Utopia
This is not just the 3rd chapter in the lives of the Brody family who were already traumatized by two different jawses. No, this is not just the tale of what happened to those Brody boys who were almost eaten off the boats and catamarans when a second jaws showed up and made everyone realize that there may be many jawses. Sure, the Brody boys are grown and are in this story, but they are not the focus.

No, this is the story of a seaside utopia, a story of a compound so small that it can be summed up with a 3D model the size of a card table. This Sea World is perfectly contained. Never do the inhabitants bow to an outside authority. When there is a death, a crisis or an attack by two jawses they handle it themselves. No cops. They have all they need. There’s a roadhouse bar, an apartment complex, restaurants, and a coroner’s morgue right there on the premises.

This is a perfect society where urban cowboys flirt with aerobics instructors and people return to work hung over, half naked in bummer shorts. The men run, jump and play in their perfectly fitting pants, sneakers and shirts. They jet ski just because it’s faster. They feed the dog on the counter. They skip the conditioner in the shower because there’s usually a lady to look at in there.

Yes, the focus of this tale is the uncanny time of perfect harmony, of economy, youth, water and beer; a nowhere past when rainbows didn’t mean anything and every motherfucker swam and laughed.

Twenty-somethings are the reluctant specialists here. They are the semi-professionals who need to relax a little after a day at their fun fucking jobs. These are the party people who drink but never fatten, who smoke without stinking and who smile while they kiss. These are they with feathers for hair, sex in their blood and shorts that don’t fuck around with being short. (No matter what Mrs. Garret says. You’ll see.)

These hyperboreans work to entertain the kids that look like shit (as they should) and the sparkling new adults all dressed in sun drenched hyper color. (For all we know the spectators live in the Sea World too. We never see them arrive. We never see them leave. They may, like Jack Torrance, have always been there.)

This is a worker’s paradise, a celebration of happy adulthood where underwater welders, dolphin trainers, hospitality ladies and professional leaners all lean and loaf while examining a blade of grass. This is the politicians speak to when promising the impossible. This is the place that can grow priceless corral reef in a few weeks.

This was back when people could have a hit water-ski program. Everyone would come to see the ripple skippers and the wavin’ girls. What could be cooler than seeing the ramping human pyramid? Why not have country waitresses perched on the shoulders of mustached grins?

“I gotta see that shit. Did you hear what they got at Sea World? They got one of those live action fake hillbilly fights and a pig-worshipping kind of dance number. I heard the pig is great, a real break out performance. And the hillbillies end up scrappin’ in a mud hole! Oh, I’m taking Tammy. It’s on.”

So, this is what is at stake, what is at risk: Utopia. Ageless awesomeness. Work and play combined. They have it all, but they’ve had it all for a while. And the people’s boredom dooms their peace.

Complacency.

Peace breeds wandering eyes.

Guys watch TV through the feathers of their girl’s hair while making out.

Dreams become barbarous.

Women ache for their men to fight just so there might be something real on the line.

People act like people everywhere are playing “Stand Off” but actually only they themselves play “Stand Off.” People are caught jacking off to maps of Europe.

People are ordering telescopes.

Trips are considered.

Here in our bucolic, sleepy little Sea World the domestic intimacy has sadly peaked with estimating the severity of other couple’s problems.

Now, A long-term relationship is like a pool in your back yard. Before you get it installed all you want to do is swim. You and your friends go to the public pool, you make a day of it, you drink and laugh. It’s special. You think that you’d love to have something this special for yourself, in your home. You could use it all the time, anytime! It would be all yours; you wouldn’t have to share it. So you get a pool in your back yard and the next thing you know you’re two months into the summer and you’ve only been in it once. You don’t know why you even clean it; no one gets in it anymore. Maybe you can invite people over to share it, just to spice it up? Maybe you can put a jaws in there, or at least a jaws hunter? Yeah. A sexy, dangerous, British jaws hunter? One day you find yourself standing at the fence with a towel, scoping out the public pool and someone asks, “Hey, what are you doing here? Don’t you have one of these at home?”
Monogamy is a two person Utopia: complacency the downfall for both.

