Family Ritual and JAWS
David Sims’ excellent coverage of the “40th
Year Legacy of Jaws” in The Atlantic
last week conjured memories of almost four decades of watching this movie with my Dad,
ironically before our annual family trip to the beach.
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| Roy Scheider as Chief Brody in Jaws |
Sims’ theory about why Jaws has become a legacy is that it’s simply a film about “three
men in a boat, chasing a shark,” in a situation that could happen anywhere and
to anyone, and that Spielberg’s “everyman a hero” theme works.
It doesn’t matter to me whether the movie, set in the Fourth of July, is
labeled a classic by critics, because (however odd it may seem to
others) it is a tradition that Dad and I share, and anchor to a special
childhood.
There’s this fragment of a memory: me, standing
in line with Dad, to see Jaws at the
Lee Theatre in Pennington Gap, where his dad would take him to the movies. Times were different when I was little;
helicopter parenting wasn’t the norm. Mom asked me if I was traumatized by
seeing it at such a young age. But I don’t recall a reaction, or feeling afraid.
Being on the street beside him, my little hand in his, having him all to myself…that is what my memory banked.
We began taking annual vacations to the sleepy
Sunset Beach, with its one-lane swinging bridge (until it became an artifact of
another time, replaced by a bigger bridge to accommodate larger crowds) around
the same time the movie came out. My dad rents a house for a week, and over the
years he has built friendships among the king fishers at the Sunset Beach pier.
Three decades later, he is still meeting them once or twice a year to fish
there.
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| Swinging Bridge, Sunset Beach, N.C. |
Occasionally they catch big fish, like sharks.
They caught several this year. Nothing as big as Jaws, though.
Once we settled in, we’d watch the movie. We
know every line in the script. And every time, it is just as terrifying, just
as funny, just as thrilling when Chief Brody- trapped on a sinking boat- takes
on the three-ton beast with an air tank and a rifle. There are no frills, no superhuman strength.
The father of two, who is most afraid of the water, uses what he has and makes
the best of it. He wins.
But there’s something more meaningful in that
tradition. Dad and I share a strong connection to history, to a love of the way things used to be. Last year, our oceanfront
rental sat next to the first house we rented at Sunset beach, sometime around
1977 or 1978. My cousin had a broken arm and had to wear a plastic bag on it
when she swam. There were saloon doors between two of the interior rooms. My
mom wore frosted hair like Farrah and Fonda; my dad had sideburns. And being at
the ocean was the most exciting part of the year besides Christmas. It meant
shark tooth necklaces and shell bracelets, trips to the Callahan’s in
Calabash-a place that is worth a visit for the sensory experience alone-fried fish,
hushpuppies and tea, finding sand dollars whole in low tide as the sun rose. It
meant walking trips to the Kindred Spirits mailbox on Bird Island, where people
leave their thoughts and prayers in a simple notebook. It was one of the first
houses built there: simple and small.
The house was empty that week, and I spent far
more time than I should have studying it from our screened front porch, just
remembering, the past settling over me as comfortably as the warmth of evening
sunlight. I wandered around its carport, and took pictures.
Megan Mayhew Bergman, in an Oxford American interview, describes
this feeling as being “drunk on nostalgia.” She said, “I love sensual bridges
to another time—my imagination can find its way in with song, scent, and taste.”
Jaws is one of those bridges for us. So is Sunset
Beach. And there are more places and rituals throughout the year that our
family returns to, in large part because of Dad.
My brother and I have teased Dad at times about
his love of tradition, of returning to the same places year after year. But the
truth is I'd be lost without his consistency, his dependability.
