You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. A show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief.

American Olinsky. Back in March, when New Yorkers learned that the city was about to head into lockdown,

Alex Shepherd was out buying essentials.

I had done my last supply run, which of course was to ask their wine and spirits,

and I was sort of walking back burden with all this wine, and there were just hundreds of people out

and walking to the square park. That was when it sort of hit me that this is going to be really, really, really bad here, really, really quickly.

And this was a time when a lot of people were watching movies like Outbreak or Contagion to prepare them for what was to happen.

But those movies just didn't feel right to Alex. And when he saw those people in the park, he thought about another movie.

Jaws.

That combination of people sort of frolicking about is if nothing is wrong, and this killer sort of lurking just beneath the services is something that's hit me again and again.

This is a situation in which one, the experts are being ignored, but when given 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.

This music has become a very familiar trope over the years. But suddenly, Alex was able to imagine what it must have been like to hear that music for the first time,

and how it must have hit audiences at a gut level.

What we've been looking for this entire year is just ways to express this general sense of dread.

Or I keep coming back to it, trying to find slow moving dread in art is not necessarily easy. I think Jaws captures it really, really well.

Although that feeling of slow moving dread was not the original plan, the mechanical sharks that Steven Spielberg had commissioned didn't work.

So for most of the movie, the camera becomes the point of view of the shark.

The way that the camera moves is the shark. There's a certain, you know, almost raw intelligence about the way it moves, but also this determination 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 something terrible 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 the metaphor for COVID,

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