I don’t know how old I was the first time I watched Jaws, but I do remember that the opening scene scared the absolute shit out of me. Which doesn’t help narrow it down at all; I could’ve been any age from 4 to 34. Even seeing it today, in IMAX1But not in IMAX 3D, which I kind of regret now as part of the 50th Anniversary re-release, it felt horrifying and relentless.
I think it’s the best scene in the entire movie, setting the tone from the start, letting you know it’s not going to be pulling any punches. There’s a scene later on where someone gets eaten by a shark (spoiler!), and what seems like a geyser of blood shoots up from the water and surrounds a bunch of terrified children. And I still don’t think that was as disturbing as the opening, where something under the water is pulling the young woman back and forth as she’s flailing and screaming but no one can hear. And she holds onto a buoy for safety, but gets pulled away and dragged under all the same. It feels intensely violent because it seems to go on forever.
I initially had no intention of watching the re-release, since Jaws seems like a movie that I practically have memorized. But I realized that it’s been years, maybe decades, since I’ve watched the entire movie in one sitting.
The movie is one of the most over-analyzed in history, and we’ve seen the individual moments so often — the dolly zoom on the beach, the long uninterrupted take riding a ferry with the Mayor and Medical Examiner, the split diopter shot as a man is talking to Brody while he’s trying to scan the water — that I’ve started to think of them completely out of context, saying nothing other than “Jaws is a pretty great movie.” But as good as individual moments are, it’s only by seeing how they’re put together that you can remember why it’s such a masterpiece. It switches between terror, tension, humor, quiet, and chaos with a command of rhythm and pacing that feels unprecedented.
There are only a few things that keep it from being perfect in my mind. One is that Steven Spielberg’s affectations and Richard Dreyfuss’s affectations keep poking through. Another is that it feels split into two distinct halves that don’t really “talk” to each other. And one that surprised me today was that I don’t think the scene with Hooper in the shark cage works at all.
It seems like the height of arrogance for me to be suggesting a “fix” to an action scene from Steven Spielberg, even 50 years ago Steven Spielberg. And maybe it’s just an image that’s been killed by too many Shark Weeks, and back in 1975, the idea of being in a cage underwater surrounded by man-eating sharks was so exotic that it was inherently tense. But I just kept thinking that it was a rare misstep to show Hooper escaping. If he’d pulled out his knife, the scene cut to the boat where there’s a lot of violent thrashing, they see a lot of blood rise to the surface, and they pull up the demolished cage, it would’ve heightened the feeling that Brody was out there completely alone.
And as long as I’m arrogantly nitpicking a masterpiece, when I talk about “Spielberg’s affectations,” they’re the moments that are still restrained here because they’re in their infancy, but still happen enough to be distracting. It’s the kind of thing that was in full force in E.T. and then Jurassic Park, which made that movie kind of tough for me to completely love on its release. It’s when a child suddenly bursts into not-quite-convincing laughter. Or when Dr. Grant physically turns Dr. Sattler’s head around to see the dinosaurs for the first time.
My brain still immediately rejects that kind of thing: Real human beings don’t behave like that!!! I think for most of my life, I was dead-set on the idea that movies had to be either completely realistic, or completely stylized, and anything in between was a failure on somebody’s part. That’s a dumb idea, and I’m gradually getting better at suppressing it, but I still have to occasionally remind myself They’re not trying to make a documentary, Chuck. Actors playing characters in a movie sometimes do stuff just for dramatic effect, and that’s okay.
While I’m complaining about the work of geniuses, I was surprised by how much I didn’t like the score. The main theme, of course, is iconic and absolutely perfect, every single time it’s used. But the rest of the music was almost distracting in how it either didn’t quite match the tone of what I was seeing, or it didn’t do much of anything at all. I suspect that the main theme is so good, and John Williams’s work is so often flawless, that I misremembered this score as being on the same level as Star Wars or Raiders or Jurassic Park.
Anyway, I’m extremely glad I saw this classic again in a theater. The experience of watching it with an audience didn’t add a ton, to be honest: there was a sense that everybody in the room was so familiar with Jaws that it was just scene after scene of people thinking, “Say the line! Say the line!” And there was indeed applause after “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” and “that’s a bad hat, Harry”2Which I had heard lots of times but never realized was from Jaws, and plenty of other moments that have now become iconic.
My favorite is still the guy who’d never heard of a tiger shark before. And the banter between Brody and his wife is so good, so perfectly played that I’m not sure I ever even noticed before just how good it is.
My favorite gag that I’d forgotten is when the guys are showing each other their scars, and Hooper says “look at this” and pulls down the collar of his shirt to show his chest. Brody asks, “Are you wearing a sweater?” But the entire movie is funnier than I’d remembered it, full of moments that land without feeling forced. Like Hooper showing up at the Brodys’ house after the police chief had been slapped in the face by a woman whose son had been killed because he didn’t close the beach, and the first thing Hooper asks is, “So how was your day?”
For years, Jaws has felt to me as if overfamiliarity had turned it into something like the tiger shark3The whaaat?: thoroughly killed and dissected, all of its insides spread out and carefully examined for years. It was a masterpiece, and it was the very first summer blockbuster, but it was very much a product of its time, and over the years, all the magic had been drained out of it.
This showing on its anniversary proves that that’s completely false. It’s a masterpiece because it’s just a damn good movie, intensely scary but also charming and funny, and deliberately artful but never at the expense of being entertaining.
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