JAWS

Directed by Steven Spielberg (Universal) and ; ■

SHARK'S TREASURE

Directed by Cornell Wilde

1975 has been the year of the sharksploitation epic. Not so much because of some greedy abundance of films on the subject (there's only two that I know of, Jaws and Shark's Treasure), but moreover because there is a deeper need satisfied by the shark's recent star billing on and off the screen as the sleek silent killer: the wish to experience some good old-fashioned fear. Fear is a shark's best friend. It follows that the two should become natural components in a campaign to shock and titillate a public yearning for soothing atrocities. The media discovers a new winning combo, and the banner headlines of a sleazier tabloid last summer bears this out: SHARK MAULS MAN, AS WIFE WATCHES; panels of psychiatrists ponder about the psychological attraction of The Fish With The Dorsel Fin. Back in the movies, especially in the box office smash, Jaws, the shark has become a satisfying way for millions to get the fear. If you've got to surrender to the purifying forces of terror, it beats becoming a complete Mansoniod idiot drinking dog's blood.

Author Peter Benchley and director Steven Spielberg in Jaws and producer, director, star Cornell Wilde in Shark's Treasure have cultivated the undeniably attractive, PG-rated killer shark, and given birth to the sharksploitation genre.

Perhaps it reflects Hollywood's swing back from the impersonal objective terror of Airport, Towering Inferno and Earthquake, which served up human tragedy in DeMillean proportions, to the soul searching simplicity of a one to one Chance Meeting with a Shark. The confrontation, at least, attaches a sense of purity and dignity to being torn asunder and battered like some kind of rag doll, chewed and spit out by a nonthinking eating machine. But with the absence of any moral absolutes, heroes if you will, what could be more terrifying and emotionally satisfying than to hear, here come da shark?

Therein lies the rub—the shark's success in this year's film is due to the ambiguous and curious search to create 1 a perfect metaphor for escape. Jaws is the best escape' movie since Hitchcock's Birds. Audiences flock to see good clean gore which shows nature, not amok but in its natural indifference toward the problem of who eats whom. This distinction has earned the film Jaws a carte blanche PG rating with the special admoniton that it might be too intense for children whereas a film like Rollerball gets an R because of its contrived ultra-violence. The trouble is tLaws might discourage some eightyear-old from ever going into the water again, while Rollerball might only prompt some kid to start wearing spiked gloves or something equally flighty. When I was a kid, you could take or leave The Monster Who Devoured Cleveland, but then you didn't see some kid your age disappear down the throat of a big fish. Jaws is the answer for people who demand violence but want it couched in some kind of realism, so they can leave the theatre thinking: "thatcouldabeen me." That's escape.

Which leads us to the point that neither shark movie, Jaws or Shark's Treasure is able to deal with the human element and steal top billing from the shark." Shark's Treasure is about human greed and sunken treasure hunts, but it's much more interesting to watch the society of sharks which may at the slightest provocation strike. The scariest part of the movie is when the shark nearly beats the diver back to the boat and chews his flipper off like turkish taffy. If I wanted human interaction, though, I'd rather watch old reruns of Sea Hunt. In Shark's Treasure, the image of the wounded shark savagely tearing apart its own wounds in a thoughtless search for food is worth a hundred Cornell Wildes doing pushups with one hand: the metaphor exceeds its creator.

Jaws is much more conscious of a shark's view of reality, but falls victim to boring melodrama. Carcharadon carcharais, The Great White Shark is a loner who wanders into the warm, shallow water off the East Coast com-, munity of Amity. He feasts on the hapless tourists and the enraged citizenry get together a shark hit squad, the shark gets blown to pieces and the film has the expectedly patronizing happy ending.

One shark dids, another is maimed and wounded, but nothing can detract from the fact that the shark is the only real anti-hero who can eat its way through dull treatments like Jaws and Shark's Treasure and still come away hungry for more.

Gregg Sutter