Good Things #2: Jaws

To understand Jaws, you need to see it in the theater. In the entire history of movies, there is no movie that translates worse to TV viewing. You need to see the vastness of the sea, you need feel its dangerous majesty and luminous glow. You need the shark to be ten feet in length, you need to see the screen flood with twenty feet of blood at every shark attack, you need to hear the screams and crunch of the victims, you need to see every detail of the beach and all the archetypal beach bums who populate it. And most importantly, you need an audience. You need someone to scream when the boy gets eaten. You need to feel the quiet when Quinn tells the story of the USS Indianapolis. And you need people to clap when the shark explodes.

Last week, I did something stupid. I went to the Senator to see a showing of Jaws. My friend Sean told me it was playing, and I hadn't been to a movie in two years. I figured it would be just a typical Senator showing, 35 people in a 40,000 sq. ft. theater of more than 700.

It was no such thing. A crowd of 250, barely a seat open if you wanted something in a center isle. Half weren't wearing masks, and a good 25% were teenagers. Realizing how many people were there was horrifying. I was so tempted to leave and I stayed largely in deference to my friend whom I hadn't seen in a year, slumping terrified in my seat.

But then the movie started. A stupid movie about a shark turned out to be soul food. It was oxygen, it was life. You don't know how much you need an experience like that until you have it, and who knows when we'll have it again if the delta variant gets worse?

Is Jaws great art... well who gives a shit? Seeing Jaws is an 'event', a movie designed to thrill a whole country all at once. It's perhaps the first true 'event movie' since Doctor Zhivago or The Sound of Music, and probably the greatest event movie that will ever be made. No matter what it's politics, other event movies like Gone with the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia take themselves so seriously, while Star Wars and Harry Potter are more franchises than events, at this point they're corporate cults meant to satisfy demands for content that's a guaranteed hit.

Jaws had all kinds of risible sequels, but it's a self-contained universe of a movie. A concept so flimsy that it has all the content you need for one single solitary movie. Yet Jaws milks flimsy content for exponentially more than anybody thought you could get out of a concept so dumb.

Only a movie this idiotic could be this close to perfection. Every detail of the movie rings true:

• Amity Island is clearly meant to be Martha's Vineyard off of Cape Cod. Look at the teenagers in the opening scene. They're all upper class preppies, privileged cool kids who spend their summers partying on the beach. Most of them probably go to boarding school, and they're all attractive, but not 'Hollywood attractive.' They all look like plausible Massachusetts residents. Everybody has a horse face or bad teeth, and half of them are as Irish looking as Kennedys.
• Every time Brody has to watch the water, clueless residents sit in his line of vision to talk to him for no good reason at all - trying to be polite and friendly as small-town Americans always are (or used to be...). Only master filmmaking can make you feel multiple emotions at once, and the sequences are simultaneously funny and terrifying. A girl Brody can't see screams, and then we realize it's just a guy flirtatiously lifting her up out of the water. Ten kids go into the water at once, and another guy sits in front of Brody's to make fun of Brody's fear of water. Brody's wife gives him a massage telling him he's too uptight, and that's the moment the shark reappears and eats a child. And then we see the child's mother, and we see right away, this woman is too old to have any more children. If this is her only one, her loss is total.
• Look at all the extras. Every small-town New England archetype is there. The old Victorian prude wearing pearls who seems perpetually scandalized, the tall WASP in the ugly sport coat and yellow shirt, the professional lady who wears a business pantsuit to town meetings, the loud working class boaters with the army jackets and baseball caps, the fat lady with such an excessive tan she looks like a prune, the short Portuguese fishermen, the fat Boston Irish guys with white hair and perpetually red faces, the young hippie woman painting the ocean, the mayor with the searsucker suit and bad toupee who looks straight out of a corrupt southern town. It's important to mention that these are not stereotypes, they're archetypes we're innately programmed by life experience to recognize. That's how the authenticity of fictional storytelling is built, and even if you want to use fiction to subvert stereotypes, you have to put those recognizable archetypes in place before you surprise us with how you change them.
• Misfortune in movies comes in threes. On 4th of July weekend, we have the ultimate expectation of a shark attack. Hundreds of extras, most of them kids. A shark appears in the ocean, everybody gets out of the water, but it's just two obnoxious kids with a costume shark fin, one of whom blames the other. Brody forces his son to go to the pond instead, and somehow the shark made his way over, kills a boater 20 feet away from Brody's son, and swims right past him. Spielberg follows that moment with a vast panoramic shot of the ocean. It's a little much to call it a Homeric implication of fate, but there is something about that moment that feels surprisingly deep for a movie about a shark munching on spoiled Americans.
• People complain about Spielberg's sentimentality, but nobody is better than Spielberg at portraying people's decency. Over and over again, Brody is presented with situations where he would be within his rights to tell other characters to go to hell; yet over and over again, he willingly accepts the blame for other people's incompetence. Even after the shark nearly kills Brody's own son, he doesn't beat up the mayor or even tell him to go fuck himself, he just gets the mayor to finally sign the order to close the beach.
• The very moment after Brody says 'shit' comes the first appearance of the shark. 81 minutes in, it's the very first curse word of the movie. Brody is finally relaxed enough to let his guard down, and that's the very moment the shark appears.
• When Quinn and Hooper compare shark scars, Brody unconsciously lifts up his shirt to reveal his own scar. The implication is clear that Brody was shot, and suddenly everything about his character makes sense. The actor, Roy Scheider, was the supporting character in The French Connection, the ultimate 70s New York cop thriller.
• The shark chase could easily be chaos, but Spielberg meticulously takes us through every detail of the hunt so that even if seeing it for the first time, we know exactly what the three shipmates of the Orca are doing. It's a virtuoso bit of filmmaking all the more miraculous for a 28 year old filmmaker making his second feature.

