Steven Spielberg’s Jaws was a cinematic awakening for me at 10 years old in 1975. No one who went to movies back then had seen anything like it. The gift of Spielberg with that movie and many of his other films, was not so much the visual effects or the fantasy, but the characters were people we know and come to care about. While it might not seem like such a big deal to manage that feat, seeing so many of today’s films pale in comparison to Jaws, illustrates just how good Spielberg was at depicting real people in extraordinary situations. How he did that at such a young is, I think, more about his growing up as an outsider. A geeky Jew amid a suburban Americana made him an observer of life rather than a participant in it.
Spielberg allows us to see the world of Jaws – the people, places, and things — as an outsider would. “Let me tell you about Amity,” he says. This is how they talk. This is how they dress. This is how they wake up. This is what do in the morning. This is what it is to be a New York City cop on an island, though it is only an island if you look at it from the water. THAT makes a lot of sense.
Jaws is, as so many of the best stories are, the Hero’s Journey.
Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) doesn’t belong on Amity Island but he’s the police chief anyway. Already, we like him for that reason. He’s an outsider and so are we. He is new to that place, and so are we. We already know the danger he’ll have to confront because we saw it in the opening scene.
If you weren’t hooked by that opening scene, chances are Jaws would never be for you. As a ten year-old growing up in Southern California, you bet I was hooked. But it was more than that. The magical combo of Spielberg and composer John Williams gave us something we didn’t even know we needed. Watch that scene and listen to the music.
It is that slow, seductive theme weaving through the film like a shark weaving through the seaweed. It is the moon on the water. It is the dumb drunk boyfriend who can barely walk or undress himself and the promise of an uninhibited naked woman swimming out too far.
In the 1970s, rapists and serial killers were sprouting up like mushrooms. They were suddenly everywhere. You could say that the newly freed American female in the post-feminist America made them easy targets and that wouldn’t be wrong. Jaws effortlessly expresses this in a way feminists didn’t like: why should she punished for skinny dipping? But punished she is because she is easy eats for a hungry shark who did not come to play.
From that moment on, the question then becomes who will kill the shark? It’s not going to be the ordinary fishermen. They are no match for this bird who will swallow you whole. Will be the old fisherman who knows the secrets of Old Amity, before all the rich people moved in? No. His fate will be met by this supernatural beast who doesn’t discriminate between old fishermen, children or women. Bad fish. This shark, swallow you whole.
Quint (Robert Shaw) survived World War II but he could not survive this shark, our shark. He thinks he can catch that fish but he wants all the newly rich townspeople to pay him for it. He will sacrifice his life chasing his pot of gold. We know Quint so well just from the way he walks into a room, how he dresses, and how different he is from everyone else we’ve seen on Amity.
Will it be the snarky, cocky rich kid from the Oceanographic Institute? Nope. That needle won’t, and that shark cage won’t. But at least he’ll survive by hiding underneath the water. Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) fits in New Amity to a degree, but not Old Amity. They see him as an egghead who can’t manage the wildness of the ocean. They’re partly right.
No, it has to be our hero, Chief Brody, who kills the shark. The hero’s journey requires it. He is the one most transformed by the end. The guy who is afraid of the water swims back to shore, no longer afraid. He kills the shark no one else could and saves the day but he also becomes someone different by the end. That’s why the sequels to Jaws never worked. This story is about Brody’s inner transformation more than it is about anything else.
The movie kid I was in 1975 was someone who, like Spielberg, didn’t fit anywhere else. But I fit in the movie theater because movies, especially Jaws, were for everyone. They weren’t specifically designed to include all marginalized groups. They settled on the majority for maximum profits. So I was welcomed in because how else would I have been?
I escaped into the movies back then and for much of my life. Stories like Jaws that follow the Hero’s Journey are made for people like me who desperately needed saving back in 1975. Take us away from our ordinary world and allow us to feel what it’s like to be the hero. That is why Jaws is so beloved all of these years later. Our hero, and those he meets along the way, have embedded themselves in our hearts. The same is true for Star Wars, which came along a few years later. Whatever it was that made us feel that way – like we too were plucked from our ordinary world to embark on a call to adventure is absent most movies now.
The franchise films that make Hollywood untold amounts of money can’t ever really conclude. The idea that they are about heroes is baked in already so there is no surprise of someone like Chief Brody called to adventure. In Hollywood now, there is no such thing as an ordinary world because Hollywood is newly “woke” and so there is no such thing as “ordinary.” There can’t be. It must reflect a certain kind of person – hip, intersectional, Left-leaning, socially conscious. That is Hollywood’s ordinary world perhaps but it leaves out 75% of the population.
The other problem is that Hollywood is now comprised of corporate monopolies who care more about their ESG score now than they do even profits. Disney, for instance, owns such a large portion of Hollywood’s products, if they decide they will push social justice into their movies, it will have to be in EVERY movie in all of the companies they control, from the Star Wars franchise to Marvel to Searchlight.
The same is true of Netflix. They offer up a variety of content for people but ultimately, those at the top must be protected, which means genuflecting. Also you have to be a subscriber and not everyone can afford to join up. That part of it is only getting worse.
Movie theaters are still struggling. They’re trying to make their seats more comfortable, the experience more enjoyable overall, with a variety of food offerings. The one thing they can’t do is make the movies better because Hollywood doesn’t care anymore about what Spielberg and Universal cared about in 1975: how to make a hit everyone wants to see and no one can miss.
It’s a tragedy to live through the end of it all. It’s not Spielberg’s fault that Hollywood went corporate, that everything is a brand or a franchise and that much of the country’s people have been left behind. But he and everyone else who is an influencer in how movies get made might start to think about leaving a legacy that isn’t necessarily one that holds its place among a subset of New Amity. Maybe he might think about how to make a movie even Quint would like.
In 1975, the Oscars had to nominate Jaws. They would have looked like fools if they didn’t. Also nominated:
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (the winner)
Nashville
Barry Lyndon
Dog Day Afternoon
One thing about the Oscars is that they’ll never be better than they were in the 1970s. The counterculture made for great art across the board. But think about a movie like Jaws alongside all of those other films that were dark and complex. That’s all you need to know to understand why Jaws was a hit and why everyone still remembers it today.
In a different time and place, this would be a day to celebrate Jaws by showcasing the movie I wrote airing on Netflix called The Summer of the Shark. But this isn’t a different time and place. Now, Netflix stands on one side, and I stand on the other. I am grateful for the opportunity to have made it. It was like seeing Jaws in 1975, a moment I will never forget.
The best thing about Jaws, like so many of the best novels ever written, and the greatest paintings that hang in museums is that no one can touch it now. It exists as a relic of a different time, in a different Hollywood and much different America. Happy 50th to the Greatest of All Time.
