A love letter to Chrissie Watkins
The Summer Girl
Nobody really talks about what a strong swimmer the girl at the beginning of Jaws is. How she never slows down for the stumbling drunk boy as they run away from the party. How she glides through the water with long, graceful strokes.
No, we talk about the shark lurking beneath her. How shocking and iconic her death is. How Chief Brody tries to close the beaches, and how the Mayor of Amity needs them to stay open. “A summer girl goes swimming,” the Mayor says, wearing his lousy sports jacket covered in tiny anchors. “Swims out a little far. She tires. Fishing boat comes along.” We talk about how the girl becomes an unheeded warning, and everything that happens after that.
But I think a lot about this summer girl. Chrissie, her name is Chrissie Watkins. I’ve watched her run along the beach, dive into the water, and die so many times that I know every beat of her two minutes on screen by heart.
I was born the same year Jaws arrived in theaters. I have no memory of the first time I saw it. It has always been a film I’ve seen. So I’ve been thinking about this, in some way or another, for nearly my whole life. Her pain, my pleasure. How the audience loves watching Chrissie Watkins die.
There were girls who met terrible ends at the beginning of films before Chrissie. (Marion, Dora, Clare, Pam – the first few that come to mind.) But countless girls followed in Chrissie’s wake: the predictable inciting incident, the pleasure of looking at their pain, so many mangled girl remains. Chrissie’s indelible death ushering in decades of far more forgettable ones.
It loomed so large, so quickly, that Spielberg even parodied it himself just four years after Jaws. The opening scene of his forgettable comedy 1941: same actor — Susan Backlinie — same set-up, but instead of a shark, the terrible surprise is a submarine surfacing from beneath her. The periscope rises up out of the water first, Chrissie’s death dumbed down into a dirty joke.
Watching Jaws now, it’s so easy to view her death as a device. But the sun-kissed, skinny dipping summer girl means so much to me, and more with every rewatch. How happy she is in the ocean. How hard she fights and struggles and screams.
Long after her two minutes is up, and the town forgets her, and the Chief and the Mayor forget her, and the credits roll, and fifty years goes by, I’m still watching the summer girl, and I see so clearly now how much she loves the water, how effortlessly she swims, and how very badly she wants to live.
Thank you for reading.