Three Ways to Watch "Jaws"
We recently looked at Peter Benchley's novel "Jaws" on its 50th anniversary. I'm still in a "Jaws" mood, so I'm resurfacing an essay about Spielberg's adaptation from the depths of the archives.
The first moments in Jaws — from the night-time setting and ominous music, to the traumatic death of a naked teenager in the teeth of a silent killer — are textbook horror. Yet Jaws ends as if we’ve been watching a buddy-cop movie, with our unlikely duo swimming into the sunrise. Categorising this ineffably unique film feels like a fool’s errand, though that hasn’t stopped critics from making the attempt. Spielberg’s blockbuster has been variously described as an action thriller, aquatic-monster movie, an adventure, and a horror.
Jaws has also been interpreted in a multitude of ways: as a warning of an insurgent attack on the family from anti-tradition liberals; as a reflection on changing norms around masculinity; as a portrayal, in Fredric Jameson’s phrase, of the “haunting and unmentionable persistence of the organic — of birth, copulation, and death — which the cellophane society of consumer capitalism recontains in hospitals and old age homes”.
In short, Spielberg’s Jaws can signify multiple things, sometimes all at once. Brody’s stoic quip in response to the leviathan size of the shark — “You’re going to need a bigger boat” — could stand in as a comment on any single reading of the film. Or we could borrow from Shakespeare, because there are more things in the subtext of Jaws than are dreamt of in any one interpretation of the film.
Let’s take a closer look at Spielberg’s trio of shark hunters (Quint, Hooper, and Brody), along with three ideas of what each might represent, and three ideas of what Jaws might be “about”. I’m not going to unspool the full length of each of these readings, but I’ll hand you the thread to unwind for yourself. These are complimentary readings that involve masculinity, religion, and the life cycle. However different these frameworks are from each other, they each endorse a shared philosophy: that multiplicity is richer than singularity.
ON MASCULINITY
Spielberg knows how much a good beginning counts. You could take the introduction to any of his main characters as a micro-masterclass in conveying vital information, ratcheting up audience interest, and establishing themes to come. Take one of the most memorably obnoxious character introductions in all of cinema: Quint’s salt-water-worn hand scratching a chalkboard and silencing the useless chatter of Amity’s concerned citizens.
The close-up on Quint’s hand tells us everything we need to know about him: he’s proud of what the state of his hands says about what he’s done with his life. Honest work, by one name; manual labour, by another. He’s also a man who stands out by creating friction between himself and whoever he’s rubbing the wrong way. Like the scream of his nails against the grain of the chalkboard, listening to him can be unpleasant. His ditty about the fifteen-year-old virgin and the complaint that “goddamn women today, they can’t handle nothing” give you a flavour of the man, and it’s somewhat bitter. But unless you have calloused hands, Quint won’t care what you think of him anyway.
Here’s the first of our three readings of Jaws: who is modern man supposed to be? Quint is the epitome of manhood that some see as “romantic” and others see as “toxic”. Either way, everyone agrees it’s a kind of manhood that’s on the way out. “Men used to be men,” sighs one group nostalgically, wishing for a return to stoic endurance and muscular approaches to problems. “We must be better than we were,” asserts another group, hoping to liberate today’s men from the straightjacket of oppressive norms, seeking to use their own masculinity as a positive force, rather than a force of subjugation.
Quint and Hooper embody these opposing camps. Every look shot between them is like a silent fist-fight. Quint constantly knocks young Hooper off his academic pedestal, jabbing at him for his youth and once, pointedly, for his “city hands”, too smooth for the trials they face — “I’m talkin’ about workin’ for a livin’. I’m talkin’ about sharkin’!” The smoothness of Hooper’s hands is indicative of a lamentable lack of experience. With Brody, meanwhile, Quint is more like a weary yet tolerant father helping a son to grow up. The chief of police is top of the food chain only in the Amity police force. On the ocean, Quint is the apex predator.
That’s one way of seeing things. Here’s another: Quint is a man out of time, in every sense of the expression. He’s a man in irreversible decline, whose best days are long behind him, darkened by the shadow that his past casts over his present. He’s stuck in his yesterday as he grumbles about this new world of new men. “When I was a boy,” he exclaims on regarding the fancy gear Hooper uses as part of his work, “every little squirt wanted to be a harpooner or a sword fisherman.” Quint the man still longs for the world of Quint the boy.
