What Lurks Below the Surface: "Jaws" in the Age of Social Distance
A resounding *chomp* shook the theater and sent the crowd shifting visibly in their seats. The visual onslaught prompted audible gasps. Through a slit between fingers, I saw the crimson waters. My palms felt slick and my blood ran cold, but I didn’t really care; my undivided focus was on the tension in the room...a frantic energy, an aura so thick, you could cut it with a knife.
It was that day I learned the captivating grip of what the cinematic experience could be. I’ll never forget watching Renny Harlin’s aquatic adventure, Deep Blue Sea.
In hindsight, maybe I was hereditarily disposed to have a fascination with shark stories--even genetically modified ones that have a taste for mega famous movie stars.
Flash back to a sweltering Summer in 1975; my dad, 15 at the time, scraped together what funds he could to participate in what was being commercially touted as the must-see experience of the Summer. When Hollywood’s most eager rising filmmaker, twenty-seven year old Steven Spielberg took on directing efforts for the film adaptation of a best-selling adventure novel, he overcame the challenges of a famously burdened production that not only went on to break records, but laid the foundation for an entirely new movie industry moving forward.
Raking in $470 million at the box office worldwide, Spielberg’s film Jaws became the highest grossing smash hit of its time. Aside from making people afraid to ever touch water again, it created the formula for what we now know as a Summer Blockbuster.
With an unprecedented $2 million marketing strategy that saturated mainstream media outlets, Jaws was the first monumental moviegoing event with an associated phenomenon attached. Its captivating thrills ensnared audiences globally and re-wrote the roadmap for how studios distribute their biggest films. With its lasting sensation and groundbreaking box-office success, Jaws established the blueprint for what we still classify as a must-see zeitgeist...or at least we did.
Swing back to 2020 where the altered complexion of our new reality leaves the movie industry in grave uncertainty, putting the future of the cinematic experience as a whole in questionable limbo. Undergoing a painful metamorphosis, society finds itself engaged in a series of struggles against a relentless onslaught of social unrest and the looming threat of a lethal pandemic.
In a hazy new world where each day unfolds with an overwhelming sense of fear, I hope to nurture a haven from the existential dread through appreciation for the art that helps remind us why we so desperately need entertainment in dark times. With Summer in full stride, we reflect on some key elements that make Jaws a strangely relevant but thoroughly enjoyable classic at the 45th anniversary of its original release—though it still doesn’t measure up to Renny Harlin’s underwater opus, Deep Blue Sea.
Fear of Uncertainty
The mounting concern of our present state has thrown a wrench in the gears of perceived normalcy, as paralleled by the film’s main protagonist—police chief Martin Brody. Jaws unfolds through his eyes when he’s thrust into confrontation with an uncontrollable force he can’t quite understand.
When his ordinary life as a devoted family man in idyllic Amity Island is rudely upended by the arrival of a man-eating shark that prowls the harbor stalking its prey, Brody must abandon his comfort zone and reluctantly take to the open sea with his two mates: the cocky academic Hooper and the salty sea dog Quint in an effort to slay the menacing beast.
Brody’s initial instinct to the bloodshed awakens the implied trauma he sustained as a former NYPD cop. Those demons and the subsequent fear that it brings manifest themselves through unhealthy coping mechanisms, mainly drinking—and if there were a single frame of the film more emblematic of the spirit of 2020, it’s Brody in despair guzzling red wine out of a pint glass.
Mrs. Brody looking like the concerned Rite Aid cashier as I buy my fourth bottle of cheap merlot this week.
A partial factor of Jaws’ lasting entertainment value lies in its ability to tell a compelling story without relying solely on spectacle. While, sure, it’s admittedly thrilling to see a 25-foot behemoth crunch into the stern of a capsizing boat like it’s a hardshell taco, the essence of all truly great horror lies in its ability to find a relatable human element. That element sometimes eludes viewers at first or second glance but reaches their subconscious from a level that’s not always obvious at face value. Though most of us can’t relate to what it’s like being terrorized by a sea creature, we can all find commonality in Chief Brody’s mortal struggle to maintain control and find resolve in the midst of uncertainty.
Immersion & Catharsis
While a film’s deeper meaning can serve to provoke inward reflection, its ever-reaching power can transcend the fourth wall to create a living, breathing sensory experience. A transaction occurs between the film and our brains; what we see with our eyes, what we hear with our ears, what we build with our mind can poke at emotions and stimulate psychological responses that manifest themselves in physiological ways. This very real response is the reason horror fans..well, love horror movies--it helps purge the conscious mind of the fears we face in real life.
As legend would have it when Jaws made its gargantuan splash, it famously targeted the fears of a beachgoing Summer audience, as exemplified by the now universally recognizable promotional image used for nearly every single piece of its marketing content.
From John Williams’s foreboding main theme to the haunting imagery of a young boy’s bloody raft washing in with the tide, the film’s most engaging horror elements prey on subconscious fears of our inability to control the forces of nature. The film’s portrayal of sharks as cruel, deadly and uncaring inspired a generation to never want to set foot in water again. According to common cultural lore, its very release caused a downward trend in beach attendance that very Summer.
