Watched: 06/21/2025
Format: Peacock
Viewing: (shrug emoji)
Director: Steven Spielberg
June 20th marked the 50th anniversary of the release date of Jaws (1975), and, so, Jamie selected it for our viewing on the 21st.
As I was born mere months before the release of the movie, Jaws existing as a cultural force is a key early memory. The movie came out, and did not just go away - it became part of the cultural lexicon overnight and then just stayed. We had teenagers who lived next door when I was in pre-school, and those kids told us about things like the band KISS, and movies like Jaws.* But, also, the poster and music for Jaws was as omnipresent as Star Wars in my youth, the triangle of the mouth rising toward the woman above. The 1970's also saw maybe the final real explosion of classic Universal horror monster interest, along with Hammer and other horror scenes, and I remember things like "Monster Maze" books that would include "Jaws" beside Quasimodo and Dracula. My brother, who has always been able to play music by ear, figured out the key few notes to Jaws on the piano and would play it - he was five or six.
But I don't think I actually watched Jaws until high school, and on basic cable at that. That said, the first time I remember really liking it was in college when I was in film school and they kept talking about Jaws as the first summer blockbuster and I figured I should know what it's all about.
Since those viewings, I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen it. A lot? Probably two dozen.
On this viewing I was thinking about how Jaws would be made today, and what makes it work for me as it is. I dunno. I feel like part of re-watching this movie and celebrating something that's somehow endured when even ET and Close Encounters seem to have faded over the decades - or, rather, have not been as embraced by subsequent generations as Jaws - should be a moment to ponder what it is about the movie that's made it resonate.
It's an odd movie in that it feels like part of that same movement of those directors - De Palma, Coppola, Scorsese - but it feels like it's pushing forward and backward in time. It feels more like a modern film with its relentless drive than others from these guys at this time. It's more Coca-Cola than Coppola's glass of chianti or Scorsese's pack of cigarettes and shot of bourbon. But it's also casting the great Robert Shaw against the up and comer, Dreyfus.
I don't think it's a huge secret that part of Spielberg's early work that makes it feel so buyable is the casual humanity of the work. In E.T., Elliot is one of three kids in a messy house that's just experienced a divorce when his alien pal enters into what, in the 1980's, felt like a very familiar suburban world. Dreyfus and Teri Garr are living a typical 1970's middle-class existence in Close Encounters when Dreyfus gets into the mashed potatoes.
And, so, too, are Chief Brody and his wife Ellen, getting by as a married couple trying to settle into a new town and raising some typical kids, when an extraordinary event occurs. It's Frank Capra-esque as Brody deals with his neighbors worried about the kids karate-ing fences and trash cans too close to drives - when he realizes he'd got a dead girl he has to deal with.
In this movie, Ellen Brody doesn't need to be a hot love interest for Brody to fall for - it's taken as fact he has a good marriage, and she's a concerned wife. The movie stops to let us see them parenting. It's organic.
The story isn't about a shark, it's about Brody finding two men who balance him as he confronts his fears and career challenges.
I mean, yes, it's definitely about a shark. We paid to see a shark.
But... is it about the shark? The shark has no lines. It's an existential threat as well as a physical one. Sure, we get good quips and our adrenaline pumping when the shark acts very un-sharklike and rams the boat and chases it.
But aren't the best scenes the ones where our men are sharing scars and stories? When Hooper is showing up with wine at a dinner he wasn't invited to? When Ellen Brody sees the picture in the book about sharks attacking boats and tells Michael to get out of the boat? When Chief Brody realizes his son is copying him at the dinner table?
The interaction of the three men on the boat is amazing character work. Each has things they value in the other two, and things that are a problem. And - so I can finally get to the point - this is a movie where so much goes unsaid but is there and is communicated.
A script in the last 15-20 years would insist we stop and say short, pithy things. A modern film would not have Quint see the line on his reel start to pull and quietly slip on his harness for what he knows is coming. In 2025, we'd make sure he says something cool like "looks like our boy is ready for lunch", warning the other two characters (and therefore the audience) that we need to take action. The Chief would show his scar and have it explained one way or another. Ellen Brody would be dropping exposition about their life in New York and what brought them to Amity. The Chief and Quint would have a full conversation about Quint's deathwish, what happened to his psychology as a result of the Indianapolis, and exactly what it meant that he had smashed the radio.
You cannot possibly leave anything up to the audience to simply get - you must tell them at every turn in 2025.
Yet, this movie was the biggest thing in the world when it came out. No one balked at these moments. No one was left confused. When it arrived, it changed how we think about movies so much, we studied the release of Jaws in film school. And at the end of the day, it's kind of a personal movie about a cop overcoming trauma that's turned his whole world upside down. And a shark who eats folks, yes.
And people in a less cosmopolitan, less connected world understood it.
There's barely any stunts. We only occasionally see the shark. And the action is mostly dudes lobbing bullets at the water and almost getting hurt because boats are dangerous when you're trying to do two things at once. And yet, it's wildly compelling.
Of course people like an adventure story and they like a horror movie, and this is, arguably, a bit of both. But Martin Brody is a great lead. Roy Scheider makes him so relatable and understandable in an understated performance as a man is given one job, and the people who gave it to him now won't let him do it lest the city fall on hard times. And, my god, if there's one thing that feels more present these days than anything else in almost any other film, it's this conundrum. That things must become absolutely bleak and blood has to be spilled - that children have to be thrust in harm's way - before our trusted officials will take action. There's a reason this movie was memed to death during COVID.
We're propelled by one of the great film scores. And you can't really say enough about the editing in this movie by the great Verna Fields.
Anyway, here's to fifty years of being afraid of the ocean and thinking a bit about the Kintner boy every time you put a foot in the ocean.
*This was the 1970's in Canton, Michigan, and back then, kids were very free-range, so I absolutely remember just wandering through these people's house.
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