Jaws, Pop Culture Icons, and the Problem With Being Cool

Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Shark

Didn't feel like doing a dedicated illustration, so here’s this instead. Even though you may have seen it before. No more meeting of expectations...

A few nights ago, I saw Jaws again. For the 20th time, give or take. But for the first time, I saw it in a cinema. On a big screen. In the dark. With surround sound. With people. The way it was intended to be seen. Or at least, the way people saw it 50 years ago when it first came out, which I only recently learned was—yes—50 years ago. Half a century. I wasn’t even born yet. That’s how old it is. Not how old I am.

Despite this sudden confrontation with time, I was thrilled. Jaws is one of those movies I’ve watched repeatedly, often late at night, always knowing exactly what’s going to happen and still flinching when it does. There’s that particular kind of dread when the music starts—you know the one—and you feel it in your spine, even if you’re simultaneously judging how fake the shark looks.

I’ve always liked Jaws, but if you ask me why, I have no idea. No interesting female characters. Not particularly profound. Even though seen with today’s eyes one could comment on things like toxic masculinity, or political and commercial interests above all. The acting is decent, the pacing holds, and it does what it came to do. Which is: scare the crap out of you. Especially if you, like me, watched it way too young. That’s how it used to be—one second you’re watching cartoons, the next you’re traumatized for life by a man being eaten off a boat.

I was alone when I first saw Alien too, another one of my formative, and favourite, “this-was-a-bad-idea” viewing experiences. I was staying at my grandmother’s house. She went to bed early, and I stayed up and turned on the TV. I ended up crawling under the table because I was too afraid to sit in the open, I was maybe ten or eleven, and I stayed there the whole movie, crouched in terror. The things we did before streaming.

Both Jaws and Alien stayed with me. Not just the fear they triggered, but the way they sunk their teeth (or claws) into the cultural landscape (my first boyfriend, many years later, got a huge Alien tattoo on his back). They’re pop culture royalty now, though I didn’t know that when I first saw them. They were just movies. And yet, they shaped something. In me. In most of us.

Which brings me, somewhat inelegantly, to BAM! Festival de Pop Culture, where I’m curating a collage exhibition as part of the festival. The town hosting it asked me to organize an open call via PCC—an invitation to collage artists everywhere to create a piece inspired by their personal pop culture icon. The one figure—real or fictional, human or otherwise—that left a mark. The one that haunted your dreams or got you through a breakup or helped you survive adolescence.

The Trouble With Icons

While preparing the open call, I spoke a lot to Denis (who works for the town and the festival) and Gerard (his brother and a fellow collage artist). They’re both a little older than me, both French, and both full of strong opinions about pop culture. We had the kind of sprawling conversations that start with “Who’s your icon?” and end up in strange, nostalgic territory—reminiscing about childhood television, obscure comic books, the cartoons that raised us. [Goldorak. Apparently a big thing in France. My partner confirms. No clue what they’re talking about.]

It turns out there’s a lot to unpack when you ask someone who their pop culture icon is. Age, geography, class, language—everything filters your answer. I’m from East Germany. Denis and Gerard are from France. The overlaps were there, but so were the gaps. We realized quickly that what really sticks with us tends to hit during that soft, spongy part of life—when you're maybe 8 to 18, confused and impressionable and absorbing things like a dry plant soaks up water. What you love then, stays.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about my own icons lately, or more precisely, the lack of a clear one. I don’t have a single pop culture hero that I worship. I’m too indecisive. Too contradictory. Too suspicious of enthusiasm.

I get weird when things are too popular. I still haven’t seen Titanic. That might tell you everything you need to know about me. Everyone was losing their minds over Leo and a ship, and I simply refused. Just on principle. If everyone likes it, I probably won’t [meaning: don’t want to!]. Besides, we all know how it ends. No surprises.

