Jaws: On the Beach

Here's a pretty good article that gives a bit of a history of Jaws and also details some of the lasting effects it's had on the American movie industry. Give it a read. Report below in an online class discussion. Your comments should be thoughtful and thorough. You will be graded on quality as well and quantity.

SUMMER FILMS: ON THE BEACH

The Movie That Created the 'Summer Movie'

By TERRENCE RAFFERTY (NYT)

Copyright New York Times Company Apr 30, 2000

Twenty-five years ago, Steven Spielberg's ''Jaws'' created the Summer Movie as we know it: the action-heavy ''thrill ride'' sort of picture, aimed at sensation-hungry younger audiences, which moves into theaters around Memorial Day and remains there, partying hard, until the school year starts up again in September. ''Jaws'' opened on June 20, 1975, and its phenomenal popularity -- it was the first movie to relieve American audiences of more than $100 million of their hard-earned money -- helped turn Hollywood into what is now largely a summer-business town, sort of like Amity, the New England beach resort where the film's dire events take place. Watching the picture today, you might interpret it as a kind of allegory, in which the business community of Amity, refusing to close the beaches after a couple of fatal shark attacks, eerily embodies the ethics and aesthetics of the entertainment industry. The distributors and exhibitors do not shut down the multiplex even when they know that something lethal -- a ''Speed 2,'' a ''Godzilla,'' a ''Wild, Wild West'' -- lurks within.

This is not to say (as some do) that ''Jaws'' is responsible for the ''blockbuster mentality'' that has held sway over the major studios for the past couple of decades. When did Hollywood not try for blockbusters? You can pin this rap on any enormously lucrative picture you happen not to like; just from the decade preceding ''Jaws,'' suspects include ''The Exorcist,'' ''The French Connection,'' ''Love Story'' and ''The Sound of Music.'' ''The Godfather'' has the alibi of obvious greatness; even if it were the culprit, not a court in the world would convict it. The worst you can say about ''Jaws,'' I think, is that its success suggested, to the beady-eyed studio marketers, a link between the kind of movie it so spectacularly was and the time of year when it was released.

When studio executives first saw ''Jaws,'' they must have reacted like those old cartoon characters whose eyes would pop open and turn into dollar signs. The movie proposed a solution to a problem that had been plaguing the suits since the late 60's -- how to tap into the big ''youth'' market, but reliably. The studios didn't quite understand the appeal of pictures like ''The Graduate,'' ''Bonnie and Clyde,'' ''Easy Rider'' and ''M*A*S*H'' and certainly couldn't replicate it. (For that matter, they couldn't even figure out how to clone ''Love Story.'') But ''Jaws'' was, on the face of it, entertainment of a type the studios knew how to produce. At that time, action pictures were mostly being marketed to older audiences, but ''Jaws'' showed Hollywood it could sell action to kids too, with a few adjustments -- a faster pace, a hipper kind of humor, a stronger sense of horror and no Charlton Heston. (Mr. Heston had in fact wanted to play the police chief in ''Jaws,'' but Mr. Spielberg wisely rejected him in favor of Roy Scheider.) And why not release that type of movie in the summertime, when -- for the middle-class young, at least -- the livin' is easy?

The discovery of the action-youth-summer nexus is a stirring myth for marketing departments, a Grail legend for M.B.A.'s. Ordinary moviegoers, however -- and especially those over 25 -- tend to view this achievement as rather a mixed blessing. What if, some pleasant evening in July, you want to go to the movies, but just don't feel like a blow-you-through-the-back-wall-of-the-theater experience? You're out of luck, and that could make you a tad resentful toward ''Jaws'' and its spawn. But that feeling should be resisted, because ''Jaws,'' like ''The Godfather,'' is a great film. And it, too, deserves immunity from prosecution for the crimes of present-day Hollywood.

