Jaws - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Watches a Classic for the First Time

Jaws was a cultural phenomena, and I must be one of the few surviving members of my generation who had not seen it.  Apparently it arrived in theaters after a new kind of blitz advertising where the airwaves were saturated the weekend of its release - it didn't matter what kind of viewing or listening you did, you heard about Jaws.  That weekend I happened to be camping in the woods or on some type of unplugged vacation, so not only did I not see the movie, I didn't really get it as a cultural phenomenon.  So my kids determined that my cultural literacy was in peril and insisted that movie night this week should revolve around Jaws.

And it is a cultural piece.  Released in the summer of 1975, it is clear from this vantage point that it was a post Vietnam protest coming-of-age movie for baby boomers.  As they (we) were transitioning from anti war protest and the kind of free love that reliable birth control supported to becoming parents and taking over responsibility for a system of authority that we had been not just opposed to and frequently disdainful of, we needed models of authority that we could identify with.

Enter Roy Schneider as the chief of police of the small island summer resort island of Amity.  He has retreated there with his family, feeling that he can have an impact in a community of a more reasonable size than New York; a nice hippie, back-to-the land sentiment.   And in the person of a cop, no less, just to underscore the authority aspect.   But a cop with a problem - he has chosen to live on an island but is scared of the water.  He is immediately confronted with ethical dilemmas as the shyster mayor insists that the beaches stay open even though a shark has eaten a skinny dipping hippie chic (The not so subliminal message: "OK, boomer kids, its time to grow up and distance yourself from skinny dipping, it'll kill ya!").  Schneider buckles to pressure and doesn't close the beaches and, even though he tries to protect his kids by keeping them in an inlet, he is responsible for the death of a kid and imperiling his own.  This being in charge is complicated stuff.

Enter Richard Dreyfuss as the whiz kid marine biologist, a privileged scientist with his own super modern yacht decked out for shark hunting.  Together he and the police chief clarify that there is a killer shark out there.  Then for obscure reasons that clarify that we have entered the world of allegory, they hire on with the local grizzled shark hunter, played by Robert Shaw. He represents the World War II generation who accomplished so much, but who seem crusty, bitter and ready to give orders.  These three get on Shaw's whaler and head out to get the Great White Shark, who might as well be named Moby Dick.  When Shaw bashes the radio so that we can't call in the coast guard, we know that we are locked into that allegory and that these three men will have to figure out how to defeat this monster - the source of the anxiety about whether life as we know it, filled with commerce and fun, can continue, or whether it (and we) will be destroyed.

The old man (Shaw) turns out to be drawn to shark hunting because he, like the Dreyfuss character, had an earlier traumatic interaction with sharks; in his case because, after he delivered the bomb that would end the war, his ship was sunk and he and three hundred others had to survive a shark attack - something that only about a third of them did.   So he has devoted his life to rectifying this horror, mastering it by killing, over and over, the threatening ones - seeking vengeance, but also mastery over his own sense of very real vulnerability.  His scars are the most harrowing, but all three are scarred, Dreyfuss from his early experiences, and Schneider in ways that are only hinted at.  He, as the hero, bears whatever scars each of us bring to the interaction - made visible in his fear of water, something that he must master on this trip.

This film feels very much like a Hitchcock film.  The framing of the film, but also the sense of "suspense" (verging on terror) is reminiscent of Hitchcock's work.  Hitchcock's father was friends with the local constable - and his father had the young Hitchcock locked up for some minor infraction.  Hitchcock is said to have stated that he wanted to engender in his viewers the feeling of terror that he experienced in the slammer, when he didn't know whether his parents would ever come to get him.  For Spielberg, whose direction of Jaws gives it the feel of a Hitchcock film, the original anxiety that he works to portray and then to manage is the fear that he experienced in the wake of his parent's divorce.  That fear, at least as portrayed here, feels to me like a fear of making one's way as an adult in a world without adequate models - having to figure out how to deal with whatever it is that is trying to bash in the sides of the boat - whatever it is that is threatening to drown you, and, in solving the problem without adequate direction, to use whatever it is that you have at hand to achieve a resolution, now matter how chaotic that means things become.

In the movie, Shaw throws everything but the kitchen sink at the monster, but it is still coming back for more, so he turns to the college kid - Dreyfuss - who enters into hand to hand combat, only to lose his weapon when he is caught by surprise, and, after being pummeled, is forced to hide and wait out the ultimate battle.  It is Schneider, clinging to a sinking ship who, after the shark consumes Shaw (in so far as Shaw is a father figure, what better Oedipal victory can there be than to have him eaten by his nemesis whom you are fighting?), who must confront him with the weapons available to him.  What does he use?  The very things that have almost destroyed him as he has naively tripped around the boat, almost causing them to explode.  Now he uses them to cause the shark to explode, and, at least for me, there is some sense of loss that this great warrior, this great adversary, this thing that Shaw wanted to take to the taxidermist as the trophy of all trophies, is destroyed.  I guess we get attached to the things we fear.

