I saw Jaws with my father in the summer of 1975, the year it came out. When we walked out of the Oaks movie theater in Berkeley, California, we were giddy, punch-drunk. It’s a perfect movie—a big, exciting American movie. From its opening minutes you live inside of it, your regular life suspended somewhere behind you. Waiting for my mother to pick us up, we noticed that we were both vaguely on guard against shark attacks, even though we were standing on Solano Avenue, where the only dangerous sea creatures were down the street in the King Tsin lobster tank. The tagline of the marketing campaign was “You’ll never go in the water again,” and my only non-Jaws thought during the movie was I am never going to the beach again.
My mother picked us up, and we tried to tell her about the effect it had on us. My father compared it to Psycho, which many people of his generation did.
“There’s a guy who gets his leg bitten off!” I said. “And you see it floating to the bottom!”
“Sinking to the bottom,” my father said mildly.
I thought of the leg falling through the water, the foot in its tennis shoe landing first and making a little bounce: sinking.
My father loved the movies, and he knew a lot about them. He’d grown up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and as a child he’d gone by himself to the Pickwick Theatre every weekend. On Saturdays, he’d get the whole enchilada: the serial, the cartoons, the short subjects, the newsreel, a Western, and then the feature. On Sundays, there would be a shorter, more dignified program—the coming attractions, the newsreel, and a better class of feature. I had the clear impression that those hours at the movies—maybe as much as his tremendous reading, which began early and never stopped—were the most fully lived hours of his childhood. While other boys were playing baseball or running track or engaging in any of those dull and harassing pastimes that boys were supposed to love, he was at the movies.
He went to see the original Dracula in 1931, and it had a tremendous effect on him. He loved to say, “Children of the night—what music they make!” in a very Bela Lugosi way. He did it for laughs, but “children of the night” must have been a frightening thing to hear as a kid, and he was partly laughing off his own childhood fear.
When I was about 10, he started taking the family to a Berkeley revival house that played the great movies of my parents’ youth. I loved those nights; even though many of the movies confused me, I never missed a show. I was a Flanagan, and this is what we did—we read everything, and we saw a lot of movies. There were lines from some of them that we repeated for years: “I was misinformed” and “Was you ever bit by a dead bee?” My older sister looked a bit like Lauren Bacall, with the same side part, and sometimes we’d address the question to her. “Ellen, was you ever bit by a dead bee?”
The movies were shown in a double feature, and in the half-hour intermission between them, you’d spill out of the black-and-white 1930s and into the night carnival of Telegraph Avenue, 1971. Pushing through those doors was like Dorothy Gale opening her own front door in The Wizard of Oz, when the world switches from black and white to Technicolor; the scene on Telegraph was itself a bit like Oz: filled with strange people, vibrant with noise, attractive but also tinged with menace. What a relief to get back to the world of light and shadow, to the breakfast tables set with white linen, where educated people shake open newspapers and murmur, “Yes, please,” when uniformed servants offer coffee from a silver pot. Was real life ever like that? It was in the movies.
When I was in seventh or eighth grade, my sister moved out, which left a gaping hole in the family. She was the smart one, the ideal moviegoer, my father’s favorite. In an effort to drag me up from the farm system, my father instituted a new policy: On very special Saturdays—which would follow no schedule and would always be announced on a Wednesday night—he and I would go to San Francisco, have lunch, and see a movie. My father didn’t drive, and this was before BART ran under the bay to the city, so these trips—unlike the countless times my mother drove me or all of us to the city—never really felt like a sure thing until we were back at the house. First, we’d catch the 7 bus that went from the Berkeley Hills to downtown Berkeley, and then we’d wait for the F into San Francisco. Very occasionally, and theoretically in a way that could be predicted by looking at the bus schedule in the kitchen, what creaked to a stop wasn’t the 7 but the 7-F, which had all of the benefits of the 7 combined with the ultimate destination of the F, and we received it as an augury of safe passage and a fantastic piece of luck. From the moment we took our seats, way up on Cragmont and Euclid Avenues, we could relax as the bus moved in its stately way through Oakland, and then onto the freeway and across the Bay Bridge, eventually to the end of the line, the old Transbay Terminal in San Francisco, which I recently read described as a “hot mess” during that era. But San Francisco itself was a hot mess at that time.
