Shark Attack Obsession! by Johnny DiLoretto

I spend a lot of time thinking about sharks.

Let me rephrase. For a guy who lives in the middle of Ohio, doesn’t travel much, and never goes into the ocean, I spend a lot of time thinking about sharks.

Yes, it’s all because of Jaws, but, more than fear, Jaws inspired in me a lifelong fascination with sharks. Can’t get enough of ‘em. Love to learn about claspers and the ampullae of Lorenzini and all that.  Look those up and thank me later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clasper http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampullae_of_Lorenzini

Photos like this are hypnotizing. You know, you could be in there...

I should also clarify that in addition to thinking about sharks, I think a lot about being eaten by a shark. Now, the Washington Post just published an article about this and here are the latest numbers: “Last year, 80 unprovoked shark strikes took place worldwide: Seven resulted in deaths, including one in California. Fifty-three strikes took place in U.S. waters, nearly half of them off Florida.”

That’s more than enough to justify my anti-frolicking-in-the-surf stance. By the way, this is also a guy who loves to fish from the shore when we vacation in the Outer Banks. And while I’m safely fishing from the beach, I intently follow all the swimmers just waiting for one of them to do that horrible jerking thing right before they’re tugged under in a gush of froth and blood.  

I know I have a better chance of being felled by a wheat penny dropped from the Empire State Building than I do of being attacked by a shark, but I’m not interested in the numbers really. Shark attacks are inevitable. They are inevitable because people go into the ocean, and there are sharks in the ocean. If sharks were found in Crate and Barrel, people would be attacked while they were shopping for sofas and flatware.

So, a couple times a year I will see the inevitable news story about someone being bitten and/or killed by a shark. I then eagerly post the story on Facebook and Twitter with an added, and I’m paraphrasing, “I told you so.” Whenever I post these shark-attack stories, beach-lovers and saltwater-swimming enthusiasts everywhere comment to the effect that I’m an idiot; that these attacks are so rare I have nothing to worry about; that more people die in car accidents every year than they do by shark attacks, and so on and so forth.

But this is the reasoning of people who, if they were fictional, would end up dead first in a horror movie.

Yes, it's Photoshopped, but you get the idea. It could happen to you..

First of all, their argument doesn’t hold up. Let me see if I have this right: More people are killed by cars than sharks, so why aren’t I afraid of cars? That's their reasoning? Well, for one, a car won't fucking eat you. 

But I'm getting ahead of myself. OK, it’s unlikely, I get it, but why play that particular lottery? We play the good lottery, the big cash payout, change-your-life lottery, because despite the astronomical odds we just might win millions of dollars. But why play the bad, possibly decapitated, lose-your-life lottery? The odds are equally astronomical but if you win this one --- you get eaten by a shark. Congrats. You're a torso. 

That’s ridiculous. If you absolutely insist, by some misguided logic, on playing some variation of lethal lottery,  why not play the golf-club-in-a-thunderstorm lottery. At least you're in one piece when that one's over. 

This is the shark equivalent of having a rain cloud over you.

But, just for kicks, let’s examine this car-shark argument a bit closer. First of all, as I've mentioned, a car won’t eat you. It’s not like you’re walking down the street and suddenly a car swerves off the road, grabs you in its grill and starts thrashing back and forth, tearing off a huge piece of you before casually pulling back onto the road and driving away.

Furthermore, for this shark-car analogy to actually make any sense, we’d have to be driving sharks. And, well, now that’s just Crazy Talk.

This is not Photoshopped. This is really a man being eaten by a car. 

The bottom line is that because automobiles are manmade and because they're one of the most common things we see on a daily basis, they just don't inspire terror. We spend a lot more time in the presence of cars than sharks, so of course we're more likely to be killed by a car. In any event, I would rather die in a car accident than by shark attack. In other words, I’d rather die by blunt force trauma than by being crushed and torn apart in the gaping maw of a ruthless carnivore.

Here’s another, different way of looking at the problem. Why risk it because we may just have it coming... Humans kill more than 100 million sharks a year for no good reason, so maybe shark attacks, which are on the rise globally, are just the animals’ way of trying to even the score. I may be scared shitless of them, but I’m definitely on the sharks' side. I'm with them. Absolutely, I would attack someone if I was a shark too. With pleasure. I’d be like – “look at this guy - dicking around in my territory, swimming, splashing, flailing around like an idiot with his dopey limbs and tacky board shorts. What balls on this guy – killing 100 million of us every year for soup and he comes into my ocean? Screw this guy.” Then wham, I’d clamp down on his ribs.

Just a little food for thought. And, now, for your reading pleasure - a brief history of shark attacks.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/6984067/Worlds-10-worst-shark-attacks.html

Johnny DiLoretto thinks a lot about sharks. You can read his top notch story about the  the movie JAWS by clicking here. Also check out our contributors page to learn more by  clicking here.

Why JAWS Keeps Getting Better With Age by Johnny DiLoretto

Everytime I see Jaws it gets better.

I don’t swim in the ocean because of Steven Spielberg’s movie. Yes, I’m missing out on the sheer joy of frolicking in the surf. And, yet, I take comfort in the fact I’ll never have my torso severed in two by a fish.

I love this movie. Most people consider it a horror movie, but really, it’s an adventure movie; albeit, one punctuated by a few excruciating moments of horror. Jaws is a miracle of editing, narrative pacing, and some of the finest character acting of the 70s. Roy Scheider as Chief Brody is absolutely perfect. His performance is deftly, profoundly complemented by Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper, the marine biologist, and Robert Shaw as the salt-weathered Quint, the hard-drinkin' shark fisherman. And those are just the three leads. This movie is alive with the lived-in faces of the extras and smaller roles. Amity feels like a real place, like you could step through the screen and into the street. 

