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ACF #29: Jaws
The podcast’s going back to the ’70s for a couple of stories about crazy heroes and crazy times in America–it seems the right season for this sort of trip down memory lane. The first is Jaws, one of the original blockbusters back in 1975. It was an $8-million movie that grossed some $260 million in America and nearly half a billion dollars worldwide (that’s before you adjust for inflation, then you’re talking real money), won three Oscars and was also nominated for Best Picture. It made Spielberg’s reputation. (The Academy, guaranteed to do stupid things, gave the award to the Ken Kesey story One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.)
But of course, there’s a catch. We talk about the movie in relation to 
Tocqueville’s teaching on the New England township! Instead of deliberation, we get failures of deliberation; a community too good for evil. We talk about the men in terms of the Western, the strange community they form among themselves and how they relate to America’s past and future.
Toqueville is fine, but I hope you talk about whether Robert Shaw was sober in any scene.
Jaws was great and has aged well, but I think Cuckoos Nest was brilliant.
Give the podcast a listen–we might persuade you to reverse ranking…
Robert Shaw knew his Tocqueville.
The spectacle of a town where deliberation has collapsed into commercial spirit & individualism drove him to drink, as it would any of us…
Well, that and being on the USS Indianapolis.
I didn’t see Jaws when it was released but did see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and thought it was great. Saw it a few years ago again and found it unwatchable. Jaws is much better.
The theater in Fargo that showed “Jaws” was on the outskirts of town, and we’d had some bad flooding. The first few rows of the theater were still underwater when I saw the movie. Couldn’t have been a better setting.
“Cuckoo’s Nest” is brilliant indeed, but popularized the whole idea that the mentally ill are just different, and really, in a way, more sane than people on the outside of the asylum! I mean, why put a free spirit like McMurtry into the bin unless he’s a threat to your uptight Eisenhower values?
That’s precisely why I found it unwatchable on a more recent viewing. It was one of the many threads that helped create homelessness and rob families of the ability to help their loved ones. It turns out Nurse Ratched was the hero of the movie.
Yeah, that’s Ken Kesey alright.
So, aside from the flood, did people love the stuff? The theater go crazy?
Liberals had done the crazy stuff in the law already.
Nobody has much minded since.
It’s one of the parts of American freedom where you see, one downtown at a time, that there’s a lot of abandonment of civic responsibility. Courts humiliated the politicians who had passed laws for interning the mad & everyone’s just living that way now…
The mayor (Murray Hamilton) is an archetype that has become a staple of thriller/disaster/monster movies, many of which feature a figure obsessed with commerce who is in total denial over the threat that the audience sees. “Why we haven’t had an earthquake/flood/tornado here in over a century–don’t go spreading that stuff around Dr. Know-it-all.” When you hear that, you know it’s gonna be bad.
Yeah. But it’s still true.
Happens with every boom cycle.
& when corporations get their investments nationalized in strange countries & need some kind of bailout.
I don’t think the failure to act on the part of the town is all that uncommon, or indicative of any change from past history. Whenever the peaceful complacency of a society is upended by outside forces, those forces tend to stomp all over that society for a good long while before any effective resistance shows up. Not particularly American in that way.
Just an add on here. I highly recommend downloading this podcast from ITunes not only for its content, but also the highly debonair picture of Titus that accompanies it. His pic above looks a bit more like working class Titus, but the other picture is red-carpet worthy.
That’s very kind of you. There, folks, go on iTunes–review us!
Go for the podcasts, stay for the photoshoots.
If we become famous, you’ll know it by the photoshoots…
In a sense, I agree with you. Complacency is the universal tendency of the many.
But this being an American story, we make the most of the American details. Not all peoples work the same way. The combination of commercial spirit & individualism is the source of much of what goes on today.
Like Jaws all you want, but some serious credibility gets lost by dissing Cuckoo’s Nest.
You guys are missing a tremendous amount of the message(s) if you’re just seeing raw politics or believing the movie was responsible for some programs that had negative consequences.
