Steven Spielberg’s Struggle Was Good for Him

To this day, when I open my eyes underwater—sometimes even in pools—my mind wanders to the image of an open-mouthed shark suddenly materializing from the murky middle distance. And I know I’m not alone. Yes, there are probably a few weirdos, stoics, or Beowulfs out there who were unfazed by the movie. But, statistically and stylistically, I’m comfortable saying that Jaws freaked everybody out.

Speaking of statistics, I have a gripe with how people talk about Jaws, and frankly, with shark discourse more broadly.

“Scientists in California believe that the classic 1975 film ‘Jaws’ led to a generation of galeophobics—people with an irrational fear of sharks,” the New York Post reported back in 2022. CBS, reporting on the same study, phrased it almost the same way: “Scientists in California are researching what makes people so scared of sharks. They believe the 1975 movie ‘Jaws’ caused a generation of people to develop galeophobia—an irrational fear of sharks.” The “Jaws effect,” the Post reiterated last week, “caused an entire generation to develop an irrational fear of sharks.”

Here’s the thing: Fear of sharks is entirely rational. If you’re in the water and a giant shark approaches you, it is entirely normal for you to deploy an improvised bowel-emptying version of the squid ink tactic in response. Alas, we are not human B-52s, and the deployment of fecal chaff countermeasures is not a proven way to distract sharks.

I always laugh at the advice on how to deal with sharks. One common suggestion is to treat a shark encounter like a job interview or negotiation: Look it in the eye. This is, apparently, sound advice: You don’t want the shark to think you’re prey, and prey don’t do the whole Robert DeNiro in Meet the Parents thing—“I’m watching you!”—with a great white shark. Good to know, but in the annals of “easier said than done,” this ranks just above “playing dead” during a grizzly bear attack, standing your ground when an elephant charges you, and not feeling regret over eating at Taco Bell at 3 a.m.

Anyway, here’s my point about statistics. The Jaws effect is better understood as an irrational fear of the likelihood of a shark attack. Think of it this way. It is entirely normal and rational to be afraid of serial killers who want to eat your liver or wear your skin like a suit. It’s irrational to organize your life around avoiding this fate. Most of us understand this when it comes to air travel. Pretty much all sane people are afraid of plummeting to the earth in a fiery ball of twisted metal. But we grasp that the odds of that happening to us are very, very low. If every person afraid of dying in a plane crash avoided flying, the airlines would go out of business.

Let’s get back to Jaws.

Part of the movie’s genius is that you don’t actually see all that much of the shark. We really don’t lay eyes on it for the first hour or so of the film. This was not the plan, but the three mechanical sharks constructed for the movie kept breaking down like an Amish-made dialysis machine. The 26-year-old director, Steven Spielberg, feared his career might die in its infancy; production delays and cost overruns were killing him. All because Bruce—the mechanical shark, nicknamed after Spielberg’s lawyer—was a dud.

My buddy Rob Long once told me a (probably apocryphal) story about what Spielberg did next: consult with Martin Scorsese, George Lucas, and other legendary cineastes about how to deal with the problem. Spielberg brought them all to the lot and showed them the fakakta shark. According to the legend (I can’t find any proof it’s true), Scorsese said something like, “I got it. Turn the camera around! Film the whole thing from the point of view of the shark.” (If Leonardo DiCaprio had been alive, he probably would have suggested casting him as the shark.)

Whether the Scorsese angle is true or not, that’s basically what Spielberg did. And it worked brilliantly: We see all those dangling legs from Bruce’s POV, and that makes us feel so much more vulnerable—that could be me!

Oceans are awe-inspiring because there’s so much of them. Our imagination gets the better of us because there’s just so much … muchness out there beyond our control. We can’t feel the bottom. We’re at the mercy of unconquerable nature. The shark becomes the manifestation of that anxiety. Of course, it’s also the manifestation of that much narrower terror of a giant, real-world, eating machine biting us in half.

As a writer, I think about Spielberg’s dilemma often. Hardship and difficulty can be a gift.

Take deadlines. Deadlines can be a real drag, but they’re also a reason to get out of bed. Would you have ever written a term paper or filed your taxes without the threat of a deadline?

As Parkinson’s law holds, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” Parkinson’s law is one of the great gifts to unions and government contractors. Just ask the folks in charge of California’s still entirely theoretical high-speed rail system. Choose your cliché. Desperation breeds daring. A sword over the head sharpens the pen.

