I watched Jaws almost 50 years ago, but I'm still terrified of the water
I'm with my family on a small rib boat in Monterey. Instead of the habitual Californian sunshine, everywhere is shrouded in mist. It's hard to make out the horizon and, when I turn back, the security of the shoreline has also disappeared. It's eerily silent and I'm trying to think happy thoughts.
'So, we had a sighting of a great white shark a couple of days ago,' said our guide. 'It breached just over there, beyond the pier.' The happy thoughts scatter to make way for a familiar fear. Now all I can think of is that famous line, 'We're gonna need a bigger boat,' as I gaze down at the mere inches that separate us from the water and the fact that I am sitting exposed at the back with my eldest. It will get us first.
As we putter along, we pass a dead seal floating in the water, a chunk of flesh missing. 'Do you mind if I take another look at that?' our guide checks. My middle child is keen while I've already written the headline in my head: 'Family of five in great white tragedy'. This is what happens when the first film you saw at the cinema at an inappropriately young age was Jaws.
I was three when Jaws was released, so even by the relaxed parenting standards of the Seventies, I couldn't have seen it then, even though it was rated A – the equivalent of a PG now. It must have been a re-release or a special summer showing as I was aged about seven and at primary school. I remember telling my friends over a packed lunch of fish-paste sandwiches that I wanted to be a marine biologist when I grew up, with no idea what that entailed.
As an only child with working parents, I spent a lot of time in the school holidays with my widowed grandfather. My parents suggested he take me to the cinema. Perhaps they had something like Mary Poppins or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang in mind. However, these were not the days of infinite choice, and Jaws was the only option in the small cinema in the West Midlands we found ourselves in. We had no idea what lay ahead, although the iconic poster should have presented us with a large clue. Saccharine Disney, this was not.
Cocktail of horror, confusion and fascination
As I passively smoked the cigarettes of other cinemagoers, this cinematic experience marked me. I remember the strange cocktail of horror, confusion and fascination watching the opening scene of the midnight swim where Chrissie is attacked.
Steven Spielberg located the psychological weak points I didn't know I had at that tender age: the depth and expanse of the ocean, intensified in darkness; the human, powerless against the forces of nature; a predator; the shock of the surprise and the power of music to grab the subconscious and give it a good shake.
With Chrissie's agonisingly lengthy – or so it felt to me – demise, I remember the abject terror of being at eye level with this woman, as though I was in the water opposite her (clever one, Spielberg), shocked by the tugging, the thrashing, the dragging. It was viscerally jarring. The image of her long, tangled hair when her remains are discovered and pored over, lodged in my head. The popcorn remained untouched.
Looking back now, it's as if Spielberg had communed with Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to skewer our fears. Let's take a place associated with carefree fun, somewhere everyone goes, and unleash hell. No-one was spared. The bright and beautiful young things were taken out; the cute kid on a lilo was seized in front of his mother's eyes as the sea turned incarnadine. Even cocky Quint's hubris is crushed between the jaws of Jaws.
All of it wrapped up in the genius of John Williams's musical score which signalled the presence of a predator in a slow, chilling bass to the extent that merely saying 'dun dun' is a shortcut for danger for those who know. The way the music ratcheted up in volume and pace until it was a screeching frenzy, reminiscent of Psycho, created almost unbearable tension.
I exited the cinema with a crush on police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) and the adrenaline rush of having been on a cinematic roller coaster. I remember my grandfather letting out one of his trademark whistles of relief at the end, and it certainly cemented our already strong bond. We'd survived.
I left with a fear, horror and yet almost obsessive fascination with sharks. I could freak myself out during a school swimming lesson, just by imagining the music. Similarly, my imagination went into overdrive pottering about in the sea on childhood holidays to Bournemouth. Weirdly, it hasn't dimmed with age.
Sharks: friend or foe?
Much to the understandable consternation of those experts who know and understand sharks best, Jaws has been the worst PR ever wrought on an animal that does a stellar job at maintaining the oceans' ecosystems. One of those experts is Brendon Sing, founder and co-director of UK charity Shark Guardian. He has worked with sharks most of his adult life; his WhatsApp profile picture of a great white stares up at me, like a form of aversion therapy.
'It still has such an effect on people today, and I'm blown away by that,' Sing says of Jaws.
'A lot of stuff you're told about sharks is completely wrong.' He's frustrated with the amount of misleading information put out through TV documentaries and alarmist media headlines. One of his pet hates is the phrase: 'shark-infested waters'.
'Sharks don't infest the water; they live there. Sharks have been in the oceans for over 400 million years,' he says.
Sing clarifies that sharks do not have an aggressive agenda against us, nor are they out to eat us. Humans are not their prey. Shark attacks, of which there are incredibly few, are usually owing to mistaken identity or a curious shark investigating a possible meal before realising it's not their usual fare.
'We have millions of people that enter the oceans on a daily basis and there are sharks there all the time. On average, we lose four or five people a year. If they did eat us, we'd be losing thousands a year and that just doesn't happen,' states Sing. The Shark Guardian website also points out that around 50 people a year are killed by jellyfish and 150 by falling coconuts.
Sing tells me that drone footage they have gathered over the past few years shows how often people come into contact with great whites without ever realising.
'Sharks will sometimes be swimming 10 metres away from people, but once they realise we are not their food or natural prey, they turn and swim away. They do everything they can to avoid us. Sharks are very intelligent and very curious but their number one priority is self-preservation.'
Indeed, more than 90 per cent of shark bites that occur are superficial because the shark retreats once it realises it has made a mistake.
How to prevent an attack
I gingerly ask Sing what I should do if I were to encounter a great white. Things I've read, like punching a shark on the nose or poking it in the eye, seem both impossible and counterintuitive.
In a diving scenario, sharks are most likely to swim to you before turning away, Sing explains – and the best thing to do is to stand your ground. 'If anything, move towards it first and you'll see it turn away and back off. You're showing you're a threat,' he says. I can't even conceive of doing this, but I defer to Sing's expertise.
It's easy for sharks to be demonised in films. They don't have the cute factor of dolphins nor the Hollywood smile, and Dangerous Animals, a horror released this month, further perpetuates their killer qualities. Yet, as Sing points out, sharks need protecting – and education needs to shift our perception.
'They're still doing the job they've been doing for millions of years: maintaining the marine ecosystem and keeping our oceans in the best condition possible to sustain all life. They're massively important,' he adds.
Sing urges me to break my fear and go to see sharks with an expert, but it's going to take a significant amount of brain-rewiring to take that step. Will I be watching Jaws this month? You bet – in honour of my grandfather – but, hopefully, this time it will be with more facts and less fear.
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