If you missed the pagan Midsummer’s Eve, tonight is the Christian one! We’re at the exact opposite end of the year from Christmas Eve now. Tonight is the eve of the commemoration of the birth of John the Baptist. And what a better way to celebrate it than by watching Jaws, huh?!

          A very cool thing: Phil and Kim were watching the very same screening down in Florida. We were texting each other before and right afterward. How amazing it is to consider that! The two boys who grew up on Jaws, who lived and breathed it for years, who encountered it at the magical ages of 9 and 10, who reproduced the entire movie several times on audiotape with a storyboard and sound equipment in a bathroom, were now seeing it 40 years later. 40, one of the Biblical numbers of completeness–the wheel has gone round; the fulness of time has come–same movie, same time, many states away–still together in Jaws. “My husband tells me you’re in sharks.”

          First: no matter how big our TV screens get, the best movie experience is still seeing them on a giant screen in a dark theater. And it’s a communal experience, too–rather like a worship service. Having that audience adds a dimension. We are people experiencing a story together.

          Second: the movie holds up remarkably well. Virtuoso storytelling is virtuoso storytelling. There’s not a wasted moment, not a wasted shot. This remains a textbook for newer generations of filmmakers to study. Almost any technique of storytelling that you want to teach, you can find an example in Jaws.

          Third: it was a string of “accidents,” refusals, etc. that brought these particular three principal actors together. Can that be anything but the hand of God? Can you imagine how much would have been lost without any one of these three guys in their roles? Can you imagine how much would have been lost without the John Williams score?

          Fourth: it was fascinating to study the audience. For the most part, this was an audience of Jaws nerds, people who had come to relive their childhoods or to introduce their kids to the movie on a big screen. For the most part, these were people who knew Jaws well, who easily got all the answers to the trivia questions shown on the screen before the movie, who couldn’t wait to start telling their younger companions reams of Jaws trivia on the way out to the parking lot afterward. So the element of surprise that was there for audiences in 1975 was gone. People knew when the scary moments were coming . . . and even if they didn’t, they may be a bit more desensitized to shocks and gore than audiences were 40 years ago. (The estuary victim’s severed leg still got a reaction, though!)

             HOWEVER, what I enjoyed seeing was the audience’s reactions to all the little things, particularly in the first half of the film, that they’d forgotten or never really noticed before–all those elements of expert tale-telling that they’d absorbed years ago without realizing it. The humor in particular–Spielberg’s humor worked on the audience tonight as if it had been invented yesterday, for people in 2015. It was absolutely fresh and drew the very same laughs that it drew from audiences in 1975.

               No, there weren’t the screams that we heard back then. There weren’t those explosions of released tension in jabbering exclamations that obscured entire scenes following appearances of the shark or Ben Gardner’s head back in the Summer of the Shark.

          But there was awe and wonder, tension, edge-of-the-seat suspense, fear, and immense relief.

          It’s still the best movie ever made. It’s still Jaws.