Louis

(Louis Gosset Jr. as “Calvin Bouchard”. You know when you see an actor billed as a specified character in quotes that the actor is about to go into acting hyper-drive. Scenery will be chewed, the top will be vaulted and new limits of dramatic surplus will be defined.)
This is a magical time. A time when a man can rise up and build himself a Sea World.

A time when a man can build an undersea Truman Show with waving skeletons, seaside hoe downs and goddamn dolphins.

This man, Louis, commands the whites. He is flanked in whiteness. We know he is the boss when an untrimmed Playboy Bunny chauffeurs him away from a party in his cute little cherry wood speedboat. (Who’s the boss will be black in a moment, stick around.)

He gives the whites their free drinks and their special dinner. He gives them exactly what he knows they want, even the version of himself that he enjoys to put on: the happy minister, the leader of the flock, the man who punctuates with his whole body.

Opening day has Louis just a-goin’ around keeping it tight, and drinkin’ white zin. And on this special day he wears a suit made entirely out of white people. He is clearly a man with a “no questions” dry cleaner.

He tells the newspapers that “No jaws is going to bust up my Sea World.” Fast forward to the future, Louis, and we’ll see you yelling, “Oh no! A jaws is busting up my Sea World!” But, No. Not now. Now you are all, “Ain’t no jabber jaws gunna come up in my Sea World, twinkletoein’ around on his back fin. I brought up this Sea World, and only I can take it down.” Oh, how right you are, Louis.

He looks over a model recreation of his Utopia with Quaid and some other guy. The three talk about something so boring it’s possible to forget that soon a few jawses will fuck the place to bits. Opening day just seems to lack the punch. If only there were something fresh, exciting, mean and awful. If only…
Louis commands from below in the undersea flight tower.

In the flight tower White Girl and Nephew assist Louis. They struggle to not shake their heads and glare when he speaks into his mic. (Watch White Girl. Nothing can keep down her defiant head shaking, not even the actress within. These two seem to know that in the future he will be munched and she will be saved only for her memory of special codes.)
Louis has an eye everywhere. He has cameras trained on vents, on locks, on shoes. His cameras are so ubiquitous that at one point young Quaid converses with the air and Louis, in the form of the night, replies.

Louis has built a pressurized hamster tube network in an effort to dazzle the spectators with a reworking of the same two ingredients as always: sea and world. He’s designed the tubes to clinch their door-muscles at the first sign of danger. (When this occurs the people will be trapped, as well as a few McConaugheys. Look for them.)

He is the control, the order, and the power: it’s all Louis. He maintains the peace, and he decides when to entertain the danger. He predicts accurately that audiences’ attentions will wane away from the dolphins, the dancers and the rainbows. He starts looking for fun in the dangerous, in the evil, in the death. (He didn’t even recognize his building of an underwater glass house and inviting kids into it as signs of his own dangerlust.)

When there is discussion about maintaining a great white in captivity he grins at the thought of how well he maintains whites. “Can we keep the jaws? Oh, can we keep him, daddy?” Louis sees the angle, and nods.

And it’s not just Louis. His white people are swimming at night in the ocean. Night-fishers flaunt their poaching of miracle corral right in the face of Nix. Ms. McFly tempts the younger, eyebrow-less Brody into the black until they are waste-deep in a nothingscape attempting love in the whispering wake.

Yes, they all think they are just buying a stairway to heaven but before they know it here comes crunch-and-munch making celery noises out of them all. But not yet. No, still the night and the water are safe little ass tightening excitements. The night, the blackness, the water, the bar -it’s never enough. Soon it’s the submarine, the harpoon and the grenade. Sounds pretty cool, but before you fucking know it you are miscalculating the slow motion of death’s trajectory as it skips over crucial sections of time. You find yourself magically transported onto death’s bounding mattress of a tongue. In death you hold the grenade and only your living arm and dead face remain in this dimension.

Young Quaid’s Ice Queen

She thinks she is the dolphin whisperer, but in reality dolphins talk to anyone holding a fish.

