Jaws, Shark Week, and the Deep Blue Sea

The first thing I ever recall wanting to be is an oceanographer. I currently live in Kansas City, so that probably sounds pretty dumb. But when I was a kid, I lived on the East Coast near the ocean, so it made sense. The only real reason I wanted to be an oceanographer is because I wanted to study sharks. You know how little kids latch onto things like dinosaurs and astronauts and zoo animals and robots? I liked sharks like that.

When I was younger, my family went on a family vacation just about every summer to a beach house my dad’s uncle owned in Ocean Isle, North Carolina (near Myrtle Beach). I loved a lot about those vacations. Myrtle Beach had the best mini-golf courses I’ve ever played, seafood buffets with endless popcorn shrimp and clams and oysters, beach souvenir shops full of t-shirts with terrible puns and shark-tooth necklaces, and double-scoop ice cream cones every night. (When you’re a kid, the combinations of the double-scoop cone are vast and magnificent: mint chocolate chip, black cherry, cookies & cream, chocolate chip cookie dough...basically heaven in your hand.)

The thing I loved most about those trips, though, was the actual beach. I walked out the door of the beach house, across the street, onto a small stretch of sand, up onto a boardwalk that took me over a grassy sand dune, and down on a pristine beach strand that led to the endless blue expanse of the Atlantic. When I was a kid, I thought that sparsely populated strand must be some sort of low-rent beach substitute, because Myrtle Beach was where all the putt-putt and food and traffic were. But looking back, Ocean Isle was the perfect place to fully enjoy the essence of what the beach had to offer.

Dad fished, Mom tanned and swam, and my brother and I alternated between wading in tide pools and body surfing in the ocean. We all chased crabs down the beach and scooped out clams and sand fleas that burrowed down into the wet sand after every wave. Occasionally, we walked down a fishing pier near the beach house and peered into fishermen’s buckets to see what they were hauling in. Most of the buckets were filled with red drum, spot, and croaker. But one time we saw a fisherman haul in a thresher shark, which gave the guy fits on the pier. I stared in amazement at this—the shark flailing and flopping all over the pier, and the fisherman trying and failing to pin it down. I knew about sharks. I loved sharks, and I knew in theory that they swam in the ocean, and that I also had been swimming in the ocean. But this was the first time those things really connected for me.

Did that stop me from swimming in the ocean? Not at all. I kept doing it, every year. I came close to drowning once. I got caught in an undertow about twenty feet out from shore. I kicked and pulled up hard, even though I kept getting sucked under and pinned against the sand. This went on for what seemed like forever. But eventually there was a lull in the downward pull, and I popped up and spat and coughed up water and stumbled to the edge of the surf and flopped down on the wet sand. Nobody was nearby (I must have drifted quite a ways down the beach), and nobody knew what had happened but me. It was one of those things I figured just happened at the beach. I still think the ocean almost killed me that day, but no shark was involved. They were out there somewhere just doing their thing, leaving me well enough alone.

Maybe there was some sort of cosmic inevitability that I’d end up obsessing over sharks. I was born the same year Jaws was released in theaters. I’ve seen that film more times than any movie besides the Star Wars original trilogy, and it’s still the greatest film I’ve ever seen. Better than Citizen Kane and Casablanca. Better than The Goonies, even. Seriously, beyond the fandom of it all, it’s just a perfect movie. Plot, characterization, suspense, acting, dread, hope, companionship, storytelling, family, redemption, cinematography…Jaws has everything I want in a film. I read the novelizations of Jaws, Jaws 2, and Jaws: The Revenge (which was terrible), I watched all those movies (even Jaws 3-D) over and over, and I internalized all of it.

It wasn’t just about Jaws, though. There’s something about the form and function of sharks that’s inherently, objectively fascinating. For one thing, these creatures are ancient. They’ve been on this planet for millions of years. Part of the reason they’ve survived this long is because they have a perfect form for what they are and what they do: sleek, slender, perfectly symmetrical, efficient, capable of lazy hovering or torpedo-like bursts of speed. In the movie Alien, an android named Ash explains what he admires about the Xenomorph the Nostromo crew has discovered:

Ash: "You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility."

