Essentials: Jaws

The shark never seemed to work. Shooting went way over schedule and budget. Robert Shaw was drunk. Nothing seemed to work during the production of Jaws, the first real big movie production of director Steven Spielberg. But somehow, through hard work or dumb luck, a classic was made, one that birthed the modern day summer blockbuster and the careers of the biggest director and composer in film history.

Written by Carl Gottlieb and Peter Benchley and based off Benchley’s book, Jaws follows Richard Brody (Roy Scheider), the Chief of Police of Amity Island, a beach community that finds itself under attack from a killer shark. With reluctant Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) downplaying the severity of their crisis, Brody enlists oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and wily sea captain Quint (Robert Shaw) to track down and kill the beast.

Jaws masterfully builds tension. Through editing by Verna Fields, the score by John Williams and cinematography by Bill Butler, the film escalates tension to heart-racing effect.

Take the scene below, Brody’s first encounter with the shark; Brody is staring at the ocean, his focus on discerning whether or not there is a danger. He’s interrupted with a mundane man, but a woman just over the man’s shoulder starts screaming. Brody jumps up, but the camera cuts back to reveal she’s just goofing around with a boy. A false scare. We go back to the scene. More kids in the water. Splashing, making noise. Quick cuts. A man loses his dog. He calls out to it. The dog’s toy floats unattended. An underwater shot of legs flapping in the water and the score ratchets up. The camera is the POV of the shark as it hones in on its prey, a boy on a small floatie. It moves closer and closer. Back to Brody’s view, we see some commotion just off the distance. What is that? We see blood. The boy is dragged under the water. We zoom focus on Brody’s face, and the score zings as we realize what has just happened; the shark has attacked.

Seemingly simple and yet so efficient, Spielberg used the language of cinema to build suspense throughout the film, using what we see and what we don’t see to increase the tension. 15 years after Psycho and 12 years after The Birds, cinema found its heir apparent to Alfred Hitchcock in Spielberg.

At its heart, the story is simple: a town is terrorized by a shark and the Sheriff is tasked with stopping it. In the decades that followed, monster movies saturated the market and the nature of movie effects proliferated immensely. So why does Jaws still hold up? The answer is in its story and specifically its characters.

Great drama is built around conflicting characters and Jaws features three distinct, contrasting personalities in Brody, Hooper and Quint. Hooper and Quint are each able seamen, but fight along social, age and education lines. They don’t like each other because of their differences, and this drives conflict in their relationship. Brody is caught in the middle; he doesn’t even like the water. As an outsider, he is the viewpoint of the audience, our lens into the world of the story. His journey of embracing adventure and overcoming his fear of the water is the heart of the narrative. This keeps us invested, the triumvirate of characters not just chum for action but fully realized individuals that we care about.

This also leads us into the town of Amity. Far from an idyllic beach town, the area is infested with flawed, selfish people. Led by an inept, business-centered mayor in Vaughn, the community is totally unprepared for the calamity of the shark that has descended upon them, putting trivial matters of money, propriety and calm over the needs of safety.

Sound a bit like Covid? That’s because Jaws is not just a monster movie, but an investigation into the weakness of mankind against nature. No one in the film, from the town to Brody to Hooper to Quint, is truly able to definitively tackle the shark and what it represents. Nature is infallible, humanity doomed to petty disagreements and shortsighted grievances, the real threat posed by the natural world untamable. When Brody ultimately kills the shark, it is through dogged determination, quick thinking and dumb luck, not any kind of subjugation of nature. Mankind hasn’t won; it’s just lasted to fight another day, just as our current battle against the threat of a virus is never truly over; it’s just been extended until another strand, another disease, emerges to test us.

Of course, no discussion of Jaws is complete without recognizing the two drastic changes that emerged after the film’s release: the birth of the summer blockbuster and the terrible toll on sharks in the wild.

As Jaws raked in mountains of cash, becoming the highest grossing movie up to that point, executives realized that the summer season, with school out and families about, offered the opportunity to release tentpole films. The birth of Star Wars just two years later confirmed that the blockbuster could turn film into a bigger business than anyone thought possible. For fifty years, big, action-packed films have been released in the summer, catering to the Jaws-demographic, drowning out the marketplace, for good and bad, forever altering cinema’s perception.

The movie also made sharks appear malevolent, a threat against anyone in the water, enhancing their public perception as dangerous killers to swimmers everywhere when facts dictate that this is simply not the case. On average, there are 16 shark attacks per year in the United States, with one fatality every two years. In comparison, cows kill roughly 37 people per year (imagine a more correct remake featuring killers cows properly titled Moo– that would certainly pique my interest). Since the film’s release, it is estimated that 20-100 million sharks have been killed every year in the wild.

Jaws author Peter Benchley became a shark advocate later in his life, realizing the harm that the film and book had caused. While the shark is the monster of the film, it’s important to remember that the real antagonist was humanity, too self-invested to give nature space and understanding; in many ways, the shark is responding to them, eager to profit off their vulnerability.

Jaws still packs a wallop of frights nearly 50 years after its release because of its story, its detailed characters and its use of cinematic technique to enhance tension. It’s a defining movie in the history of film, a cursed production that nevertheless managed to erupt into a phenomenon and define the marketplace in a way still felt today.