She has the kind of irritable bitchiness that a man can’t help being drawn to, like a masseuse is drawn to Stephen Hawking. Like, “I got to smooth that out, that which seems unsmoothable.”

Even when she’s being sweet you know she’s just trying to let the medicine work.

Of course she must flirt with the dangerous alpha male of the homosexual, British duo of jaws slayers.

“British? Check. Hogwarts sweatshirt? Check. Cockney, overprotective, henchman? Check?”

When invited to fuck the Brit she makes no mention of her boyfriend, Quaid. She keeps it open. Keeps it possible. She has that duel action flirty insult. (In a way, it is the perfect combination, right guys?)

Later she goes on her hundredth really boring submarine tour with Quaid. The little sub was designed by no one, but instead came about by a combination of dares and excess parts. (As a child I dreamed of owning it. Now I dream only of when I could dream of owning it.)

After the slowest dolphin get away ever recorded, the Ice Queen and Quaid barely escape an errant lil’ jaws. When they scramble upon the deck they land on top of each other and the film must cut away or else be hit with an x rating. The proximity to death finally warms her tepid veins and they bounce on one another in moves that are surely pre-coitus.

Of course, later, we’ll see her inventing communions with a drugged, rubber shark. Oh, how she pretends to have a bond with her clubbed little danger. We all know her type: “No, really. I understand pit bulls.” You know, the kind of girl who at a party squats too close to the fire, is warned, but stays there because no one can tell her what to do. “I smell burning hair.”

Watch, No matter how many times she kisses the young Quaid he, along with us, is never certain of her love. Her only lifeline is getting in the thick of the danger. She barks orders at the dolphins, acting like a mother with birthing remorse. She is so bored.
In the roadhouse she’s over there breathing into her bottle, a million miles from Quaid despite their huggy kissy pantomime. “If only I could kill, or watch killing. If only some real shit were on the line, not just some fucking diva dolphins and my boyfriend’s Venezuela trip.”

When the fan is invisible under all the shit, she can’t just let the boys handle it. She must jump in the black with them.
Quaid himself loves to smoke, loves to get his jeans wet and loves to leap out or off a moving vehicle. He’s the stud on this ranch. If some British jaws slayer shows up wearing only an open hoody without a t-shirt, well shit, he can too. Fuck, that’s how he always rolls. Open hooded sweatshirt over a naked torso? Fucking of course. Makes the cig taste better. (Watch for this moment. I couldn’t believe my eyes.)

THE JAWS IS UPON US.

After exactly one hour the mother of death attacks the utopian society. The Sea World itself is the object of her fury, not the people. She has a plan. She wrecks around, hitting inanimate objects, knocking out their cable, destroying property and avoiding many obvious opportunities to eat scads of flailing legs. She is hell bent on destroying the ordered, perfect world by causing maximum amounts of minimum damage. She chooses nose butts for glass and metal, dorsal displays for boys and girls. She is like a cat that is dropped in a take full of mice but only attacks the tank. No one dies, no one is eaten and the puffs of underwater blood seem to only be the result of scrapes against broken wood.

Oh, but do note the combination of fear and joy on the mice’s faces. The danger is delicious. The severity of the situation, the meaningfulness of each moment is relished completely. “LIFE OR DEATH! HERO OR LOSER! SAVIOUR OR THE SAVED! MARTYR OR SUPER MARTYR!”

No one wants it to end.
(Note Quaid taking advantage of the crisis to wreck all manor of vehicle with negligent dismounts.)

Sadly, the only true casualty is the libido of Mrs. Mcfly. After this she’ll never want to fuck in the water again. And that was the only way she could get off.
When everyone is out of the water, one jaws is dead and the other jaws is contained, no outside help is called. No cops. The press is shooed away and our rag tag band of delighted fuckers come up with the dumbest plan imaginable.

How they move through space

Now, all jawses love to creep silent. All jawses, even the lil’ ones on TV, move like fake jawses. They glide with fixed, hateful smiles. They are propelled by a flick of the tail made twenty minutes ago. They are like orbiting space shuttles, “Spsss. Float. Float. Spsss.” They are masks of frozen irritation, gracefully traversing unmeasured space. Death’s mouth is stopped, still and unreal at the tip of a lost rocket.