Ronja, Momo, and Guns N’ Roses

I do have a soft spot for Ronja the Robber’s Daughter, though. That wild girl with her tangled hair and her stubborn refusal to live the live her father wants for her. I must have read that book a hundred times. I wanted to be her—independent, living in the woods, talking to trees and yelling at storms.

Momo, too. Michael Ende’s strange, slow book about grey men stealing time. I don’t remember the plot at all, but I remember the feeling of reading it. Like something very important was happening under the surface. Like time was being stolen, and maybe still is.

And then there was Terminator 2. Not the movie itself, but the fact that Guns N’ Roses did a song for it. That changed things. That opened up the whole leather-jackets-and-boys-with-long-hair part of me. I grew up in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Germany. Pre-internet. The other girls were into boy bands and pastel dreams. I wore band T-shirts and scowled a lot. My rebellion was aesthetic. I needed to be not like them. It was probably my Ronja moment. I didn’t have a bow and arrows, but I had eyeliner and Dr. Martens.

In retrospect, it was all very quaint. But at the time, it felt urgent. Life-or-death level serious. Like if I didn’t define myself in opposition to the mainstream, I’d drown in it.

Barb Wire and the False Choice of the '90s

In university, I developed an ironic appreciation for Barb Wire. Yes, that Barb Wire—Pamela Anderson in latex, shooting things. I had a huge poster of her in my student apartment. Friends were confused.

The 1990s were a weird time to be a woman. You were either smart or pretty. Either serious or sexy. Either into French literature or dumb action flicks. Everything was binary. You couldn’t be both. You had to choose. I hated it.

Pamela Anderson got dismissed as a joke, as anti-feminist, as a blonde caricature. But I saw something else there: someone who took what she had and turned it into power. It wasn’t my kind of power, exactly, but it was still something. And I appreciated it.

The Problem With Taste

That’s the other thing about icons. They’re shaped by taste, and taste is treacherous. It’s performative. It’s social. We curate it. We lie about it. We tell people we love Kubrick and Godard when what we really want is to watch Die Hard for the sixth time.

Or maybe that’s just me.

I once got into an argument with a professor about pulp fiction. “You can’t seriously read that,” he [!!!] said, side-eyeing a copy of something mass-market and trashy in my bag. But I could. And did. And still do. Because highbrow and lowbrow were distinctions invented by people trying to protect their turf. Pop culture was always the scrappy outsider, the underdog. Until it wasn’t.

Now pop culture is the culture. Which makes things confusing. It must be hard to rebel when your rebellion is sponsored by Netflix.

Why I Like Asking the Question Anyway

The open call for BAM! is an excuse to poke at all this. To ask people not just what they love, but why. Why this movie, that musician, those comic books? What stuck? What shaped you?

It’s been fascinating to see the responses so far. Some people choose the obvious icons—Madonna, Bowie, Prince. Others go deeper.

Each submission is its own tiny essay. A love letter to influence. A visual diary of memory.

And while I still can’t choose a single pop culture icon that defines me, I know the exercise is worthwhile. It forces us to reflect. To remember. To give shape to the murky cultural soup we’ve all been swimming in since birth.

Besides, it’s fun. And like everything in pop culture, fun is serious business.

A Final Word on Sharks

So yes, I watched Jaws again. And maybe I still don’t fully understand why I love it. But maybe I don’t need to. Maybe the value of pop culture isn’t always about meaning. Maybe it’s about memory. Texture. Atmosphere. The way something makes you feel, even if that feeling is terror and confusion and a slightly irrational fear of sharks where there are none.

Maybe it’s about sitting under your grandmother’s table, heart pounding, knowing you’re seeing something you’re not supposed to. And loving it anyway.

So here’s to our icons—chosen or accidental, celebrated or obscure. And here’s to the weird, wonderful detours that brought us here.

Come join the open call. Make a collage. Revisit what made you. And if your icon is also a 25-foot animatronic shark, just know—you’re in good company.

See you again soon, I hope, and please share thoughts and suggestions in the comments,

P