But then, there's Quinn. Quinn both belongs in a much more serious movie than Jaws, and is the ultimate reason the movie is so good. Half of what he says is almost gibberish, but you feel as though he's served with Captain Ahab. He might be schizophrenic or have an antisocial personality disorder, he might also be 10,000 years old. Hooper represents science and the wealthy leisure which allows people to study it. Quinn represents mystery, myth, man at nature's mercy, the sea as the mystical force we can never understand. You feel as though Quinn's made of salt water, and his monologue about serving on the USS Indianapolis is one of the great moments in any movie ever made. It's so manipulative, and yet it's exactly the sort of spooky sea yarn that old sailors tell young ones about watery demons of the deep.

Robert Shaw was an unlikely choice to play Quinn. Spielberg originally wanted Americans like Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden, but with no Shaw, there's no Quinn. Shaw was a classically trained Shakespearean actor and a playwright, he largely wrote the famous monologue that takes this movie from a popcorn thriller to something much deeper and darker. It's a time immemorial story like those from Jonah and the Whale or Odysseus and the Sun, only this time, it's about the bombing of Hiroshima. It's a story that sounds uncannily like divine vengeance.

The reason to see Jaws in 1975 is that it's the most thrillingly thrilling thriller in the thrilling history of thrillers. The reason to see it in 2021 is that it's so more than just expert craft. It may or may not be great art, but this stupid movie about a mechanical shark gnawing on swimmers has the vastness of the sea in it - injected with some of the same DNA as Moby Dick, The Odyssey, and Turner's sea paintings.

But whatever else it is, the plot is this: shark sees us as fried chicken, he eats a few of us, so we kill the shark.

Even if we've never seen it, it's so simple that we'd know the plot from just the title and the poster without even having the movie described to us. We want it to be stupid. We just want to watch people to get eaten real good, and then we want to watch the shark get killed real good. There are no giant worlds that yell at us to take popcorn fiction seriously like in Batman or Lord of the Rings. If we want to think, we can look under the hood, but we're not there for what's under the hood. Jaws is as close to perfection as the world gets because in spite of the vastness of the sea and its limitless depths, we really just want to watch sharks eat people.