Deadlines invite creativity because the scarcity of time creates not just the demand for solutions but the inspiration to find them. 

If Spielberg weren’t on a clock, he probably would have waited until the crew got the shark to work. But he had to get the movie done. As Spielberg later put it, “The shark not working was a godsend. It made me become more like Alfred Hitchcock than like Ray Harryhausen.” 

Time scarcity is just one kind of scarcity. Lack of working animatronic sharks is another. The larger point is that nearly all human progress—certainly nearly all material progress—is driven by one kind of scarcity or another. Better farming techniques, modern transportation, cures to diseases, stuffed-crust pizza: They all exist because there was a need to solve or alleviate some form of scarcity. Of course, scarcity is just another way of talking about necessity. No one has invented a way to kill steel-plated, super-intelligent, laser-equipped, flying bears. But once those suckers start hovering over our cities, someone is going to get to work on that real quick.

There are a vast number of literary, religious, political, and intellectual traditions focusing on the importance of struggle. I dislike a lot of it, but not because all those Kampf-lovers don’t have a point. Accomplishing meaningful tasks is one of the few great wellsprings of life satisfaction and earned success.

The misapplication of the point is what gets people into trouble. Going to war to toughen up the young is gross. Oppression can create heroes, but the heroism is not worth the price. The yearning for struggle is human and can be the source of great and glorious things, but the manufacturing of struggles for struggling’s sake is dangerous folly. Albert Camus, for instance, once wrote, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

No, one mustn’t. The point of Sisyphus’ struggle was that it was pointless—and struggle for its own sake is by definition pointless. If Nietzsche was right that “whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” everyone would be grateful to get audited by the IRS or lose a limb.

But thinkers like John Stuart Mill, C.S. Lewis, and Alexis de Tocqueville (to name three of many) were right about the problem of not providing people with meaningful avenues to struggle, achieve, or overcome. As Mill put it: “The worth of a State, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it …” And a state “which dwarfs its men” so “that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes—will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.”

De Tocqueville said it even better: 

It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my own part, I should be inclined to think freedom less necessary in great things than in little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without possessing the other.

Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated.

But Lewis said it best: “We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.”

I can go all libertarian about these points and how they relate to public policy. Dependence on the government is always bad when dependence is unnecessary. But I don’t want to get into a big argument about cutting Medicaid for able-bodied people or any of that stuff. 

Instead, I want to close with a different point. Technology is great. I am no Luddite. But technology is a huge part of material culture. And material culture is a huge part of, well, culture. Try to think of culture without reference to the physical stuff we associate with it. Talking about cuisine without talking about the methods and ingredients is sort of silly. Music is largely a function of the instruments on which it is played. Clothes, cars, architecture, movies, even books are inseparable from the doodads and doohickeys that make them possible.

One of the great challenges of technology is that it removes or lightens the amount of struggle and effort from tasks. Again, I think that is mostly a good thing. I do not want to walk to the river with buckets every time I need to bathe. I don’t want to walk or ride a horse to California, no matter how much I would benefit from the lessons of the journey or how many friends I would make along the way. I like antibiotics even if they come at the cost of some revelatory fever dreams. Is that you, Obi-Wan?

But I worry that the rise of the internet and screen life in general has enervated a lot of character. My friend Tevi Troy published a great tribute to our old boss Ben Wattenberg today, and it got me thinking about how grateful I am that I worked as a researcher—for a fairly polymathic dude—before the advent of the internet. And it makes me even more grateful for having a father who responded to nearly every question I asked with, “Let’s go look it up.” I would roll my eyes as he dragged me to a book or books in search of the answer. Today, I often get similar eye rolls from my daughter, even though the answer resides in the internet-connected supercomputer literally in her hands. 

I was a good researcher, at least in part, because I read a lot. I got asked a lot of questions I didn’t know the answer to. But because I read a lot, I had a good idea about where to look for the answers. And in the process of looking, I further prepared myself to find the answers to yet more questions still unasked.

The struggle made me better. If all I had to do was ask ChatGPT or Google for the answers, the process would have been, in most cases, more efficient for Wattenberg, but I would be the less for it. Indeed, the evidence for this point is already starting to trickle in. 

