Jaws and its charades
It's a book, a film, and a reality. It was about Covid, and now it's about everything.
First published on 27 January 2021
Jaws is a 1975 film directed by Steven Spielberg about a shark, played by Murray Hamilton. The biggest set of jaws in the film belongs to a great white that lives in the Gulf of Mexico. The most important set of jaws in the film belong to Mr Hamilton. He plays a supporting role as a city official – the mayor – in the small, fictional seaside resort of Amity, and the book by Peter Benchley, and the film by Mr Spielberg, are all about him. The great white is just background décor.
I hear people say they can’t wait to return to normality. Some say it’ll be in six months; some say a year; some say it’ll never return. Not the way we knew it. I used to act, quite a lot in fact. I played supporting roles and lead roles in great Shakespearean plays like Coriolanus, Twelfth Night, King Lear, King Henry IV, King Henry VI, As You Like It, Kit Marlowe’s Faust, Robert Bolt’s A Man For All Seasons, Pieter De Buysser’s De Lokvogel, Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men, Tim Firth’s Calendar Girls, and others besides. I loved theatre because it fosters a sense of community and togetherness whilst engaging the participants in building towards a goal, perfecting a craft, sharing a common experience; but that togetherness involves us in being and acting in close proximity to one another, and that is why theatres are closed, for it’s not just the audience that is “packed in”; in amateur theatre, especially, it is very much the actors who are “packed in” as well. As we sweltered in the tin shack that is the Petit Varia theatre in Brussels, playing out the miscreances of Prince Hal and his confrontations with his father, Henry IV, and as audiences dwindled at half time simply because of the searing evening temperatures of 25° and more (more like 35° in the auditorium) and we hopped around backstage bumping into each other as we wriggled in and out of armour, tabards and beautiful vodka-sprayed costumes (to reduce the body stench) and the audience out front fanned themselves with their programmes or paper plates or just anything they could get their hands on, what germs were floating around in the atmosphere? Who remembers being off sick in the weeks afterwards? Nobody, probably, because we didn’t think seriously about such things back then. [Do we now?]
In my time, I’ve been packed in in many a situation, as have we all, bar the super-rich in their cloisonéed Rolls-Royces: on the Paris tube, in squad coaches playing away games of rugby and cricket; in lifts to the top of London’s old Post Office Tower, Chicago’s Sears Tower and New York’s erstwhile World Trade Center. In cars full of smelly schoolboys (my father remarked once after giving a lift to mates one Saturday how the car “smelled of boys” afterwards). I’ve been to Ibrox and Hampden Park and Murrayfield and stood on terraces with thousands of others watching fantastic games of football and rugby (at the Park, as a Rangers fan under the additional burden of being at the end of the stadium chosen by my Aberdeen-supporting companion). I’ve sat in examination halls, which offered some degree of separation, if only to prevent cadging answers off nearby O-level students. I’ve sat in crowded Paris cafés and at humungous wedding banquets, piled through sweaty nightclubs and pubs desperately trying to catch a barman’s eye for a refill of the round. And, at less professional rugby games, I’ve shoved my shoulder against the arses of boys smaller than me as we endeavoured to scrummage an odd-shaped ball back to our number eight for a phase-two rugby play.
So, are these the normalities that I yearn to return to? “Don’t come near me, I’ve got a cold” was a common enough admonition in those times. But, when you’ve got a Wednesday afternoon practice or fixture, you could be pretty certain that you’d either get a detention or at least be whisked off the squad if you told Bairstow or Windle or whoever it was “I can’t play today because I’ve got a cold”. And you’d have been labelled “wimp” by your teammates, actually the very fellows who you’re trying to protect from your germs by running the touchline. Because, back then, we were all inoculated against measles and mumps and polio and a cold portended nothing more serious than a few days in bed with a thermometer up your backside. Tonsilitis? Had them out. Heart attack – 16-year-old boys don’t get heart attacks (though I know of one 18-year-old who did). The common cold held no greater danger than a paper cut whilst dishing out exam papers. No one, but no one thought for a second that there could be a great white in the depths beneath us.
“I just found out, that a girl got killed here last week, and you knew it! You knew there was a shark out there! You knew it was dangerous! But you let people go swimming anyway? You knew all those things! But still my boy is dead now. And there's nothing you can do about it. My boy is dead. I wanted you to know that,” says Mrs Kintner to Roy Scheider as Brody after burying what remained of her son in Amity. “I'm sorry, Martin. She's wrong,” says Hamilton as mayor to the chief of police. Scheider replies, “No, she’s not.” It’s that three-word phrase, “no, she’s not”, that makes this film all about Murray Hamilton’s character, Vaughn, and not Martin Brody, Amity’s chief of police.
By now we all know there’s a great white out there and in some ways, the threat is getting even bigger as time elapses. When we all crowded into tubes, and buses and cafés and theatres before, we knew about the flu and colds and even measles, but no one dwelt for a second on those hazards as we “packed ourselves in”. But when our governments sound the “all clear”, when we emerge from our bunkers and breath fresh air again after a night cooped up on the platform of our underground station, when we view the smoke and destruction of the blitz raid and when we count our dead, how many of us will be launching ourselves back into the “normality” of the status quo ante bellum? Will we, like Chief Brody, listen to the far-distant voice that tells us “You know it’s dangerous”? Or will we be acceding to the reassurances of Mayor Vaughn: “They’re wrong, Martin, they’re wrong”?
As long as this generation – these generations – are extant on this planet, I really don’t think that things will ever quite be the same again. Not till dangers of the deep are long forgotten and as long as they remain forgotten – for the time being.
[The normality we eventually tried to return to saw 8 million Ukrainians flee their country in a hail of hypersonic missiles. What will tomorrow’s normality bring?]