Jaws: Sexual Awakening and Obsession
By Debra Mitchell
Stop playin’ with yourself, Hooper. Slow ahead, if you please.
— Sam Quint from Jaws, 1975
I was 13 years old — just the right age to fall in love for the first time — and I fell hard for Jaws. I saw it a dozen times in the summer of 1975. It was the first film I obsessed over, that I couldn’t wait to see again and again. It was the movie that made me love the experience of being in love with a movie.
Most of my viewings were at the Village Eight, a second-run multiplex by my house where you could buy a ticket for a dollar on Thursdays. The theaters were shoeboxes with faux space-age seats, a location straight out of Stranger Things where a raggedy reel of COMING ATTRACTIONS swirled across the screen in psychedelic colors to cheesy music introducing the same preview that was shown every time I saw Jaws. It was Diana Ross in Mahogany. Her plaintive, “Do you know where you’re going to/do you like the things that life is showing you/where are you going to/do you know?” served as foreplay, teasing me, preparing me for the seduction I knew would take place next.
The prints were bad. The sound sucked. But I loved it.
Sometimes I was one of only three or four people in the theater. All the better. This was my secret love affair. A film I wanted to see alone.
The opening scenes are drenched in twilight blues. A bonfire crackles on a beach. I’m at a party that would be forbidden to me — excited to indulge in a new kind of glamour: drunken skinny dipping in the ocean with a college boy. Night falling, sensual pleasure, danger, deep waters, and beautiful darkness. The woman’s naked breasts onscreen shocked me. I had just started wearing a training bra, and watching the elegant silhouette of this young woman swimming I suddenly felt more grown up. She embodied what I was becoming — made more tangible and visceral than the stodgy, sanitized films about puberty I had to watch in school. Something else that grabbed me about the scene: the undercurrent was weird and scary, just like my changing body was weird and scary.
John Williams’ infamous Jaws theme swells, and the woman is sucked under the water by the shark’s mouth. She’s gasping for breath, in shock, screaming, trying desperately to get away, but she can’t. I doubt that I made any conscious connection between this scene and my own fears about growing up, having sex, and feeling adult pain and childhood being devoured, but I know these things were activated deep in my psyche.
I loved the sun-faded look of the film. After the night of terror, the setting turns ominously sunny and deceptively comfortable: Amity Island, a New England beach town in high summer. It’s a postcard image of a classic family vacation that reminded me of the water-color paintings in my favorite picture book, Robert McCloskey’s Time of Wonder. Or more intimately of Cox’s Lake, the magical pool my family belonged to during the time I was obsessed with Jaws. The film and this central location of my childhood have intertwined in my memory.
Cox’s Lake was a quarry that had been reconfigured as a lake with a sandy beach. It was outside the city, down a rural route lined with wildflowers and sheltered by drooping branches of old trees. My brother and I would throw on our bathing suits and pile into the blistering interior of the family station wagon. The car had no a/c, and the backs of our legs stuck to the vinyl seats. We rolled the windows all the way down so a hot wind blew across our faces while we listened to the Beach Boys on WAKY-AM, known to us kids as “wacky radio,” on the way to the pool, our paradise.
The far end of the lake was called the Deep because there was no place where a child’s toes could touch the bottom. The nearly black water smelled sharply of chlorine. The Deep was surrounded by cliffs and tall pines. I remember the shushing wind in their branches when I’d venture out by myself, swimming on my back so I could follow the movement of the sky: towering black and white cumulus clouds like scoops of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. I’d crouch in the water, all the way down to eye level, and survey the surface of the pool: bodies floating on inflatable rafts, feet dragging in the water, inner tubes bobbing, and random airborne beach balls.
Time shifted at Cox’s Lake. A day could disappear in a single splash or it could linger for a century, the sun hanging in the same place like a Chinese lantern at a party. The best days started early in the morning and ended when the pool closed. My father came to meet us after work, sporting his baggy checkered swimming trunks, a terry cloth jacket, and his ridiculously long Seventies sideburns.
The summer that Jaws came out, my dad would swim out to the Deep with my brother and me and act like he was being eaten by a shark, gurgling and gasping. For the grand finale he’d dive underwater and stick his hand out so it looked like a floating, dismembered limb.
Cox’s Lake was my Amity Island. I felt strangely at home in the world of Jaws, and my character identification shifted to police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider). I immediately understood his phobia of the water. It conjured up traumatic swimming lessons when I was little, being forced to stay underwater too long. I couldn’t hold my breath anymore; I thought I would die. Brody was the part of me that expected the worst and failed at preventing it. His frantic effort to herd people out of the water during the second shark attack was more terrifying to me than watching the unsuspecting kicking feet of the boy who gets eaten.
But the biggest way that Jaws hooked me and the experience I’ll never forget came from Richard Dreyfuss’ performance as shark scientist Matt Hooper. I loved him at first sight — in his scruffy beard, silver-wireless-hexagon glasses, knit cap, weathered denim coat, and beat-up duffle bag. He was not cool, sexy, or macho. At least not in the conventional cinematic terms. But he was funny, smart, and a dweeb like me. Matt Hooper was my first big movie crush, my first real crush of any kind.
