Posted on 09/18/2020 3:28:04 PM PDT by Capt. Tom
The blockbuster film Jaws has been a perennial favorite here on Martha’s Vineyard since its release 45 years ago.
The epic 1975 feature film, shot on the Vineyard in iconic places like the picturesque fishing village of Menemsha, pits a fictional seaside tourist town called Amity against a villainous great white shark whose fearsome triangular teeth—300 of them—bite and kill unsuspecting townspeople and summer visitors enjoying the local Atlantic Ocean waters.
Jaws played recently at a COVID-safe drive-in theater here, allowing viewers to scream in the privacy of their own cars.
The movie took a deep dive into the psyche of audiences—and ocean swimmers—creating a larger-than-life fictional movie monster that evoked perpetual fear of the great white shark.
“The book and film exaggerated the white shark’s behavior. The white shark in the film was far larger than normal—about 25 feet—while the largest animals in the wild are typically 15 to 18 feet,” says Greg Skomal, a fisheries biologist and well-known shark expert with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries.
When Jaws came out, “relatively little was known about the white shark. We know a lot more now about white shark ecology, distribution and natural history,” says Skomal. Studies of the white shark species, Carcharodon carcharias, show its critical role in keeping the marine ecosystem in balance, exerting top-down forces on the food web that help hold other ocean species in check.
Nonetheless, when attacks do occur, they draw incredible publicity. In July, a wetsuit-wearing 63-year-old woman swimming in the chilly Gulf of Maine waters was killed by a great white shark—the first such death in Maine’s history. In September 2018, a 26-year-old man boogie boarding off Massachusetts’ Cape Cod was killed by a shark, the first shark attack fatality in the state since 1936.
(Excerpt) Read more at scientificamerican.com ...
There is nothing like an inane fear of sharks to channel our behavior.
How lucky do you feel, or are you afraid of flying also?-Tom
Crummy science is what Scientific American is all about these days - they should love ‘Jaws’. Not enough left-wing posturing?
Love the movie...just love it. I don’t really care that it is “bad science”...:)
The characters in it are wonderful. I watch it about once a year just for kicks, even when you now see how hokey the shark looks at the end of the movie.
If you put the choice to people “Would you rather be eaten by a giant shark, or fatally hit by a bolt of lightning?” most people would run to the nearest open field in a thunderstorm!
“Crummy science is what Scientific American is all about these days...”
it is. It’s horrible. Often it’s pseudoscience. And of course it’s filled with propaganda disguised as science.
This shark article is probably better than most of their crap.
Love sharks! Went on special scuba diving trip to see them. Spent two nights on Long Island, Bahamas. They had shark night dives and feeding frenzy dives. Not fond of night dives but the feeding frenzy dives were fantastic.
LOL. Crummy science. Like undetectable matter and energy that just “have to be there, though we can’t find it?”
We watch movies to be entertained, not to learn the ultimate secrets of the universe. Which scientists don’t have, anyhow.
Oh yes they had some left wing posturing in the full article, but since I had to excerpt the article , I passed over it, sparing the Freepers some typical left wing talking points. - Tom
In the novel, Amity was on Long Island, not in New England.
Can’t wait for their review of Godzilla, Mothra and King Kong.
And we do appreciate it!
Let me guess...
LOL, and I didn't even read the article...:)
It’s quite common to have a fear of open ocean swimming, whether irrational or not.
I do it, but I get freaked out every once in a while.
I saw Jaws when I was 6, totally scared the shit out of me.
Only The Shining was worse for me as a kid.
JAWS was filmed on Marthas Vineyard. -Tom
I vividly remember seeing that movie with my father as a 12-year-old. The crowd outside the theater was enormous and my father fought his way to the ticket booth, dragging me with him. It was a PG-13 movie at the time and anybody younger had to have an adult with them. People who couldn’t get in waited the 2 hours outside for the next showing. It was insane, the box office that movie did that summer.
Scared me, and I was 26 in 1976. Roomie flung a box of popcorn up in the air when Ben Gardner’s head popped out of the boat hull.
Peter Benchley said before he died that as a matter of conscience, knowing what he learned about sharks since he wrote his novel, he could not have written that book again.
“In the novel, Amity was on Long Island, not in New England.”
And Brody’s wife was a slut............
If it was the first run it could not have been a PG-13. Jaws came out in 1975 and the first PG-13 rating was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984.
You hit on some of the talking points just right.
When I was doing a lot of shark fishing charters, Dalhousie Univ. in Canada was pushing the 90% of shark have been wiped out theory.
We would catch and release on rod and reel 30 big blue sharks in a day .
I would wonder what it would have been like, if 9 times as many sharks were around the boat. -Tom
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