Happy Birthday, Bruce: Jaws @ 50!

Fifty years ago today, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) was released into the wild, into the world, and into the film industry and its golden anniversary is being celebrated globally with much hype and fanfare, including here, at Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction (which, as we all know, is possibly the UK’s second longest-running sf/f fiction zine and approaching its own silver anniversary). I wrote about the film’s impact on me, on Hollywood, and on sharks in the wild (none of which were particularly good) in my review of Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg (2018) so I won’t say much about any of that here. I will say that for all that harm the film may have done, it is in my opinion – and quite literally – almost perfect as a work of cinema and entirely deserving of its 97% on the Tomatometer. If it were up to me, I’d push that to 99%, deducting 1% for Bruce, the mechanical shark named after Spielberg’s lawyer. The problem is that Bruce moves like a wind-up toy (which is essentially what he is) rather than whipping through the sea like a fish in…well, water. It turns out I’m not the only one to have problems with Bruce and Jon Harvey’s recent article in the Guardian reveals that the decision to show very little of the shark until the end was motivated by practical rather than artistic considerations. Let me say one thing in Bruce’s defence (it being his birthday): what he lacks in speed and suppleness, he almost makes up in menace and mass. One more thing about Jaws before I move on to thoughts about recent imitations and the Sharksploitation genre more broadly. A few months ago I read Peter Benchley’s much-maligned 1974 novel, on which the film is closely based, for the first time. I thought it was good – very good, actually. Where the film is let down a little by Bruce’s performance, the novel suffers a little more from Benchley’s inability to write convincing women but is otherwise a compelling and chilling read.

Since reviewing The Meg, I’ve watched a host of terrible shark movies I haven’t bothered to write about. Lowlights include John Pogue’s Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020), Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2: The Trench (2023), and Andrew Traucki’s The Reef: Stalked (2024), all of which provide ample evidence for the law of diminishing returns in film franchises. Meg doesn’t even deserve its 27% on the Tomatometer; how The Reef and Deep Blue Sea achieved 71% and 79% respectively is completely beyond me. (Perhaps the Tomatometer isn’t as reliable as I thought.) I have yet to see Matthew Holmes’ Fear Below or Sean Byrne’s Dangerous Animals, both of which were released this year and come highly recommended, but both of which raise immediate reservations. Fear Below looks very similar to Christian Sesma’s Into the Deep (2025, 27%), which deserves dishonourable mention with the three franchise films, and Dangerous Animals is being marketed as ‘shark plus serial killer’ (eye roll). I’ve also watched Martin Wilson’s Great White (2021), which can consider its 44% on the Tomatometer generous; Justin Lee’s Maneater (2024), a well-earned 17%; and Joachim Heden’s The Last Breath (2024, AKA Escape from the Deep), with a very generous 30%. Yes, filmmakers keep churning (chumming?) them out and I keep lapping them up. I blame Jaws. (For both the churning and the lapping).

One thing that has become tiresome over decades of watching movies in what is now called the Sharksploitation genre, much more so than the appalling use of CGI in most, is the way in which they all replicate and reinforce the (hu)man versus nature trope. I’d have hoped that by now, with nature collapsing all around us, this might seem a little too twentieth (or even nineteenth) century to continue to appeal to audiences. This doesn’t just apply to Sharksploitation, but to many other contemporary films and franchises, such as, for example, Baltasar Kormákur’s Beast (2022) and the Jurassic Park (now Jurassic World) media moneymaker. Jurassic World Rebirth, the seventh film, is due next month and will no doubt involve plenty of land, sea, and air lizard mincemeat. Though I won’t be around to witness it, I also wonder if by the time Jaws’ centenary comes around, the orca won’t have replaced the shark as our favourite cinematic sea monster. Orcas are much bigger and much clever than sharks, hunt in pods, and are increasingly encroaching on human-infested waters as ocean temperatures rise. They do look like they’re smiling rather than snarling when they open their (immensely strong) mouths though, which probably doesn’t make a lot of difference if you’re in the water with one but might make them less likely film fodder. I leave that for the future...in the present, it’s time to revisit the past with (yet) another viewing of what might just be Spielberg’s best.

Game of Thrones | review by Rafe McGregor

Game of Thrones, HBO, 8 seasons, April 2011-May 2019, £9.99 (monthly subscription rate)

Fantasy at its finest.