Death’s trolling mouth collects stars. The stars are like schools of sea-monkeys tumbling into the hatch. A shark moves like this. A shark is the hovering extinguisher. A shark eats the light. They have no idea how slow or fast they are going until they crash fast into a boat or into an underground terminal. Then right away they start the head wiggle and mouth smack or they slowly fall out of the crash hole, never ceasing the smacking.
True, it is easy to see a jaws as a phallus, yet I’ll go further and say it is a vagina as well. It is both and it is death. It will ram you, but you will enter it, and when you do you die. The cycle is complete! (In this way a jaws is like a musket: you ram your load into it, sure. But you point the barrel at a body and fire that load into that body and death may be the result.)

Discovery Channel

To see a jaws jump out of the water on the smart cable TV shows… to see a jaws get tricked like a pet dog… to see a jaws get that fake seal in his teeth… I feel embarrassed. It’s like I’ve seen Churchill leap soapy, naked and frenzied out of his bath in order to snatch at what he thought was a piece of mutton on the ceiling. It’s embarrassing to trick the mighty.

In slow-mo, aerial flops, the jaws attacks in a ferocious way, but he has a nerf in his mouth and we know it and we laugh. Imagine Churchill giving the order to firebomb a nerf Berlin.
Setting up a controlled act of ferocity… it feels weird, it makes the monster silly, it makes us in control… and that is the folly of the Jaws 3 people. They mistake containment for control.

You feel in charge of death and before you know it… you are the nerf. Your Sea World is getting busted up by a jaws and your decision to spend your welding funding on more and more skiers seems pretty misguided.

(I mean what good is the world’s largest skiing human pyramid if your jaws-gate is being welded by an out of work circus strongman?)
We bring it on ourselves when we play with danger. Keep your husbands! Play board games! Swim in the pool! Train the Shamoo! Please! Don’t look for excitement in violence, war, danger, infidelity, jawses, the British… whatever!

Back to it

We think we hear it roar. We think it growls. But that is just the sound of our blood screeching to a halt. That is the crash of our life against the face of death. That thudding collection of throaty wumps is just our shit hitting our brainpan.
The sublime vista is from the underwater control room window. The jaws has indeed broken all natural laws of space and time by just hovering in a-reality. It is advancing towards us, but isn’t. It is 3D and 2D at the same time. It destroys all just by being in the all. It is angry, focused, crazed, yet inert, silent, a toy unmoving. We are the young Quaid, The Ice Queen and Louis. The death dream has come true for us. Our Freudian death drive, our destrudo has over-reached. The demon has come and reality is in its wake. We move as tortured sleepers and our roars are silent, our eyes without lids. In a final assault on our childish theory of utopia the jaws turns the wall between life and death into shattered rock candy. We are submerged in our destiny of chaos. Our star is snuffed.
The only voice disinterested and perturbed by death’s dance is young Quaid’s. He has seen it before. He is one who was shot when a baby and who murdered as a child. He came to us as the cool one. A knower. A Klaatu. He has seen, he has said, but no one heard.

The only hope handed out from this movie is young Quaid and his Ice Queen dealing with their overstepped curiosity. Even Quaid must admit that there is something new to be learned from these events. He’s learned that complacency is only a problem for the willfully complacent. He now knows, and even more so does his Ice Queen, that love and peace are worth the boring times. “Fuck it, let’s stay together, let’s pack up the dolphins and teach them Spanish. Let’s go to Venezuela. Lets stay together and never again allow the possible destruction of our tenuous, boring peace!”

They denounce their recent excitements and they sentence death to death in a rose bloom Hiroshima that issues its thorn strip dentures toward us as if to say that this death was indeed overestimated. Its time-bending power was only enfeebled dementia of brittle old age.
And in the end, when getting back to the garden, the man and woman are flanked by the man and woman dolphin. The movie indulges in the categorical impulse to call one part of life over and frozen, before deeming the next moment the next chapter.