So this movie becomes a rallying point for a generation seeking to manage the fear that authority is corrupt, that it cannot be trusted (Watergate is in the immediate rear view mirror, and it is just the final fatal blow that follows My Lai, the bombing of Cambodia, but also the failures of the antiwar movement).  We are in danger of becoming paralyzed by our fears, or of being drawn into the water because this is, after all, why we have come to the Island, despite the risks.  The movie suggests that we can ally ourselves with those who have come before us, despite their apparent shortcomings, and despite, or maybe because of their scars, we can compare ours and join with them, and then use all that has come before: the hard won wisdom from the school of hard knocks; the fruits of modern technology; and our own, new version of Yankee ingenuity that integrates the new wonders, and we discover that we can step into the breech and perform, protecting ourselves and the world more generally from whatever it is that is knocking down the walls.  Despite the failings of the previous generation, despite their self interest to the detriment of the common good, and despite our fear that we can't do it - that we can't make it across the water - we can.

So, if this movie is an allegory or a dream, it is one that is reassuring because it takes our most primal fears and masters them.  We beat the monster.  My daughter told the story of her high school teacher, who stated that he was afraid to walk across the puddles to get to his car after seeing the film in the theater.  If so, I think he missed the point.  Yes, it is scary that there is stuff out there - could be in the nearest puddle - but Spielberg is telling us (and apparently enacted in the making of the film - the special effects sharks did not act as planned, so he increased the intensity of the experience by referring to the shark only obliquely) that we can handle whatever it is that life will throw at us.  We are capable.  Of course, the only way to get at that is to mobilize our most intense fears.  Doing that and resolving them in only two hours is quite a trick.  Perhaps it is easier to take the high ground watching the film 25+ years after its release.  I can see not just how the movie, but how the cultural moment will play out.  We will take the wheel, and we will navigate some treacherous waters, but will make progress.  If you ask me what will be coming in the next twenty five years, I will not be quite so sanguine and might find a similar, contemporary film more disturbing - not just because the effects would be superior - but because the feelings that would be stirred would be more contemporary.

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Richard Ford's Canada - The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Learns How to Get Away with Murder

This book is about how to get away with murder - or three of them actually.  One is accidental, but two are not.  In one sense, I'm not giving anything away - the murders are mentioned in the second sentence of the book.  That said, they are mentioned in what I believe to be an intentionally misleading, and therefore clarifying way.  Thus a spoiler alert: the rest of this essay will necessarily interfere with a first reading of the book.

The book is told from the point of view of Dell Parsons, a 15 year old fraternal twin of Berner.   They are the children of Bev and Neeva.  This nuclear family is accidental.  Bev is handsome, blond, and Alabaman.  Neeva is small, Jewish, and the child of immigrants.  They hooked up in a night of passion that created their children and thus, unintentionally, their family.  They became an itinerant Air Force family, reliant on each other as they disdained the military culture and never got connected with the civilian culture because of their constant moves.  I think the unintentional creation of a family that must be self reliant, and one that does not have the resources to sustain the nuclear functioning of that family, is the real crime that is at the heart of the book.  The action, such as there is, revolves around two other crimes both referenced in the first two lines of the book:   "First I'll tell you about the robbery our parents committed.  Then about the murders, which occurred later."

The first two hundred pages of the book is about the robbery, the second two hundred is about the murders, and the final 25 pages are about the rest of Dell's life.  I believe that the robbery and the murder are mirror images of each other - the second is a reworking of the first - a reworking with a "happy" ending - Dell, who is "saved" by his mother's scheme, participates in the second crime, and creates a life that is unremarkable, but stable and consistent; a life that has a better trajectory than Berner's; she who is condemned to a life of four marriages, drug abuse, and barely being able to hang on.  The first crime leads to broader tragedy; the incarcerations of Bev and Neeva, her suicide, and Dell and Berner's being cast to the wind.  The protagonists of the second crime get away with murder without apparent consequence.

The first two lines suggest a book of action, but this book only qualifies as an action novel if you find watching paint dry riveting.  It is about the internal life of Dell, a kid whose mother sees him as being most distinctive in his ability, we learn very late in the book, to engage in "reverse thinking."  This skill, poorly directly defined directly by the author, is perhaps best exemplified by the telling of the book.  The twins throughout the book - Dell and Berne; the US, where the robbery takes place, and Canada, where the murders occur; Bev, who bungles the robbery, and Arthur Remlinger, the American in Canada Dell is shipped to, who gets away with murder (I bet you, like I, if you haven't read the book, thought Bev and Neeva, or maybe Dell, committed the murders); the two police officers who follow and arrest Bev, and the retired cops who suspect Arthur of the first murder, follow him, but are murdered and disposed of by him; etc.