I’ve been wanting to write about HBO’s Game of Thrones (2011–2019) for a while now, but kept putting off what seemed like a mammoth task. I came to the series late, somehow insulating myself from all the hype for nearly a decade. Then COVID-19 arrived and (like many people, I later learned) it seemed the perfect time to tackle all 73 episodes (which run to just over 70 hours in total). I watched it on my own during the first lockdown, then with my wife, and then we watched it together again during the second lockdown. I had heard, as one does, that GOT was yet another case of diminishing returns and that fans were particularly outraged at the final season. The former accusation is complete nonsense and the final season was just as good as the rest and even better than some. One of the reasons for its poor reception may have been the slightly longer wait (two years instead of one) creating unreasonable expectations. Another is probably the fact that the television series had overtaken the novels on which it was based, George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (five of seven novels published from 1996 to 2011, the rest as yet unpublished), and readers were dissatisfied with the direction it had taken. Which is fine…but no one is forcing you to watch the series and personally I sometimes avoid cinematic or televisual adaptations if I really love a novel or series of novels. The only justified accusation of anticlimax is that there is a Lord of the Rings-like sense in which the biggest and most desperate battle takes place before the final battle, but the final battle is between the protagonists and the antagonist so the narrative is perfectly in keeping with what we expect (and, indeed, desire) as audiences. To stay with LOTR for a moment, I loved both the films and the books, but read and watched them as two separate works rather than expecting the latter to slavishly imitate the former and I recommend the same approach to GOT. (I read Martin’s novels after watching the series and enjoyed them too, but they are very different.) On the point of giving audiences what we desire, two of the great triumphs of GOT are the way in which it both deploys and undermines the mythic mode of storytelling (which has been the Hollywood norm for the last fifty years) and combines that mode with a rich architecture of allegorical meaning.

GOT is an incredibly complex narrative with a multiplicity of interwoven plotlines, all of which revolve around the struggle among the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen for the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros. The plotlines involve hundreds of characters, dozens of main characters, eight great noble houses in addition to the pivotal three (Arryn, Baratheon, Bolton, Frey, Greyjoy, Martell, Tyrell, and Tully), and at least eight leading characters. The leading characters are an older generation of three Lannisters (Cersei, Tyrion, and Jamie), a younger generation of four Starks (Jon, Sansa, Arya, and Bran), and Daenerys Targaryen (played by Emilia Clarke). These leads can be distilled to two protagonists and an antagonist, one from each house, as follows: Jon Snow (played by Kit Harrington) from House Stark, Daenerys, and Cersei Lannister (the antagonist, played by Lena Headey). Each of the 73 episodes runs from 50 to 82 minutes and they are distributed across the seasons as follows: 1-10 (Season 1, 2011), 11-20 (Season 2, 2012), 21-30 (Season 3, 2013), 31-40 (Season 4, 2014), 41-50 (Season 5, 2015), 51-60 (Season 6, 2016), 61-67 (Season 7, 2017), and 68-73 (Season 8, 2019). The series also employs the five-act structure popularised by Shakespeare, although the acts do not follow the series exactly. Having watch it four times now, I’d say the overarching narrative goes something like this: exposition (episodes 1-9), complication (episodes 10-29), climax (episodes 30-50), crisis (episodes 51-67), and resolution (episodes 68-73).

In addition to following this structure, the overarching narrative is structured as what the late Fredric Jameson calls a ‘genuine allegory’, which I first mentioned in TQF when reviewing another television series, Amazon Studios’ Carnival Row (2018; there’s a review of the second and final season here). Genuine allegories have four distinct levels of meaning that combine in interesting and sometimes unique ways to provide audiences with especially memorable and meaningful experiences (and are well-suited to the television series because of the length of the form). The literal level of meaning of GOT is revealed in the title, the deadly game played by the Houses of Lannister, Stark, and Targaryen – as well as the other eight – for the Iron Throne, which bears the weight of many a different noble bottom as the seasons progress. The symbolic level is the Night King (played by first Richard Brake and then Vladimír Furdík), his army, and his winter as transparently representative of climate change. Significantly, the first episode of the series is titled ‘Winter is Coming’ and it is an oft-repeated phrase used by the inhabitants of Westeros to refer to a particularly lengthy cold season that occurs across the continent on an intermittent basis. At the existential level of meaning, GOT appears to establish a fairly simple moral axis, with Cersei almost completely selfish and vicious, Jon almost completely selfless and virtuous, and Daenerys somewhere in between, for the most part well-intentioned but prone to egotism and hubris. Given that Jon has no desire to rule the Seven Kingdoms, the Kingdom of the North, or even the Night’s Watch, it is Daenerys and Cersei’s constructions of subjectivity that drive the overarching plot, in a particular and peculiar play of difference and identity that draws attention to sexual violence, femicide, and systemic sexism. The anthropic level is primarily concerned with the relationships among the three levels of war that threaten to destroy the Seven Kingdoms. The micro level is the internecine conflicts within individual kingdoms or noble houses, such as Stannis Baratheon’s (played by Stephen Dillane) wars against first his brother and then his nephew. The meso level is the conflict among the Lannisters, Starks, and Targaryens and the macro level the war between the living and the dead, between the armies of Westeros and Essos (the continent to the east of Westeros) and the Army of the Dead. This is the only war worth fighting and quite obviously the most momentous, but it is the war that the noble houses are the most reluctant to fight, content to dismiss the Night King as a legend and to believe that the imminent winter is natural rather than supernatural.