Lambert: "You admire it."

Ash: "I admire its purity. A survivor…unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality."

For me, this is a perfect description of sharks. In Jaws, Hooper says something similar about the creatures he’s devoted his life to studying:

Hooper: "Mr. Vaughn, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks, and that’s all.”

When I was a freshman at Georgia Southern University, I took an English composition class my first semester. One of the first prompts our professor gave us was to think about what else we would like to be if we could. I can’t remember exactly what I said, but it was something along the lines of what Ash and Hooper said plus some metaphorical explanation of how sharks can’t stop moving and swimming without suffocating and dying. (That’s true, by the way.) The teacher liked what I wrote, and she encouraged me to keep writing. I’ve had some phenomenal teachers and professors who have guided me toward where I ended up, but I don’t remember a lot of specific assignments or papers. I remember that one, though—partially because it was a really formative time for me, but mainly because it was about sharks.

So yeah—I love pretty much everything about sharks, including Shark Week. For well over a decade, The Discovery Channel’s Shark Week was one of my favorite weeks of the year every year. I’d sit in front of the TV every night and marvel at basically the same stuff packaged over and over in a myriad of different ways: shows about shark attacks on humans, shows about sharks breaching up out of the water with seals in their mouths, shows about tagging and tracking sharks. I found all of it fascinating. It reminded me of the Jacques Cousteau shows I used to watch decades ago.

That began changing around the time Sharnkado came out on the Sci Fi Channel (or SyFy, or whatever it’s called now). I’m not sure if Discovery looked at the success that came from Sharknado and its sequels’ particular brand of brainless absurdity, but they began changing their programming (for the worse). Instead of producing specials based on science and education, they started focusing on sensationalism and hype. There was a semi-fictional mockumentary about a megalodon. Then some weird special about whether Olympic hero Michael Phelps could outswim a shark. This year they’re promoting a special about Mike Tyson called Tyson vs. Jaws: Rumble on the Reef. It’s just so incredibly dumb. Obvious joke: Shark Week had pretty thoroughly jumped the shark for good this year.

Don’t get me wrong – I’m completely down for some bad shark movies and books. I’ve read the whole Meg novel series by Steve Alten, and I thoroughly enjoyed the terrible movie version of The Meg that came out a couple summers ago. I watched the first few Sharknado movies and laughed a lot. I’ve enjoyed more of those stupid SyFy monster movies than I’d care to admit: Sharktopus and Ghost Shark and Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus and 3-Headed Shark Attack, etc.

But because these movies are very meta and self-aware of just how stupid and ridiculous they are, the sensationalized stuff The Discovery Channel is touting just ends up being boring. They play their dumb stuff straight, and it never works out. It might be good for marketing, but the results almost always fall flat. They shouldn’t be playing in the same waters as SyFy. If I want something dead-stupid, I know where to find it. If I want something fictional but smart, I’ll turn to Jaws, Deep Blue Sea, Open Water, The Shallows, or 47 Meters Down (all of which are surprisingly great).

Mostly, I miss what Shark Week used to be. Sharks are amazing enough without having to rely on dumb gimmicks to sell them. I know Discovery has to evolve to keep viewership coming back from year to year, but it’s evolved beyond what I used to tune in for. And that’s okay, I guess. If they’re getting the viewership they’re hoping for and people occasionally see something educational about sharks and think these wonderful creatures are very much worth protecting and preserving, then that’s good. I don’t need it to be what I want it to be. I bought a DVD box set of some of Discovery’s classic shark shows about ten years ago, and I can always revisit that if that’s what I want to see.

This year’s Shark Week officially starts tonight, but I’ve kind of already had my Shark Week. I’ve created my own version of Shark Week in one form or another for most of my life. I keep it swimming around so it doesn't die. One tradition I rarely miss is that I usually watch Jaws around this time every year. A couple weeks ago, I watched it with my sons for the first time, and that was one of the highlights of my summer. That’s probably Shark Week enough for me this year.

(Ah, who am I kidding? I’ll probably still pop in Deep Blue Sea tonight just to watch LL Cool J talk to his parrot and make fun of stupid people.)