A Love Letter To JAWS (1975)

Amity is a summer town, we need summer dollars.

A film of S-U-S-P-E-N-S-E!

A film of F-E-A-R!

My FAVORITE film.

JAWS.

A film filled with the perils of capitalism.

A torrid affair between the talons of tourism and a public safety crisis. 

A summer season of beach leisure INTERRUPTED by a…

Great -- White -- SHARK. 

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The recipe for my perfect film. Why?

• It’s a story about my home.

• It opens with a young man reporting a missing woman to the local police. She must have drowned. He’s vacationing on the island. He’s from Greenwich, Connecticut.

• He went to Trinity. In a strange twist of fate, I would end up attending that college. 

• I learned to swim in the waters where JAWS was born. 

• I watched the movie as a young tadpole, jumping into the cold Atlantic the very next day. 

• Great White sharks are common where I am from. 

• We have an app called SHARKTIVITY. We track sharks when they pass radars around our Cape of good fear.

• Sharks with names like FRUIT LOOPS. They still inspire fear, even when frosted in cereal sugar. 

• A lesson in masochism, I have gone Great White shark cage diving.

• The heart of all this: I am from a summer beach town.

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Art imitates life, but in turn -- life has been transformed by this art. 

My neighbors, my peers, me.

A tinge of that fear still runs up our spines whenever we dip our toes in our familiar ocean. 

The filming location for JAWS -- Martha’s Vineyard -- among all its monikers, is still Jaws Island.

A fictional story of tourism and sharks has created a tangible space for tourism and sharks. Art imitates life, life imitates art, art imitates life, life imitates art. Over and over and over. 

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This leads us to a universal question: “What’s the cost of closing the beaches?”

For the mayor of Amity Island, the cost was a few lives.

“Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars.”

We are still grappling with these questions today. Summer dollars are still crucial to summer towns on the East Coast and beyond.

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Remember the pandemic? Do we keep our businesses open at the potential cost of life? What is the meaning of livelihood? Is it about keeping the lights on or keeping your life? Money has stuck us all between rocks and hard places. 

Lahaina burns down. Do tourists stay away from Maui, so locals can heal and rebuild? Yes. Yet, a large portion of Hawaii’s economy is wrapped up in tourism dollars. How do we navigate these kinds of situations? These future realities.

In the case of JAWS, four people died. They got caught in the crosshairs of municipal decisions, questions of cultural heritage, and economic livelihood.

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Where I am from is DARK in the winter months. Cape Cod is a hotbed of the opioid crisis. Seasonal beach towns turn a corner in the cold. Populations decrease astronomically with the departure of summer vacationers. Tourists are the ones who buy the $40 lobster rolls. The ones who pay for the ferries and the beach parking. The ones who fill the ice cream cones and the tip jars, hopefully. An entire year of business is packed into three months. Closing the beaches means closing a summer town’s minutia. 

Locals wait for summer, too. They don’t just wait for the dollars. We wait for that endless summer like everyone else. We wait inside quiet, brash, freezing, and violent winters for the sun. Closing the beaches means eliminating this seasonal recharge that seemingly makes all of that cold worth it. Lack of transparency is the ultimate fault of Amity’s mayor. Intentionally ignoring and hiding public safety information is what’s wrong. The reality behind that choice is complicated, though. For all these reasons mentioned prior. 

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Tourism has talons and these talons dig into communities in unflinching ways. Therefore, these places are complicated. Tourism touches most parts of the planet, but certain areas get more heat than others. This leaves locals stuck inside some twisted catch-22. What IS the cost of closing a beach? In the case of JAWS, the cost is four lives and 24 hours of income lost. Local business owners scream in the town meeting, “24 hours! That’s like three weeks!” It’s an interesting predicament because this crux exists all over the world when a crisis strikes. Sure, JAWS is a masterpiece of fiction, but it tells the truth about my home.

I don’t have an answer to any of this, by the way.

I am from a summer town. I am always looking for a dorsal fin along the water’s surface. I respect sharks and all the ocean’s creatures. I also love clambakes and frolicking on the beach way past sunset. I don’t like pina coladas, or coolattas from Dunkin’, but I do love the dunes of the Cape. My heart skips a beat in equal sadness and fear when I think about beach closures -- so much of my heritage exists in the sand. I don’t want to become some amuse-bouche for a shark named FRUIT LOOPS, but I am certainly not going to sit inside when the breeze is salty and the sun is high. 

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I love JAWS for all these reasons. I grapple with this suspense to the tune of John Willams. Two notes and I shudder in anticipation. I am a complicated masochist to my core and that is why JAWS is my favorite film. The elements, fearful and forceful, are central to my heritage. Complicated feelings and temperatures, spaces that wash away and build back up with tides are reminders of my home. Like a gonzo tourist, I watch that movie over and over and I see the realities of my home, too.

So, as the summer draws to a close -- a moment of silence for another season lost to the sunset. For now, we coexist. Locals and tourists. Sharks and humans. Summer and winter seasons. Right answers and wrong.

Waiting. 

For the next metaphorical Great White.

A menace to society that will force us all to examine what we value most, once again.

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This is a love letter.

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