GOT is, as my brief summary suggests, an incredibly complex narrative consisting of layer upon layer of plots, meanings, protagonists, characters, and conflicts, all of which are eventually – and masterfully – tied together in a resolution as rewarding as it seems retrospectively inevitable. While the combination of myth and allegory is, as already mentioned, exemplary, my particular fascination with the series is the way in which it succeeds in replicating rather than representing the experience of living through an – or perhaps the – apocalypse. In his long essay, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2022), Mark Fisher discusses one of the few other narrative fictions to achieve the same end: ‘The catastrophe in Children of Men is neither waiting down the road, nor has it already happened. Rather, it is being lived through. There is no punctual moment of disaster; the world doesn’t end with a bang, it winks out, unravels, gradually falls apart.’ As T.S. Eliot wrote before him (influenced by if not explicitly reflecting on the mass destruction of World War I) in ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), ‘This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, This is the way the world ends, Not with a bang but a whimper.’ For all the fire and ice in GOT, deadly dragons and unstoppable undead, humanity is petering out slowly, person by person, most by starvation and disease rather than blade or bow. It is, another words, a world very much like our own, where humanity faces existential threats from multi-polar conflicts, artificial intelligence, and climate change that most of us are able to ignore most of the time. I have only had such an experience twice before, with Octavia Butler’s Earthseed series, which consists of the novels Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) (about which I wrote here) and with Alfonso Cuarón’s feature film, Children of Men (2006). Read and watch them all: I guarantee you won’t be disappointed and you might just find them resonating with you in the same way I did. ****

The Spectral Link | review by Rafe McGregor

The Spectral Link by Thomas Ligotti

Subterranean Press, 94pp, £11.80, June 2014, ISBN 9781596066502

 

This review was first published in November 2014, in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 49, following what I hope will be my longest ever absence from the magazine (a three-year hiatus).

If Thomas Ligotti is not the only contemporary practitioner of weird fiction, the genre that emerged as an epiphenomenon of literary modernism, then he is certainly the most accomplished. This slim volume comprises a two-page preface and a pair of short stories which, like his entire oeuvre to date, resist interpretation and exemplify the recondite. Ligotti’s acquaintance with the perennial problems of the disciplines constituting the Western tradition of philosophy – logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics – is striking and his work exploits the failure of repeated attempts to answer crucial questions about existence, knowledge, and morality. The suicidal narrator of “Metaphysica Morum” might be speaking for the author when he registers his ‘scorn for the saved and their smug sense of how perfectly right things were in the universe’ because Ligotti appears convinced that all is not right in the universe and continually revisits the fearful consequences of this conviction in his strange, singular, uncanny stories. There is a strong impression, for example, that “Metaphysica Morum” is nothing more than a slow, sustained unravelling of the meaning of the word ‘demoralization’, which is exposed as having implications beyond personal concerns with the terminal.

Despite its innocuous title “The Small People” is perhaps the more philosophical of the two tales, exploring one of the most pervasive questions in metaphysics, the difference – if any – between things as they really are and things as we perceive them; or, alternately, the extent to which human concepts reflect the reality of the natural world. Here, the narrator finds disturbing evidence of a mismatch and realises that he is one of the few possessed of ‘a type of instinct that actually forced me to see things as they were and not as I was supposed to see them so that I could get by in life.’  He experiences a systematic disintegration of reality when the ‘small country’ he perceives is contrasted first with the ‘normal country’ and then the ‘big country’ until the border between small and big is breached by ‘halfers’. If neither “small” nor “big” map on to the world, do “self” and “other”?  As the narrator penetrates deeper into the mystery of small and half-small people, he is less and less able to “get by” and runs the risk of that ultimate undoing…demoralization. Ligotti is a writer of weird tales and these two will not be to everyone’s taste: their weirdness overflows and unsettles.

