Notes on Jaws Then and Now

The myth of the Great White bears numerous meanings, of variable relevance, from the perspective of then and now. Either way, the old Ahab type is unable to triumph, but the Middle-Class Savior and Young Nerd come to the rescue. In the end, the most significant vanquisher was the young middle-class film nerd with long tousled hair, scraggly beard, and wire-framed glasses who inaugurated, for better or worse, a new era in American movies.

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The past year, 2025, marks the 50th anniversary of Jaws. Though we’ve become used to such anniversaries, this one makes a particular impression. To put it in personal terms: When I saw the film for the first time on its release, I was 15 years old. When I recently saw it again, I was 65. Jaws was directed by a very young Steven Spielberg, and attracted crowds of teens (and many others), so looking back through both a historical and personal lens may invite distortion. But before the movie recedes too far back into the mists of cinematic history, it may be useful to consider it with the double focus of then and now. This may reveal aspects of ourselves and American culture that the film has registered like celluloid – or digital – litmus paper.

What was striking on a second viewing was that there are only two shark attacks in the film, at the beginning and the end. (One is more analytical now: When I was a teen the movie seemed to pass like a single uninterrupted sensation, as in a dream.) It opens with a famous scene of a young girl attacked in the night. The violence is implicit: We don’t see the shark, not even its fin. We don’t see any blood. The emotion is terror (according to Northrop Frye’s definition: fear at a distance).1

The second attack takes place toward the end, in broad daylight, and is very graphic, as we see the shark eating Quint (Robert Shaw) alive, chomping methodically, blood gushing. The emotion is horror (according to Frye: fear up close)2. Also humor, of the gross-out eww variety. Horror and humor often go together, as detailed in William Paul’s brilliant book Laughing Screaming (which not only surveyed horror and comedy but examined the link between them, especially in terms of adolescent sensibilities).3 Even in that first scene, one shot of the victim being dragged at speed through the water has a cartoonlike quality.

In between these bookend attack scenes are entertaining shots of the jump or shock type, or suspenseful sequences, but without overt violence. The scene of the oceanologist Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) scuba diving by a sunken boat and surprised by a severed head. A mother’s trauma at the disappearance of her young son. A supposed approach of the shark that turns out to be a kid’s prank. The scene in which the shark leaps to the surface to face Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) as he’s tossing chum into the water. On a technical level these scenes display the skilful exploitation of both the suddenly seen and the unseen. The manipulation of rhythm is musical, so different from the ritual repetition – numbingly dull for the outside observer, hypnotic for the engaged participant – of much contemporary horror (not to mention video games and social media).

On a second look, the sexual dimension of the attack scenes stands out. British critic David Thomson described the first attack as a rape: phallic jaws charging between the girl’s legs.4 (This image was used as the logo for the movie and tie-in version of the novel.) Chrissie Watkins (played by Susan Backlinie) is nude, and swam into the water after going to a secluded beach for a tryst with a boy (luckily too boozed-up for skinny-dipping). Thomson also could have mentioned the sexual dimension of the attack on Quint: the macho male being devoured by the shark’s dentata, a gaping tooth-lined vagina of a mouth. (Actually, the shark’s gender is never identified, though the mechanical props were nicknamed Bruce.)

Both wanton girl and manly man get theirs. The film is not exactly pro-sexual, at least in terms of traditional heterosexuality, or ’60s free love. The portrayal of Quint was seen at the time as a post-60s critique or parody of old-fashioned American masculinity. John Wayne, star of so many Westerns, had been rejected by the young generation after turning right and making The Green Berets, joined on the cultural dust heap by assorted Rat Packers. Without being overly Freudian, the attitude in these scenes also seems like a projection of a (male) pubescent or barely adolescent fear of slightly older girls, as well as of much older men.

What disappoints on a re-viewing of Jaws is the insubstantial role played by Brody’s wife Ellen (Lorraine Gary). She isn’t very present, not even as a support for her put-upon chief-of-police husband. There’s never any friction or tension that might have arisen from his growing fixation on the local situation. The strongest emotional chord in the movie comes from another woman, the mother of the boy killed by the shark. She confronts Brody, slaps him, accuses him of having concealed the danger posed by the shark. He shamefacedly all but admits his guilt, of having given in to the corrupt mayor of the town (smarmily played by Murray Hamilton), who didn’t want to put a crimp in the town’s tourist season. On a story level, this also gives Brody a deeper motivation for hunting down the shark.

In terms of relationships, the film quickly becomes an all-male threesome. When Jaws first came out, the line of tension was considered to be between Quint and Hooper, with the younger, hipper “new man” displacing the traditional masculinity of Quint. Although it’s marvellous to see a young, fresh-faced Dreyfuss again, his character’s more callow antics seem dated now, while Quint has acquired the dignity of a historical relic. His speech about the Indianapolis (the ship sunk in WWII whose crew members were supposedly ravaged by sharks) is still chilling. Since the film’s initial release, our serial national traumas – Gulf War, September 11, Iraq War, Afghan War – have altered our identification with participants in (and victims of) violent conflict.

