Larry Vaughn, the mayor of Amity in the movie Jaws, is having a hard time as of late. The poor hapless politician is now a pandemic meme, with opinion pieces in the New York Times comparing him to Donald Trump. In the movie, Mayor Larry ordered the beaches to stay open even though there was evidence that a massive shark was offshore waiting to eat everyone in town. “You yell ‘shark,’” he says, “we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”
But let’s be fair. Yes, some parts of a girl washed up on the beach. But hey, Amity has never had problems with sharks before, and then the coroner agreed that the girl had been killed in a boating accident. And the mayor had science on his side: shark attacks, especially fatal ones, are exceedingly rare in the Northeast. Take that, Chief Citiot Brody!
“Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars,” says Mayor Larry.
We Hamptons residents live in summer towns, where we need summer dollars. We’ve faced the same issue the mayor did: close everything down to avoid Covid-19? Ruining people’s businesses and livelihoods? Or open up somewhat to try to keep things going? How many people will die if we do? What about city folks? Are they going to clog up our only hospital?
So far, things are going fairly well in the Hamptons, better than they went in Amity. With the beaches open by order of the mayor, the shark then kills the little Kitner boy. Local fishermen catch a shark, and cheering, everyone agrees this is the killer shark. But Hooper, after dissecting the shark, declares this isn’t the shark that killed the girl and the little Kitner boy. Mayor Larry, who is not going to have his summer economy ruined by a rich-boy egghead’s opinion, declines to close the beaches.
“It’s a beautiful day,” Mayor Larry tells a reporter. “The beaches are open and people are having a wonderful time.”
Not so much on that. The shark entered a nearby estuary and killed a boater. After that, Brody convinces the mayor to hire Quint to kill the shark.
Hindsight is so easy, isn’t it? In hindsight, we can judge Mayor Larry for allowing two people to die. (You can’t blame the girl’s death on him. Though to be honest, without the town hiring Quint, the shark wouldn’t have eaten Quint in the biggest metaphor of 1970s moviemaking. So maybe three people as Mayor Larry’s death toll.)
On the plus side, Mayor Larry had exemplary sartorial sense. Just look at his blazers. Few, indeed, are the men who can carry off a jacket covered in little anchors, especially the mayors of small seaside towns. Even for the 70s, Mayor Larry was a trailblazer.
Also, while it’s easy for us to judge—blah blah blah, if Mayor Larry didn’t exist, there would be no narrative tension to the story, all horror stories need a bad guy, the beaches would stay closed, blah blah—although what if the beaches did stay closed? The shark would get even more hungry and angry and then what? When people went swimming after Labor Day, the shark would eat probably six, maybe eight people, because that’s how this works and also the town would be bankrupt—anyway, getting back to it being easy for us to judge: remember, Larry was still mayor in Jaws II. So obviously the townspeople didn’t hold any deaths against him. If they didn’t, maybe we should overlook a few bad days in one summer.
Mayor Larry, like so many of us, was a flawed human being. Yes, he should have closed the beaches. But he did his best to serve his town’s citizens as he saw fit. And he looked incredibly swell while doing it.