There was a Fox news host who, recently, had a kid and later on his show admitted his mind changed and now supports paternal leave – which was picked up by the lefty Youtube channels I watch like TYT, Rising or Tim Black. They ran it as an example of frequency of right wingers not caring about social issues until it affects them. I thought about that while watching Murray Hamilton’s Mayor of Amity who refuses to believe or support Roy Scheider as the police chief, despite the shark having so far had three appetizers, until of course when the fourth murder happens, his own children were at the beach. Even then, he’s catatonic over how to accept the real threat of what the town will lose in tourist revenue vs. innocent lives lost. Everybody knows the two note Shark theme though Stanley Kubrick also did a pretty good job in Eyes Wide Shut engaging Jocelyn Pook to just play octaves which were just as frightening, and only one note. In my teenage memory the best scene was Robert Shaw and Richard Dreyfus comparing body scars but watching it again I was surprised by great striking moments. Robert Shaw’s character, the real shark hunting authority, breaks up a cacophonous townsfolk meeting where everyone is yelling over each other by scratching his fingernails on a blackboard. Another great use of silence when the mother of a boy, killed by the shark, dressed in black approaches the chief and slaps him for having known in advance a woman was killed and yet beaches stayed open. My new teaching assistant job is for a film studies class, about blockbusters over four decades and the first film assignment is Jaws which I saw as a teenager at the Odeon theatre, even got up close and personal with the mechanical monster on my first visit to Los Angeles when my dad took me on the Universal Studios tour. Off the top John Williams receives third credit, deservedly so which presages the future between him and Steven Spielberg (which will be pretty awesome) and half the time as I view it years later I thought the classical ideas and sequences are fantastic and not the style we hear more often than not in the current suspense or horror genres.