This is an admittedly tiny example of what I am getting at. I think living a very online life creates an expectation that life offline should operate the same way. We can now generate realistic pictures and videos with relatively few keystrokes. Why shouldn’t reality-reality be as subject to our whims as the pseudo-reality on our screens? Consciously, we all know the answer—but I’m not sure that answer holds for many people subconsciously. When I hear people like Zohran Mamdani talk about public policy (Government grocery stores! Free public transportation! Rent freezes!), I hear someone who thinks reality should be as easy to manipulate as Photoshop. Why care about scarcity? Just print more money, mint a $2 trillion coin, and will cheaper housing and free bus fare into existence by declaring it so. Small children ask, “Why can’t everything be free?” Grown-ups know the answer. But I think screen life makes the make-believe world of childhood seem ever more plausible.

Children also dream of being knights and warriors, conquerors and kings. Screen life summons this childish yearning to the surface. Every day, I see people yearning to live in interesting times, as the Chinese curse goes. The yearning for “greatness” is derivative of the yearning for struggle, and it has a siren-like appeal to men without chests. Screen life fuels this yearning because, like all addictions, the drug constantly demands a greater dose. But the unreality of screen life doesn’t bolster the tools of character worthy of actual greatness. People want the juice, but resent the effort of the squeeze. Pre-packaged joy should be delivered to us like so many items in our Amazon cart.

America does not lack for real problems, of course. But those problems do not lend themselves to the sort of character being formed by technology today, because the problems we have are hard, requiring not only sacrifice, but the civility and seriousness required to do the homework, to look up the answers, to listen to people who disagree with you. And that kind of struggle is just too boring and hard for the denizens of the screen age.

If Steven Spielberg had had access to today’s CGI and AI tech, he would have made the movie he planned. It would have been really cool. It wouldn’t have been as good. 

Canine Update: The beasts had a rough week (which at least partially justifies Pippa’s reluctance to get out of bed). The weather has mostly been equatorial, and they do not like it. We have also had some bad thunderstorms. Yesterday, during a hellacious storm, the girls barged into my office while I was on a Zoom meeting like a SWAT team with a no-knock warrant. All three huddled under my desk. The thunderstorms do have one positive effect on the girls: They’re happier to be alive in the morning. Another problem with the weather is that it has become almost impossible to keep the dogs out of the water on midday walks. Kirsten tries to enforce a “Fridays only” policy for swimming, but Pippa in particular questions the legal framework of this policy. Today, she got to go swimming with Kirsten’s blessing. But what really ruined their week was a trip to the vet, aka The Bad Place. The verdict was that they both need to go to The Worse Place—the doggie dentist. This is particularly worrying with regard to Zoë, who had like 22 teeth removed a couple of years ago. She just doesn’t have many to spare at this point. It’s possible Zoë’s recent rolling in foulness was a protest to such injustice. I did make an interesting discovery. TFJ suspected the reason the girls refuse to sit during morning treat time is that they don’t like to do it on the slippery kitchen floor. I tested this by bringing treats to the living room, and they immediately followed instructions. In other canine-related news, Penny—Dispatch Executive Editor Declan Garvey’s Boykin spaniel—has been formally named the Dispatch softball team mascot (we do not know if Penny is related to Zoe and Pip’s buddy Clover). Gracie is great. Chester still demands appeasement. 

Owner’s Name: Andy Isabell 

Why I’m a Dispatch Member: I’ve listened to Jonah since the first day of The Remnant, and I love the thoughtfulness he and the entire team bring to current (and non-current) events. I’m also an attorney and former DOJ employee, so I admittedly love and appreciate Ms. Isgur’s perspective on legal issues and the courts.

Gotcha Story: We went to meet her after chatting with the breeder, and Luci was the last one left from her litter. My wife immediately fell in love, and I knew she wouldn’t let her stay there long. I also found out that very day that I had passed the bar exam, hence the middle initial B.

Pet’s Likes: Eating paper, chasing squirrels and groundhogs, barking at other dogs.

Pet’s Dislikes: Too many snuggles, invasion of her personal space, and the vacuum.

Pet’s Proudest Moment: When she casually strolled into her neighbor’s home (a very friendly boxer), stole his toy, and brought it back to our house.

Bad Pet: She once chewed the wooden plantation shutters at my in-laws’ house (maybe don’t put shutters on the bottom window, guys, gosh!).

Do you have a quadruped you’d like to nominate for Dispawtcher of the Week and catapult to stardom? Let us know about your pet by clicking here. Reminder: You must be a Dispatch member to participate.

—Bacon, Eggheadery, and Cheese

—Rooting for the good guy 

—I scream, no more ice cream! 

—Taking accountability