The immersive visual element of the film’s out-to-sea portion remains a staple in its use of space and atmosphere. A large part of the film takes place aboard a shabby fishing vessel, the Orca, as it bobs up and down a vast stretch of ocean. Much like Alien’s (1975) Nostromo hurtling through an empty black void, Jaws set the gold standard for blockbuster horror in solitary locations.
Floating on a boundless stretch of sea with no land in sight, the film illustrates the terror of isolation by effectively trapping you on a hunk of buoyant steel in a slow, disorienting cradle with an incomprehensible force lying nearby in wait. The madness and tension it awakens in our three distanced heroes is sure to strike a chord with stir-crazy viewers trapped in their apartment, belching tequila breath and howling songs into the night like a couple of drunk sailors.
Lasting Merit as a Political Statement
Through the gunsmoke of social struggle, we still battle an unseen enemy as COVID-19 shows no signs of slowing. While states begin to open up tentatively, massive ideological rifts have formed between those who firmly believe in city closures in the name of public safety, or reopening in an effort to avoid a full scale economic meltdown. This ethical dilemma is mirrored in one of Jaws’ most enduring motifs that bears striking resemblance to the current state of our global affair.
A crucial thematic element of Jaws is the underlying motivation of people in power--specifically, that of Amity’s incumbent mayor, Larry Vaughn.
In a tight-knit New England beach community where the crux of their economy relies on Summer tourism, the two primary factors behind Vaughn’s most critical decisions are money and reputation. When the remains of a local teenage swimmer washes ashore mere weeks before July Fourth, Vaughn, thinking solely in terms of economic consequence, refuses to shut the beaches down--much to Chief Brody’s chagrin but met with support by various business owners in the community. This decision ultimately leads to further bloodshed.
While the man-eating shark is clearly used as hyperbole, it represents underlying themes that are still just as resonant today, but with implications that have potential to be innumerably more fatal. In a time characterized by deepening ideological polarity, individual priority has proved to be a big indicator of stance. While more states begin to open up and reported deaths soar past the 100,000 mark in the US alone, we can’t help but draw connective lines to the potentially grim downsides of a Capitalist mindset.
The Blockbuster Prototype
For years prior to our present day turmoil, we’ve been undergoing a transition in the way we ingest and define entertainment. In a digitally connected age where streams of content are perpetually churned and spoonfed to us from the comfort of our own homes, most of us feel no obligation to go out and experience a film unless it has instantaneous commercial recognition like Avengers: Endgame or spectacle event marketability, like anything Christopher Nolan touches.
As theater chains tremble under the weight of an indefinite disruption due to COVID-19, studios are forced to suspend the release of their biggest projected films until further notice. Meanwhile--prospective audiences, weary from endless months spent cooped up at home in restless desperation, are flocking to take part in alternative means of pastime entertainment by rebooting an artifact long thought to be extinct.
Last weekend, 45 Summers after its initial release, Jaws swam back into 187 drive-in theater screens across the nation, grossing over $516,000 in revenue. While the concept may seem like a novelty relic from an ancient past, Jaws’ continued success in the drive-in movie theater resurgence and its recent addition on the HBO Max streaming platform indicates agelessness, a proven influence and global appreciation that transcends all notion of time.
In simplistic terms, the true legacy of Jaws lies in its undeniable rewatchability; the scale and spectacle of this brisk two-hour creature feature somehow always feels like a fresh experience, regardless of year. A major factor in that timelessness is its ability to distinguish itself from the entertainment of its time; while it’s not actively trying to be as existentially ambitious as 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969) or as ancestrally poignant as The Godfather (1972), Spielberg approaches a high-concept premise with a masterful balance of childlike wonder, gripping intensity and stunning execution that made audiences fall in love with how much fun the moviegoing experience could be.
For all intents and purposes, Jaws was rolled out to be a home run. As previously mentioned, Universal took a big swing by investing $2M in the marketing of this film, whose mythical production hiccups were once thought to be the ultimate undoing of everyone involved.
Nevertheless, Jaws burst onto the scene on an unprecedented 460 screens across North America and fundamentally popularized the key tenets of Blockbuster film structure: a harrowing hero’s journey set to the tone of an Oscar-winning musical score that features cutting-edge special effects, a slew of tremendously complex, multi-layered characters and maybe most importantly, you can never underestimate the power of a witty one-liner:
You have to admit even John McClane would be proud of this line.
To Make A Long Story Short...
The quality of a film’s appreciation value over time is most aptly measured by the sum of its moving parts—sometimes literally. The legacy of Jaws and its animatronic antagonist stands out as a monolith of pop culture phenomenon whose groundbreaking influence on the movie industry built an everlasting legacy that formed the foundations of entertainment as we know it and cemented Steven Spielberg as one of Hollywood’s most prolific filmmakers.
The half-century span of Jaws’ continuous reign is cold, hard proof that it simply does not age. Its ability to trigger emotional and sensory response pioneered the moviegoing experience and helped us understand how entertainment gives fleeting shelter from the hardships of life. But with all its praise and definitive universality, did we ever get Roy Scheider doing an end-credit rap song like LL Cool J in Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea? I think not. Catch up, Spielberg.