Shark tales

As mentioned in an earlier post, I have three writing rules:

1. It’s all about the people, stupid.
2. Always entertain.
3. Fiction is memory.

Point 2 I sort of explain in the post about wrapping paper. Point 3 I will probably come to at some future time. Today I feel like looking at the least cryptic of the three, Point 1. And I plan to look at it through the medium of a rubber shark.

Everyone loves the film Jaws. Well, I do at least. Yet at heart it’s just another monster movie. Aside from the Durham, Durham theme music, I believe that one of the things that made this potential B-movie into a classic was its attention to character. If you really care about the people, you stop noticing that the main threat to them is rubbery and strangely unconvincing. (Just compare the more recent film Deep Blue Sea, with its hyper-real CGI sharks… I had to struggle to remember its title, which tells you all you need to know about it.)

The scene in Jaws that most people remember (that doesn’t involve sharks, blood or Ben Gardener’s verdigrisly corpse) is simplicity itself. It’s the “Show me the way to go home…” scene. Brody, Hooper and Quint are sitting in the cabin drinking and talking. This scene is full of character moments that turn the carnage to come into real human drama, as opposed to mere fishy spectacle.

The highlight of their drunken chat is where the macho Quint and the nerdy Hooper are comparing their scars. The irony is that they are surprisingly evenly matched. At first it looks as if Brody can’t join in (Brody with his water phobia is unlikely to have many shark bites to date). But then he tentatively exposes a scar on his torso, only to change his mind and hide it. This fleeting gesture tells a whole story in itself. The scar is (we presume) a gunshot wound from his former life as a city cop, which is what sent him out here to Amity in the first place, in search of a quiet, safe life (ho the irony). It reminds us that there are sharks on land too, that Brody is equal at least to his shipmates, and in fact probably outdoes them as a survivor (an important plot point). But crucially, unlike them he won’t brag about his scar, because he is also a family man and thus values his life more. For him, life and death is a serious business. In short, that single two-second gesture confirms him finally as the hero of the whole piece, the valiant everyman who will slay the demon in the end. The others just don’t have the gravitas.

When directors everywhere finally realise that moments like this can make up for all the mediocre special effects in the world, maybe they’ll start wasting fewer millions on stars and grandstanding, and instead pay them to the screenwriters and character actors. For it is all about the characters…

Head in the clouds... as usual

I love dipping into physics, so long as no-one expects me to understand it properly. Things like the cloud chamber fascinate me. Physicists who study the elementary particles can’t actually see these particles, they can only see the trails they make in the clouds of a cloud chamber. By following these trails they can see how they interact with other particles and so deduce many of each particle’s properties.

Call this a foolish leap, but this reminds me a lot of characters in a story. In a good book, you get to know characters not by direct description (“he was a hard, uncaring sort of man”) but by how they interact with those around them; by the trails they make in the clouds. If characters are like particles, then their traces are all the subplots that trail away from them. In the end you don’t need to see the character at all – like the physicist, you can pinpoint him purely from the trails he leaves behind.

On a totally random digression, don’t those particle tracks in the picture remind you of the Nazca lines? Just a thought.