The 50th anniversary of Jaws will be met with extraordinary pomp and circumstance. Special screenings in Boston will feature live orchestra music, the cellos thrumming John Williams’s two-note soundtrack of imminent horror (E-F… E-F… E-F-E-F-E-F!). In another special showing slated for Martha’s Vineyard, “Jaws on the Water”, floating viewers will once again witness the malfunctioning 26-foot-long shark — nicknamed “Bruce”, in honour of director Steven Spielberg’s lawyer — grind his mechanical teeth rather indiscriminately through flesh, bone, and ship hull.
The movie was never for the faint of heart. The Los Angeles Times chief film critic, Charles Champlin, harpooned it. He was horrified by the severed limbs; “Jaws,” he wrote, “is nightmare time.” As for Spielberg: “Intimacy is not yet his strength.” Of course, Champlin missed the point. Seventies America was high on cocaine and disco and thoroughly disenchanted with almost everything else, which is to say no one was particularly interested in intimacy. It was a paranoid decade, a decade in which shark attacks resonated, as such a thing could stand for any number of demonic threats.
In 1975, the country was reeling from the oil crisis, inflation of 8%, and a battered economy. That year saw two assassination attempts on the president and ended in an act of terrorism as a bomb exploded at New York’s LaGuardia airport, killing 11 — a crime that to this day remains unsolved. America was no longer captain of the ship, master of her fate. The Grammy-winning song of the year was “The Way We Were”.
The tone of the movie is set from the opening scene: sun sinking into the ocean behind a bevy of beach-guitar-strumming, pot-smoking, long-haired college students, blissfully unaware that one of their crowd will soon be destined for dismemberment. There was something satisfying in that realisation that the Age of Aquarius was about to get its just deserts. Saigon had fallen and Richard Nixon along with it, suggesting that America, naked and vulnerable, was swimming through dangerous waters in a sexed-up haze, gloriously ignorant of the savage appetites lurking beneath the surface. Of course it’s the Fourth of July. Of course it’s an allegory.
In the face of clear and present carnivorous danger, the ambitious mayor and his well-fed lawyer sidekick spew pure greed. “We need summer dollars,” rumbles Murray Hamilton, who had caught Spielberg’s notice by playing Mr Robinson in The Graduate, in yet another Seventies harbinger of American decline.
Soon, yet another corpse sinks into a blood-stained sea, but these are not the crimson beaches of America’s bravest, sacrificed for world democracy on the sands of Normandy or Iwo Jima, the men Spielberg would glorify in Saving Private Ryan. The shark-chomped bodies of 1975 were the first articulations of what would come to be called American carnage. The cop, the child, the old-salt sonofabitch, the naked hippie doing water ballet — the beast from the deep knows no difference. Not even fancy college kids who had escaped the draft were safe.
“Saigon had fallen and Richard Nixon along with it, suggesting that America, naked and vulnerable, was swimming through dangerous waters in a sexed-up haze.”
Peter Benchley was one of those fancy college kids who dreamed of writing the Great American novel. His grandfather, the journalist and novelist Robert Benchley, had been a stalwart of the Algonquin Round Table of New York’s finest wits, along with Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx. Yet Peter had found little success in the writing world. He was about to quit when he came across an interview with a Montauk sport fisherman who once hauled in a 3,427-pound Great White.
Jaws was Benchley’s last attempt to make it as a writer — and the resulting novel was smattered with faux-deep social commentary and small-town drama, including a sprinkling of the mafia and a dash or two of adultery, none of which would survive the great sausage-making of what would be heralded as the first Hollywood blockbuster. Benchley’s total advance from Doubleday was a meagre $7,500.
While Benchley was labouring over drafts, another drama was unfolding 3,000 miles to the west, where Richard Darryl Zanuck, reeling from the failure of 1967’s Doctor Dolittle, was in the midst of losing his job as president of 20th Century Fox. He was fired by his own father, company founder Darryl F. Zanuck, which may have sparked Richard’s fascination with claustrophobic dramas of men intent on out-manning one another and killing the monstrous father beast. But as is generally the case with nepo babies, Zanuck fils landed on his feet. He became partners with the erstwhile head of his story department, David Brown, and the collaboration promptly blossomed into 1974’s Best Picture, The Sting.
Zanuck and Brown suddenly had some money to invest, which is why before Benchley’s novel ever hit bookstores, they could afford to see if they could develop the book into a screenplay, rustle up a director and a few actors, and make a movie. They spent $175,000 for a book that still didn’t have a title — which, in retrospect, was a bargain. Twenty minutes before the deadline, Benchley finally came up with the word that summed it all up. And just like that, Jaws hit the bestseller list and remained there for the next 44 weeks.
Zanuck was not the only one to have understood that this was the key to the American zeitgeist. The pages also landed on the desk of young Spielberg, who was disappointed to discover another director, Dick Richards, had already got his hands on it. Luckily, Richards made the mistake of repeatedly referring to the shark as “the white whale” in front of Benchley, who, instead of being flattered by the comparison with Melville, became incensed. The macropredator was the whole point — not some humpbacked vacuum cleaner of microscopic krill.
Spielberg got the job. He hired Robert Shaw to play the manliest of men — that is, the most homicidal — as a farcical send-up of the Hemingway man. Richard Dreyfuss became the preppy ichthyologist, and Roy Scheider became the New York cop, a stand-in for the urban everyman, now on notice that being a landlubber didn’t exempt you from the horrors of the deep.
At the film’s first screening at the Medallion theatre in Dallas, the audience cheered and screamed — and one of them vomited. What followed was a tidal wave of publicity, with Jaws merch of every sort, from trading cards to beach towels. It was a kids’ movie — the bloodiest ever — and the gory opus summarily grossed more than $470 million worldwide (at that point, the top-grossing film of all time), and established its place in Hollywood iconography. Pauline Kael gushed: “The film belongs to the pulpiest sci-fi monster-movie tradition.”
As it turns out, old men and the sea never get old. Fifty years after the closing credits of Jaws, the model of what Kael called the “primal-terror comedy” has endured: shark eats man, shark eats ship, shark gets blown to smithereens. Swap shark for evil alien or mechanical dinosaur. Rinse, repeat. It’s horror. It’s comedy. And what is striking is that after half a century, the two have become one, which is perhaps a reflection on American culture more generally, arching from one hysterical pole to the next.
In October 1975, Spielberg was asked at the San Francisco Film Festival whether he would direct Jaws II. “Making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick,” he responded (don’t mention Jurassic Park). Of course, Spielberg’s opinion hardly mattered. What ensued was a school of fishy spawn: Jaws II, Jaws III, Jaws: The Revenge, Cruel Jaws, Santa Jaws.
Beneath it all lurks the secret of the movie’s extraordinary staying power. It was then, and remains to this day, a metric not only of American fear but of American aggression, a foreshadowing of a future not only of Hollywood big-budget gore-bloated extravaganzas, but of a country declining into numbness that only the most sensational of spectacles could touch. Hollywood was the first to perceive that our taste for apocalypse, once the niche purview of melodrama, had expanded its market.
Half a century later, we don’t know whether to laugh or cry as we swim, if only a little less innocently, into the depths. Because as it turns out, no one cares about old men and the sea. It’s the Great Whites, symbol of American paranoia, predation, and violence, which adorn our whiskey bottles and popcorn buckets. D.H. Lawrence had it right when he commented: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”
He didn’t say it was a shark.
