Movies: How to build a shark.

I don't have any particular insights to share about the images below. I just thought they were spiffy and should be shared. From the Hollywood Movie Costume and Props blog come these tech drawing of Bruce, the mechanical shark from Jaws.

Mad science: "You know that she is in a movie in which sharks eat people; she thinks that she is living a normal life."

Paul Bloom, Yale psych professor, has an extensive and excellent article about the pleasures of the imagination posted on The Chronicle of Higher Education. Bloom discusses the role of imagination and focuses on those liminal experiences that seem to hold over both real and fictional stimulation. The whole article is worth your time, but I pull out a little extract here because it discusses the first kill in Jaws, a horrifying scene I recently wrote up as an unofficial entry in Arbogast's "One I Would Save" blog series.

Here's Bloom on the role of empathy death of Chrissie Watkins:

Often we experience ourselves as the agent, the main character, of an imaginary event. To use a term favored by psychologists who work in this area, we get transported. This is how daydreams and fantasies typically work; you imagine winning the prize, not watching yourself winning the prize. Certain video games work this way as well: They establish the illusion of running around shooting aliens, or doing tricks on a skateboard, through visual stimulation that fools a part of you into thinking—or alieving—that you, yourself, are moving through space.

For stories, though, you have access to information that the character lacks. The philosopher Noël Carroll gives the example of the opening scene in Jaws. You can't be merely taking the teenager's perspective as she swims in the dark, because she is cheerful, and you are terrified. You know things that she doesn't. You hear the famous, ominous music; she doesn't. You know that she is in a movie in which sharks eat people; she thinks that she is living a normal life.

This is how empathy works in real life. You would feel the same way seeing someone happily swim while a shark approaches her. In both fiction and reality, then, you simultaneously make sense of the situation from both the character's perspective and from your own.

Movies: The one I would save.

Arbogast, creator of what might be the closest thing to a definitive horror blog, started a blog-a-thon around the concept of those unfortunate horror victims that we wish we could save. Unofficially dubbed the "The One You Might Have Saved," the blog-a-thon results have been downright brilliant. Check them out, but notice to those with coworkers or kiddies about, Arbo's own entry includes tits and a bush shot. Arbo's loves the ladies, what can I say?

I've never officially managed to throw my hat in the ring for either of the now two waves of entries for this thing because a) I'm a coward and fear the withering gaze of contempt and pity Arbo would give me if he ever read my writing and, more importantly, 2) I've never been able to decide between two victims that shout out for some saving.

Ultimately, I've decided on one.

The person I'd save is Christine "Chrissie" Watkins. You might not remember the name, but I guarantee you remember her: She's the skinny dipping hippie chick who becomes the shark's first victim in Jaws.

My reaction to Christine's death is visceral and always unpleasant.

One can easily over intellectualize the immediate experience of watching a film. Christ-ine (check the name) dies calling to God. Her death is, simultaneously, an act of delivering news to the town. The community will fail to heed the news and be judged for it. If you prefer your horror more secular: The young Christine enters the water on the promise of sexual adventure, when an unseen monster rises from the depths to pierce her body (the damage being localized in the nether regions) and destroy her. Not political enough for you? Reframe the rape fantasy as a class revenge fantasy. Christine is one of the summer people. Those rootless seasonal residents think their money entitles them to treat the island as their own private playground. Her lack of concern for the dangers of night-swimming is a facet of the privilege of the wealthy. Only this time, she pays for it.

But all that's bullshit. Write that crap in the margins of your Bordwell and Thompson to share with your Intro the Film class amigos.

The power of Christine's death comes from the fact that Spielberg frames it so powerfully as to make it something you experience before thought. Like the carpet/hardwood floor countdown scene of The Shining, the scene builds to a climax through the use of dozen nearly subliminal cues.

The scene starts with a subdued soundtrack. A harmonica and guitar are prominent, but they fade along the conversation, replaced by the sounds of the tide. There's a brief moment when the dialogue between Christine and her presumed conquest sticks out, but this is eventually replaced by alternating shots of the famous John Williams motif and a soundtrack where the slightest ripple of water sticks out. As we watch the boy chasing Christine falter, Speilberg even gives us a quick foretaste of Christine's fate. Christine is swimming a leisurely backstroke and, Bubsy Berkley style, kicks up one leg. Then she sinks and the leg, silhouetted against the early dawn sky's reflection on the water, sinks into the dark.

Her head emerges and she calls to the boy. The sun's behind her and the water glows. It's almost beautiful, but it casts her features in a dark near oblivion. You can't really read her face. She's simply a female form, calling out for somebody to join her. The nebulousness of her identity is revisited almost immediately: After we see the would-be drunken hook up collapse on the beach, we get a shot from Bruce the Shark's POV of Christine, just a female form, gracefully passing over the surface of the water. Her track across the dim blue background will mirror several shooting stars that appear throughout the flick.

