Dun dun. Dun dun. “Jaws” was released in theatres fifty years ago today. And then, how to prepare for the coming heat wave. Plus:
• Is the #Resistance back?
• “F1” is a snazzy piece of blockbuster engineering
• What happened to the women of #MeToo?
“JAWS”, 1975.Photograph from Universal Pictures / Everett Collection
Richard Brody
A film critic who has been contributing to the magazine since 1999.
In the summer of 1975, as a newly minted high-school graduate, I went to the movies one night because that’s what you did on a date. We picked “Jaws” because that’s what everyone was going to see. At the time, movies rarely made an impact on me; it wasn’t until a few months later, when I went off to college and was exhorted there by a friend to go see a campus screening of “Breathless,” that the art form instantly became my main passion. “Jaws” may well have been the last movie I saw casually, and that’s how I experienced it—wondering what, other than the effective jump scares, the fuss was all about.
But fuss there was. We went to see it a week or two after it opened, at a nearby Long Island theatre, which was packed, and the audience was predominantly young. I remember “Jaws” as the first movie that had a nearly universal appeal among my peers. This surprised me—it had nothing of rock music or youth culture (it was no “Tommy”), and it was centered on adults, yet it nonetheless felt far more familiar than other Hollywood films did. Only after my conversion to the art of cinema, my immersion in critical discourse, and my viewings of Steven Spielberg’s subsequent films was I able to put my finger on what’s distinctive about his movies: their kinship with television. Though I didn’t have the concepts or the vocabulary to name it at the time, the story and the tone of “Jaws” had reminded me of TV, which I and my whole generation had been watching pretty much constantly since early childhood. That’s what made Spielberg our contemporary.
The simple pleasures of “Jaws” didn’t escape me, but I did not expect that it would be fondly remembered—or remembered at all. I’d have been shocked to learn that people would revere “Jaws,” and watch it for a half century to come. I’d have been even more shocked, though, to learn that, in just a few years, we’d all watch movies at home on videocassette as regularly and as obsessively as we listened to music, and that this innovation would make movies of the past more present than they’d ever been—that nostalgia would become the common coin of movie love.
For more: Read Michael Sragow on the unassuming greatness of “Jaws.”
How Bad Is It?
A record-breaking heat wave is expected to drive temperatures north of a hundred degrees across huge swaths of the United States. More than a hundred million people may be affected. We spoke to Dhruv Khullar, a contributing writer and physician, who has covered the effects of extended exposure to heat on the body.
Q: Just how dangerous is this kind of heat event?
Khullar: How bad it is really depends on who you are. Extreme heat is most dangerous for certain vulnerable populations, including young kids, older adults, people who have underlying medical conditions, people who don’t have access to good air conditioning, or those whose work keeps them outdoors.
Heat waves are among the deadliest weather-related events. Every year, they kill many more people than hurricanes or tornadoes or floods, and they send a lot of people to the hospital for things such as heat stroke and heat exhaustion. Unfortunately, this is something that is going to increasingly be part of our lives in the years and the decades to come.
The most important things you can do are to stay hydrated with cool fluids and stay indoors with air conditioning, if possible. If you need to go outside, try to do that early in the morning or later in the evening—avoid the midday heat. And, if you do go outside, wear loose-fitting clothing and stay in the shade as much as possible. Some cities have cooling centers now; it might be a good idea to familiarize yourself with where those are.
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