Released: June 20, 1975
Director: Steven Spielberg
Screenplay: Peter Benchley & Carl Gottlieb (based on the novel Jaws by Peter Benchley)
Tagline: "Don't go in the water"
Cast:
Roy Scheider as Police Chief Martin Brody
Richard Dreyfuss as Matt Hooper
Robert Shaw as Quint
Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody
Murray Hamilton as Mayor Larry Vaughn
It's not uncommon for those who have seen this toothy tale to have images from the film flash across their mind every time they take a dip in the ocean…or a lake…or a river…or in a swimming pool. I used to have a recurring dream as a child that every time I went underwater in my own pool I would see a great white shark barreling towards me from the other end, despite the water being crystal clear if you were above water…and the fact that, you know, it was a pool and not the freaking Atlantic.
The story that has terrified so many is a simple one. Based on the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, Jaws (1975) centers around the quaint coastal community of Amity Island, whose survival depends on summer tourism. After a suspected shark attack, Police Chief Martin Brody wants to close the beach, but the mayor worries that the bad publicity will ruin the annual July 4th celebrations, the most important weekend for the islanders. When a second attack claims the life of a child, Brody finds himself facing the animosity of the very citizens he has sworn to protect. Eventually, he teams up with a marine scientist, Hooper, and a colorful local fisherman/bounty hunter, Quint, to track down the rogue great white shark that has been bedeviling the silver waters of Amity Island. Aboard the Orca, the three men find that this particular great white shark is more resourceful, powerful, and committed than they ever would have guessed.
Director Steven Spielberg fashions a beast that is primarily nuanced and hidden throughout the film, an avatar of revenge. But as in the case of Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963), the motivation for that revenge is not immediately apparent. For example, there's the fact that this rapacious sea dragon arrives in Amity thirty years to the day after the dreadful "Indianapolis incident" which occurred on June 29-30, 1945. Quint describes, in detail, that crisis in the film: the day that his ship delivered an atom bomb to Japan. Given this anniversary, some fans have suggested the notion that the shark could be more than mere animal--a supernatural angel of death come to achieve what its finned, black-eyed brethren at the Indianapolis incident could not: the death of Quint, one of the American men who brought death and destruction to entire cities. And now the shark is not only after Quint, but is bent on hitting America where it hurts most: our economy.
"I'm only trying to say that Amity is a summer town.
We need summer dollars"-Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton)
Cinematically, Jaws derives much of its terror from what one might term "information overload." Although the great white shark remains hidden beneath the waves for most of the film, unseen but imagined, Spielberg fills in that visual gap and the viewer's imagination with a plethora of facts and figures about this ancient, deadly predator. Legendarily, the life-size mechanical model of the shark nicknamed Bruce malfunctioned repeatedly during the film's production, a reality that forced Spielberg to hide the creature from the camera for much of the time. Yet this problem worked in the film's best interests. For much of the first two acts, unrelenting tension builds as a stream of data about the "monster" washes over us.
After a close-up imagine of a typewriter clacking out the words "SHARK ATTACK," images, illustrations, and descriptions of the shark hurtle across the screen in ever-increasing numbers. Brody reads from a book that shows a rendering of a shark as a boat-destroying, ferocious sea monster. Another schematic in the same scene reveals a graph of shark "radar," the fashion by which the shark senses a "distressed" fish, its prey, far away in the water. Additional photos in the book, and shown full-screen by Spielberg, depict the damage a shark can inflict: victims of shark bites both living and dead. These are not photos made up for the film, but authentic photographs of real-life shark attack victims. At one point, Quint even draws a shark with a human inside its giant maw, a cartoon version of learning and fear. Taken all together, there images cover many aspects of sharkdom: from reputation to lore, to impact on soft human flesh. The information about sharks also comes from eyewitness testimony: Quint describing the aforementioned Indianapolis incident in horrific detail during, arguably, the film's most powerful segment.
This information overload build up the threat of the film's villain to an extreme level, while the actual beast remains silent, unseen. When the shark does wage its final attack, the audience has been rigorously prepared and it feels frightened almost on reflex. Thus, Spielberg has managed to create, from scratch, an educated audience, one that fully appreciates the threat of the great white shark. His clever filmmaking continues, however, when, even after all this education and knowledge and information, Spielberg unexpectedly harks back to the mythological aspect of sea monsters, hinting that this is no ordinary shark, but a real survivor, a monster potentially supernatural in nature. In the end, facts are unimportant, as Brody, Quint, and Hooper face down an old-fashioned, seemingly indestructible monster.
