- A man is attempting to swim around Martha's Vineyard where "Jaws" was filmed.
- Lewis Pugh is swimming to call for more protection of sharks.
- Stephen Spielberg has expressed regret about how sharks were portrayed in the movie.
He’s doing it for the sharks.
Endurance swimmer Lewis Pugh set out Thursday to attempt the first-ever swim around Martha’s Vineyard where the blockbuster movie “Jaws” was filmed 50 years ago. In so doing, the British-South African who has completed a long-distance swim in every ocean of the world will break his own rule against talking about sharks.
“On this swim, it’s very different: We’re just talking about sharks all the time,” he told the Associated Press.
Pugh, 55, wants to change public perception around the now at-risk animals, which he said were maligned by the movie as “villains, as cold-blooded killers.” He’s swimming — and talking — to urge more protection for sharks.
He’ll swim three or four hours a day in the 47-degree water in swim trunks, a cap and goggles, mark his progress and then take to the shore to educate people about sharks. He expects to finish the 62-mile route over 12 days.
Pugh’s swim started just as the New England Aquarium confirmed the first white shark sighting of the season off the coast of Nantucket earlier this week, per the AP.
“It’s going to test me not only physically, but also mentally,” he said, while scoping out wind conditions at the starting line. “I mean every single day I’m going to be speaking about sharks, sharks, sharks, sharks. Then, ultimately, I’ve got to get in the water afterwards and do the swim. I suppose you can imagine what I’ll be thinking about.”
Swimming for a cause
Pugh, who has swum near glaciers and volcanoes, and among hippos, crocodiles and polar bears, told the AP this will be the most difficult challenge he has undertaken. No one has ever swum around the island of Martha’s Vineyard before.
Swimming to raise awareness for an environmental cause isn’t new for Pugh, who has been named the United Nations Patron of the Oceans for several years.
“It was a film about sharks attacking humans and for 50 years, we have been attacking sharks,” he said of “Jaws.” “It’s completely unsustainable. It’s madness. We need to respect them.”
An estimated 274,000 sharks are killed globally each day, a rate of 100 million a year, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Shark perception
Stephen Spielberg’s 1975 movie, which became the highest-grossing film at the time and earned three Academy Awards, had significant impact on how people perceive sharks, much of it negative. Its tension-building musical theme by John Williams is etched in the American psyche.
“The film depicted a rogue great white shark as a ferocious and mindless man-eater, and this portrayal has persisted in popular culture to this day. The film’s depiction of sharks as fearsome predators that attack humans for no apparent reason led to a widespread fear of sharks, and many people believe still that all sharks are dangerous to humans,” according to Shark Stewards, a California-based advocacy group working to save endangered sharks and rays.
In California, the movie led to “vendetta killings,” great white shark tournaments, a commercial fishery that along with bycatch in a gillnet fishery almost completely wiped out the population of white sharks along the west coast of North America, according to the organization.
Since 1970, the abundance of sharks and rays has declined by more than 70% as a result of an 18-fold increase in fishing pressure, according to a Nature study conducted in 2022.
Would “Jaws” be made today?
Both Spielberg and author Peter Benchley, who wrote the novel “Jaws” upon which the movie is based, have expressed regret over the impact of the film on viewers’ perception of sharks, according to AP.
Shortly before his death in 2006, Benchley said, “I couldn’t write ‘Jaws’ today. The extensive new knowledge of sharks would make it impossible for me to create, in good conscience, a villain of the magnitude and malignity of the original.”
In a December 2022 interview on the BBC’s "Island Discs" program, Spielberg said, “That’s one of the things I still fear. Not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975.
“To this day, I regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film. I really, truly regret that.”
Both Spielberg and Benchley have since contributed to conservation efforts for the animals, which have seen populations depleted due to factors like overfishing and climate change.