Social Warfare in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws?

Enough has been written about Jaws’ narrative tightness, excellent acting, and technical prowess. Really, what more needs to be said? Spielberg’s shark tale is the 1975masterpiece that spring boarded him into our cultural spotlight as possibly the greatest director of all time and set the standard by which all blockbuster films should be compared. It’s essentially a man vs. nature film. A great white shark brings physical and economic carnage to the town of Amity, so three men must battle it mano-a-mano in chilly Atlantic waters. It’s a simple film, but when I recently rewatched it, I couldn’t help but find deeper social commentary.

            WARNING: SPOLER ALERT.

            WARNING: I am reading far too much into this.

  I’ve always found Jaws’ second half more interesting than its first. Don’t get me wrong, the first half is terrifying (the fleeting brutality of the Kitner boy’s death is probably what scares me most). Yet, the second half provides three rich characters (Brody, Hooper, Quint), each possessing internal demons, and the shark the catalyst for metaphorical confrontation.

AGAIN—I’m reading too far much into this.

            Okay, first we have Matt Hooper, the excitable shark scientist. From the town’s point of view, he’s an outsider, a rich boy, an aspect the film hammers home repeatedly. As Hooper says, he has money on top of his family’s money. Hell, look at his freakin’ boat! All that gadgetry!

Matt Hooper. Rich. Intelligent. Bearded.

            Anyway, during the film’s second half, Quint takes a special disliking to Hooper because he’s rich. When examining him to see if Hooper can work on his boat to catch this shark, he tells him he has city hands, that he’s “been counting money all his life.” Hooper immediately cries, “I don’t need this working class hero crap!” The scene is played wonderfully by Dreyfuss and Shaw.

            Quint and Hooper’s animosity only continues on the boat. Quint makes fun of Hooper’s shark cage and other expensive items he brings aboard the Orca. “Don’t know what he’ll do with it,” says Quint in reference to the shark. “Might eat it, I suppose.” On the boat, Quint constantly criticizes Hooper, from how he ties off lines and barrels to his steering of the ship. Quint to Hooper: “Don’t tell me my business.”They do have a night of bonding, the famous “Show Me the Way to Go Home” scene, but quarrel for the rest of the movie.

            Finally, when Quint’s methods for killing the shark fail, the three men agree to lower Hooper into the water in his shark cage to jab the fish with a poisonous needle. As Hooper is lowered, I can’t tell whether he earns begrudging respect from Quint or if the captain can’t wait for him to become shark food. Of course, the shark proves too much, breaking through the cage, causing Hooper to drop the needle. He escapes to hide behind a rock near the seabed, leaving Chief Brody and Quint at the shark’s mercy.

            For Hooper, the shark represents his own discomfort with his class standing, the constant reminder that his money makes him different than others and produces overwhelming hostility. In the end, he will always be running from this fear.

Da Chief.

            Next, we have Chief Brody, the middle-class hero of the group. He owns a nice house in a nice section of town. He has a nice truck, nice clothes. He’s average in all possible ways. In town, he’s an outsider because he hasn’t been born on the island, yet everyone treats him with respect because he is chief. He’s humble, self-deprecating, and reliable.

His wife jokes several times how scared Brody is of water. He never swims, just stays on the beach. She says he even sits in the car on the island ferry. For him, the shark not only represents this fear, but also his fatherly duty to his wife and kids. He has to confront the shark on open water to protect his family.

After it destroys Hooper’s cage and kills Quint, Brody is left on the sinking Orca with only a rifle and a few bullets. In the famous ending, he tosses a SCUBA tank in the shark’s maw, lets it circle toward him, and shoots the tank, blowing up the shark. Earlier in the film, he’d seen a picture of a shark in a textbook with a similar tank in his mouth. If he hadn’t had both the guts to get on Quint’s boat and the impetus to have studied sharks beforehand, he wouldn’t have been able to kill it. Brody must be pushed out of his comfortable middle-class existence to confront what these comforts have caused him to lose—primal-survivalist struggle with Mother Nature.  

"Smile you..."

Finally, we have Quint, whose story is undoubtedly the saddest and most disturbing. He’s a fisherman, a working class hero as Hooper puts it. He’s also crazy, made evident as he smashes the sinking Orca’s radio and their last chance to get outside help. In the “Show Me the Way to Go Home” scene, Quint explains he served in WW2 on the USS Indianapolis, the aircraft carrier that delivered the A-bomb. The ship was sunk by a Japanese torpedo and the survivors attacked for days by sharks. Many were eaten alive.

This is not the face of a sane man.

Quint swears he’ll “never wear a life jacket again,” preferring to rely on his know-how/intuition. Thus why he dislikes Hooper’s expensive tools and prefers to kill the shark “old school.” As the film progresses, he becomes more like Ahab, seeking revenge against the great white for the killing of his mates and the emotional destruction such an experience has cost him.

Ironically, Quint is killed by Hooper. Yes, the shark jumps onto the boat and Quint slides into its mouth. Brody tries to catch him, but Quint slips through his fingers. Quint does grab the edge of a table, but one of Hooper’s SCUBA tanks rolls over his fingers, causing him to jerk in pain, lose grip, and slide to his demise. So, yes, the shark kills him. But Hooper’s tanks give him that unfortunate push. Quint is then consumed by his painful past, the demons that have followed him all his life and now manifest in the shark itself. Really, this is the only logical end for Quint. What, was he gonna go to therapy? Get over the whole shark thing? No. No life jackets, remember?

Another picture of Quint. Never a bad thing.

So, what is the film trying to say?

Is Hooper—the rich boy—doomed to run from his money all his life?

In Brody, does the middle-class policeman provide the means for heroism?

Does Quint represent the working man, who provides the bulk of the hard work, yet is doomed to be rolled over by the rich and consumed by his spot in the socioeconomic structure?

In a movie about a killer shark, I don’t know if it is posing any of these questions.

But I find myself asking them just the same.