Jaws, however, is only partially interested in revisiting that yesterday; it also has a lot to say about tomorrow. Hooper is the man of tomorrow, looking forwards with his scientific equipment and his soft hands. As a man of the future, he has very little patience for the past. In this, he and Quint are reflections of each other. Hooper prizes academic excellence above the folk-knowledge of the working man. Quint, meanwhile, holds expertise in the highest regard, so long as it’s been earned in sweat. His ego is too fragile to respect expertise in other fields where he doesn’t have any prowess.
This is why they set sail in Quint’s boat, the undersized and rudimentary Orca, rather than Hooper’s much larger and better equipped vessel. Quint insists on his own turf, his own methods, and his own rules; he consistently places himself where he is king. It’s a throne he eventually dies on, victim of his own pride and aggression, victim of his own masculinity. And while Hooper ultimately fares better than Quint, his own insistence on the purity of his methods — that his technical gear and book-learning is all he needs — is what leads to him cowering in a cage underwater in the final showdown. In the end, it’s Brody who represents a unity between these two men and who, as a result, wins the day. But we’ll come back to that later.
ON FAITH
So how do we meet Matt Hooper, our oceanographer rich kid? In many of Spielberg’s introductions, the protagonist is gradually introduced through the accumulation of features — think of Indiana Jones with his hat and whip before his face emerges from the shadows in the opening of Raiders. Here, Hooper jumps off of a boat and immediately into Jaws. Standing face to chest with a much larger local fisherman, he says, “Hello,” and is greeted with, “Hello back, young feller.”
Hooper’s character is drawn by comparisons with him and those around. He’s an outsider to Amity, from a different socio-economic class to Quint and Brody, and his knowledge is of the academic kind, as opposed to the tried-and-tested wisdom that comes of trying-and-testing in the real world.
We then watch the officious newcomer hand out advice to the locals swarming the docks. He tells two boaters how best to push off without colliding (“Don’t raise sail, you’re just gonna’ luff it!”) and informs a boatload of fishermen that they’re overloading their vessel. In response to their surly dismissal of him, Hooper mutters sardonically, “They’re all going to die.” It’s clear that, to Hooper, these antediluvian types who don’t value scientific insight are a lost cause.
This brings us to the second reading of Jaws, in which faith and reason are pitted against each other, and the film examines the cultural contest between religion and science. Hooper is our Enlightenment man, proponent of the worldview now commonly represented by so-called “new atheism”. Quint is our man of pre-scientific faith. He might seem an unlikely source of religiosity, but he embodies one of the principle hand-downs from faith to Western culture: the Protestant work ethic. Quint’s conceptualisation of this “works first” mindset is rather rough at the edges, a coarseness that’s rubbed away the community-oriented aspect of this theology. For Quint, manual labour is the heavy-lifting, back-breaking route to personal glory.
Nowhere is the difference between these men and their methods made more salient (or hilarious) than their respective assessments of the threat Amity faces. After an impersonal examination of what remains of the shark’s first kill, Hooper pronounces “the non-frenzied feeding of a large squalus – possibly Longimanus or Isurus glauca”. Quint tells us, “Bad fish.” A taxonomy of species, or a taxonomy of evil. Head or heart.
At bottom, Hooper and Quint both deeply value knowledge. But the source of what they know, along with what exactly is worth knowing, differs drastically. Quint prioritises the physicality of the body and wisdom earned through action and work; Hooper privileges the mind and knowledge born of study and the intellect. Hooper has no time for the subjective insight of lived experience, only the objective facts available through formal study. In his opposition to Quint’s folksy, pseudo-animistic faith, Hooper is an Enlightenment rationalist looking down on the “unenlightened”.
The question raised here isn’t so different from the question raised by our previous lens of masculinity: are these two positions forever in opposition? Can the objectivity of science ever find compromise with the subjectivity of faith, and vice versa? Could a unity between them offer us something new, something more? We’ll have to turn to Brody for an answer.
ON GROWING UP
We’re left now with our somewhat bumbling hero, Officer Brody. Brody is our middle-man in Jaws: if Quint signifies what a man does and Hooper represents what a man can know, Brody has done little and knows less. He’s an uncertain man in uncertain circumstances, half-belonging here and half-belonging nowhere. The conflict at his core is over who he’s supposed to be and what he’s supposed to do. He spends most of the film looking to Quint and Hooper for answers, then trying to act on that education and often getting it wrong. At one point, he asserts, “I can do anything, I’m the chief of police.” We, however, see that this self-confidence might be misplaced.
Here’s our third and final reading of Jaws, which happens to be my favourite: the three men represent the three stages of life, from Youth through Knowledge to Authority. Quint is our old sea dog, the captain of the ship with a lifetime of experience that gives him authority. Hooper prides himself on all that he’s learned, all the knowledge he can bring to bear on their shark problem. And Brody is our model of Youth — he’s naïve, fearful, and in need of guidance. Brody’s story and, arguably, the story of the whole film is that of a child attempting to grow up.
