Land Jaws

There are many well-worn and overused Jaws quotes (some of which I’ve grown to despise), but the one I love, and always turn over in my head, is when Brody, on the subject of Amity Island, tells Hooper that “it’s only an island if you look at it from the water”. I don’t know what it means, but I know it means something.

It’s that quote in particular that came to mind when I recently watched Land Jaws — that is to say, Tremors. It’s a movie that helped define my childhood, and re-watching the film only strengthened my memories of Tremors as one of the best monster movies of all time: a witty script, genuinely unsettling monsters, and a plot that stretches that childhood “the whole floor is lava” game into an entire film and makes it work, dammit.

In fact, I think that Tremors is the embodiment of that quote from Jaws, a monster movie about being stranded on an island in which no one is able to “look at it from the water”. The water has become a desert, and the monsters are adapting to it better than the humans.

Jaws is one of the most prototypical pieces of pop culture of all time. Before everything was Die Hard on a BLANK, there was Jaws, but with BLANK (even Spielberg’s earlier movie Duel has been retroactively deemed Jaws, but with a truck). This is not to say that Jaws itself was a particularly original premise. In many ways it’s boilerplate horror. But it was Spielberg’s skill, and the serendipitous timing of the film’s release in the midst of the New Hollywood and a restructuring of theatrical distribution methods, that made it an icon. Jaws set the tone for decades of cinema much more than Star Wars; this seemingly unassuming shark movie secretly underlies the more conscious parts of the cinematic brain.

It’s the cinematic equivalent of something that lurks underneath the surface, going unnoticed, that only reveals itself at unexpected, splashy moments. I can’t think of an actual thing that’s like that, but the point is clear nonetheless.

Even more than any other film, Jaws is a cinematic ur-event, a kind of psychic trauma that lasts to this day. No matter what film you’re watching, no matter what non-film thing you’re doing, there’s always the threat of Bruce the shark popping out of the water. Somehow psychoanalytic film theory has failed to account for this particular primal scene. I’m not in that school but I think Jaws is a film that haunts our collective consciousness. It’s a film about the development of our lives, our bodies, our minds. Somehow, Jaws is everything, to me at least. Jaws is the infinite, and in the words of Harvey Keitel in Mean Streets, “you don’t fuck around with the infinite.”

Tremors is an obvious antecedent of Jaws, but then, so is everything else.