The city was peerless in its beauty and famous for murderers who came with boogeyman names: the Zodiac Killer, the Zebra Killers. There was also street crime, much of it violent, and political assassinations, and bombings. The terminal was cavernous and poorly lit, and I thought it was a bit scary, but my father’s noninterest in ordinary things, such as driving and figuring out a bus schedule, extended to a failure to notice—really to acknowledge—dangerous circumstances, and so we’d hop off the bus and ankle it up to Union Square to have lunch at Lefty O’Doul’s.
Lefty’s was a baseball bar named for a beloved player and manager, so you wouldn’t think it would be a Tom Flanagan kind of place. But it was also an Irish bar with shamrocks and tricolors in the grand old tradition of the San Francisco Irish, so it was actually very much a Tom Flanagan kind of place. It also had a great steam table. We always ordered either hot pastrami sandwiches or plates of corned beef with the works—cabbage, carrots, horseradish, the full catastrophe—and then we’d bring our trays to a table and give the cocktail waitress our order (“One martini and one Coca-Cola, please”), and we’d sit there eating and talking.
He’d order a second martini, and I’d have a slice of what I think of as California cheesecake (the flat kind, unlike those texture-filled ordeals I would encounter in the East). There was never another child in the bar, but no one ever said anything about my being there, just as nobody said it at the Top of the Mark or the half a dozen other San Francisco bars I frequented with my parents. I owe a lot of my education to conversations held in those places. Lefty’s closed in 2017 because nothing gold can stay, but you can almost catch a glimpse of it at the very beginning of The Birds, when Tippi Hedren walks past Union Square and takes a left on Powell to go Davidson’s Pet Shop.
At a certain point, my father would look at his watch and say, “Okay, drink up,” and we’d squeeze our eyes shut, drain our glasses, and head out. Our first movie was The Poseidon Adventure, which was released at the beginning of the disaster-movie craze of the 1970s, and unlike Spellbound and Casablanca, I understood it perfectly and found it thrilling. It’s about an ocean liner that gets capsized by a rogue wave—“an enormous wall of water,” someone tells the captain, played by Leslie Nielsen—and a group of passengers who band together and try to escape.
Every disaster movie operates the same way. In a busy and cheerful first act, you meet the principals and find out what makes them tick: Mr. and Mrs. Rosen are going to Israel to meet their grandson. Mr. Rogo is a brusque cop who’s always trying to cheer up his wife—the 13th labor of Hercules because she’s a former prostitute who tells him that one of the men on board looks like a former customer—played by Stella Stevens. Reverend Scott, who will eventually lead the group to safety, is a turtleneck-wearing, semi-groovy Protestant minister trying to hash out his theological problems. Once you’ve made these and several more introductions, disaster strikes and you wait to see who gets picked off and who makes it.
I was engaged by every moment of that movie, horrified when Mrs. Rogo called Mrs. Rosen “old fat ass” and satisfied when she herself fell into a pit of fire. The actual plot of the movie is summarized by Reverend Scott’s runic assessment of their predicament: “We’re floating upside down. We’ve got to climb up.” Our group stalwartly tries to get to the hull, even as they pass doomed passengers, in their soaked gowns and tuxedos (it’s New Year’s Eve). At the end of the movie, Reverend Scott has delivered a sinners-in-the-hands-of-an-angry-God speech and sacrificed himself so that the survivors can make the final hurdle without being scalded by steam. Soon enough, rescuers use a blowtorch to make a hatch, and they climb out, saved. I realized that I’d been living so deeply inside the movie that I never thought about their actual rescue. As the light in the theater began to rise, I felt like the movie was breaking up with me.
