Jaws: Timelessly Terrifying

As a boy, I grew up fascinated and captivated by the shark. I was both enthralled by the power they wielded over both us and the animal kingdom, and equally upset by the practice of finning. For those of you unaware of the term, finning is where fishermen take the very valuable fins of a shark and leave the animal to die without actually doing anything useful with the rest of the body. Luckily, finning has been gradually made illegal in the United States and many other countries around the world as the 21st century has increasingly made itself at home, which has significantly curbed the killings. Yet, life remains strange. You see, the funny thing is that as far as the United States is concerned, much of the killing was influenced not by science, not even by politicians, but rather by anti-shark sentiment that arose from of all things Steven Spielberg's Jaws, a movie so terrifying that it almost single-handedly created the modern stereotype of the killer shark. Before Jaws, the public was relatively indifferent to the creatures. After Jaws, the monster we fell victim to was not a creature of the ocean, but our own morbid imaginations and tendency to fear what we don't understand. Still, that's not to detract from what Spielberg accomplished with his movie. Not even close, and even quite the opposite.

One of my favorite things about Jaws is the presence of this mostly unseen shark. He hangs over this film like a dark cloud just waiting to rain on Amity Island's Fourth of July parade again, raising some good questions of totalitarian safety versus libertarian risk-taking. Do you shut the parade down or allow a killer shark an opportunity to strike yet again? The tug of war between the safety of closing the beach and leaving it open in the name of business is well-portrayed. Jaws offers no easy answers, just a bunch of hard questions that neither its characters nor I knew how to answer. And when this unseen menace does strike, Jaws paces his attacks both marvelously and methodically. First, the movie fakes us out. Must've been the wind. Then, something minor goes wrong. Should we be worried? And then, the shark swoops in for the kill, and it's all over but the frantic swimming, running, and screaming. Rinse and repeat, even if the blood won't completely wash out. Of course, the shark being the main attraction doesn't mean that Jaws skimps on character.

Amity Island raised its citizens right, or at least in ways that make them interesting, because the cast of this movie is fantastic. Mr. Quint, a seasoned fisherman who volunteers to kill the shark, is my personal favorite. His presence in a room rests somewhere between a calm wave on the shore and nails on a chalkboard, which I promise is way more fun than I make it sound here. Chief of Police Martin Brody, with his near-unnatural calm, is another standout, and he's the anchor of this story amidst the choppy, shark-infested waves. And oceanographer Matt is the brains of the operation, even if he lacks Quint's mariner experience or Brody's discernment. Narratively, Jaws is two stories in one. It's first a story about conflicting ideas on how to deal with a crisis, and secondly, an attempt to solve the crisis once it becomes clear that it cannot be managed. Tying these two stories together are three very different characters doing their best to do good. Their agreements are unifying, their differences worrying, and their mission timelessly attractive.

Fifty years after Spielberg unleashed it on the world, we're still talking about Jaws, and for good reason. Its characters are magnetic, its cinematic language fluent, and its shark attacks both endlessly patient and intelligently brutal. Believe it or not, this film was based on a novel of the same name released the year prior by author Peter Benchley, a poster detail that's understandably easy to miss when it features a shark swimming ravenously upwards toward an unaware woman. Even if public opinion of sharks has mellowed since Jaws stirred the pot, it's rare for a movie to whip people up into a panic like this one did - in fact, I can't say I've ever seen a movie instill fear in its audiences like Jaws did, which is pretty amazing when you consider that it's relatively restrained in regards to its on-screen violence, especially when compared to splatter films of the 1970s. Jaws scares less with what you see, more with what you don't. And we all know that it's the ones you don't see that end up getting you.

Jaws - 10/10

Psalm 104:27-30