Me: I was in the hospital changing room the other day, and I overheard some staff I didn’t know talking about being irrationally terrified of sharks.
They seemed a bit younger than me, but I thought I could guess what they blamed it on from what I overheard of their discussion. It was due to a movie they’d seen at a young and impressionable age. “Was it Jaws?” I asked…and it was.
I would have been around eleven when I first saw it at the movies. I was petrified, and it scarred me for life. I’d always loved the sea – my extended family had a crappy old bach in Northland, complete with long drop that we had to redig every year – and we tended to spend all our summers around the sea. After seeing Jaws, though, I was anxious about sharks every time I got in the water. And I’m talking any water – Lake Taupo, or swimming pools at night – even though I knew it made no sense. At first I assumed it was my own personal failing that I felt this way, but then I started noticing other people of my generation being equally odd around water. I well remember my cousin’s wife refusing to even put her foot in the estuary near the bach.
It took me years to gradually get over my fears, and I swore that I wouldn’t ever let any children of mine see the film until they were much older than I had been.
An offspring’s response:
A bigger boat
Before I’d ever watched Jaws, or even heard of it, my mum had written it off as a terrifying film that single-handedly prevented her enjoyment of the sea. To be fair, it’s hard to enjoy a beach trip when you’re at least 80% sure there’s a 5 foot long “Bruce” ready to tear your limbs off. Any dark shadow in the water becomes a great white shark, ready to turn a normal day into a bloodbath. Yet for some inexplicable reason people born upwards of 20 years post-film seem immune to any of these “side effects”. Speaking as an aforementioned youngling, the only thing we took away from Jaws was respect for the film industry’s improvements in special effects over those 20+ years – nothing even close to the fear assailing our predecessors everytime they stepped foot in the ocean. In fact, most of our viewing was accompanied by constant giggling at the almost ridiculously fake looking shark – that was supposed to be making us cower in our seats. Although the animatronic shark and cheesy lines might not have aged particularly well, it’s still a solidly enjoyable film – albeit for slightly different reasons now. My sister fondly remembers the movie, as she couldn’t stop laughing the whole time. Something about the poorly aged animatronics made the film more of a comedy than a horror, and although maybe it’s not quite what Steven Speilburg intended, the film still lives on. Bruce the shark is surely proud he both instills fear and a good chuckle in 2021.
