Stephen Spielberg, “Jaws” (1975)
After nearly 50 years since its release, the big surprise about “Jaws” is that this flick hasn’t aged as much as it might have been expected to, and still has power to send chills through its audiences. Obviously that power is partly due to our continuing ignorance about sharks, and our fear of them, particularly great white sharks. But the power might also be due to how a flimsy script featuring one-dimensional characters can be fleshed out with steady pacing, deft direction, minimal yet highly atmospheric music and great cinematography that emphasise suspense and fear; with good actors who make the most out of their sketchy characters; and with themes and motifs that resonate with the audience even if those don’t advance the plot significantly. Details that make the story more relevant to North American audiences are important too: shifting the story to a New England setting brings it (and the suspense and horror) closer to people most likely to see the film, and the plot holes become more credible in a story featuring characters who’d be expected to be naif about sharks and shark behaviour.
When a young woman’s remains are found washed up on a beach in the New England seaside town of Amity Island, and the coroner determines she was killed by a shark, new police chief Brody (Roy Scheider) shuts the beaches to avoid further deaths. Town mayor Larry Vaughan pressures Brody and the coroner to reconsider, and the coroner then changes his report to say the woman died in a boating accident. Brody is forced to open the beaches, and next thing you know, a young boy is killed by a shark at a crowded beach. This time, a bounty is placed on the shark and local eccentric shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) turns up and offers his services for $10,000. Visiting oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) later examines the young woman’s remains and concludes a huge shark killed her.
After a third fatality at the Amity Island beaches, and Brody’s own son narrowly escaping being mauled and killed, a shamefaced Vaughan is finally persuaded by Brody to hire Quint to kill the shark. Though Quint and Hooper initially distrust each other, nevertheless they and Brody head out to sea on Quint’s boat to hunt the shark. From then on, the plot and the suspense revolve around how the men will find the shark – or rather, how the shark finds the men – and who ultimately will triumph, and what that triumph represents to the audience.
A parallel may be drawn between “Jaws” and “Moby Dick”, in particular between the character of Quint and that of Captain Ahab, obsessed with hunting down the eponymous whale. Like Ahab, Quint is obsessed with killing the shark and claiming the glory for himself, to the extent that he is willing to sabotage his boat’s communication equipment to stop Brody from calling for help. To some extent, Brody becomes an Ishmael-like character, made to carry out distasteful jobs like dishing out evil-smelling chum into the ocean, and Hooper is Queequeg to Brody’s Ishmael. All three actors do what they can with their limited characters, and what they do varies from great to brilliant. Scheider displays an unexpected comic touch in several scenes but otherwise plays his character fairly straight; Shaw inhabits Quint; and Dreyfuss turns his nervy oceanographer into a quirky, even likeable individual in his own right. Put together in very closed quarters on Quint’s boat, the relations among these characters generate tension that matches the growing tension as the hunters become the hunted, and the hunted becomes the hunter, though the human tension is diffused somewhat after Quint and Hooper start bonding together during a night-time drinking session.
The rest of the cast does adequate duty, and Murray Hamilton as the town mayor brings into focus an interesting subplot that, frankly, goes nowhere: subverting safety to the demands of making money and pretending all is well in Amity Island. For a short while at least, the film highlights socioeconomic factors that force Brody into reopening Amity Island’s beaches, with the tragic results that follow. It is significant as well that Brody is an ordinary working man who finds himself out of his depth as a newly appointed police chief in a town he and his family have also recently moved to. Likewise, Quint is an ordinary working man, albeit one with an obsession that will cost him his life. His conflict with Hooper arises from these two men’s very different family backgrounds, Hooper having come from a wealthy family able to afford to send him to university. Despite these differences, once out on the boat, Brody, Hooper and Quint find they have to work together and disregard their differences when they discover the shark is hunting them.
With Hollywood’s special effects people rather all at sea (pun intended!) in the making of “Jaws”, Spielberg decided to use the mechanical shark built for the film very sparingly, and the effect of doing that, along with all the hints and the creepy repetitive two-note music, pay off handsomely in insinuating that the shark is more monstrous and threatening than it actually is. Of course, once we see the shark, it turns out to be a very hokey monster. But that is the intention of “Jaws” as well – it isn’t intended to be a serious horror film in the way contemporary mid-1970s films like “The Exorcist” are, but a more family-friendly film that sometimes plays with audience fears and expectations.
Ultimately, when Quint and Hooper fall away, Brody ends up saving the day in killing the shark, and in that alone, the film makes a very strong case that ordinary people using whatever skills, experiences and resources they have at hand are the ones who have to solve the big problems facing humanity.