In junior high, I was in the “advanced program” — a place where kids, who were already at a vulnerable age learned to cut each other down and destroy each other in academic competition. In Jaws I watched Hooper being bullied and berated by Sam Quint (Robert Shaw) — the QUINT-essential over-the-top alpha male. But Hooper didn’t back down. He wise-cracked. He flashed that sly little grin that caused me to have exciting new physical sensations. And he pushed for science and intellect over belligerent, narcissistic, closed-minded bullshit. Come to think of it, Hooper is a hero I can get behind today.
Matt Hooper was so real to me. I believed in him completely. He crossed into that special dimension of fictional characters who were more alive in my mind than most of the snotty, mean kids in my junior high. I imagined walking home from school with Hooper. We rode bikes to the library and had intense talks about oceanography. I wrote a play about the subject dedicated to him (Adventures in a Bathyscaphe). Oh God, it was the ultimate geeky intellectual romance for my 13-year-old self! I learned to play the “Theme from Jaws” in piano lessons. It was our song, and I banged out the music daily on the piano in my parent’s living room – infused with all the passion I felt for my one true love.
The scene that thrilled me the most in Jaws was the nighttime drinking conversation between the three men at sea searching for the monster shark. Brody, Quint, and Hooper share a rare moment of comradery as they pass the bottle around, get tipsy, and Quint and Hooper engage in a pissing match about who has the worst scars. Hooper scores points with his wit, baring his chest (which made me go all woozy) and lamenting, “You see that right there? That was Mary Ellen Moffit – she broke my heart.” I never got tired of this scene. It was like the perfect pop song that I wanted to play over and over again. I couldn’t get enough.
Under my breath, from my seat in the theater, I’d sing along with Hooper:
Show me the way to go home/I’m tired and I want to go to bed.
I had a little drink about an hour ago/And it went right to my head.
Wherever I may roam/On land or sea or foam,
You will always hear me singin’ this song/Show me the way to go home.
Part of the titillation was peering through another portal on the adult world. Something akin to listening to my parents playing Tripoli and drinking daiquiris with their adult friends after I was supposed to be asleep. I’d tip-toe to the stairs and strain to hear what they said to each other and what they laughed about, trying to pick up the enticing, low comments that I couldn’t quite catch.
And who was this Mary Ellen Moffit anyway? I was insanely jealous and enraged by the mere mention of this unseen person. How could she be so stupid? I thought. How could she not adore Hooper the way I did? If only he had loved me instead of Mary Ellen Moffit, I never would’ve broken his heart!
On first viewing, I believed Hooper was dead after the destruction of his underwater shark cage. I was devastated — kicked in the gut with grief. When it turned out he was alive, I cried and tried to hide it because I felt like such a weirdo. Jaws isn’t a crying sort of film. No one else was even sniffling.
Director Steven Spielberg on the set of Jaws which celebrated the 40th anniversary of its release on June 20 of this year.
I took anyone to see Jaws who would go with me. I really wanted to take Nancy Fox, another outcast girl from the advanced program. Nancy said she would go if I promised to warn her when something scary was about to happen. She told me to whisper, “Clutch!” so she could grab my arm until the pop-out-and-scare-you moment had passed.
Looking back, there was something else at work here. I wanted to give Nancy the gift that Jaws had given me. The love, adventure, excitement, access to a new world… It was Revenge of the Nerds before nerds were cool. The science geek and the aquaphobe triumph in the end. Recently I saw What She Said: The Art of Pauline Kael, a documentary about the New Yorker film critic. She got a note from Steven Spielberg congratulating her on being “the only one who understood Jaws.” I looked up her review and read:
The high point of the film's humor is in our seeing Shaw get it; this nut Ahab, with his hypermasculine basso-profundo speeches, stands in for all the men who have to show they're tougher than anybody. The shark's cavernous jaws demonstrate how little his toughness finally adds up to.
Kael went on to call Jaws a “primal-terror comedy”. I might call it a “midsummer night’s primal-terror sex comedy” — beautifully shot by cinematographer Bill Butler (The Conversation) and masterfully edited by Verna Fields (American Graffiti). I understood this subconsciously before I knew anything about filmmaking. I could feel it in the movie’s electric tensions, vivid characters, rhythmic cuts, mesmerizing score, and the storytelling currents that pulled me under and never let go.
This past Memorial Day, when all sane and conscientious people were staying off the beaches because of the coronavirus, I treated myself to Jaws and got gloriously sucked in all over again. The infinite variety of camera angles and movement aboard the constricted space of the shark-hunting Orca — (turns out they didn’t need a bigger boat) — dazzled and delighted me. I still swooned over Mr. Hooper and laughed at his jokes. It was like seeing an old boyfriend without any of the grief. Jesus H. Christ, as Quint would say, it was good to be with my old friends once more. I needed them. Not to survive adolescent angst, but to help me weather a global pandemic.
Jaws will always be about desire for me. It gave me the desire for my own brand of romance, for tasting adult pleasures, for savoring childhood’s last summer, and for seeing the next film with which I could fall in love.