Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and Brexit’s false fearmongering

“You know the thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin!"  

The current Steven Spielberg retrospective at the British Film Institute gave me the chance to watch my favourite film ever on the big screen.  Jaws was just as magnificent as I remembered it: paced to perfection, no single shot or scene wasted, and above all terrifying, flawless entertainment.  It also helped me to recall that the film has another fan, one who admires it for a rather peculiar reason.  

Jaws

Outside of the film's magnificent quartet, Quint, Chief Brody, Hooper and of course the great white shark itself, there is one other character that never fails to provoke and, crucially, entertain: Mayor Larry Vaughn.  Clad in what has got to be the most ridiculous suit ever to adorn the torso of a municipal leader - polyester, light blue and covered with tiny white anchors - the Mayor of Amity is the real villain of the film.  Refusing to close the beaches Mayor Vaughn gambles the lives of swimmers against the town's summer economy.  Even when Hooper, a respected shark expert, tells him that a recently captured tiger shark is not the fish that has been eating people, and going on to prove it with a stomach-emptying autopsy, the Mayor is not for turning, insisting  that summer in Amity is to carry on regardless.

Larry Vaughn - not the first clown to become a mayor

However, Mayor Vaughn has found himself with a very peculiar defender, someone who despite the absolute wrongheadedness of the Mayor of Amity's decisions, feels that he did exactly the right thing.  Boris Johnson, when running for the position of Mayor of London, was asked to name who was the inspiration behind his decision.  His reply?  Mayor Larry Vaughn.

"The real hero of Jaws is the mayor.  A gigantic fish is eating all your constituents and he decides to keep the beaches open. Okay, in that instance he was actually wrong. But in principle, we need more politicians like the mayor - we are often the only obstacle against all the nonsense which is really a massive conspiracy against the taxpayer."

A constituent 

On some level it's clearly a throwaway comment, indicative of Boris's tendency to self-style himself as a lovable eccentric, shooting clumsily from the hip.  But swim a little below the surface, and you begin to see something far more sinister and telling.  Boris is willing to take enormous risks.  After all, like Mayor Vaughn who is still in charge of Amity for Jaws 2, he has bounced back from mistakes before.

Make no bones about it, Boris's admiration for Mayor Vaughn is couched in the latter's willingness to weigh up the odds and gamble. And this is exactly what the Tory 'maverick' is doing with the Euro Referendum. For him, Brexit is worth a punt. And he knows it is one - if as seems more and more likely that the UK opts for Brexit - that will push him towards the top-most echelons of his party. Whether or not Boris achieves the highest position and becomes the next leader of the Conservative party (and because of the weakness of opposition, our next Prime Minster) is still doubtful to my mind. Michael Gove – as I've mentioned in a previous piece is far more dangerous and with a shrewder and less shambolic intellect.

Boris's dismissals of the fears that Brexit will hit the UK’s ability to trade, that jobs would be lost and incomes would fall, are to him a mere throw of the dice. Like the Mayor of Amity he's betting with people's lives, a calculated gamble that the great white shark will be revealed as a chimera, nobody will get eaten and he'll be seen as the man with 'principles' battling against the strangling bureaucracies of the EU. This is even spelled out explicitly by some Brexit supporters. Andrew Roberts, the self-styled 'extremely right wing' historian and journalist writes in The Times that "Brexit will be good for the British national character. It will reintroduce risk-taking and self-reliance." Worryingly, people are buying this.

Chumming with Chief Brody

Which brings me back to Jaws.  The thing that goads me most about other fans (and the occasional detractors) of Steven Spielberg's masterpiece is an unwavering insistence on how unreal the great white shark looks.  You can point out to them that most fish, certainly when they are out of the water, look just as strange and unwieldy as Spielberg's polyurethane rubber and tubular-steel creation.  Indeed, that's kind of where the 'fish out of water' expression comes from.  Even at the BFI screening there were a few unkind giggles when we got our first fearsome close up of the monster's maw.  Maybe it's the dead eyes that do it.  But then, as Robert Shaw's just as memorable monster Quint points out: 

“You know the thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eye. When he comes at ya, doesn't seem to be livin!"  

And let's face it.  Quint knows what he's talking about when it comes to sharks.

Quint - author of Ahab's Guide to Seamanship

Either way, for many people the shark in Jaws occupies that very strange position of looking fake and yet still being convincing enough to terrify.  In other words, the relationship between people’s perceptions and their processes of rationalisation are incredibly complex.  And if their perception is that we are overrun by immigrants, are giving millions away every week, and do not have the ability to make sovereign decisions, then nuanced arguments that highlight the patent untruths behind each of those claims have got their work cut out.  

'The fish isn't real, but the terror that it's causing me is.  Therefore I'm going to believe in it.'  

Project Brexit is pulling this off with aplomb.  And with former Mayor Boris Johnson pulling those strings, it looks like Britain's relationship with Europe is going to go the very same way as 1970s moviegoers and their relationship with the ocean.