Flasz On Film

In March 2020, as countries were locking down and societies began experiencing the business end of social distancing policies, the movie which emerged as prophetic because it outlined the reality of what was happening in stunning detail was Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion.  

Well, almost.  

I do distinctly remember that even the extensive research undertaken by Scott Z. Burns and Steven Soderbergh in preparation for this film could not instruct them to predict that the first items to fly off the shelves would be rolls of toilet paper, or that people, bored out of their minds, would cause nationwide flour shortages as a result of taking up breadmaking as a hobby in an effort to beat the pandemic blues.  

However, the movie which emerged as a de facto pandemic meme, thanks to at least a handful of skilled essayists with a watchful eye, was Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. This iconic blockbuster that struck immense fear of the ocean into throngs of beachgoers in 1975 became the talk of the town in mainstream media thanks to the simple fact that it didn’t take much to see the shark as a symbol of a natural calamity visiting upon a peaceful seaside community, or that the human psychology depicted in the film reflected eerily the reality of pandemic politics. In fact, Boris Johnson, who was the Prime Minister of the UK at the time, seemed perfectly content with seeing mayor Vaughn as his personal hero, as he was fighting to keep the British society open against professional advice dispensed by literally everyone around him.  

Only after his own come-to-Jesus moment where he contracted the virus – presumably with no small help from his widely publicized disregard for social distancing policies and insisting on shaking hands with nurses and doctors – he was forced to recognize that the COVID virus in its wild type could be a truly scary invader for anyone older than fifty. But only for a while. In contrast to mayor Vaughn who learned his lesson eventually and admitted that his kids were on that beach too, Boris quickly forgot and became even more recalcitrant.  

But hey, we’re not here to reminisce about Boris Johnson or any other former leaders, who shall remain nameless, but who may have insisted that injecting bleach into your bloodstream could be a viable method of combating the virus, or if there is a thematic thread in Jaws one could connect this idea to.  

Now that the dust has settled and the pandemic has morphed into but a semi-distant memory – especially since it has become progressively more difficult to even spot a lateral flow test on your supermarket shelves and that toilet paper remains in ample supply – the time has come to recognize that Jaws may not have been a pandemic movie after all. What made the connection to the COVID experience was merely two-fold and it truly boils down to the theme of collective societal disbelief at the prospect of a seemingly invisible threat closing on the Amity community… and the character of mayor Vaughn, whose ardent boneheadedness reflected the intellectual acuity of our own political class in many respects. 

But that’s mostly it. These two thematic strands are responsible for this remarkable connection between a worldwide pandemic and what used to be thought of as a seminal animal attack horror. And I think it’s time we acknowledge the possibility that Jaws perhaps isn’t a pandemic movie, or that the connective tissue present within its thematic headspace is not necessarily unique to it in this regard. Or maybe it is more useful to expand on the definition of what “pandemic movie” actually means, specifically because in the wake of COVID, this phrase has become charged with additional emotional meanings and interpretations.  

What a pandemic movie is… is just a disaster movie. Not really rocket science, is it? A viral epidemic is just a natural disaster, a force majeure the characters have to grapple with, with little to no say on the matter of stopping the disaster in its tracks. Well, it is sometimes possible (see Deep Impact, or Armageddon) but what is truly de rigueur – as far as the genre template is concerned – is that whatever volcano, avalanche or an earthquake cannot be reasoned with or reasonably stopped. It can be only evaded or contained. What is also a part of the template is the element of frustration stemming from either the society at large who disbelieve the protagonist trying to warn them of the impending calamity, or from specific personalities, usually in positions of power and authority, who refuse to acknowledge the reality of what’s to come and who may also actively work against the collective interests of the group. Think about those people in The Towering Inferno who refuse to heed the architect’s warnings about the safety concerns regarding the electrical installation. Think about the general in Meteor who refuses to understand the threat of an actual hunk of rock hurtling towards Earth. Think the White House Chief of Staff in 2012 who thinks the world is definitely not coming to an end despite all calculations suggesting it will. Think that guy in Avalanche who built a hotel on the side of a mountain. Think… Mayor Vaughn in Jaws.  

