There's more to it but that basic plot created the summer blockbuster, cut the decade of New Hollywood in half and gave us the word Spielbergian. Mainstream cinema was already a love match with unfettered capitalism but Spielberg, starting here, dragged it so far beyond the event horizon of art as business that it's no longer possible to consider film completely divorced from commerce, from satire scale profits and an endless river of merch.
The big thing about that and Jaws is that Jaws is an exploitation plot with a New Hollywood depth and a spotlessly clean lens on enriching the concession stands forever with popcorn epics like it. The big thing is that Jaws is a much greater film than it needed to be. When an exhausted Chief Brody is thawed at the dinner table by his young son mirroring his movements and demands a kiss on the cheek because he needs it, it doesn't contain a moment's cuteness because the warmth of it invites us in. We are the Chief, his son and his wife who is looking on like we are. This is from the era of gigantic disaster movies and identikit genre pieces for the drive-in. Roger Corman could have made Jaws but Spielberg made it future proof and dazzlingly polished: it's like it was made last week but without mobile phones.
The '70s was also the era of the movie brats. Scorseses and Coppolas who had grown up in the cinema as though it were a Sunday School for artists. From them came epics like the Godfather and small but deep studies of crime life like Mean Streets. The Exorcist played like a medical drama rather than a generic horror. Depth was in. The realm that Jaws unleashed went the other way and, for all the Networks and Taxi Drivers that came in its wake, changed mainstream cinema into a big dumb down. I don't mean to suggest that Jaws is a dumb movie, on the contrary, but everyone who suddenly wanted to be Spielberg (and then George Lucas) had less trouble than before selling their dreck for its dollar value.
Jaws plays like a movie brat version of an exploitation film but one made by someone without a degree from Corman University. Spielberg had come through television. He made an effective TV movie in Duel and then a feature film Sugarland Express that even his fans have to struggle to recall (it's a good movie, just not Jaws). So, while he was used to working with tight budgets he'd not made commercial films on next to nothing and Corman's make-the-poster approach. The film is normalised now but it ram raided film culture at the time and has never been out of accessible reach to cinephiles and beer and pizza night entertainment alike.
So by the time Hooper, Quint and Brody board the Orca and chugalug off to sharkville, we know a lot about why they're doing it because in a way that never feels too expository we have lived with the residents of Amity Island that summer, heard their East Coast Yankee accents opine on the situation. If it weren't for the Great White Shark circling around at the beach, we'd all move there tomorrow. Spielberg builds this without the grit of an Arthur Penn or Richard Fleischer, the photography itself squeaks with sponge finish but the sight of the kids behind the news reporter making faces and bunny ears brings real daily life home to the screen. We've walked into the cinema to see ourselves. It felt so much better than getting punched by mafia thugs in an alleyway.
But there's something else, here. Spielberg loves his bad guys and gives them so much screen love that we can forget what the movie is about if only for seconds. A shark fin breaks the surface and glides in a smooth and sexy motion in the foreground as the distant background shows a mass of ant sized humans scurrying from the water. This can be self-destructive (Schindler's List gave the head Nazi glamour and charisma that the title character could never rival) but here it is pitch perfect. In the third act, when its movements are heralded by the motion of the yellow cannisters pinned to its body, the shark appears malevolent and vengeful. It would not be the last time that a non human character would assume a persona in movie by Spielberg or one of his clones.
And then there is Spielberg Face, the reaction shots that sidebar time itself as characters register things beyond their power and comprehension. Mostly this is wonder, close-ups of awestruck faces, like our own gazing at the screen, rendering our own awe as beautiful as the faces of the movie stars. In Jaws the Face is horror. Brody on the beach locked in a glare of shock as the Hitchcock trick of reverse motion between a zoom and a tracking shot appears to make him and us queasy with panic. The equally famous bigger-boat moment comes later as he comes face to face with the shark itself. In Sugarland Express this even went meta as a movie reflection in a window appears to be projected on a fascinated face.
This, along with Spielberg's confidence that we will be engaged with mechanics and processes, mark him out for future moments in the cinema with titles that are talked about like news stories. Spielberg takes the manipulative force of cinema to the next level with this, sucking us in to believe that our purchasing power gives us a sense of agency over the film while making us cogs in the process itself. All effective art does this but Spielberg's movies make it a business model.
Personally, I believe Jaws is on the same level as any film considered canon. Fifty years have done nothing to reduce it and it stands equally with anything you can name a classic. It's the rest of Spielberg I have a problem with. After a number of equally effective movies he turned his crowd pleasing power to more serious fare, chasing the respectability dollar and critical approval and maybe, just maybe that best director Oscar that would elude him for decades.
It's not just the cuteness of so much of it that repels me. He didn't just infect his own movies with it but all but contractually mandated it for those pressed into service like Joe Dante or Tobe Hooper to the point that if a movie wasn't a teen slasher or high school romp it was a Spielbergian festival of adorability and the adorability always felt pressed out of machine tubes like sludge in fast food joints. His movies became the most beautiful tacky get well cards on screen. But he ceded the throne of cute to the execrable Wes Anderson who is lauded now for the same bullshit.
(Similarly, I have beef with John Williams as a film composer. He's perfectly adept at scoring movies and his grunting bowed strings for Jaws is a masterpiece but Spielberg used him again and again to slather the speakers in schmaltz. Not his fault? maybe not but if he was told to sludge it up on purpose, couldn't he have done something more than he did? For all his skill and orchestral talent most of his scores sound phoned in.)
The assault on respectability is another issue. Whether it's The Color Purple, Saving Private Ryan or Schindler's List, Spielberg feels lost among all the heavy messaging and just wants to get back among the gadgets and how stuff works so what we end up with is epics made of a few setpieces and a lot of meandering. It's like someone who never smiled trying it out from a YouTube video; there is a creepiness to Spielberg's pursuit of gravity.
The truth is he was already doing it in his action adventures where the dysfunctional families and dark authority were just part of the plot and crunched along like popcorn. Jaws with its humane treatment of communities, shared fear, belly laughing irony and pure white knuckle suspense. I can't feel nostalgia for Jaws as it's never been out of reach. Seeing it again doesn't feel like putting on a golden oldie because it will sweep you up in minutes every time. To be fair, most of his movies do this, regardless of what I think of them, but this is the best of all of them.
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