Jaws at 50: We’re Still Going to Need a Bigger Boat

The movies have less and less to offer because the entertainment-industrial complex is growing less and less substantial. The art of cinema has become the art of senselessness, churning out tired-out properties and studio-calculated scripts with far more concern for profit than performance. 

Mission: Impossible 8. (This movie will self-destruct in five seconds.) Another Superman reboot anyone? (Maybe the red trunks will bring back the big bucks?) Jurassic World Rebirth. (That DNA strain is long lost.) All these retreads are trying to catch financial lightning in a bottle through the hollow, burnt-out image of the OGs. There’s nothing new under the Hollywood sun, and the same old cynical Marvel CGI prepackaged spectacles keep digging for brain-dead dollars shamelessly. Summer movies are all but DOA these days, as are summer moviegoers.

But it was not always so. The summer blockbuster was born 50 years ago this month with Jaws, a film that was marketed as no other movie had been before, which filled seats as no theater chain had seen before, and raked in box-office proceeds that no studio had collected before. Jaws took the summer of 1975 by the leg with its pulsing two-note cello theme by John Williams and an invisible aquatic menace that plunged audiences into exhilarating terror as Roy Scheider famously ad-libbed, “You’re going to need a bigger boat.”

The instantaneous popularity of Jaws made it the highest-grossing film of all time (until Star Wars blasted its way to the top in 1977). Jaws was the first of its kind and changed the movies forever. And it’s a good film—and one for a Catholic audience, too (with some discretion recommended over the first scene’s suggestive skinny dipper).

Jaws is more than a popcorn flick, however, and it’s worth some cultural consideration. Jaws started the now ridiculous trend of ticket-sale obsession, measuring a film by how much it makes. And it set this trend only because it is such a solid film. It is ironic that, for all its validity as a piece of art, Jaws paved the way for money and marketing to override art, turning films into overhyped, manipulative ploys instead of worthy works of entertainment. Catholics with a mind to track the cultural tailspin should mark Jaws as a harbinger for the movie-mindlessness that lay beneath the studios’ surface and now has society in its jaws, entertaining us to death, to paraphrase Neil Postman’s title.

Jaws is a very worthy piece of cinema, even if it opened a floodgate of money-grubbing trash-churners. Besides being a cinematic watershed, Jaws effectively represents a cultural disease of fear, capitalist greed, and ignoring the threat of deadly, driven forces. Just as its towering success was not anticipated, Jaws has continued to surprise audiences over the 50 years since its release by providing a surprisingly suitable metaphor for our world of mindless moneymaking, economic self-destruction, unseen killers, and unforeseen heroes.

Despite the deep defects of the mechanical shark, Jaws is not the shallow picture that its successors have largely become. Twenty-seven-year-old Steven Spielberg, fresh off his first feature film, The Sugarland Express, was beset by production setbacks due to his insistence to shoot on the Atlantic Ocean, problems with temperamental cast members, a script that was constantly changing, and a shark (built by the man behind the giant squid in Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) that wouldn’t work. But the sheer movie magic of Jaws surmounted all. 

Spielberg probably didn’t intend to create a fable for modern society with Jaws—much less a picture that has some strong Catholic undertones to it. But his determination and skill in telling a story well elevated a potentially campy movie to a magnificent adventure film with, believe it or not, a pertinent message 50 years later.

The value of Jaws as a cinematic social symbol lies in the phenomenon that the artistic expression of popular culture often (whether consciously or subconsciously) expresses diagnoses and remedies for popular maladies. Jaws is remarkable on an allegorical level as well as a cinematic level, tapping, as it does, into what is both primal and perverse in human nature and human economy. 

The storyline is straightforward. The town of Amity Island relies on their tourist season for survival; but when a woman’s remains are washed up at low tide and the coroner assigns the cause of death as a shark attack, the chief of police closes the beaches. The mayor scrubs the report as a boating accident and keeps the beaches open for summer dollars. 

Three fatalities later, the police chief hires an eccentric fisherman to kill the shark. The final act launches out on the high seas, as the cracked captain, joined by the rugged chief and a quirky marine biologist, hunt down the leviathan in a chase and struggle with overtones from Moby Dick and The Old Man and the Sea in a Hitchcockian, piratical chess game of man versus nature. It’s grand.

One angle of interpretation that renders Jaws a relevant piece for those engaged in the battle for Christian culture is the theme of a society determined to ignore a prevalent, pervasive threat instead of facing it and destroying it. The problem of the shark is undeniable and one that promises to destroy. Nevertheless, the powers that be explain it away. As the Amity Island mayor says, “It’s all psychological.” There are sharks we’re supposed to believe in and sharks we aren’t supposed to believe in.

This pattern is only too familiar, with more blind embraces of perils nowadays than would be believed 50 years ago. Homosexual and transgender sanctification. Smartphones to stultify every man, woman, and child. AI infiltration and abuse. Liberal left-wing communism. The capitulation of Church before State. Lies and false narratives constantly downplaying the dangers that threaten to tear civilization apart as it swirls between Scylla and Charybdis, between modernity and the maelstrom—and all for the self-serving sake of money and power.

Jaws is a cautionary tale where people turn a blind eye to the plagues that threaten Western culture, moving silently—and slyly—beneath placid waters. But the jaws that gape beneath that surface are devouring jaws. Nature can breed monsters in her fallen state, and it is her betrayals that man must resist at all costs and not accept as “progressive.” As in the film, the only way to react to such infiltrations is to take the risk of heroism, which is difficult in a society that champions insipid tolerance instead of virtue and courage. Jaws is a cautionary tale where people turn a blind eye to the plagues that threaten Western culture, moving silently—and slyly—beneath placid waters.Tweet This

The message of Jaws is loud and clear: the ordinary man can rise to extraordinary occasions. This old-fashioned American theme charges clear against the newfangled American paralysis and pusillanimity that fears litigation if the truth is spoken or blacklisting if a stance is taken for reality. But the common man is still capable of uncommon change against the aberrations of nature bolstered by corporate magnates. He can strive against the urge to sanitize and suppress the knowledge of life and the acceptance of death. 

The denials run deep, however, born of the madness of contradiction. Those who give in to insanity only serve to perpetuate the threat of unreality and the spiritual sickness in themselves and others till there are painful explosions like the Sean “Diddy” Combs trial. Though no one can ignore the unhappiness intimidating society, most ignore the cause. They deny it. If a cure is inconvenient to the markets, the malady is contradicted—even though it is everywhere and obvious. What else can explain the apparent fact that only white people can be racists? Or the polite, silent sanction of the sterile slaughter of abortion? Or the normalization of both pornography and feminism? These are deep and dark waters—and evil lurks within their depths, seeking to devour.

In spite of its pop culture status, Jaws, now more than ever perhaps, endorses cultural rationality in a culture that is disintegrating under senseless attack. It promotes those solid elements of sanity fast becoming extinct as society slips into an undercurrent of relativism as indiscriminate as a killer shark. After 50 years, we are still going to need a bigger boat. And the only boat big enough to protect us against our predators is the Barque of Peter. In the salty cries of Captain Quint from the bridge of the Orca in Jaws, “C’mon, chief, this ain’t no boy-scout picnic. I see you got your rubbers…Ha! Ha! Ha!”