This year Jaws turns 45 and I think it's become an allegory for modern life in the United States.

Jaws turns 45 this year, and I thought I'd bring up things that the story profoundly illustrates. They are unchanging and enduring with regard to the way humans treat each other.

The corrupt money-grubbing Mayor (Larry Vaughn) is every Republican in Congress, and he's President Trump in a nutshell. "Let's open the beach...we can still save July 4th!" "It's the economy that's important!" The parallels between Covid 19 endangering and killing people seems remarkably similar to the shark swimming around eating people. Another one of his quotes that I love is, "Martin, It's all psychological. You yell 'barracuda,' everybody says, 'Huh? What?' You yell 'Shark,' and we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July." This is an acknowledgment of the power of gaslighting people, and it's happening every day with our current administration.

There's also the time when Sherriff Martin Brody says, "I can do anything, I'm the chief of police." It's a great line and clearly a joke. Martin's been drinking a lot, because he's incredibly frustrated and worried about his own family and the citizens who live on Amity Island. He feels the weight of his decisions and is troubled by the death of Alex Kintner, because he didn't have enough guts to close the beach. And he doesn't know if they actually caught the shark. When taken into 2020 context though, the quote takes on another level of meaning that they knew about even back then: that cops (when push comes to shove) basically feel like they are not accountable to anyone. To put it another way, society does not (often) visit consequences on law enforcement officers. It's as true in 1975 as it is in 2020 America.

Ignoring science experts--this was a thing in the movie and it's still a thing today. The mayor in the film prefers to use "cheap" solutions to try and get the shark. None of them work, but he gaslights everyone into believing that the beaches are safe. The science expert in the movie is named Hooper (played brilliantly by Richard Dreyfuss) and he knows that the shark is still out there. He even explains to the mayor very passionately that he pulled a tooth the size of a shot glass out of the bottom of Ben Gardner's fishing boat, but got spooked and dropped it. The mayor instantly seizes on this with, "So you don't have the tooth?" and then uses this lack of evidence to dismiss Hooper utterly and completely.

Jaws is a great story. But more than that, it has become (in the decades that followed its release), an allegory that reveals much about human behavior in modern America.

Is Jaws the only good shark story?

Is Jaws the only story that can have sharks in it that's any good? The original novel by Peter Benchley that took the world by storm in the seventies (yes that was forty years ago) was made into a movie by Steven Spielberg and to this day, the movie adaptation holds its own as a chilling tale. It has great actors, a riveting plot line, and a really evil shark.

I will never go into the ocean because of Jaws. I think I could go in a big boat or something, or I could reasonably get my toes wet, but anything more than a few inches...no thanks.

But, as much as Jaws terrified me, I kind of wanted more. Not more of that same story. But a different story that was just as good.

And it has never happened.

This week, "out on dvd" gives us the latest in just really awful shark films called "Bait 3D" and as I watched the trailer, I realized that yes, Jaws by Peter Benchley is the only good shark story that there will ever be.

This looks unbelievably cheesy.

Here's the synopsis for it: When a freak tsunami hits a sleepy beach town, a group of survivors find themselves trapped inside a submerged supermarket. As they try to escape to safety, they soon discover that there is a predator among them more deadly than the threat of drowning -- vicious great white sharks lurking in the water, hungry for fresh meat. As the bloodthirsty sharks begin to pick the survivors off one by one, they must work together to find a way out without being eaten alive.

It sounds undeniably bad. So don't you think it's strange that Jaws is the only good story?

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I mean it would be like saying, "Is the only wizard school story that will be any good the one penned by J.K. Rowling?" Which we know is wrong, right? I mean, we have Lev Grossman's "The Magicians" and other similar takes.

I wonder what the limitations are about sharks? Maybe they are just too one dimensional. But aren't zombies one dimensional...yet there are a number of good zombie films. Sharks are like zombies, only in water. They swim and they eat and that's all that they do. So, really there are only so many plot lines one could use to get A) people in the water and B) to show sharks eating them.

Any thoughts on why we keep getting terrible shark movies?

I leave you with this cheesy clip from Bait 3D.

Have a great weekend :)