Jaws
You're gonna need a bigger boat.
I wasn’t originally going to cover Jaws for my newsletter. Why? Because I do not like it.
I know it’s considered one of the best films ever made, and I know it had a massive impact on Hollywood and filmmaking, but every summer, I try to avoid watching Jaws at all costs. I absolutely despise the scene in the beginning when the shark eats the dog, and even while revisiting for my newsletter, I skipped right over it. I’m also deeply disturbed by the ending scene when Quint slides off the boat right into the shark’s mouth.
I love horror movies. I love movies about killers, like the Strangers franchise, and I love supernatural horror films like The Exorcist. Neither of these types of films leaves me feeling as deeply anxious and unsettled as Jaws does. I’m not sure why I can sit through Ghostface carving out people’s insides in the Scream franchise, but watching people get eaten by a shark is too much.
Part of it is attributed to the fact that a lot of horror films lack logic. Characters don’t go to the police right away, or when they do, the police are absolutely useless, and characters rarely follow the rules that are put in place to keep them safe. In real life, I would know how to handle the situation in a much more responsible way. But Jaws isn’t like this; there’s nothing the police or anyone can do if someone chooses to go into the ocean and there happens to be a hungry shark lingering in the area. Plus, growing up near the ocean only intensified the fear the film brought me.
The worst part is I’m not sure I would consider the shark to be a villain. In Scream, when Ghostface dies, there’s a feeling of relief. We know Ghostface is in the wrong for going on a killing spree. But in Jaws, is the shark really in the wrong for eating people who are invading his home? He has to eat something, and in the same way he would go after fish if he saw them, he’s going to go after people. I feel a sense of sadness when he dies in the end. All they had to do was stay out of the water for the summer, and everything would have been fine!
“Sometimes that shark, he looks right into ya. Right into your eyes. You know the thing about the shark, he’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll’s eyes,”-Quint, Jaws.
Needless to say, Jaws causes me a lot of anxiety and frustration. But as I go over all the reasons I don’t like the film, I’m falling right into the filmmakers’ trap. To evoke such emotions was the intention, to begin with, and that’s why I absolutely had to cover Jaws for my newsletter. Peter Benchley, Steven Spielberg, Carl Gottlieb, and Howard Sackler set out to terrify audiences and cause great discomfort for decades to come, and they did one hell of a job.
Greed
There’s a crucial scene in Titanic that I would consider the heart of the film, and that is when Bruce Ismay sits down with Captain Smith to ask him to speed up the boat so they can make headlines. In this moment, they put everyone’s lives at risk for some fame, money, and good publicity. I’m bringing this up because when I realized this isn’t too far off from the theme of Jaws, it made me want to cover it even more. This was not some tragedy out of everyone’s control but something that could have easily been contained had it not been for the greed driving Mayor Larry Vaughn. To me, he is the real villain of the film.
Vaughn makes it clear from the beginning that he is not concerned with losing lives; he is concerned with losing money. He ignores Martin Brody’s pleas to shut down the beach because doing so would mean guests would spend their summer in a different beach town, and Amity Island would lose its summer income. Vaughn not only belittles Brody, but he goes as far as to convince the coroner that Chrissie didn’t die from a shark attack but a boating accident. Vaughn ignores Matt Hooper when he tells him they’ve caught the wrong shark. He later walks around the beach, encouraging people to go in the water, even though many of them look terrified of taking his advice.
At its core, Jaws is a film about how much more value our society puts on money than on human lives. Vaughn was not only okay with the risk of letting people lose their lives so he could make money, but he sat back and watched it happen over and over again. The worst part is he never gets his karma. It’s the shark that dies in the end, not him. I think it may have been a much more satisfying ending if the shark had eaten Vaughn and then swam off and left everyone else alone.
The characters in Jaws also seem to have this false sense of invincibility, which is not uncommon in humans in real life. In the context of the film, some characters seem to think the shark, a sea creature at the top of the food chain, isn’t going to eat them. As always, they’re humbled very quickly. I believe humans are capable of incredible things in this world–in the end, Brody is actually able to defeat the shark. However, I don’t believe we should go through life with a superiority complex, and I do believe that we need to respect animals and their habitats. The ocean is a huge place, and we still know very little about it. If there are sharks lurking around the area, maybe stay out of the way until they relocate somewhere else.
The First Blockbuster
When Jaws was released, people were lined up down the block to get into theaters to see it, or so I've heard. It was also the first film to surpass $100 million at the box office. Aside from being a massive success, its legacy has lived on for decades. In Barbie, there's a scene where the Kens are sitting around a campfire on the beach, serenading the Barbies. Greta Gerwig confirmed this was inspired by the opening scene in Jaws when, before Chrissie's death, everyone is sitting around a campfire playing music. I think Jaws' legacy can be summed up in this fact alone–that nearly 50 years after its release, one of the most successful modern films owes one of its scenes to it.
Jaws is also considered the first blockbuster film, despite several successful films that came before it, like The Godfather. In addition, it's considered the first big summer movie, as it was released on June 20th, 1975. As Indiewire stated in June this year, Jaws "paved the way for the massive tentpole features that now dominate the summer season" without sacrificing the quality or integrity of film.
There is so much that contributes to Jaws being a great film. I love that we know that Chrissie was eaten by a shark before anyone else does. I also love the way the shot was set up; we saw Chrissie floating in the water from the shark's perspective. We knew she was going to die; she had no idea, and for just one moment, we got to be in the killer's shoes. Spielberg made several other incredible directing choices, like a tracking shot that speeds along with Brody and another officer, demonstrating the panic and chaos of the shark situation. However, one of my favorites is when the shark eats a local fisherman, and we see his bloody calf slowly sink to the bottom of the water. I remember watching Jaws years ago on the beach with a group of friends, and when that shot came on screen, my sister pronounced, "Steven Spielberg is amazing."
While revisiting Jaws, I realized how unrealistic the film actually was and only just found out that it was responsible for a rise in society's fear of sharks as well as many misconceptions about the animal. There have been many cases of shark attacks in real life, but the odds of a shark targeting humans out of anger and resentment are highly unlikely. In fact, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, sharks rarely attack humans. They would rather eat fish and other marine mammals. Revisiting Jaws has actually taught me something new, something that will make me more likely to go into the ocean and something that might make it easier for me to watch Jaws in the future: knowing that it is not only fake but as unrealistic as someone murdering a group of friends while wearing a Ghostface costume. I still hate the scene when the shark eats the dog, and I will still skip over it every time. But I can't deny a well-made, legendary movie when I see one.