I think the central twinning - the central "reverse thinking" - is the difference in the way that the current time crime is committed in each of the stories.  In the first, Bev considers taking Dell as his accomplice.  He has a well thought out plan, one that involves stealing a car from a ranch house that is currently unoccupied - with a vehicle with the keys in it in front of it, and using this vehicle as the get away car - returning to pick up the Chevy Bel Air that is the family vehicle - from the ranch, and then driving back across the border to the family home in Montana.  Dell is appalled when he learns that this was his father's plan, but also wistful about the possibilities, especially compared to the clear failure of the alternate plan, where his mother drives the family Bel Air as the get away car - a car that stands our in the pickup truck plains states world almost as much as she, a jewish immigrant, does - ultimately being part of what leads to their demise.

Arthur Remlinger is an enigmatic figure.  He is the person that Dell has been entrusted to in a sketchy plot that his mother hatched to keep Dell out of the orphan's home.  So, Arthur, his putative stepfather, emerges as a man who wrote anti union tracts while working for Chrysler at a job that compensated him well enough (thanks to the Unions) to attend Harvard, something that fell apart when he lost his job by arguing with the Union steward  (This mirrors Dell's retirement from the Air Force in part in relation to a sleazy scheme to sell stolen beef to the commissary).  Arthur responds to this setback by bombing what was to have been an empty union hall on the part of the anti union group he is connected to, unintentionally murdering the union official who had gone back to get a forgotten document.  On the lam, he, like Dell, lands in a business of marginal repute, but unlike Dell, he is successful.  Remlinger keeps the books at a sketchy hotel that services laborers, including their needs for bed, bath, and prostitutes, and the seasonal goose hunters who come up from the States.  He keeps the books so well, and scrupulously sends the profits to the owner so that, when the owner dies, the owner wills the hotel to Remlinger, who is able to finance his expensive tastes in clothing and to support himself and his girlfriend, an attractive artist who has had children in a previous marriage, but whose only "child" in this relationship is Dell, whom she looks out for after his arrival.

Dell mucks out the rooms in the hotel and lives in a shack near Remlinger's creepy lackey who sometimes shows up wearing make-up and guides the hunters to the geese.  Dell observes Arthur from afar and their relationship only begins to become real as the police detectives, following the cold trail of the union hall murder twenty years later, begin to bear down on Arthur.  Arthur (like Bev before him) takes Dell for long rides in the country.  He uses him as a wingman, including in the fateful encounter with the ex-cops.

The cops, thinly masquerading as goose hunters, are now barracked in Dell's old shack, after he has moved into a garret in the hotel.  Remlinger pretends - in a pretense that no one seems to buy - that Dell is his son, which of course, he is in this through the looking glass world I believe him to be in.  He is dismissed from the room before the shooting begins, but witnesses it from Remlinger's car and participates in the clean up, being most grossed out not by the blood, but by disposing of the toupee of one of the cops.

And somehow, and this remains a bit of a mystery to me, this second version, this revision, this reworking of the crime, has a better outcome.  The murderer gets away.  Dell is sent to Remlinger's girlfriend's brother's home, where he will be educated, something he has craved throughout the book.  He is cared for and, despite being necessarily derailed by the events - by the bank robbery, by the loss of his family, by witnessing the murders and the disposal of the bodies, and by being relocated again to another family - he is able to achieve something of the stability that he has craved and to have a life, while not worthy of the attention that the two crimes receive, suits him well enough - certainly better than her sister's fate serves her.

I do not understand all that is being portrayed here.  Part of what is delicious about this book, besides the quality of the writing, is that it unfolds in ways that are satisfying precisely because they are messy and intricate and, perhaps, unfathomable.  It seems to me that this is a meditation on guilt and reparation.  I think that Ford may be encouraging us to consider the implications of our decisions to have children.  We are guilty from the moment we conceive, because we are responsible for the most important part of the lives of our children - their childhood.  I think that Bev was guilty not so much for stealing meat, or for robbing a bank, but for not including Dell in his hijinks; for not recognizing that Dell was an essential part of his own life, which was necessarily and integrally linked with Dell and Berner's lives.  To put it slightly differently, Ford may be writing a morality play not as a diatribe against all that Dell stands for and, through that, a condemnation of intermittent and distant parenting, which Remlinger represents; but rather he may be imploring fathers, disconnected though they may be, not to disconnect from their children, nor to underestimate the capacities of their children to appreciate the complexities of life, especially when they are engaged in their own most difficult and even heinous tasks.  If the child is engaged, Ford may be telling us, there will be consequences, but they will leave the child with a sense of being responsible for their own destiny rather than feeling that he or she has been left to the whims of chance. Knowing, quite literally, as Dell does, where the bodies are buried, and who did it, allows a child to develop with a sense of agency.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.     For a subject based index, link here.

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