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 mean by structurally unusual. The town fades away. This story is about Roy Scheider. One guy--Scheider--must take on his arch-nemesis. He must move from reluctance (in the form of a plea for "a bigger boat") to pragmatic risk-taking. Even Scheider's frenemies disappear; Robert Shaw is eaten and swallowed, Richard Dreyfuss is trapped (mysteriously) underwater. The final moments--involving a scuba tank and a rifle--count as "pure cinema." These are images that would make Alfred Hitchcock proud.
I only wish that the creators of "Pressure" had spent more time with the Steven Spielberg syllabus.
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