My father’s favorite movie was Jean Renoir’s La Grande Illusion, closely followed by Les Enfants du Paradis, so he certainly had a developed taste in film. But I think all of those Saturday mornings watching serials—fast-paced, full of adventures and cliff-hangers—gave him an appreciation for movies like The Poseidon Adventure.
We only once went to a restaurant other than Lefty’s. My father presented it as a special surprise and mentioned it all week. It turned out to be a fancy French restaurant, and there wasn’t one thing on the menu I wanted to eat. At the very bottom, I saw that there was an omelet, which I chose, and my father looked disappointed: “Don’t you like it?” I convinced him that I really, really loved omelets and ate most of it, but from then on, we went to Lefty’s.
Only one bad restaurant and only one bad movie—although it wasn’t really a case of its being bad; it was a case of wishing we’d never been born—and it was The Day of the Dolphin, possibly the most sinister movie of the 1970s. We all know that Roman Polanski was in Europe working on a movie when Sharon Tate was murdered by members of the Manson family. Do you know what that movie was? The Day of the Dolphin. Mike Nichols replaced Polanski, Buck Henry wrote the script, and George C. Scott played the lead role, but even with this congeries of talent, the film could not escape its curse. The Day of the Dolphin is a talking-dolphin movie, but it’s also a thriller about an attempt to assassinate the president. Pauline Kael said that Nichols should find other work if he couldn’t come up with a better story. A New York Times review that said that, despite its loftier ambitions, the movie prompts “memories of last winter’s visit to Marineland.”
Scott plays Jake Turrell, a marine scientist and a man with a secret: At a marine center off Florida’s coast, he’s taught a dolphin to talk. Fa is an all-around swell dolphin, and I fell in love with him at once. If anyone else had played Jake, the thing would have been a nonstarter. But this is General Patton–level George C. Scott, and he’s not phoning it in. Jake has an obvious, fatherly bond with Fa, and Fa has the mien of a 10-year-old boy who idolizes his dad; he calls Jake “Pa” and splashes happily in the tanks of blue water, snapping up fishy treats when he says his words.
Don’t let anything happen to that dolphin, you think, because it can’t be this simple, can it? No, it can’t, and soon enough we’re in Come Back, Little Sheba territory. It turns out that if a talking dolphin falls into the wrong hands, there’s hell to pay. Poor little Fa and his girlfriend, Bea, are kidnapped and trained to attach magnetic bombs to the bottom of the president’s yacht. After 25 minutes of frantic plot that even the greatest script girl of the 1940s wouldn’t have been able to get straight, they manage to escape and find their way back home. Fa goes right to Jake, who’s standing on the dock.
“Fa … love … Pa.”
“Yes, Pa knows,” Jake says. The dolphins can’t stay; they must get as far from humankind as possible. The bad guys are probably on their way back to get revenge. Somehow he has to explain this to Fa, who’s confused and heartbroken.
“Fa … stay … with … Pa.”
I was so overcome by emotion that I had to fight to keep myself from outright sobbing in a way that might indicate I was not old enough to go to PG movies or, for that matter, bars. Moreover, I knew this was the exact thing my father hated in movies. Now I know the term is sentimentality; I couldn’t have named it then, but I could certainly recognize it.
Finally, Jake conveys that he could be in danger if the dolphins don’t leave, and Fa is persuaded to turn away and swim off with Bea.
Jake stumbles away from the marine center and walks down the beach, his wife beside him. But then Fa appears at the shoreline a few feet away, lifting his head out of the water: “Pa!”
Jake doesn’t even look at him. He collapses onto the sand and he sits there, saying nothing. His heart is broken.
Fa says it again—“Pa!”—and Jake doesn’t move. Eventually Fa turns away a final time, and he and Bea swim away forever.
By then I was so distraught that by modern standards I was probably traumatized, but it wasn’t about Fa anymore. It was because, in between the times Fa says “Pa,” my own father had emitted a sound: a quick, surprised sound—like a gasp, but not a gasp. It was a small, audible sob.