There were reports that Dreyfuss and Shaw didn’t get along during the filming, adding to the tension. Shaw’s son Ian (only 6 when Jaws came out) even co-wrote a play based on the idea. Dreyfuss himself has said that accounts of mutual hostility were exaggerated. On a contemporary viewing, it seems as if Hooper and Quint, after vying for Brody’s attention, wind up falling for each other, at least on a buddy level (as if the film’s Moby Dick parallel had taken on some Billy Budd undertones).

If anything, Hooper seems pre-sexual. We are aware of only two encounters of Hooper with women. One, in the real-time of the film, is the autopsy of Chrissie Watkins, in which he forces himself to observe the procedure through his revulsion at the mangled female body. The second is jocular backstory, when he points to a scar on his chest and says it came from a high-school crush who broke his heart. As for Quint, the only company we see him with is a male bud or colleague at the beginning of the film. As Leslie Fiedler pointed out in his famous essay “Come Back to the Raft, Huck Honey,”5 the film’s homosociality is a constant in American culture, and we feel the characters would not be out of place in today’s world of bros, incels, and masculinity-in-crisis.

Brody finally screws up his courage and slays Bruce the Shark after witnessing Quint being masticated and gulped. Hooper, who’d gone underwater in scuba gear (and we fear might also have been victimized by the Great White), rises to the surface safe and sound. It’s not too far-fetched to see him as a surrogate son, and we recall not only the boy who’d been killed by the shark earlier but Brody’s own son, who’d panicked him by momentarily disappearing at the beach. The film ends with the two survivors paddling amiably to shore, their shark-shattered boat having sunk, like two patrons at a Club Med. (The boat’s name, ironically, was the Orca, after the killer whale capable of vanquishing sharks, even Great Whites.) From my own personal perspective decades on, Jaws now ultimately seems like a Dad adventure cum moral fable.

It’s easy to see the larger parallels as well. Jaws was released the same year the Vietnam War ended in debacle and a year after the resignation of Richard Nixon, the old-school politician disgraced by Watergate, brought down by young investigative journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (who got their own movie, All the President’s Men, in 1976). That was the year Jimmy Carter, Good Dad incarnate, was elected president.

While the political moment gave the film’s social context – the mayor’s cover-up – a distinct Watergate vibe, this wasn’t what engrossed most viewers. (For that there was, aside from All the President’s Men, The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.) Politics was something to get away from, escaping to sea on the little boat with the intrepid trio of shark hunters. We recall the beginning of Moby Dick: Ishmael’s description of the “damp, drizzly, November of the soul” and the need to sign onto a new ship, bond with hitherto unknown crewmates, and lose oneself in the boundless ocean. That also describes, in a less exalted way, Martin Brody, though we’re not given details of his pre-Amity Island life in New York City (bankrupt at the time and told to “Drop Dead” by Gerald Ford, at least according to the Daily News).6

The political/social subtext may be lost on contemporary viewers, who have different concerns. Jaws prefigures these, as well. After its enormous success, becoming the highest-grossing film ever, there were complaints that the nature of sharks was being inaccurately portrayed, and the number of fatal attacks was said to have been grossly overstated. Conservationists and researchers feared that regulations to protect sharks might not be enforced strictly, that shark-fishing might increase, further endangering the species. The Great White shark population in particular was small, just several thousand worldwide.

In terms of contemporary perceptions, there’s a paradox: The frequency of attacks remains rare. (In 2024, the total number of fatal attacks was seven.) One big difference between then and now is social media. When attacks do happen, or when a shark is simply sighted, footage is easily recorded by smartphone, GoPro, etc., and quickly disseminated far and wide. The public, instead of being more educated about sharks, is perhaps just as subject to misconceptions as when Jaws was first released.

Today we might consider the context of Jaws in terms of environmental depredation: Climate change warming the ocean. Nuclear plants heating coastal waters even more. Plastic and other debris creating vast islands of rubbish. Overfishing by giant trawlers depleting fish populations. Overtourism by giant cruise ships disturbing the seas. Overdevelopment disturbing coastal areas. On a more positive note, the number of sharks has been rising in the last several years, while international controls are enforced more efficiently with the aid of technology, and the human taste for shark seems to be in decline.

The myth of the Great White bears numerous meanings, of variable relevance, from the perspective of then and now. Either way, the old Ahab type is unable to triumph, but the Middle-Class Savior and Young Nerd come to the rescue. In the end, the most significant vanquisher was the young middle-class film nerd with long tousled hair, scraggly beard, and wire-framed glasses who inaugurated, for better or worse, a new era in American movies. Two years after its release, George Lucas’s Star Wars featured young space-opera heroes (and one heroine) and broke Jaws’s box-office record. Soon after that the American electorate replaced a president who’d shifted from normal to dour with a smiling, tree-chopping, made-up and hair-dyed former actor. In the next decade, Spielberg and Lucas would team up to dominate commercial cinema, catering to the child (or infantile) in us all. Spielberg abandoned the irreal embodiments of malevolence in Jaws and the earlier Duel, in favor of more positive, sentimental fantasy figures in Close Encounters and E.T., and the cartoon villains in the Indiana Jones films. Yet it all started with Peter Benchley’s very mainstream novel, itself an updating of the Herman Melville classic many students had a hard time getting through in high school.

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All images are screenshots from the film.