Dear Bruce,

You were so much more than a mechanical shark.

In real life, you were plain ol’ Bruce, a cantankerous jumble of machinery and rubber that failed more often than succeeded at emulating a live great white. Those pitfalls aside, you played the most important shark to ever grace the silver screen in one of the all-time best American films.

The movie famously opens with your first kill, and Bruce, you were terrifying.

Or were you?

Not really. You and your brothers (you were actually a team of three models that each had their own specialized motion) were no where to be seen during the skinny-dipper’s moonlit demise. You were probably far from the filming action, with some mechanic swearing up a storm as he twisted up your guts with a wrench.

On the screen, however, when that unmistakable music started: da-da da-da da-da da-da, my spine straightened. It got louder and my breath got faster. A spike of fear jolted through me when terror bloomed on Chrissy’s face as she got tugged by a massive unseen force—surely the leviathan depicted on the movie poster.

Those 52 seconds of film are intensely vivid, yet the set is dark. They are utterly bloodcurdling, yet there’s not one drop of blood. Most importantly, your no-show performance establishes you as one seriously badass fish, yet the audience never saw so much as one fin.

Then comes one Ben Gardner, who we first hear about when some locals catch a tiger shark, which they falsely believe to be your character. They’ve strung it up on the dock.

Upon seeing it, Chief Brody grins widely and immediately asks if Ben Gardner caught the giant fish, thereby establishing Gardner's formidable reputation as a seaman. We later discover the tiger shark ain’t the shark at all, just a rogue predator out for a swim. We don’t hear about Gardner again until the horrific night outing.

"That's Ben Gardner's boat," says Brody as he and Hooper come upon the ghostly wreckage. Then of course, Hooper makes that infamous and gruesome discovery.

Once again, the action had nothing to do with you, Bruce. You were still landlubbering over in the shop. Instead we had a lone tooth and Gardner’s grisly head ratcheting up the terror.

While the scene was surely effective, it was also pretty ridiculous. Although the floating debris and bite-shaped chunk out of the side of the boat were nice touches, they were also improbable. And, come on … that eyeball stuff was over the top, but by that time, Spielberg & Co. had me so deep in the fictional dream, I would have believed just about anything. It all added up to one subtle message that was crystal clear: this badass fish not only just took out one of the toughest locals, he damn near sank his boat as well.

Your first truly shining on-screen moments come in the the pond scene. It starts with two kids and their fake shark fin, which astute viewers pegged as a hoax long before Hooper calls it. Why? Because the da-da da-da da-da music didn’t boom from the speakers. It’s an omission of pure movie-making brilliance, because when the woman in the kerchief starts screaming her head off about the SHARK! in the pond (at around the 6:00 mark in the vid below), that singular da-da da-da da-da rises right along with the hair on the back of the audience’s collective neck.

“Now what?” says Brody as the woman’s calls get more insistent.

The Chief races to see about the commotion as your dorsal and caudal fins surface just offshore and we finally get an idea of what we’re dealing with. But how do we know how big you are? Brody's tiny son is playing on the beach as you glide behind him.

Not only are you unfathomably huge, this visual takes the fight straight to the human heart: Spielberg & Co. used a sweet little kid to give you scale. And why not? After all, you were playing a sweet-little-kid-eating shark.

All of us in the audience had plenty of reason to believe there was one mean and hungry fish in the water, but after you swam behind Brody’s kid (and subsequently chewed off a guy’s leg in front of his other young son), your character went from the shadowy idea of a shark to JAWS, the man-eater we were promised in the promo material.

From then on, we understand exactly what Brody is up against, and so does he as he looks out over the ocean: This fight is not only real, it’s up-close and personal, full stop.

You know what, Bruce? While I love every second of the following scenes that unfold on the Orca, your big finale (when you horf down Quint) is probably my least favorite footage in the movie. I realize Spielberg & Co. were more or less mandated to include that gory scene, but I have to wonder, had you not been so prone to malfunction, would the first half of JAWS been a barrage of graphic people-eating? Did your ornery ways force Spielberg & Co. to make a better film? I have no idea.

The running time for JAWS is just over two hours, but after debuting on June 20, 1975, it was long enough to keep an entire generation from dipping so much as one toe in the ocean for the rest of the summer and plenty long after that.

Author, circa 1975

In my 59 years on the planet, Bruce, I’ve learned a thing or two about belief. It’s a much larger component of our existence than we give it credit for. A dollar bill is just a piece of paper; it’s our belief that gives it value. And a statue is nothing more than a chunk of painted wood until our belief makes it a worthy of prayer.

We humans are easily manipulated, and few entities prove that as clearly as you did 49 years ago. Even though this letter focused mostly on the time you spent off screen, (I’m weird that way), in the end, you won the day. You’re still winning it. You’re hanging in a museum, for pity’s sake.

How many mechanical sharks can say that?

The power of belief and a giant man-eating shark? Baby, plenty of us are feeling hunted by a massive unseen entity here in 2024, but this letter has gone on long enough, so I’ll leave that litany of loaded metaphors for another day.

Until then, I’ll miss the summer of 1975, not just the movie, but those old-style cutoff shorts and the sound of Dad’s Zippo lighter and the smell of Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil. I’ll miss the way you made it fun to be scared when I was 10 years old, when threats in movies weren’t real. It’s a far cry from where we are today.

I miss so many things, Bruce, but one thing’s for sure, despite your cantankerous mechanical flaws, when it comes to being a true-blue star, you were perfect and then some.

Love, Erin

---

ps: When my brother and I finally got Mom and Dad to go see JAWS on the big screen, Mom was holding a huge bucket of popcorn dripping in movie-house butter when Gardner's grisly head popped out of the hull.

She let out an ear-piercing scream while simultaneously launching the tub of popcorn vertically into the air. It bloomed into a partially hydrogenated trans-fat mushroom cloud above our heads, then rained down upon us and all of our neighbors. Oh, it was something, Bruce, really something.

pps: Believe it or not, Bruce baby, your predecessor was a menacing Peterbilt 281 tanker truck whose nemesis was a red 1971 Plymouth Valiant. Yes, really.

ppps: I was such a fan of you as a kid that I had the JAWS soundtrack (on cassette, no less). I turned this joint upside down looking for it. No luck.

Oh well, at least there’s a puzzle for all of this.