There's that damn music.

We get another above surface shot of her. She smiles, she's happy, she's enjoying being healthy and young and playful. The music stops and all we hear is her deep breathing, from all the swimming, and her splashing.

Then another shot from under the water. She's just a dark shape, clearly female, but any female. Perhaps all females. The music starts again.

Cut to above the surface again. Before the trouble starts, we already know this is the end. The music, which has been a subsurface phenom up to this point, doesn't stop. Our brains our primed for the coming violence.

There's a little tug, and a shocked Christine is pulled down to her nose, but not completely under. There's a pause as she rises slightly and looks around. She looks vaguely upset, but not harmed. Though this only lasts a second. The next tug pulls her all the way under. It happens so fast, a tiny little whirlpool forms where she was. She emerges quickly, her breath, which is astoundingly loud on the soundtrack, is now ragged and uneven. She doesn't even gasp, just makes these uneven breaths before she's under again.

Then the scene explodes. As with the music between the attack shots, the sound acts as a sonic bridge between shots. Christine emerges nearly out of frame and begins to scream, "Oh God!" Her voice is unhinged. She drags the phrase out. Her scream acts as a link to the next shot. She's dragged across screen. There's a light buoy in the background. The light buoy isn't just some clever, ironic metaphor; without it, against the gray-blue dawn, we'd have no sense of her speed. Because we have a stable point of reference, we can sense the power of the beast dragging her.

She's pulled toward the light buoy (the beast must change directions between cuts). And then she stops and is thrown back and forth across the screen. The limits of her jerky movements are slightly past frame on the viewer's left and just right of center on the right. It's a sawing motion that evokes images of the feeling of worrying some meat or a dog working on a bone. Without showing us any blood or even the slightest bit of the shark, we know exactly what we're watching. Her shrieking is punctuated by her cries for help. She screams "help me," then "no," then "help me."

We get a shot of the boy, passed out on the beach. Her screaming vanishes from the soundtrack. I think, oddly, the boy is the viewer. As scary as Jaws may be, there's always a little disconnect. We're watching from dry land, as it were. When we watch the movie, we know we're safe. We always already back on shore.

The soundtrack, notably, doesn't just kick back in. When we cut back to the violently flailing Christine, the soundtrack quickly speeds back to her screaming. This odd stretching of the soundtrack produces a pig-like snort that rapidly resolves into a high-pitched scream. When you first hear it, it almost sounds like the beast is making some grotesque sound. (Notably, great white sharks do kind of snort when they come out of the water; the effect is, I suspect, intentional.) Christine's wailing - banshee-like, literally, in that is sounding doom for many others as well - is punctuated with her screaming, "It hurts."

"It hurts." It seems almost so obvious as to be silly. But that's the point of this scene. Without a clear source of pain, ripped from context, lit to become some ur-body, Christine hangs on our screen, like some image of a saint in the throws of martyrdom. She's embodied pain. She is hurt.

New shot. She's dragged, nearly thrown, against the light buoy. Suddenly, she's no longer being dragged. She holds on to the light buoy and repeats, with her head lowered against the metal frame of the buoy, "Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god . . ."

Suddenly she's grabbed again and dragged towards the viewer.

The first shooting star is seen behind her in the sky. It's a badly done effect, because it wobbles in sky a bit.

She screams for God now. "Oh God, oh god, please help."

Her request for God to help her will be the last thing we hear from Christine.She goes under and stays under. He has forsaken her.

I realize, as I write, I don't want to save Christine. Some better angel of my nature wants, of course, to reach out and stop her suffering. What I really want, though, is for God to save Christine. I want her cries for help to be answered.

Somebody once wrote that faith isn't the belief that everything will eventually make sense. It's the belief that everything will turn out alright.

Christine's death hangs there, an earnestly nihilistic image of humanity as a suffering body. Her death says to me, "No. Things will not be alright."

If I could save on victim in a horror film, it would be Christine. Because if she could be saved then, perhaps, then there would be the possibility for all of us that things might just turn out alright.

But we never can save her. She always vanishes under the water.

Link proliferation: They really are a scree-um.

Their house is a museum . . .

Artist Mark Bennett has made a name for himself producing floor plans and maps for locations that only existed inside the magical world of TV land. Above is his layout for the Addam's Family mansion. He's also done the home of the Munsters, the charted whole of Gilligan's Island, the specs for the Lost in Space ship-turned-space-age-cabin, and mapped out the travels of Richard Kimble.

Your life is a song, but not this one.

