about, but they really aren't the popular things that have become oversaturated in our collective memories. Give me The Last Starfighter or The Legend of Billie Jean, which are both flawed films that still inspire in me a great deal of affection.

But we're past the 50 year anniversary of Jaws, and I would love to see Spielberg revisit this masterpiece with some of the amazing technology he used for Jurassic Park to make the shark look real. It's not even in that many scenes. The second unit work where Ron and Valerie Taylor filmed real sharks doesn't have to be touched. I realize no one wants this but me, but because of my love for sharks, I would love to see jaws with a sleek, realistic bruiser of a shark that didn't resemble the old Universal Ride shark at all. It was great for its time, but put a real looking fish in that damn movie.

Next, why is Jaws not my #1 favorite movie anymore? Because I saw John Huston's Moby Dick.

I am a tremendous fan of Melville, and I was excited to see the movie until our teacher, the beloved Mrs. Caskey, explained stock footage of real whaling was used in the movie, and I noped out. It has always really bothered me to see real animals slaughtered on film. There are numerous documentaries I can't get through because of the brutality of man on animals. But also, I'm a big horror buff, but have never made it through Cannibal Holocaust. Just nope. Sometimes it can be totally fictional and it still bums me out. I was at the gym one day in Wilton Manors, which is the gayest, most bearish city in the United States, and they were playing Finding Nemo on one of their TV screens. I saw that little fin Nemo had and had to run out of the gym because I was about to cry like a wee baby.

But after a much too long delay, I finally watched Moby Dick for the first time, and I had no idea how good it is. Not just spectacular performances but the cinematography by Oswald Morris is truly awe inspiring. As I watch, though, I realized I had seen this before. It was Jaws. In fact Moby Dick's fingerprints are all over Jaws from the texture of the ropes and sets to the way the light glints off the water at sunset. Even Moby Dick's script by Ray Bradbury and John Huston has a naturalistic cadence to it that wasn't common in 1956. It's an amazing movie, and Jaws, with good reason, borrows from it liberally.

No, I don't love Jaws any less, but I no longer see it as this amazingly original movie anymore. I'll still watch it every 4th of July. I will still hum every musical cue when they hit. I will still annoy my husband by basically quoting every line as they say them when we watch, but I just don't see it with the same young eyes anymore now that I've seen how much of the visual language from Moby Dick inspired Spielberg.

Now. HATE ON ME.