 

The Spectral Link sold out almost immediately on publication and is unfortunately now only available at exorbitant prices on the used books market ($99 and £189 respectively on Amazon US and UK at the time of writing).

Mr Mercedes | review by Rafe McGregor

Mr Mercedes by Stephen King

Hodder & Stoughton, 416pp, £20.00, June 2014, ISBN 9781444788624

 

This review was first published in November 2014, in Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction 49, following what I hope will be my longest ever absence from the magazine (a three-year hiatus).

 

In June 1999 Stephen King was run over by a Dodge minivan while on his daily four-mile walk. Three years later, he was still unable to sit down for long periods without severe pain and announced his intention to stop writing. Eight years later, he wrote that ‘the force of my invention has slowed down a lot’, a tragic admission for a prolific author whose work has ranged across the horror, science fiction, fantasy, crime, and thriller genres. Mr Mercedes is King’s sixth full-length novel since his accident. Like some of his best work – Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption (1982) and Misery (1987) to name but two – there is no supernatural element at play and the narrative follows a retired detective’s attempt to catch a spree killer before he strikes again. Like Duma Key (2008), the novel is subdivided into very short numbered sections and the eight named parts are really chapters, varying from one to forty-three sub-sections each, which (a few excepted) tell the tale from either the protagonist or antagonist’s point of view.

Mr Mercedes does not plumb the existential depths of Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, nor is it likely to have the popular appeal of The Stand (1978) or The Shining (1977), but it isn’t the work of a writer whose inventive force is flagging either. From the dramatic yet restrained opening, in which a grey Mercedes emerges from the fog in as frightening a manner as any mythical monster, to the plausible handling of the various plot twists, there is no evidence that King’s creativity is on the wane. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Mr Mercedes is its intra-textuality, King’s explicit and implicit references to works previous and forthcoming, with recurring symbols and motifs from his extensive oeuvre. The murder weapon recalls, of course, both Christine (1983) and From a Buick 8 (2002) and the killer’s disguises as a clown and ice cream vendor, It (1986). The final stage of the story, which places the detective in an unlikely trio of crime-fighters, is reminiscent of The Dark Tower series (eight books published from 1982 to 2012). There are also at least two allusions Revival, King’s next novel, which is due for publication in November. Mr Mercedes is, to some extent, a homage to King’s own work, but with such an illustrious career upon which to draw, the gesture is long overdue rather than self-indulgent.

 

Mr Mercedes features the first appearance of Holly Gibney, who subsequently became a serial character and is the protagonist of King’s latest novel, Never Flinch, which was published last month.

The Earth No Longer Exists by Ben Fitts (Alien Buddha Press) | review by Douglas J. Ogurek

Pessimism smothered in absurdity with a dash of hope: short story collection substantiates future bizarro heavyweight

Ben Fitts’s bizarro collection The Earth No Longer Exists is custom-made for the media-weary twenty-first-century reader. The writing is clear, concise, and above all, original. The paragraphs are short. The language is modest. Fitts admirably avoids any writerly pretension, and with each entry not only entertains but also tackles contemporary issues with a jocular pessimism that occasionally leans toward hopefulness. Moreover, despite their simplicity, all his stories leave room for interpretation.  

Although absurdity permeates them, these pieces are not merely weird for weirdness’s sake. Fitts’s characters ¬¬– sometimes foolish, sometimes silly, and often flawed – operate from a viewpoint of misunderstanding. Political leaders think that replacing the world’s dead superheroes with janitors is a smart move. A man decides he’s going to become the world’s third-sexiest matador… so he can get with a woman. An artist born into privilege becomes so obsessed with the idea that a successful artist needs to be destitute that he loses sight of what he’s creating and what art is. In an insightful exploration of empty sexual encounters versus lasting love, a young man discovers something unexpected in the shoebox of his new lover.

“Raspberry Heart,” an indictment against the chauvinism that still permeates corporate America, introduces a raspberry interviewing for a job. The raspberry grows agitated because its would-be employer is focused not on its qualifications but rather on the fact he’s interviewing a raspberry. 

