Jawsis known to be a lot of things, but perhaps the most widely agreed upon is it being the first Hollywood Blockbuster. But what many fail to see is thatJaws, albeit a commercial vehicle at first glance, shares a lot of characteristics with New Hollywood films. One of these is its reflections on Vietnam, lurking underneath its surface just like its famous shark. While there are more famous, explicitly anti-Vietnam New Hollywood films likeApocalypse NowandThe Deer Hunter,Jawsemerges as an unlikely Vietnam movie. This is because the shark inJawsis a mysterious, foreign enemy, taking away the lives of the American youth and ripping apart the picturesque Americana of New England.
When a killer shark unleashes chaos on a beach community off Cape Cod, it’s up to a local sheriff, a marine biologist, and an old seafarer to hunt the beast down.
What Is ‘Jaws’ About?
Let’s first refresh our memories on the plot ofJaws: in a beautiful, fictional seaside town called Amity Island, the NYC-transplanted police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) investigates the death of a young woman who’s been mutilated and washed ashore. Medical analysis quickly determines she was killed by a shark, and Brody, eager to safeguard the townspeople, closes the beaches. But he is opposed by the mayor Larry Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), who forces him to keep the beaches open for July 4 tourism. It’s not until a few more deaths occur that Mayor Vaughn buckles under public pressure and Brody, along with local shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) and oceanographer Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), sets sail to kill the shark once and for all.
Jawsis undoubtedly one of the most important movies of all time, as it’s commonly credited as being the first blockbuster. It also proved (by accident, as the mechanical sharks gave considerable trouble) that sometimes, the less we see, the more terrified we are It was an unprecedented success thatbecame the highest-grossing movie of all timeandinduced mass hysteriauntil it was leapfrogged two years later by a little movie calledStar Wars. It also launched the careers of many men involved with the film, including a director calledSteven Spielbergand a composer calledJohn Williams. It is the prototypical Spielbergian film, with trademarks like his family-oriented optimism and fluid camera movements present in almost all his films afterward.
‘Jaws’ Is a Bloody Metaphor for the Vietnam War
However,Jawsis a much darker film than Spielberg’s later reputation would suggest. Firstly, it’s a horror film with blood-soaked gore, with severed limbs galore. When you mention Spielberg’s war films, titles likeSaving Private RyanandSchindler’s Listwill come straight to mind, but notJaws. That’s because people often overlookJaws’s mature thematic exploration of national social anxieties at the time, especially regarding Vietnam. The first key element to this is the great white shark, nicknamed “Bruce” by the production crew.Like the Vietnam War, Bruce is a foreign entity that strikes fear deep into the heart of America.
‘Jaws’ Emerges From the Blood-Soaked Waters With Gnarly Pinball Machine
The Steven Spielberg classic has been scaring moviegoers for almost 50 years.
Bruce is similarly difficult for the characters to fight because they are unaware of his ful capabilities. His hyper-intelligence keeps the characters in the dark and his evolving strength surprises even an expert oceanographer. Our main characters have to team up, form a little military operation of their own, and venture into foreign waters to defeat him.As Spielberg has said before, Bruce is a “leviathan,” more a metaphor for a mysterious enemy than just a regular shark. Most importantly, almost all of Bruce’s victims are children and youths. While Bruce technically also kills two adults in the film, for most of the film, Spielberg exclusively shows Bruce devouring children and teenagers. That Bruce seems to only pick on children captures how America sent a whole generation of young men to death in Vietnam and how the war, both in the U.S. and Vietnam, spoiled the adolescence of an entire generation.
Spielberg Deconstructs the Idealistic View of America With ‘Jaws’
The second piece of the puzzle is the destruction of Americana in the form of Amity. Born in 1946, Spielberg is quite literally a Baby Boomer, and as audiences saw in the semi-autobiographical filmThe Fabelmans, he grew up in an idyllic small town. Obviously, his childhood was not ended by a great white shark attack, but a lot of Baby Boomers grew up during the era of the nuclear family and swallowed a hard pill during the ’60s when events like the Civil Rights Movement, the JFK assassination, and the Vietnam War put an end to any childhood fantasies of America. The ’60s gave rise to counterculture, of which anti-war protests were a large part, andthis disillusionment with America is a classic theme reflected in many New Hollywood films, includingJaws.
Spielberg spends the whole first hour ofJawspainting Amity Island as a tight-knit community with common-folk concerns, building it up so strongly just to tear it apart. The townsfolk turn hostile to one another as the foreign enemy sows division. During Bruce’s final attack on Amity Island,he destroys the family fun of Independence Day, tearing the most American of festivities to shreds. No matter how hard the mayor tries to push forward, the arrival of this threat means that the people cannot keep pretending everything is normal. The Norman Rockwellian Americana of Amity Island is irrevocably tainted by tragedy and unnecessarily prolonged bloodshed.
Spielberg’s intelligence means that his picturesque Americana is more than just beaches and housewives. Most tellingly, the antagonist ofJaws’s first hour — the person opposing the protagonist —is not the shark. The shark is just a plot device; the true villain is Mayor Vaughn. It is his capitalistic greed (and Brody’s complacency) that leads to two unnecessary deaths. This blind urge to keep the tourism machine running, despite all the signs pointing towards bloodshed, evokes the American military-industrial complex that was too deep into Vietnam to pull out. The concept wascoined by President Eisenhower in 1961andfrequently mentioned by activistsduring the anti-Vietnam War era as the reason the U.S. stayed in the War. There are more references to commerce in the film: at one point, opportunists jump at the chance to make money from capturing Bruce, and the deaths are crassly mocked by a billboard on the beach. Like the America that withdrew from Vietnam, the mayor eventually swallows his pride in Spielberg’s film, but his misjudgment has cost multiple lives he cannot get back.
Quint’s Monologue Crystallizes the Metaphor
If there’s one scene that shows the shark-as-war metaphor most clearly, it’s Quint’s monologue. In a drunken state, Quint reveals hesurvived the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, specifically how his fellow soldiers were eaten by sharks as the U.S. military failed to come and save them. As he recounts, he blurs the horror of war and the horror of sharks together, and he talks about the sharks less like living creatures and more like a relentless killing machine. Of course, the WWII veteran character was talking about the Pacific War, but the war freshest on audiences' minds at the time ofJaws’s release was Vietnam. The fall of Saigon occurred just months beforeJaws’s summer debut. The reason Quint’s monologue is so resounding is thatit spoke to the collective experience and scars of so many Americans at the time. As he described his wartime memory of sharks in such horrific detail, he evoked the many images of war that Americans, for the first time in history, saw on television.
Of course, this is just a thematic interpretation. Spielberg’s fictional genre film, no matter how surprisingly gritty it is, cannot compare to the very real deaths and traumas of the Vietnam War. But perhaps this shows thatSpielberg was (and still is) a smarter filmmaker than people gave him credit for at the time(hefamously didnotget an Oscar nomination forJaws) and that his blockbuster shares a lot of the sympathies shown in New Hollywood films by his friends such asFrancis Ford CoppolaandGeorge Lucas.
Jawsis available for rent in the U.S. on Amazon Prime Video.
