The Shark
is really three different
mechanized sharks plus
footage of one real shark
filmed during a trip to Australia
for that specific purpose. The parts of JAWS
that frighten are the parts where you can’t see
the shark. They’re scary because
you can’t see the shark. They had to work around
a malfunctioning mechanical shark,
rewriting scenes so the shark’s presence
is suggested rather than manifest. Even
Spielberg was grateful, in retrospect,
for this forced restraint. Anyone
who has seen JAWS knows this
is not a movie that would be improved
by more screen time
for the mechanical shark.
I wish my mind would exercise
some restraint. I could do without
the daily, detailed visions in which
I and my loved ones suffer and die,
visions I experience as both
terrifyingly plausible and
shamefully self-centered, insulated
as I am in the world. My therapist
calls these intrusive thoughts,
and I wish they’d stay beneath
the surface. I did not sit down today
to read JAWS as a metaphor for the mind,
a better adapted one than mine,
in which the shark,
which is an understanding of death
and human fragility, doesn’t even
break the surface in most of the scenes,
yet here we are, now we’ve gotten it out of the way.
Some things can’t be helped.
My head’s playing duhn-duhn, duhn-duhn
most of the time. The source material shark attacks
belonged to New Jersey, not New England.
It’s Trenton Makes the World Takes except
in this case it’s New Jersey’s Atlantic beaches
in the summer of 1916, and four people
are dead in the water. This kind of thing
gets its teeth in us more
than the everyday horrors we’ve wrought:
the danger of being in or near the ocean dwarfed
by the danger of being in or near a car,
but we like to map our fears
onto something wild,
something other than our own.
Not me, my imagination’s terrifying
and full of plastic. But a shark
is a shark, and sharks
must eat. Now just imagine
what we can do to one another.
We don’t each have our own shark, no,
I’m not saying that, and anyway,
nowhere near enough sharks in the sea,
especially these days, but would you like,
at least, a tooth? To remind you of the size
of an animal that knows nothing
about you? After brushing his,
my love tells me he is reading a piece
in the LRB about ancient chores,
and I become excited for him to describe
what people long dead and not me
had to do each day to continue
being a person. No, not chores, he says,
shores. My excitement drains away. I already know
the water’s rising. A place my mother
sometimes took us as kids was
the state university’s natural
history museum, where I became a person
obsessed with certain details,
and where the atrium was full
of variously sized jaws
from sharks both extinct
and living-today. It took us
a long time to move on from that room
each time, and that is why, today,
I’m full of the fun fact that sharks
shed and regrow teeth the way we do hair.
That room, plus the creek bed
behind my best friend’s house
where we spent hours sieving grit
and filling jam jars with shark teeth
from the Miocene, when Florida
was underwater. It will be, again.
To make the real shark look
like their giant fake sharks,
the film crew used a smaller diving cage
in the Australia footage.
The real shark got tangled in the ropes,
so they wrote that into the scene,
had the shark dragging
the pulley to breaking,
so in one sense, a real shark,
living today, or at least
living in 1974, cowrote some of JAWS.
No, not like hair, actually: the teeth
come in rows, row after row unfurling
in the shark’s mouth, not single spies
but in battalions. Florida creek bed fossil haul
is a genre of internet video, I learned today,
watching some soft bros go sifting
in the creeks of central Florida.
They are better equipped
than my friend and I were
behind her house as eight-year-olds.
The young man filming his friends as they sieve
keeps trying to zoom in
on the teeth his companions hold up
in their wet palms,
but his phone won’t do close-ups
and these shots are blurry,
while their ankles, in the silty water
at the bottom of the frame,
are as sharp as the man’s youth. We can’t
see what we’re being shown—we can see
something else. A first viewing
of JAWS (I was, maybe,
seven or eight) set me to work at once,
primarily on that opening scene, sorting out where
she went wrong: was it drinking
on the beach, was it leaving the group,
was it being young and unworried?
I must have decided worry would
protect me. Or at least, worry
is where I live now.
The horizon of safety gleams
like a dollar on a fishhook
under American pool water,
but that baby is just some guy now,
who tried to sue Nirvana for the use
of his likeness: dismissed. Never mind.
The pool was where my older cousin
wanted us to go in the dark humidity after JAWS
was rewound and back in the box. Yes,
those grandparents had a pool, had moved
to a place with a pool to lure family
for visits, like the visit we were in the midst of
when I watched JAWS for the first time.
Later, that same grandmother
retreated into near-speech-
lessness and, when that same older cousin
and his wife were expecting their first child,
declared, oracle-like:
Boy, when they told her. Then, months later
when the ultrasound confirmed:
Good. Maybe she meant it’s dangerous to swim away
from the group while wearing
nothing. When I was very young I thought
that to be a marine biologist
tagging sharks with a harpoon
like in the documentary we had on VHS
would be the life for me,
but then in college I found myself
in a screening of JAWS for History of Film instead,
realizing, when people laughed,
that certain parts
were funny. Oh calamity of love, oh
fanged world. If there is anything to say
about this, it’s been said already,
so how do you like my catastrophe
hairdo? When you look at a great white shark
leaping from the water full speed—I mean
not in slo-mo like the nature shows—
what you see is a very big cartilaginous fish.
Many creatures are categorized by whether or not
they have bones, calcium that solidifies
into the shape an animal hangs on. The hardest part
of a shark is the teeth. That thing about blood
in the water, how many parts per million
a shark can smell, vulture of the sea, don’t tell me
a word like chum doesn’t
get you excited to go to Red Lobster,
the one by Regal Cinemas. Under the creek beds
of inland Florida, the teeth
of ancient sharks wait triangularly.
