What makes a film “feelgood”? If it’s not a romcom, or otherwise setting out to impart warm fuzzies, familiarity plays a big part. I’ve seen Jaws so many times that watching it now truly feels like sinking into a warm bath.
It’s always been my favourite film; I’ve read the book, got the hat, seen the play. (Did you know that, on set, the animatronic shark was called Bruce?) Far from keeping me out of the water, Jaws stoked my interest in marine life, even inspiring me to get my scuba qualification.
A few years ago I fulfilled my dream of cage diving with great whites. When the 3-meter-long shark, a juvenile female, heaved into view, it was like spotting a celebrity in the wild – I was starstruck.
I appreciate it’s not the standard response to Steven Spielberg’s defining summer blockbuster. When Jaws hit cinemas 50 years ago this June, it had people screaming in their seats; many still credit it with keeping them out of the water.
But my parents are passionate sailors and I spent much of my childhood around ports or at sea, meaning Jaws’s maritime setting is less inherently unsettling or alien for me than it may be for the average viewer. There are even moments of cosy recognition: my father had no more success teaching me to tie a bowline knot than Quint (Robert Shaw) does with Brody (Roy Scheider).
That is perhaps why the facts spouted by self-described “shark addict” Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) made a greater impression on me than the terrifying attacks – because I understood that they were more representative.
Ultimately Jaws proved disastrous for shark species, encouraging their mass slaughter in game-fishing tournaments and tarring them with a villainous reputation that has persisted through decades of attempted damage control. Sharks may bite people, but very rarely – you are more likely to be killed by a cow – and they certainly don’t seek revenge.
Both Spielberg and Peter Benchley, the late author of the Jaws novel, have expressed regret at its negative impact on sharks. But if you set aside the use of dramatic licence, the film is otherwise quite diligent about matching fear with fascination.
After the shark claims its first victim, in what must be one of the most shocking openings in blockbuster history, police chief Brody’s response is to check out a book. “You know people don’t even know how old sharks are!” he exclaims to his wife Ellen.
That’s true – as is the fact that tiger sharks, like the one Hooper guts on the dock, really have been known to chow down on car licence plates. That sort of detail gives Jaws’s world a lived-in quality: it seems textured, immediate and real, even for viewers without any particular connection to the ocean. (In 1975, a teenage girl in landlocked Kansas was hospitalised with psychological trauma, later attributed to “cinematic neurosis” from having recently watched Jaws at the cinema.)
On my more recent watches, I’ve been struck most by what a well-made picture it is – at once rich and economical. Spielberg stripped the distractions from Benchley’s novel (such as Hooper’s affair with Ellen) while amping up the humanity of its hero Brody to create a “perfect engine” for adventure (to give Hooper’s awed epithet for the shark).
A large part of the “feelgood” satisfaction of watching Jaws, I find, is feeling yourself to be in capable hands – particularly these days, when the most crowd-pleasing blockbusters are typically also bloated and predictable. From the moment Chrissie Watkins sets out for that fateful midnight swim, Jaws hooks you almost as violently as it does her, then for two hours doesn’t let go.
There’s no empty dialogue, no wasted shots. The claustrophobic dynamic of Amity Island, the stakes of the imminent high season and Brody’s uneasy authority as an outsider are all established briskly but elegantly.
Even the bit parts have punch. Lee Fierro makes the most of the minutes she’s onscreen as the grieving mother of the shark’s second victim, while Murray Hamilton is note-perfect as Amity’s craven mayor (name-checked by Boris Johnson as his pandemic-era leadership model, in a mystifying moment of self-awareness. Fierro, incidentally, died from Covid-19 in 2020, aged 91).
The confines of word count don’t permit me to do justice to the three central performances. Suffice to say, the bitchy sniping between Hooper and Quint never fails to delight me (and is made all the more delicious by knowledge of Dreyfuss and Shaw’s on-set feud).
The heart of the film is Scheider’s Brody, triumphing over the shark when Hooper’s brains and Quint’s brawn fail. Jaws follows Joseph Campbell’s time-honoured hero’s journey arc, pushing Brody to conquer his fear of water. But the film also endorses his initial trepidation: the mass slaughter of sharks is too far, but the ocean and its inhabitants certainly deserve our respect.
Indeed, the truest, most resonant things it has to say are about people – not fish. The thought and care that has gone into each element is why Jaws has endured: it’s a sufficiently watertight picture to sustain a half-century of interpretations, from a pandemic parable to Christian allegory.
Yes, it’s about a man-eating shark – but there’s so much more beneath the surface. I find something new to chew on every time.
Jaws is available to rent digitally in the US and is on Amazon Prime in the UK