Brody begins in a state of uncertain maturity; he’s a husband and a father, but he’s not sure how to consistently be these things. His son has a bloody cut caused by the swing-set Brody hasn’t yet fixed. When he sets off to chase down the shark, he reminds his wife not to use the fireplace as he still hasn’t cleaned the flue. In his opening scene, Brody is even “taught to speak” by his wife, like a child with his mother: he says the kids are in the yard, and she tells him, “In Amity, you say ‘yahd’.” He then practices saying it right, seeking her approval.
The sharpest representation of Brody’s growth from metaphoric youth to maturity is in his relationship with the ocean. Brody still bears the burden of a childhood fear of water. (Ellen says, “There’s a clinical name for it, isn’t there?” and Brody responds, “Drowning.”) By the climax of the film, that same man will be swimming in the ocean and telling Hooper, who swims alongside him, “I used to hate the water ...” Jaws is the story of how Brody gets from fear to courage, or how he grows up.
Brody learns a lot from Hooper’s knowledge and Quint’s authority, but he also learns from their mistakes. Hooper is arrogant in thinking he’s above people who don’t think like him (“I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a man who’s lining up to be a hot lunch!”) and Quint is conceited in his conviction that his way is the only way and he can do it alone. “I don’t want no volunteers, I don’t want no mates,” he tells the gathered townsfolk when he offers to kill the shark, “there’s just too many captains on this island.”
In the end, Hooper’s failed scientific instruments lead to his hiding at the bottom of the sea, rendered impotent without his syringe-on-a-stick. Quint fares no better, with his primal aggression driving him to destroy their communications equipment and push the boat to literal breaking point, all in the futile hope of proving he can come out best in a fight between man and shark. The man who remains to finish the job is Brody. He takes Quint’s old M1 Garand rifle from the cabin of the sinking boat and, with it, shoots the air cannister Hooper brought along as part of his scientific equipment. The explosion tears the shark apart. Brody is victorious thanks to the combination of Quint’s weapon with Hooper’s tech.
In the same way that Youth looks to Knowledge and Authority for guidance, Brody has hybridised the best of Hooper and Quint to forge a new approach to the world. Youth has grown up, attained knowledge of his own, and through his experiences gained authority. Brody swims through finally calm waters, heading home to his sons, who will renew the cycle by growing out of their youth using whatever they can learn from their father’s knowledge and authority. Just as Brody approximates parts of Hooper and Quint but is his own person, his sons will use some of what their father imparts, but will become new people.
Each of our three interpretations of Jaws depends on the notion that a singular view is impoverished if it can’t be entertained as one amongst many. The idea that there’s a unified, simplistic way to be a man diminishes masculinity. The notion that science or religion is the only correct approach to life is reductive to the point of failure. No one can live by one or the other alone. And maturing from the existential plasticity of youth to a more fixed form depends on the variation that comes from blending what was with what could be.
Whether Quint is “patriarchal man”, or “primitive believer”, or the “authority of old age”, he is inescapably necessary to present-day success. After all, it’s with his guidance and authority, and on his boat, that the shark is finally defeated. Equally, Hooper shares crucial knowledge in the first act of Jaws that leads Brody to make the right calls later on. Brody is like Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol, when the reformed miser announces, “I will live in the past, the present, and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me.”
This is also what Jaws does as a film: it’s a beast that links cinematic genres and conventions, as well as being a creature of its own. It’s been hailed as the first blockbuster, and it stands out today as a dying kind of summer movie — one that doesn’t treat brains like mobile phones (things to be turned off while watching the screen). Jaws does what all great artefacts of culture do: it connects to a tradition by resembling it, continues that tradition by riffing on it, and evolves the tradition by refuting some part of it.
Jaws is a richer film for its plurality of readings. What could be seen as merely a summer blockbuster or simply a thrilling adventure movie is actually a complex story full of potential. A few years ago, I went to re-watch it with a friend at our local cinema; sitting a row ahead of me, a family had brought their two small children, the little girl gripping her armrests and the boy grinning at the shark’s eventual demise. No doubt these parents had understandings of Jaws all their own, but I’m sure that those children came out of the film with their own version of what it was all about. We can each make of Jaws what we will.
Further Reading:
• Jaws, dir. Steven Spielberg (1975)
• “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture” in Signatures of the Visible, Fredric Jameson (1979)
Excellent post!