My father was from the generation of men who didn’t know that crying was even an option. He had spent much of World War II in a destroyer that eventually came under kamikaze attack, the real reason—not his oblivious nature—for his physical courage. He had been an only child, and his father died when he was 8, the same age, I realize only now, that he started going to the movies by himself. The grief, as far as I understood, had expressed itself years before I was born. But then this happened.
That one moment was probably the closest I ever felt to my father. It was probably one of the closest moments anyone but my mother ever had with him. I knew I shouldn’t mention it to my mother, or to anyone. I never even mentioned it to him directly.
When we got on the bus, I asked him, “Why did we even go to that terrible movie?”
“I don’t know,” he said bleakly. “I don’t know.”
My father and I went to see Jaws in Berkeley because we couldn’t waste a minute of time dithering over the bus schedule or the steam table at Lefty’s. We needed to see this movie right away. It had been out for only a couple of weeks, but it had roared into the center of the culture. Driving to the theater with my husband 50 years later, for an anniversary showing of the film, I had an idea that had never struck me before: At its heart Jaws is a detective movie. A cop can’t catch a vicious killer, so he brings in a profiler who knows all about this kind of crime and the men who commit them, as well as a mercenary, someone who comes as much from the killer’s world as from his own. But in the end, the cop is alone with the monster and kills him, triumphing over not just the killer but also his own fear.
I graced my husband with this cinematic observation, and in reply he asked if I’d rather get out at street level or drive down into the parking garage with him. Fair enough. But that’s the kind of thing my father and I would have talked about while real life carried on around us. If anyone asked me the famous question of “why I write,” the answer would be: to keep the conversation going. He died a year after I started.
I felt like I was watching Jaws under the influence of a mild hallucinogenic. I’d seen it only on television since that first time—the events on the screen were so vivid and so clear that it was like having my own youth returned to me, as though I could stand up from that seat to get in my mother’s car, drive up to the house, and set the table for dinner. The whole time I could feel the essence of my father beside me. Not the complicated, unknowable full measure of him, but the person who took me to the movies.
For years, going to the movies was an almost definitionally American habit. They were where you went on first dates and what you did with a friend if you wanted to get together. There was no such thing as a weekend with nothing to do, because you went to the movies. But now that tradition is falling away. Americans buy roughly half the number of movie tickets they did at the turn of the millennium. We all know the reasons: streaming, iPhones, the pandemic, and Americans’ ever-diminishing attention spans.
The movie business has tried to adjust to this reality by betting on a few tentpole movies each year. Almost all of the top 10 movies at the domestic box office last year were sequels or remakes. Half were animated—children’s movies, essentially, that the whole family can see—and the live-action movies were based on properties originally created in 1900, 1933, 1965, 1988, 1996.
Why are we so afraid of AI? We might get some new yarns out of it.
We’re running out of stories to tell one another. I’m sure that Kung Fu Panda 4 breaks new ground in the Kung Fu Panda universe, but I also know that F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that if you start out with a character you’ll end up with a type, but if you start out with a type you’ll end up with nothing. There used to be a million stories, but today the dead-last subject anyone wants to see a movie about is human nature. Jaws is about a shark, but it’s also about greed and courage. Disaster movies answer the question of how different kinds of people respond to crises. We don’t want to contemplate that question anymore, because we’re letting go of ourselves; we’re exhausted. To pervert Norma Desmond’s famous line: The movies are small, and we’re getting small too.
When I was child, I wanted to be the same thing for Halloween every year: a princess or a fairy, or—eureka in the third grade—a fairy princess. My mother was great at making costumes, and my father, of course, had no practical skills to contribute. This costume included two large wings made of wire twisted together, bent into the right shape, and covered first in muslin and then in pale-blue chiffon. But the more the wire had to be twisted, the harder it was to manipulate, and my mother wasn’t strong enough to do it, so she called in my father, and he sat at the dining-room table with a pair of needle-nose pliers in his left hand, making those wings. What would I have become without my father? I’d be no one. I’d be nothing. You sink into water, and you float on top of it.
