Films: 1970s
(1975) Jaws
Friday, August 10, 2007
Jaws
Director: Steven Spielberg
Release: 1975
If Roy Scheider's Chief Martin Brody is faced with any monster other than the 25-foot Great White shark in director Steven Spielberg's "Jaws," it's the looming specter of genealogy and class on the tiny island of Amity.
"Jaws" is plainly a monster movie. A huge ocean fish with a bite radius large enough to cut hapless swimmer in half terrorizes a resort town during the Fourth of July holiday in the summer of 1975.
Brody, along with marine biologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfus) and half-crazy shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw), takes to the water to what amounts to a dorsal-finned dragon.
It is also, however, a movie about communities " about genealogical, economic and social divides: one is either in or out of the water.
Brody is the new chief of police in Amity, and Mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) largely qualifies his power as a non-native. Vaughn is, in turn, shackled to the wishes of his merchants. If hotel owners want people on the beach on the fourth, Vaughn must serve them up - even if they become, as Brody protests, smorgasbord for the shark.
There is very little opportunity to cross these lines, to bend these rules. It takes three bodies in the water before Brody can overpower Vaughn. And no matter how correct he proves to be, Brody is never going to be " as an Amity native puts it " an "islander."
Quint exists at the margins of the islanders. Salt-encrusted, foul mouthed, impatient with the monied upper-class that drags its heels while the Great White feeds, even Quint won't accept Brody until he is properly hazed.
Spielberg works with these divisions in two ways: they are vanquished by the moral rightness of a character like Brody, or they are compromised by circumstance.
Brody's righteous victory leaves the mayor babbling in the hospital, a concrete vanquishing - the banishment of elite materialism by an everyman public servant.
The next, more complicated, compromise is tenuous.
The three shark hunters " Hooper the trust-find researcher, Brody the urban cop, and Quint the working-class hero, can only meet on equal terms for a moment, in the cabin of the Orca, in the night, soaked in liquor. Ultimately, Quint's companions become his exploiters. It is the fisherman who slides into the maw of the beast " consumed by the object of his trade " so that the urbanite and the wealthy may take credit for conquering the ocean. A classic American deal, Amity doesn't even need to fork over Quint's promised $10,000.
And then there is the great equalizer.
The shark that slides through the waters of "Jaws" is death incarnate. It simply exists, as Hooper explains, as a marvelous example of evolution " a beast that swims and eats. The shark signifies subtext: Brody has moved his family to Amity to live out the end of his career (or life). And so the shark (read: reaper) comes for him.
Subtext notwithstanding, Spielberg wastes no frame, no dialogue, no moment on the screen. The shark arrives, the bodies float ashore, the boats set sail and the hunters find exactly what they seek.
The point of "Jaws" is not to confound, or illuminate, or develop subtexts. It is to scare, thrill, and excite. It does this with economy, bolstered with powerful performances from its three principals. 
Most notable is Scheider, who extracts a great deal from what amounts to a thumbnail sketch of a character. Thanks to his grizzled paternal tenderness, his internalized boiling rage at fat-cat Vaughn, Scheider conveys a three-dimensionality that climaxes with his first look at the shark.
It is a brilliant moment, perhaps the single most believable reaction to the unknown ever captured on screen: a quick and silent retreat, followed by a simple statement: "You're going to need a bigger boat."
Scheider improvised that line, and it captures the concept of "Jaws" succinctly. Faced with encroaching outer forces, the characters of "Jaws" are trapped in an environment rapidly growing too small for their survival. It is the island and town of Amity, dragged into the unsheltered world by a shark. It is the urban boy, afraid of the water, dragged into the open sea by his duty.
For a time, "Jaws" posits, we can send that circumstance plummeting back into the darkness " but at a price to those around us, and we are left to swim back to whatever life we've selected.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
Jaws, 1975
"Jaws" is plainly a monster movie. A huge ocean fish with a bite radius large enough to cut hapless swimmer in half terrorizes a resort town during the Fourth of July holiday in the summer of 1975.