"All this machine does is swim, and eat,
and make little sharks"
Combining the "keep the beaches open" Watergate conspiracy in the film with the Indianapolis story (a story, essentially, of an impotent, abandoned military), one can detect in Jaws a story about America's 1970's "crisis of confidence," to co-opt a phrase from President Jimmy Carter. After Watergate, after Vietnam, there was little faith in the elected leaders (much like today), and Jaws mirrors that reality with an unforgiving depiction of craven politicians and bureaucrats. The cure is also provided, however: the heroism of the individual, the old legend of the cowboy who rides into town and seeks justice. Brody is clearly that figure here, an outside in the corrupt town of Amity--he doesn't even like the ocean--who puts his fears aside to face the enemy head-on. Yet Brody was also involved in the initial cover-up, but then again, Americans don't like their heroes too neat. Brody must have a little blood on his hands so that his story of heroism is also one of redemption.
In part, Jaws remains legendary because of its opening sequence. This introduction to the world of the film features a teenager going out for a swim in the ocean and getting the surprise of her life. The scene is pitch-perfect both in orchestration and impact. The film begins under the sea as Spielberg's camera adopts the P.O.V. of the shark itself. The camera clings to the bottom of the ocean as it moves inland. Cut to the beach, a long, lackadaisical establishing pan across a typical teenage party. Smoking, drinking, canoodling, a spirited and youthful summer night. One girl, Chrissie, atypical blonde-haired 1970's goddess, breaks from the group, and Spielberg cuts abruptly to a high angle from a few feet away, a shot that signifies danger and distances us from the individuals onscreen. With her horny but drunk companion in tow, Chrissie disrobes for a nighttime dip in the sea, and the new angle is far below her, from the bottom of the ocean looking up. Her nude form cuts the surface above--a callback to Jack Arnold's Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), where the monster spied lovely Julie Adams and dances with her (without her knowledge) in the murky lagoon. But that is an image of a more romantic age. In this case, the swimmer is nude, not garbed, and her contact with the monster is quick and fatal. In a horrifying close-up shot, the camera registers Chrissie breaking the surface as something unseen but immensely powerful tugs at her from below. Once. Then again. After an instant, the audience realizes that the shark is eating her, ripping through her legs and torso. She begs God for help, but as one might expect in the secular, post-"God is dead" 1970's, there is no help for her.
In the best tradition of the horror genre, this scene is also oddly beautiful. The gorgeous sea, the blithe human forms moving in rhythm, the nighttime lighting. In short, everything about this moment should be romantic and wonderful. But it isn't. Spielberg takes the "malaise days" mood of the nation to generate his aura of terror, overturning traditional order, just as our belief in the United States as a "good" and powerful nation had been overturned by national traumas like the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal. Perhaps this is one of the reasons Jaws pulled in record-breaking numbers during its initial run in theaters. The true legacy of Spielberg's film is not the three sequels that followed, of rapidly dwindling quality (Jaws 2 [1978] sees Brody return to rescue trapped teenager sailors from a second great white, Jaws 3 [1983] involves a great white attacking a Sea World-type environment and starred Dennis Quaid, and Jaws: The Revenge [1987] defies all logic and believability by featuring a shark that apparently declares revenge on every surviving member of the Brody family), but in how the success of the film reshaped the movie industry, and pop culture in general. After Jaws, and the box office gross it made for Universal, studios turned their attention to making bigger and better summer popcorn movies, a trend that continues with debatable success to this day.
"This was no boat accident"
Of course, Jaws has also helped perpetuate the stereotype that all sharks, including great whites, are vicious, man-eating predators, when in reality, sharks tend to avoid humans on principal, and if attacks do occur, sharks do not often consume the victim whole, but rather take an exploratory bite, disregard the taste of human, and leave. In the wake of Jaws, "monster-fishing" became a widespread hobby, and self-made "heroes" made it their business to hunt down and kill great white sharks, even though an attack had not been reported in the United States in over thirty years. For a time, the great white shark was in danger as a species, and is still somewhat hunted down with prejudice today, perhaps from viewers who cannot shake the nightmare images of the unnaturally vengeful shark they saw in Spielberg's film.
Jaws is at once political and economic allegory, and a back-to-basics pure adrenaline-pumping horror film that forces the audience to confront deep-seated fears about the water and of being eaten, of being consumed by a force greater than man. Yet is is also an adventure film, one of the first action-horrors, that channels Spielberg's Indiana Jones films more than it does any of the subpar rip-offs that followed it, like Piranha (1978). For the world's first "blockbuster", there are a surprising amount of layers hidden here, if you look deep enough…
Care for a swim?
Jaws (1975)
5-Totally Terrifying
4-Crazy Creepy
3-Fairly Frightening
2-Slightly Scary
1-Hardly Horror