Johnny Foreigner, "Eyes Wide Terrified." Pac-Man style ghosties. You watch. It's good.



Real Link proliferation.

Kelly Link's short story collection, Magic for Beginners, home of such brilliant stories as "Some Zombie Contingency Plans" and the Nebula, Locus, and Hugo Award winning "The Faery Handbag," is now available to you for absolutely nothing.

That's right, Screamers and Screamettes: Nothing!

You can download the mammer-jammer for free.

That's why you should read this blog regularly. You never know what sort of free shiznos is going to be thrown around!

I don't remember Ken Burns discussing that particular incident.

In 1863, in Virginia, scientists discovered a valley containing living dinosaurs. Union military leaders believed that the destructive power these massive monsters from before recorded history could be harnessed somehow and used as weapons against the Confederates. They sent a group of Union soldiers to the valley to capture the beasts.

The result was a complete disaster.

Now, finally, a historic park recognizes the sacrifice of these brave and forgotten American heroes.

Suddenly, I've lost my appetite.

Before you link through, this one is not particularly pleasant.

Armin Meiwes [pictured above - CRwM] is a cannibal. In March 2001, he killed a man and ate him with a glass of fine red wine. A crime so bizarre, it horrified and mystified the world. You see, Meiwes' victim was a willing accomplice, he actually wanted to be eaten. A rare case of what they call "love cannibalism". Now you're going to meet this quiet, unassuming man who became a monster. For the first time, he'll tell his chilling story. And at times I should warn that it is quite graphic and could Armin Meiwes is 46. A quiet, polite man who grew up in a loving family in a small town in Germany. But make no mistake. He is also a modern-day monster. His crime so horrific, there were no laws to cover it, no words in medical journals to describe his mental state.

For some grim true-crime style horror you can see video and read the transcript of the 60 Minutes interview with German cannibal Armin Meiwes.

The cannibal's crime is seeing renewed interest in light of the release of reporter Gunter Stampf's new book on the case, based on more than thirty in-depth interviews he had with Meiwes.

Today I know that what I did was wrong. That this can never be the right way. The wishes, the fantasies you have, that these can never ever be fulfilled. And everything that you dream about will only ever remain a dream. What I did, even after I'd done it, I always thought it could be more than just a dream. Today I know that it can never be.

D.I.Y. Jaws

For a famously complicated effects flick, Jaws continues to inspire kit-bashed, low-fi homages. Here's the Aussie band Pivot's gory, puppet-filled Jaws tribute: "In the Blood."

R.I.P.: O captain! My captain!

The New York Times reports that Frank Mundus, the famed shark hunter who claimed to be the inspiration for Jaws' Quint, passed away of heart attack in his tropical island home in Hawaii.

From the obit:

Frank Mundus, the hulking Long Island shark fisherman who was widely considered the inspiration for Captain Quint, the steely-eyed, grimly obsessed shark hunter in “Jaws,” died on Wednesday in Honolulu. He was 82 and lived on a small lemon-tree farm in Naalehu, on the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii, 2,000 feet above shark level.

Was he really the inspiration for Robert Shaw's unforgettable character?

The legend grew, and in the next few years, he repeatedly took Peter Benchley, who wrote the best seller “Jaws,” out to sea.

Mr. Mundus told a New York Times reporter that Mr. Benchley loved the way he harpooned huge sharks with lines attached to barrels to track them while they ran to exhaustion.

In 1975, “Jaws” was turned into Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster movie, which for years left millions of beachgoers toe-deep in the sand. Robert Shaw played Quint, who exits by sliding feet first into the belly of a monster great white.

Mr. Benchley, who died in 2006, denied that Mr. Mundus had been the inspiration for Quint, whom he described as a composite character.

Clearly irked, Mr. Mundus said: “If he just would have thanked me, my business would have increased. Everything he wrote was true, except I didn’t get eaten by the big shark. I dragged him in.”

Curiously, the Times fails to mention that Mundus was the subject of two book length profiles: Robert F. Boggs's Monster Man (Mundus's rep for catching monster fish and his well-known advert – which promised charters "Monster Fishing" – earned him the nickname "Monster Man") and the shamefully out-of-print In the Slick of the Cricket by Russell Drumm. The latter is, for my money, one of the finest bits of nature writing in American letters. Mundus's memoirs came out under the title Fifty Years a Hooker. If you go the Amazon page for his book, you can see the short note Frank left there:

Dear Amazon customers,

If you want to find out what kind of a pesty old goat I turned into, buy my book Fifty Years A Hooker

Jaws for Sport,
Frank Mundus

Mundus was less than impressed by Spielberg's blockbuster:

“It was the funniest and the stupidest movie I’ve ever seen, because too many stupid things happened in it . . . For instance, no shark can pull a boat backwards at a fast speed with a light line and stern cleats that are only held in there by two bolts.”