Clearly influenced by COVID and current political conflicts, “On the Back of an Octopus” involves a city on the back of a giant octopus. When a shark supporting another city approaches, the politicians and scientists of Octopolis go into the highest tower and debate an appropriate response. The idea of getting along is, if you’ll pardon the pun, unfathomable to them. Leaders refuse to see somebody else’s perspective… and the public suffers. 

The volume’s only non-bizarro work, “Next Year in Jerusalem,” is strong enough to be in a high-end literary journal. After an antisemitic message is scrawled on her son’s locker, a Jewish mother decides to move her family from the U.S. to Israel. Her teenage son resists, partly because he’s terrified of being forced to fight in the Israeli military. This fear plays out in the role playing and video games the young man plays. The story stirs up emotion on many levels, particularly animosity toward the mother, who steamrolls her son’s concerns. 

Several stories cover romantic relationships – some elicit sadness, while others end on a more positive note. The man who falls in love with “The Cactus” suffers because of their relationship. Perhaps the physical pain the man feels is a stand-in for the emotional pain that comes with bad matches. That’s the negative side. On the positive side, if a spouse sticks beside a spouse no matter how much pain, that shows love. Regardless, the story punctures the reader with one irrefutable message: love is painful.

In “My Winter Lips,” another relationship-based tale, Fitts takes the current fascination with body modification to the next level by skilfully introducing a new world while avoiding expository dialogue. People can, for instance, get jacked arms or replace their fingers with something that looks like snakes. Unlike many of his peers, the first-person narrator goes to the “parts store” merely to replace his chapped lips with another pair of normal lips. The employee reveals the store is out of human lips, and what transpires is a humorous conversation and a resolution the narrator does not anticipate. The new lips aren’t just lips — they symbolize how openness to new ideas and personal change can allow one to see others in a more positive light. 

The treasures in The Earth No Longer Exists confirm an emerging author’s potential to rise as a leading voice in the bizarro subgenre. Fitts’s stories grasp the reader and refuse to let go; he knows how long each entry needs to be before it starts losing its potency, and he never gets preachy or pontificates. Douglas J. Ogurek*****   

Sugar | review by Rafe McGregor

Sugar. Apple TV+, 8 episodes, April 2024, £8.99 (monthly subscription rate)

Genre-bending neo-noir.

John Sugar (played by Colin Farrell) is a man with a mission, a private investigator who is very good at one thing and one thing only: finding missing persons. He is also a film buff and his reflections on the progress (or lack thereof) of his cases are cut with shots from classics of the Golden Age of Film Noir (as far as I could tell, anyway), which must have cost Apple a fair bit (I suppose they can afford it). Sugar loves movies so much, he might almost have used them to teach himself his trade, in a similar manner to that in which his friend Henry (played by Jason Butler Harner) might have taught himself to be an academic by reading campus novels.

For me, Farrell has taken over from Denzel Washington as the archetypal private eye or latter-day (urban) cowboy, a tough guy with a code and perhaps even a heart of gold if you can penetrate the layers of muscle. Like Washington, I never took to Farrell’s onscreen persona (just a little too smug for me), but he is an actor of such versatility that I was soon swayed by his performances in Miami Vice (2006), London Boulevard (2010), and True Detective 2 (2015), just as Washington blew me away in Out of Time (2003), Man on Fire (2004), and Déjà Vu (2006).

Why am I reviewing a neo-noir television series for TQF? Because, like Tony Scott’s wonderful Déjà Vu, Sugar has a genre-bending twist, albeit one that is revealed late in the series. (I won’t say which genre, so as to avoid spoilers, but you can be sure it’s one of science fiction, fantasy, or horror.) There are in fact two twists, an unusual change of category and a more common, but nonetheless delightful, reversal of fortune as the narrative charges to its conclusion. Does the change of category work? I’m not sure. It certainly didn’t ruin what had gone before, but ultimately I found it a little gratuitous. Meaning that the series would have been at least as good without it and perhaps better.

The case itself is standard PI fare, with Sugar hired to find the missing grandchild of movie mogul Jonathan Siegel (played by James Cromwell). Farrell is at his best since HBO’s True Detective 2 and there are outstanding performances by Kirby (formerly Kirby Howell-Baptiste, playing Sugar’s handler, Ruby) and Amy Ryan (playing Melanie Matthews, a retired rock star). The denouement is not at all predictable and even rather tense so in spite of a lost star for squeezing two genres into one narrative, I’d say it’s definitely worth watching. ***