You're Listening to Imaginary Worlds, a Show About How We Create Them
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1 You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky. Back in March, when New Yorkers learned the city was about to head into lockdown, Alex Shepard was out buying essentials. ALEX: And I was walking back, I did my last supply run, which of course was to Astor Wine and Spirits. And I was sort of walking back burdened with all this wine. And there were just hundreds of people out in, uh, Washington Square Park. That was when it sort of hit me that this is going to be really, really, really bad here really, really quickly. This was at a time when a lot of people were watching movies like Outbreak or Contagion to prepare them for what was to come. But those films didn’t feel right to Alex. But then when he saw those people in the park, he thought about another movie: Jaws. CLIP: BEACHGOERS ALEX: That combination of, uh, people, uh, sort of frolicking about as if nothing is wrong and this killer sort of lurking just beneath the surface is, is something that's hit me again and again. This is a situation in which one, the experts are being ignored, but when conflicting pieces of information, people tend to end up doing what they want to do. Right. And in that case, you go to the beach on a holiday weekend, you know, you go in the water. CLIP: JAWS MUSIC This music has become a very familiar trope over the years, but Alex could suddenly imagine what it must have been like to hear it for the first time, and how must have hit moviegoers at a gut level. ALEX: What we’ve been looking for this entire year or just ways to express this, this general sense of, of dread it's word. I keep coming back to trying to find slow. Moving dread in, in art is not necessarily easy. I think Jaws captures it. It really, really well. Although that feeling of slow-moving dread wasn’t the original plan for the movie. Steven Spielberg had commissioned these mechanical sharks, but they didn’t work. So, for most of the film, the camera acts as the shark’s point of view. 2 ALEX: The way that the camera moves as the shark, there's a certain intelligent, you know, almost raw intelligence about, uh, about the way it moves, but also this, this determination to, to kill. I mean, one of the other things going back particularly to the earlier part of this year was the dominant sense that whatever you're out in the world there is this lingering possibility that, that something terrible is, is about to happen. Alex wrote an article for the New Republic about how Jaws felt like the movie of 2020, with the shark as a metaphor for COVID. But he wasn’t the only journalist to make that connection. And a lot of these articles ended up being about the character of Larry Vaughn, The Mayor of Amity Island, played by Murray Hamilton. CLIP: It’s all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says, "Huh? What?" You yell shark, we've got a panic on our hands, on the Fourth of July. In 2020, Mayor Vaughn suddenly felt like the embodiment of every leader who initially dismissed the seriousness of COVID. Boris Johnson actually said in an interview, years ago, that he thought The Mayor was the real hero of the movie because he kept the beaches open – although those words came back to haunt him this year. But Alex still sees Mayor Vaughan as a quintessentially American type of character. ALEX: My favorite line in the movie is when he's talking to a reporter on the beach and he says: CLIP: As you can see, it's a beautiful day,” he tells the media at one point. “The beaches are opened, and people are having a wonderful time ALEX: There's a, I think a particular brand of optimism of foolish optimism that I think is uniquely American. It's the kind of thing that, you know, the Tocqueville writes about, you know, that it's the huckster character as well, you know going back to PT Barnum but, you know, the Music Man, uh, there all these great, great in quotation marks, but these great American figures who are once kind of, I, you know, either they're naive and they're cynical at the same time, they're innocent and they're conniving, they're both optimistic, but they're also always running a con on somebody They're charming and repellent at the same time. ALEX: Yes, That's exactly right. There's a populist energy, but, but beneath that, not far beneath it, is this obsessed, absolute obsession with the economic bottom line. 3 Yeah. One of my favorite lines is when, um, you know, Richard Dreyfuss who in this case seems like standing in for all scientists in 2020 is explaining all this stuff to him. HOOPER: Those proportions are correct. MAYOR: Love to prove that, wouldn't you? Get your name into the National Geographic. (Laughs) And, and like that moment of like Dreyfuss is so incredulous, he burst out laughing. I kept thinking of that scene, you know, when all these scientists were suddenly being discounted. ALEX: Yeah. And I think Mayor Vaughn is so intent on the fact that this can't possibly be happening so determined to ignore anyone who is putting what's obviously going on in front of him, that, that he just, you know, starts saying anything that you can possibly think of to discount these people. Uh, one of the, the scenes for me that, that sticks out for thinking about my 2020 at least is when, uh, sheriff Brody, you know, he sort of finally gloms onto what's happening. And he goes home and just starts reading books about sharks, you know, this guy from New York. Uh, and I was like, Oh, this is the, the 1970s version of doom scrolling. Oh, that's so true. It is like all those horrific pictures of shark bites and stuff like that. ALEX: Yeah. I mean, this is, you know, what we, what we've all been doing. As I mentioned, there were many articles about Jaws being the movie of the year – but Jaws had seriously competition from another Spielberg movie: Jurassic Park. And it wasn’t just journalists making that connection. Jaws and Jurassic Park were actually competing for the top spot at the drive-in box office – because that was the best way to watch movies in public this year. And a group of comedians set up a Jurassic Park parody account on Twitter called JurassicPark2go, which has over 320 thousand followers. They tweet things like, “we are hard at work trying to create a vaccine for being eaten by a dinosaur,” or “just found half a guest. hope he got his ticket half price ha ha,” or “Do you guys think god is pissed at us?” Sean T. Collins writes for the site Polygon. His editor assigned him a story about why so many people were saying Jurassic Park felt like the movie of the year. When he re-watched the film, he was surprised to see that every major decision in the plot was driven by money. And he began to wonder, is the real monster in this movie capitalism? 4 SEAN: The whole reason that the characters played by Laura Dern and Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum arrive on the Island in the first place is because of the accident, the accident, quote, unquote, that takes place at the very beginning of the film, when a worker is killed by the velociraptors. At that point, the insurance company starts balking and there's a lawsuit filed by the family of the worker. They need to bring in these outside experts to calm the insurance company down and calm the investors down. HAMMOND: I mean, let’s face it in your particular field, you’re the top minds and if I could just persuade you to sign off on the par, to get your endorsement, maybe to pen a wee testimonial, I could get back on schedule. SEAN: And I don't think I remembered that at all. I think I just figured like, oh, he's bringing them in to show it off because they're famous. And the whole idea that they were stress testing it, to make sure that the cashflow would still, uh, continue to kind of sailed by me. Another thing that surprised him was that he had a newfound appreciation for one of the villains, Dennis Nedry, played by Wayne Knight – who is of course, even more famous for playing Newman on Seinfeld. SEAN: He's the one who sabotages the Park. So you can try and sneak off a collection of dinosaur embryos to sell to a rival company. The whole reason he's doing that is because he's not, he feels he isn't being paid, what he's worth. And the, he actually has like a little tiff on screen with John Hammond. The character played by Richard Attenborough who owns the Park. Like he doesn't want to give an more money because we teach to read the wrong lesson. NEDRY: You know anybody who can network eight Connection Machines and debug two million lines of code for what I bid for this job? Because if he can, I'd like to see him try.