A while back, on a summer afternoon in NYC, with the sky big and magnanimously blue and the city doused in sun—maybe a little too hot, and the air thick with that distinctly New York humidity that only made AC more enticing—I went to see a 35mm print of Jaws. I’d seen the film at least 20 times in my life: wearing out a cassette ripped from a library copy; spinning a DVD at all my buddies’ houses after school in those final days before summer freedom; watching it in all its glory on Blu-ray during grad school on a lonesome Fourth of July night as firecrackers popped and drunken voices wailed raucously from the front lawns of the frat houses a few doors down. When you’re from a beach town, on the same island that bore the real-life inspiration for the salty seaman Quint (played by talented playwright and heroic drinker Robert Shaw), Jaws adoration is kind of a given. It’s inherited, like last names and eye color.
That midday screening was nearly empty, unlike those in 1975 when the film rocked the world, opening in 409 theaters replete with antsy bodies and thrumming with the unprecedented excitement of everyday moviegoers who would, in droves, contribute to the film’s historic box office performance—the first time a movie surpassed $100 million. There were just a few people scattered throughout the theater that bright day, most importantly for this anecdote a young mother with her son—maybe eight or nine—sitting in the row behind me. His feet didn’t reach the floor. Watching the film this time, it wasn’t Jaws itself that captivated me, but the boy’s reactions to a movie that came out 40 years before he was born.
It begins with a fire burning like youthful passion on the beach. Young people sit blithely around the fire drinking beer, bantering, laughing under a near-night sky as waves crash into the shore. The sun has almost sunken before the sinuous, sandy horizon. A young woman decides to go swimming. A drunk peer pursues her, but falls and passes out where the sea licks the shore. He doesn’t hear her howls of fear and anguish as an unseen underwater entity sinks its many sharp teeth into her.
Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), newly transplanted from the filthy terror of 1970s New York, whose job on the isle of Amity doesn’t seem to involve anything more dangerous than mischievous kids karate-chopping white picket fences and paperwork, wants to close the beach. But the mayor (Murray Hamilton), garbed in a blue, strong-shouldered blazer dappled with tiny anchors (the classic icon of nautical endeavors) impedes him. Amity needs summer dollars; with the genteel casualness of the authority figure, and with the support of the town, he says that Brody’s inquiries are now done, with no more fantastical talk of sharks with the Fourth of July—and all the money—coming. Then a little boy gets chomped. The little boy behind me screamed. The beaches, nonetheless, stay open.
The day I saw the print, it wasn’t just the pint-sized cinephile’s visceral reactions to the carnivorous endeavors of the monstrous shark and the mismatched men who pursue him that made me happy; it was his questions on the film’s deeper themes—politics, its social and cultural provocations, which, while too subtle for many mainstream moviegoers to care about, are, as much as the thrills and screams, the soul of the film. This boy recognized that. “Why don’t they just close the beach?” he queried; I wanted to tell him, “Because they’re more concerned about the economy than human life.” The American way.
Of course, the mayor’s mulish insistence on ignoring what happened and coaxing people to the beach to bring in those tourist dollars backfires. If there is one betrayal of truth in Jaws, one part that misconstructs the classic American way, it’s that the mayor eventually does recant. Politicians here do not recant. A shark expert scientist clad in denim from the mainland named Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) comes to assist Brody, and the Mayor and the little island’s fish-catching denizens don’t believe him. After all, he’s using science and facts, enemies of American politics. Brody and Hooper join forces with working-class hero Quint to catch the big fish. His boat is a shambles, paint-flecked, dirty, old. Perfect.
What makes Jaws so special is not just the thrills, the technical proficiency, but the wise, clear-eyed, empathetic portrayal of human reaction in an unfathomable situation.
A technical marvel with artistic integrity rarely seen in blockbusters not made by James Cameron today, Jaws is the vision of a wunderkind, profoundly talented, and cinematically wise figure destined to be the biggest director in the world. The esteemed cast and crew and the hungry, maybe frightened newcomers all come together, suffering and persevering through unanticipated and unprecedented frustration, to make something special—a film everyone still watches every Fourth of July. The fluid, seamless conflation of real footage of real sharks and Bruce, the insolent mechanical shark, constantly rebellious in its unending malfunctions, instills a sense of real, visceral fear, making an impossibly large shark believable, scary, iconic.
Jaws may be the first of a certain kind of spectacle—the Hollywood blockbuster aimed at mass audiences, a film whose ostensible purpose is to entertain—but we can’t blame Steven Spielberg for the subsequent, still-persistently dominant style of big, loud, vacuous entertainment, manufactured products rather than the cinematic realization of imagination. We can blame the studio kingpins who, following in Spielberg’s gargantuan wake, misunderstood what makes Jaws so special, both epochal and timeless: not just the thrills, the technical proficiency, but the wise, clear-eyed, empathetic portrayal of human reaction in an unfathomable situation.
The vulnerability of our three motley men stuck together on that beat-up old boat, and the careful, caring way the town and its denizens are depicted—their kindness, their selfishness, the willful blind eyes and denial, the preoccupation with money, widespread ignorance guiding their wants and the policies and consequences they come to regret—are what give the film its ageless power. It is, after all, the story of a small community in disarray after an incredible tragedy, a community more afraid of the possible financial repercussions if they close the beaches than the possibility of being gobbled up.
When Jaws devoured box office records, Gerald Ford was in the White House, and John N. Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman had recently been found guilty for their participation in Watergate; soon, Jimmy Hoffa would vanish, and America, approaching its bicentennial, was a very confused country. As it always has been, always will be. The Godfather Part II, the sequel to the last R-rated film to be the highest-grossing ever, won big at the Oscars, so all was not lost. And then Jaws arrived, a film that is something else entirely—a revelation as an escape for worried Americans, and the unintended harbinger of bad blockbusters to come. A film that, 50 years and innumerable knock-offs later, remains the zenith of analog, human spectacle. The excitement of the boy behind me in the theater is a testament to the film’s ever-enduring power. FL
