When Jaws came out 45 years ago in June 1975, it redefined the modern blockbuster. It helped to establish Hollywood’s move towards wide national releases, where movies are released simultaneously across a vast majority of movie theatres, rather than the staggered openings which were previously more common. Along with Star Wars, it also shifted the major film studios towards summer as the season for big box office hits.
Though this simple story of a giant shark that terrorises a peaceful beach town pushed the movie industry forward, it was also a significant call back to Hitchcock’s mystery films, drawing on his greatest cinematic tricks and techniques. We don’t see the shark fully until an hour into the film, but up until this point its presence is always felt as it lingers out of sight. We are given the shark’s perspective, lurking beneath the surface and quietly gazing up at unaware swimmers. The audio is muffled here too, eerily distancing us from the world of humans above.
The beach scene is particularly masterful, a shining example of suspenseful editing as we cut between Chief Martin Brody’s concerned face, distant POV shots of various beach goers, and the perspective of the shark. This is Hitchcock’s trademark voyeurism, but with Spielberg’s genius twist of the viewer watching the same subjects as two separate entities, both with separate implications. The comparisons don’t end there – the dolly zoom is an obvious call back to Vertigo, but Brody’s fear of water also parallels Scottie’s fear of heights in Hitchcock’s 1958 mystery, both phobias defining the protagonists’ character arcs.
Upon its release, Jaws was already ripe for scholarly criticism, with parallels being drawn between the mayor’s selfish interests and the 1972 Watergate scandal. More recently it has lent itself way too easily to the most obvious current issue. Yes, I’m going to say it – coronavirus. I’m almost getting sick of how many movies I have watched over the past few months that have unintentionally related to the global pandemic, but this is just a testament to their enduring qualities and endless potential for re-interpretation.
The shark is a threat to everyone in the community, claiming victims without regard for class or status. One might hope that communities would band together in a situation like this to overcome the danger, but that would be far too easy. The mayor who refuses to close the beach at the cost of the town’s economy might have once seemed to be a mere caricature of a stupid politician, but here we are, debating amongst ourselves the value of lives weighed up against the value of jobs.
Perhaps as equally iconic as the movie itself is its score, composed by the ineffable John Williams. This is a man who has the themes for Star Wars, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, and Superman under his belt, but his theme for Jaws may be his most recognisable by adults and children alike who haven’t even seen the movie. The alternating two notes a semi-tone apart are lodged in our minds, transcending their original context to become a cultural signifier of lurking danger. Though less iconic, Williams’ scoring of the rest of the film is still the work of a genius, particularly the surprisingly melancholy tune that plays as the shark perishes, as if we have witnessed the loss of some fantastical force of nature rather than a ferocious killer.
Jaws is timeless in its pitting of man against nature, and the tensions that arise from that which pit men against each other. But even without reading into these layers of meaning it is simply outstanding in its execution of a relatively simple story, drawing on our fears of what lies just out of sight to drive the suspense and terror of the film. Spielberg has created several masterpieces, but perhaps his greatest was his first.
