For Film Flunkies Only...

Has anyone else noticed the genre confusion in the JAWS franchise?

The first movie is an Adventure flcik, but all the sequels are Horror movies.

This is a fascinating phenomenon to me.

I know, I know, someone is saying "Whatever! What's Two And A Half Foot Batman up to?" He's watching HALLOWEEN II right now. (I think he watched HALLOWEEN before I got home.) This is MY blog.

A film genre is defined by its conventions -- or, when done poorly, its cliches. And by definition, JAWS is an adventure movie. many a film historian and critic have related it to MOBY DICK, and in the case of JAWS that's a fairly valid comparison. (Quint is Ahab and Roy Schieder is Ishmail.)

But it's your classic Quest plot. The villager is out to destroy the dragon that's been setting fire to all the huts of the villagers.

It's got all the trappings and conventions of an Adventure film -- there's male bonding, there's the young man rising up to meet and exceed the abilities of the seasoned warrior, there's man against monster, man against nature, man against man and man against himself. It even has some gorgeous, rousing sea-faring orchestration as they shoot across the water in search of the vicious beast.

But the key to the Horror genre is devolution: Man being stripped of his human nature and relating to the monster, a step which MUST be taken in order to defeat the monster. (And the "happy ending" is achieved when we see Man return to his humanity in a way that the Monster never could -- though, inevitably, permanently altered by the experience.)

JAWS has none of this. It's not about Man devolving into a primitive beast. If Roy Scheider devoleved, he wouldn't have been able to defeat the monster! It was his intelligence that won the day -- his humanity, essentially.

But then JAWS 2 comes along, and the genre is different. JAWS 2 is about devolution, about primal fears and how we respond when confronted with these. We see people shut down, completely unable to save themselves when face-to-face with this primative beast, having to be rescued by the hero (or A hero) in order to survive.

I mean, it's GOOD! Don't get me wrong. I watched JAWS 2 a hundred times on HBO when I was growing up and delighted in the fact that it scared me out of the apartment complex swimming pool! (For a full 20 minutes, anyway. It's alwsys been hard to keep me OUT of the water.)

Then comes JAWS 3-D.

Now, it WAS and WASN'T technically a Horror movie. It WASN'T a Horror movie by definition of its conventions. That is to say that it isn't so much about devolution, but it IS about what it is to be human. By the end of the movie you discover that in some ways, the shark is acting in an understandable and human way. It's a movie about family and protecting ones family.

JAWS 3-D was also written by Richard Matheson, one of the definitive Horror authors of our time. He's written much of the work that has inspired every Horror author whose name you know. His episodes of THE TWILIGHT ZONE are remembered just as readily as Rod Serling's ("Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", "Little Girl Lost", "The Invaders", "Death Ship") and his novels have inspired Horror novelist and screenwriters since the 1950s ("I Am Legend" and "Hell House" are a couple).

And Matheson's work isn't technically Horror, though it employs many of the trappings of the genre. But his work is what helped SHAPE the genre, since many of the genre's practitioners were following his cue and inspired by his work while they further defined and shaped the genre.

So Matheson's JAWS movie doesn't necessarily fit easily into the genre, but then, none of his work does. Matheson has always simply been about writing a good story; if everyone else lables his work "Horror" that's fine by him.

BUT... my main point here is that the third JAWS movie IS NOT and Adventure flick. And if you had to fit it into a genre, Horror is really the most suited. (I GUARENTEE that the director thought he was shooting a horror movie.)

And then JAWS: THE REVENGE is more definitively Horror. The mother has to devolve into a monster herself in order to rid herself of the curse that has haunted her family for more than a decade.

But I believe JAWS is the only franchise -- and a rather successful one, at that -- in which the sequels are of a different genre than the movie that spawned them!

HOW WIERD IS THAT?!!

Sequels are either part of an on-going saga (STAR WARS, SCREAM, the James Bond films) or they're an attempt to recreate the first, successful movie (DIE HARD, LETHAL WEAPON, HALLOWEEN). And one of the first steps to recreating that film is to duplicate the genre. Can you imagine the next BATMAN movie being a Courtroom Drama? Or a Police Procedural? (Both are valid commercial choices, I'd like to poitn out, since both genres are ridiculously successful on TV right now.)

I mean, I can see how the JAWS producers became confused: JAWS was one of the scariest pics to hit the theaters since NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD probably.

But it's the SUCCESS of the JAWS franchise that boggles me. There wouldn't be THREE sequels if we weren't so anxious -- back in the '80s -- to see that damned shark again! We paid our money, so the studio kept cranking them out.

Blah.

I get that this entry is really self-serving and probably uninteresting to most. But I guess genre is weighing heavy on my mind because of the -------- project that WhitelightEnt is working on.

Okay. I think I'm gonna join Two And A Half Foot Batman for the last half of HALLOWEEN II. (I need to rewind it, though, 'cause the scene where the nurse gets naked and gets in the theraputic hottub has already passed...)