I suppose two interesting observations can be made based on this connection that extends the parameters of “Jaws is a pandemic movie” to “Jaws is a disaster movie” and the first one is that it positions Spielberg’s movie perfectly as a lynchpin between two major Hollywood trends. After all, by mid-1970s the disaster movie craze had passed its apex with The Towering Inferno and Airport 1975 (together with Earthquake as well) earning a good chunk of the worldwide box office revenue. By 1975, the world had had enough and movies like The Hindenburg didn’t become anywhere near as successful as they could have been a few years earlier. Well, maybe the problematic nature of the narrative of The Hindenburg may have had something to do with its box office failure too; after all, the movie put the viewer in a rather awkward position of having to sympathize with a Nazi detective.  

Still, the late 70s saw the disaster genre move squarely into the realm of knock-off bandwagonery and yielded such movies as The Swarm, City on Fire (which is actually pretty amazing), or Avalanche and Meteor, while mainstream Hollywood figured out how to monetize The New Hollywood. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws became a key ingredient in this process as – following the rollout of The Godfather and The Exorcist, both of which adopted a progressively audacious release strategy – studio producers found out they could trust those New Hollywood mavericks with multimillion dollar investments that would generate astounding returns.  

Now, in pure genre terms, Jaws can be viewed as a one-of-a-kind lynchpin that transitioned Hollywood into embracing what we know as a summer blockbuster model and also moved the cultural fad of disaster movies towards animal attack movies, many of which came in the aftermath of the stunning success of Jaws (movies like Piranha, Grizzly, or Alligator) and even – if you squint (s-Quint! Ha!) – a proto-slasher that became a part of the runway for John Carpenter’s Halloween to use. Which is honestly fascinating because Jaws – depending on the angle you assume as a viewer/interpreter – is equally a disaster movie, an animal attack horror movie, a seafaring adventure and… a pandemic movie. Why not. But the point is that the label of Jaws being a pandemic film isn’t necessarily a groundbreaking observation if you understand the landscape in which this movie arose and that it came on the crest of at least five years of disaster films being in the cultural mainstream. Maybe that’s why it was so damn successful? Because it was after all a spiritual descendant of The Towering Inferno… 

Moreover, it may also be likely – and this is a possibility I shudder at the thought of – that it wasn’t so much that Jaws was a pandemic movie or that it reflected (four decades ahead of schedule) the reality of living under incompetent leadership through a natural disaster we cannot see or interact with much unless it bites us on the backside, but rather that the pandemic itself was a disaster movie re-enactment. Again, coming back to all those aforementioned examples of The Towering Inferno, Avalanche, Volcano, Dante’s Peak or Meteor, we’ve always treated those characterizations of pig-headed mayors, recalcitrant politicians and downright braindead military leaders as Hollywood cliches. As embellishments. As… fictitious figments of imagination courtesy of underpaid screenwriters on studio payroll. Little did we know that they were after all stunningly real. Too real. 

Is it because real people are just as predicable as their Hollywood depictions? Or is it because extreme circumstances tend to reduce us to the lowest common denominator and stupidity somehow prevails? Hard to tell. But it is nonetheless true that the COVID pandemic unveiled our collective leadership as clinically incapable of rubbing two brain cells together at the time when it was imperative for them to make decision which would serve the interest of our survival. Meanwhile, we heard about having to save the economy while sacrificing lives, eating bleach, nuking hurricanes (which is unrelated to the pandemic, but still eerily close to what you’d see in a Roger Corman-produced disaster movie about a hurricane) and pretending the threat was not there while the rich were getting richer. You just couldn’t make this stuff up.  

Point is, Jaws isn’t so much a pandemic movie, but the arrival of the pandemic may help to re-contextualize its importance (or add to it) because it is a de facto descendant of a disaster movie genre. And it also shows that despite our best intentions and efforts, the people we elect to lead us might not be much smarter than the average official in a Roland Emmerich movie, so – in the year of elections in many countries like the US, UK and others – make sure you cast your vote for people who won’t pretend the meteor is fake or that the shark isn’t a threat.