Reagan, as I recall, was the guy who was behind changing those laws, and there were good reasons. There’s negative consequences either way to allowing the state to declare someone insane and put them away in a mental institutions. The Soviets did that, and with how our country is going these days it would definitely be abused. My God people, wake up!
Very dissapointed in the shallow thinking here and the outright ignorance regarding the real message(s) inside Cuckoos Nest.
Calm down, guy. No, the movie isn’t responsible for the laws, which had come first.
The novel itself was published in ’62. It may have had some influence, but surely, that’s not why things changed.
Yes, what the state did to people interned was awful. Yes, the new situation is also awful.
No, I dunno if it gets better.
If you want to make a case for the movie or the novel, this is your chance.
Titus,
I’m referring to comments. Haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but you are definitely starting off on the wrong foot saying the Academy guaranteed to do stupid things, gave best picture to Cuckoos Nest. Are you kidding me???? Yes they do stupid things. That wasn’t one of them. Not even close.
Yes I know when the book came out. I read it. And I saw the off broadway play.
But I guess I look for more interesting messages in films than others. The message in Jaws is pretty one-dimensional. Good movie though!
I’m not a big fan of the movie because I see it primarily as a counterculture attack on “uptight” authority and, as such, very much a product of its time. But, in its favor, it appears that different people get different things from it, which is usually a worthy sign.
Well, the counterculture of which I am a product in many ways, had a lot of great aspects and points. Authority is now leftism generally and conservatives are ( or should be) the rebels. People like Ken Kesey would probably be hard on our side vs these authoritarian leftists if he was around today. One of the more prescient themes in the story is the oppression of masculinity. Another is how people can be so easily gaslighted by authority, drugged and intimidated. Another is the philosophical question of what constitutes reality, and of course, sanity. The film by no means claims there aren’t ‘insane’ people mental hospitals. Furthermore the mental hospitals in those days were quite primitive and outdated. I mean, they were using electroshock therapy and performing lobotomies.
My wife is deep in that profession and I assure you there are still many charlatans around.
The movie did miss several key themes the book brought out, there was just too much there and some things are impossible to translate between genres. Kelsey hated the film because they twisted the end of the story.
A note on production quality. When I played the podcast on a Bluetooth speaker, I found the conversation to be uneven in volume. For awhile I would turn the volume up when Titus would speak and then turn it down when his partner would speak (the system has a remote control).
That got tiresome. I finally gave up, and mostly listened to a mostly one sided conversation with Titus occasionally apparently placing his mouth a little closer to the microphone.
I didn’t make it all the way through.
Perhaps buying a headset where the mic is consistently the same distance from his mouth.
Thanks for letting me know. I’ll try to figure out something with better controls.
Reagan had nothing to do with changing those laws. Liberals liked to blame him for it but the changes, mostly proposed by liberals, had mostly occurred by then.
Great podcast and discussion of Jaws – well done @titustechera! I agreed with your analysis of the film and found it fascinating. One of my biggest memories of my first viewing of Jaws (back when it was first released) was the scene where Richard Dreyfus is suddenly trapped by the ropes that are wound around the two cleats on the back of the boat, and are in turn secured to the barrels that are meant to prevent the hooked shark from diving deep. As he struggles to free his legs, I suddenly realized that I – sitting in my theater seat – was trying to move my legs in unison with Dreyfus and free them from the (non-existent) rope that I suddenly felt was binding them. Talk about experiencing the realism of the movie!
Yup. It still retains the power to scare–you get a sense that you’re not in control of what’s happening & react along with the characters.
Early Spielberg was a practical psychologist of quite some ability!
Thanks for the kind words.
As always: We depend on you to spread the word about the podcast, share it on social media, give it reviews on iTunes…
Here’s the NYT, in ’84, mostly blaming freeing patients on cost-cutting politicians & overly optimistic psychiatrists.
I’m not entirely persuaded.
But I do believe them when they show that the massive fall from ~40k to ~22k patients in Cali happened before Reagan. Things continued, but I see no evidence to blame him.