And, finally, the scene that secured Quint's place in the pantheon of Coolest Film Characters of All Freakin' Time:

Books: We're going to need a bigger intertextual paradigm.

Besides being one of the "it" buzz books of the moment, Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts is a new addition to that small, and still unnamed sub-genre of horror that includes such allusion-rich and over-designed novels as House of Leaves and Demon Theory. What the former did for haunted house tales and the later did for slasher and B-grade creature features, The Raw Shark Texts does for Jaws.

The plot sounds crazy, so just take it in slowly.

Eric Sanderson is amnesiac. His therapist believes that he's suffering from a sort of extreme psychological defensive reaction stemming from the death of his girlfriend, Clio. This sounds perfectly reasonable, and would make a fine diagnosis, but a short and somewhat uninteresting novel. Mercifully, for Eric and the readers, he begins to receive letters from his pre-amnesia self. Eric 1 (pre-memory loss) informs Eric 2 (post-hunh?) that he is actually the victim of a memory- and sense-of-self eating conceptual shark. These great white mnemonivors are memes that have evolved to swim in our collective intertextuality – the conceptual sphere of ideas and thoughts and communications that flow between media and human agents – and they prey on luckless individuals like poor Eric. Normally, like non-conceptual sharks, they prey on the weak and wounded, like the elderly or those who have suffered extreme brain damage. But in this case, this thought-fish is jonesing for Eric mind-meals.

Hold on. It gets weirder.

These sharks, called Ludovicians, are territorial – in the way that real great whites aren't, but the great white in Jaws is. This means that Eric's pretty much screwed because the shark that wants him will just keep eating away at his mind until Eric dies. Unless, of course, Eric can find a way to kill the shark. This puts Eric on a quest through un-space (the unnamed and forgotten places on Earth that have vanished because they are no longer part of the collective mental map of reality), will pit him against the minions of a networked meta-entity from the late 19th century century, and, ultimately, lead to a massive self-aware Jaws homage show down in the oceans of conceptual space.

You gettin' all that?

More than either House of Leaves or Demon Theory, Raw Shark Texts embraces its weirdness. It has a sort of freewheeling goofiness that reminds of not so much of other horror writers as it does of Douglas Adams. Where House of Leaves borrowed concrete poetry methods to suggest the ever shifting maze of allusions and the ever morphing geometry of the house, Raw Shark Texts includes a flip-book style animation of a shark made entirely out of typographical mainly, I think, because it is fun. This is not to say that Raw Shark Texts completely relinquishes narrative tension in favor of laughs. There are several genuinely creepy moments throughout the novel. But in the end, it is more about wacky ideas, clever allusions, and creative execution than it is about scaring the reader.

Which brings us to, perhaps, the largest potential flaw in the text. The ultimate showdown between Eric and his conceptually toothy problem is an extended, perhaps over-extended, homage to the film Jaws. It goes on for several chapters and, barring some clever meta banter and a fairly timid sex scene (which could have happened in Jaws - things like that just happen on boats), it follows the plot points of the movie extremely closely. This does two things: One, it somewhat mitigates the suspense for any reader that's seen Jaws - and the reader that hasn't seen Jaws would have probably put down the book in confused bewilderment by this point as several descriptions are basically the author saying, "You know, like the one in Jaws." Two, it makes the reader question where homage stops and lazy theft begins.

Raw Shark Texts is not for everyone. I imagine that the relentless barrage of references and winking cleverness will strike many readers as being far too precious. It is, when all is said and done, a pretty precious book. I would understand the complaints of those who felt it was too clever for its own good. But for me, the ride was still worth it. Despite the hipper-than-thou design features and meta-literate film buff allusions, there's ultimately something of the goofy fanboy about RST which redeems it. It is a book that is meant to be enjoyed rather than studied. In this, it lack the earnestness of House of Leaves, the Ur-text off the sub-genre. It was probably a joy to write, and that fun is contagious if you're in the right mind.

Movies: Bruce Jr.

This clip has been spread round these here blogs like athlete's foot in a high school locker room, but don't think that'll stop me from posting it. Let it never be said that CRwM didn't go for the low-hanging fruit!

In the summer of '78, a group of 12-year-olds made their own version of the '75 Spielberg blockbuster Jaws. Here it is, in all its 8mm glory . . .



Interestingly, the original Youtube poster claimed that the reason the shark appeared in full only once was that it fell apart after the first scene. I find it a charming coincidence that both Jaws and Shark suffered mechanical problems with their toothy stars.