In honor of @IconographyPod's season opener, I want to share my #JawsStory. I first saw Jaws when I was in 6th grade in 1978. For some unfathomable reason, my junior high showed a lunch movie every day in the auditorium... 1/ https://iconographypodcast.com/episodes/jaws-amity-island-welcomes-you-s1!3fe25

...for the nerds, introverts, and budding film buffs who didn't want to brave the politics of the playground. The teachers would get movies that had finished their theatrical runs and show them in 20-minute increments. It often took more than a week to get through one movie. 2/

Mind you, this was before VCRs became household appliances in the US, so network TV was the only other way to see movies that had left theaters. Anyway, one week they showed Jaws, which naturally I'd never seen in a theater, since I was 8 when it came out.... 3/

But I HAD seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind in a theater. So I had already begun to internalize the Spielberg worldview. Jaws felt familiar. In fact it felt like a sequel, complete with Richard Dreyfuss, scary night scenes with colored lights, and a John Wiliams score. 4/

Of course now I realize it was Close Encounters that was the sequel. Both films explore the psychology of lonely humans working against other humans to try to connect with the unknown and the alien. 5/

The scene I remember most clearly from the junior high screening is at exactly 50:00, where Dreyfuss/Hooper is exploring the half-destroyed boat and a corpse with a half-eaten eye pops up through the shark-bite hole. Terrifying and delicious! Everyone screamed their heads off! 6/

But even as an 11yo I knew this movie wasn't really about the scary moments or the mechanical shark. It wasn't even about crusty Amity and the mayor's desperation to avoid a summer lockdown. It was about our fear of the unknown and the horrible things it makes us do. 7/

Remember the dates here. Close Encounters: 1977. Jaws (for me): 1978. The China Syndrome: 1979. (And many others I'd discover later: Chinatown, Cuckoo's Nest, etc.) Hollywood was giving us a new liturgy of post-Watergate, anti-establishment morality tales. 8/

Which I honestly think is where I picked up some of my lefty politics and my journalistic skepticism. So: I'd like to thank those nutty teachers at Charlotte Junior High School who thought showing scary lunch movies to 11-year-olds was a good idea. 9/

In closing, let me urge you to listen to Charles's Jaws episode, which is sort of about the movie but is actually a loving look at the relationship between the fictional Amity and the real-life Martha's Vineyard, where Spielberg filmed the movie. That's all. Ahoy mateys. 10/fin