Then, of course, there's the shark. In an era, when CGI effects are so egregiously overwrought, the actual physical animatronic shark, though clunky, has real physical heft and presence. It may not be a real shark, it may even look fake, but a dude is eaten by it and he’s not just thrashing around in front of a green screen. 

So, recently a friend told me that he’d read Peter Benchley’s novel and he boldly asserted that the book was better than the movie. Thinking he might be a jackass, I bought the book and read it. Turns out my friend is a jackass. The book is fun but what should have been a taut 200-page thrill ride, is a belabored, enough-already, 300-plus page diversion with aspirations to seriousness. Spielberg adapted it into an unrivaled masterpiece. 

Here are some of the changes, tweaks, and massages Spielberg made to make his movie sing:

For starters, in the book, Brody is from Amity. He grew up on the island, so there’s nothing unfamiliar about it. This is stupid. Spielberg makes Brody a NYC transplant who’s terrified of the water but trying to adapt to small town coastal life when the shark turns up on his beaches. That is brilliant. Brody is off balance, trying to find his footing from the start.

One thing movies can do that books can’t is show, and allow the audience to hear, the real-life way human beings talk over one another. You can't write words over top of words. But you can hear actors literally speak their lines over the lines of other actors. Benchley drones on for pages about the town. Spielberg in the couple of tight scenes wherein the town council members and chamber officials chatter and jockey for position, brings Amity to vibrant life. 

In the novel, Brody’s wife Ellen is a thinly drawn, vaguely dissatisfied woman who sleeps with Hooper. This is just silly filler designed to make the book seem “deeper.” It doesn’t help that the Hooper character is also flatly uninspired. Spielberg makes her a faithful wife and a concerned mother, and he gives her that great moment when Brody, after reading up on shark attacks, frantically demands his kid get out of the docked sailboat he’s sitting in. Ellen thinks he’s overreacting, until she glances at a page in one of the books and sees an illustration of a shark eating through the hull of a boat. “Michael,” she screams, “you heard your father – get out of that boat right now!”

This is the kind of smartly observed family dynamic Benchely can’t touch.

Back to the marine biologist Hooper. He’s a yawn in Benchley’s version. In the movie, we get a smart, tenacious Richard Dreyfuss who bonds with the harried police chief despite their class differences.  The two become friends, bonding over the challenge of cutting through Amity’s small town culture to solve their shark problem. From the minute Hooper surveys the damage of the first victim, and chides the selectmen that “this was no boating accident!” Brody’s on his side and so are we.

That scene doesn’t even exist in the book, by the way.

It’s no accident that Brody and Hooper swim off together at the end like Rick and Renault walking off into the night at the end of Casablanca. That classic friendship is deliberately echoed here.

Spielberg makes a number of other brilliant changes to Benchley’s book too. Most notably with Quint. Benchely’s Quint is Ahab redux. All seafarin’ growl and piratey bluster. He introduces us to the character in a 5-page phone conversation. Spielberg gives us the nails-on-a-chalkboard entrance and the line “for that, I’ll give you the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.” Spielberg all the way on that one.

The director also gives us the inestimably great Robert Shaw, who’s not the one-dimensional shark-hating psychopath of the book. By giving his Quint the monologue about surviving the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the blue shark feeding frenzy that consumed hundreds of men, Spielberg humanizes Quint, gives him a context for his shark obsession, and tragically foreshadows his spectacular demise.

In the book, Quint drowns like Melville’s Ahab. Dumb. In the film, he’s devoured in gut-wrenching high style.

I could go on. But let me end with this: in the book, Brody’s family is relegated to a few tossed off lines just to let us know he has one, I suppose. In the movie, he’s a father, his children swim and boat in these waters, and you can feel him weighing his every decision – how his every move might reverberate through the town or put his family in peril.

One of my favorite scenes in, not just Jaws, but in all of American cinema is the one following Brody’s comeuppance after a young boy is killed by the shark. (The child’s mother learns Brody knew about the first victim and that he failed to close the beaches. She publicly humiliates him with a smack to the face and the accusation that he was responsible for her son’s death.)

After this Spielberg cuts to the Brody family dinner table. Everyone has eaten; their places have been cleared. Ellen is washing dishes while a dejected Brody broods in his chair. We know the death of the boy wasn’t his fault, but, being a decent human being, he can’t help but consider his culpability.

He sighs and buries his face in his hands. When he peeks out from behind his fingers, he notices his youngest son, unaware of the true heft of his father’s burden, playfully imitating his every move. Brody plays along for a moment before he leans toward the boy and says “Give us a kiss.” “Why?” the kid asks. “Because I need it,” Brody replies, with the genuinely deflated air of a man beaten by a bad day at work and of a father seeking the affirmation of his child's love -- the child he is blessed to still have sitting across from him beautifully alive. 

I admit I cry every time I see this scene; and not because it’s some big, emotional moment. It’s just a small, sincerely realized moment of humanity. It’s the smallness of it that gets me – to see this truth played out: that sometimes, yes, indeed, a kiss from your child can cure many ills.

But it’s also the mark of a director in supreme command of his craft, taking some thrilling, pulpy material and transforming it into something human and unforgettable.

Johnny DiLoretto is a man of many talents. You can learn more about him and other Pencilstorm contributors by clicking here.