Listen, there are things you must act on
once you know. John Williams’s famous score begins
with a quote from Dvořák’s Ninth
before ascending into a cover
of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps,
famously premiered as a ballet in Paris, 1913,
where, rather than the supposed riot,
what it briefly incited was a local class war—
the boxes versus the bohemians, the former: rich
and scandalized by the stomping choreography,
the latter: eager to defend and claim
everything new detested by the former.
1913, the cusp of a red century,
Russians in Paris ruining the ballet,
fighting and yelling between the boxes
and the seats, both factions apparently pacified
and rapt by Part II.
You might quit reading now:
go listen to The Rite of Spring,
preferably a live recording that includes
the orchestra’s tuning up,
the oboe giving them their A,
the strings concur, the brass and winds hum to it,
everyone making A, tuning,
then the little flights of notes, flurries
of octaves and scales atop the droning tuning A
AAAAaaa aa Aa a Aaa aaaA
and then every instrument at once alighting
into that silent pause, kin
to the preparatory silence among
every group of musicians, which is the sound
of human possibility, the intake
of breath, before—careful,
we’re in the reeds now, or rather,
the woodwinds and brass—
the strangled bassoon solo announcing
spring’s ritual death just as Williams’s tuba will announce
the shark. In Paris, 1913,
art is becoming modern, and in Detroit,
Ford’s moving assembly line
is hauling us into a paved future of collisions
and individual responsibility,
still three years before the cluster
of shark attacks in the Atlantic will make a sensation
on the Jersey shore. In 1975,
Saigon is falling, Franco is dying, the USS Proteus
submarine is leaking radioactive coolant
into a harbor in Guam, and JAWS
is changing motion picture distribution in America,
becoming the first in a new category of movie
called blockbuster, later the name
of the store we visited monthly,
renting the same tapes over and over
in a kind of capitalist ritual. What do we do
while history is happening? In 1974,
while the Watergate prosecutions are ongoing
and the US is pulling out of Vietnam,
these guys are out on some boats
off the coast of New England waiting
for waves to subside enough
for the crew to stop being sick,
waiting for the shark to work,
waiting for those tourists on a sailboat to get out
of the shot, waiting for the North Atlantic
to resemble itself enough to film, and in this manner,
they are making JAWS.
In a way both JAWS and the story of the premiere
of The Rite of Spring
are about crowds of people
reacting to something they don’t
like. If you don’t know rays are also
cartilaginous fish, you haven’t been
a child obsessed with the stingray
touch tank at SeaWorld Orlando.
But the shark, though, the shark,
which is wild death, which is
above all, teeth. When they filmed
the three stars singing on the boat,
Show
me
the way
to go
home
I’m
tired
and
I want
to go
to bed,
the crew choked up, not because
they were moved but because it was true
that the production was
one hundred days over
schedule and everyone
wanted to go home. Is JAWS
a documentary? One copy of the boat was designed
to sink, of course.
What you might want to know here
about sandbars and tides is, I’m sorry to say,
beyond me. Those shark documentaries always include
tantalizing reports of sharks caught with all manner
of strange objects in their guts: a barrel of nails,
propellers, license plates. Surely these stories share a border
with Captain Hook’s crocodile ticking his own personal
memento mori. All our deaths,
of course, follow us around with varying degrees
of patience. I knew from high school that all art
was about sex and death, but it was only later
that I began to experience this as truth.
The poster image of JAWS, for instance:
Thanatos and Eros—why else
must the first victim be a young, naked
woman? Pull it up in your mind
or look at it now, that poster. Maybe this is why
the opening scene was such a splinter
in my kid brain before I had the language: is it possible
for a child to recognize a rape scene in disguise
as a shark attack? This is not the bad paper
I wrote in college but it might as well be. I find horror
too instructive; already I have a rolodex of terrors
in my mind’s eye. There is no terror in the bang, only
in the anticipation of it.
In Rear Window, a movie deeply suspicious
of marriage (that place where sex and death
so often coincide), we meet
Grace Kelly’s shadow
before we meet her character—
Jimmy Stewart’s face shrouded in looming threat,
though it is, remember,
the wife across the courtyard
whose husband has dismembered
her. The model sharks:
dress rehearsals of death. If you could see
the unfinished sides the camera hides,
they would take dominion everywhere.
The way, even at a distance, a single figure
walking through a frame organizes
our attention to what’s human,
or made. I have an app that shows me maps
of great white shark tracking data. I can see
their pinging paths from Florida
to Nova Scotia and back on their yearly circuits.
I have I-95 from Florida to the Northeast,
they have the Atlantic’s American coastal waters.
I am not a shark—wherever they are, that’s where they live.
Whereas I have said Sorry, I don’t live here
many times. That theory that every movie
turns documentary for at least one moment—
I think this must be especially true
with movies from the era of practical effects.
We see the boat sink because the boat
was really sinking. (The old joke about the German ship
answering the SOS: What are you sinking
about?) I’m thinking about Grace Kelly’s shadow
in Rear Window. At SeaWorld, was I ever asked
how to get back to the hall of mammals? I’m sorry,
I don’t live here. After we watched JAWS with my cousin,
once we were back home in Florida,
it turned out a person could snap the legs
off a Playmobil figure and paint the hip sockets
with red watercolor so they could wash up
on the carpet-beach after the plastic shark attack
in the tile sea. I was possibly
too young to have seen JAWS. We are all too young to see
what we have seen, everyone alive too young
to watch state-sponsored murders via cop and air strike
on our screens. Notice how we have not
hauled ourselves here through descriptions
of any real human deaths. Even
the shark attack victims—briefly glossed.
But you must understand, violence
has been here in this poem the whole time,
and now that we’ve looked
at simulated violence we must look
at the real and say with and without art:
choke off its American
supply, make it stop at once.
The bassoon is tuning up.
Now go, forget the shark.
