Growing up, I enjoyed "To Kill a Mockingbird," and I dreamed of living in some version of Harper Lee's community (without the racism). Lee--an obvious talent--transformed her own memories of childhood into a kind of picture gallery. All the denizens of the town presented themselves on various sunporches. The mean old lady addicted to opioids, the upright lawyer, the quirky gay kid, the "scandal" family. In the novel, little Scout learns about human behavior by studying her neighbors. By observing what is said and what is *not* said. My own hometown had characters. One mom would not allow her kids to play "Sega Genesis" because the brand name seemed to include a veiled allusion to the serpent in the Bible. A lonely old man distributed candies--maybe because of a warm heart, maybe because of certain unsavory wishes. A widow--a former soldier's wife--comforted herself by staring at her tricorn flag. She would ask me to march around with it while the...
Recently, I saw an ineffective movie called "Pressure," in which Dwight Eisenhower tries to predict how the weather might impact the Normandy invasion. The weather is not a great "big bad"--that's because you can't fight the weather. You just wait to see if it does what it seems to want to do. By contrast, "Jaws" is a masterpiece. You *can* fight a shark. The movie is structurally unusual. We begin with a town in its entirety. The mayor doesn't want to concede that a celebrity shark is dangerous--shutting down the beach would mean losing profit-making opportunities. (In this way, "Jaws" seems to be an ancestor of the buzzy series "Widow's Bay.") Meanwhile, local kids cause chaos by "becoming" the shark; they purchase fake fins and hide underwater. (Spielberg seems to be offering a self-portrait here; we perceive the director's empathy, his sense of a connection with his own childhood.) But here is what I m...