In order to grant ''Jaws'' the coveted ''Godfather'' exemption, though, it may be necessary for film historians and the higher-minded segment of the film audience to overcome a few prejudices about genre. ''Jaws'' is, after all, fundamentally a horror movie. There's a rugged, nautical-adventure component to the second half of the picture, in which the three main characters -- Police Chief Brody, an icthyologist named Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and the salty old shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) -- roam the coastal waters in search of the giant homicidal fish. But the movie has a lot more in common with ''Dracula'' than with ''Moby-Dick.'' This great white shark is no Great White Whale, gorging on metaphor; it's a monster, pure and simple, and its sole purpose is to generate fear.

That's the essence of the horror genre -- in fact, the only way of defining it that connects supernatural thrillers about ghosts and vampires with sci-fi monster movies (''The Thing,'' the ''Alien'' series), and also with slasher and serial-killer sagas (''Halloween,'' ''The Silence of the Lambs'') that don't require the viewer to believe in occult forces, life after death, the Devil, or extraterrestrial organisms. The shark of ''Jaws,'' as conceived by Peter Benchley, the author of the best-selling 1973 novel, is a natural predator exaggerated just enough to turn it into an acceptable horror-story nemesis: it's described as a ''rogue,'' with atypical feeding patterns that almost suggest a purpose, a malevolent will; and it's larger than normal, making it, of course, that much harder to kill. Those are the characteristics requisite to a monster: a whiff of evil and an aura of invincibility.

And Mr. Spielberg, who had successfully attributed those very qualities to, of all things, a big truck in the television movie ''Duel'' (1971), knew even more than Mr. Benchley did about the mechanics of producing fear. One of the reasons the film is so much better than the book is that Mr. Spielberg is more single-minded in his dedication to scaring us silly; he eliminated the novel's distracting subplots, and his editing rhythm is so unsettling that the audience never gets the chance to relax, even during apparent lulls and scenes of comic relief. We're always aware of something awful under the placid surface.

How much an individual viewer actually enjoys that unremitting tension is, I suppose, a matter of temperament. What makes a horror movie more disturbing than other kinds of suspense thrillers and action movies -- police dramas, say, or the international intrigue Tom Clancy serves up -- is that the anxiety it generates is magnified by a sense of helplessness: you're up against a force that can't be mastered by reason. Many adults, especially those of the well-educated, professionally accomplished variety, don't like that feeling one bit and may complain about having been manipulated by a genuinely scary movie like ''Jaws.'' (If there's manipulating to be done, they're going to be the ones to do it.) Those of us who don't feel quite so masterly are a good deal more comfortable with the horror experience. Teenagers get it in a big way.

Two years after ''Jaws'' opened, Mr. Spielberg himself sounded a little sheepish about what he'd done, almost apologetic about the film's effectiveness. ''I have very mixed feelings about my work on that picture,'' he said. ''I saw it again and realized it was the simplest movie I had ever seen in my life. It was just the essential moving, working parts of suspense and terror.'' He was unfair to himself. Of the thousands of suspense-and-terror machines constructed for the movies in the medium's first century, only a few have made their ''moving, working parts'' function so smoothly. (Even though the movie's mechanical shark, famously, didn't work very well at all.) But Mr. Spielberg didn't want to be known as, in his words, ''a shark-and-truck director,'' perhaps in part because, like all young virtuosos -- he was 28 when ''Jaws'' opened -- he had a tendency to get bored with his own facility, to undervalue the skills that other artists would sell their souls for.

And he probably suspected, too, that as a director of horror movies he would never be taken entirely seriously as a filmmaker and might even wind up looking faintly disreputable. (The career of his friend Brian De Palma would, over the next 10 years, provide confirmation of that suspicion.) Mr. Spielberg could have used some of the magisterial confidence of Alfred Hitchcock, who was always inordinately proud of ''Psycho'' -- the ''Jaws'' of 1960 -- precisely because it was the film in which he exercised the most absolute control over viewers' responses. The master of suspense wasn't apologetic about creating fear, because it's a potent emotion, and he was fortunate (or, if you will, cynical) enough to believe that for a filmmaker no emotion was better than any other.

Hitchcock may not have been right about that. The sheer terror of ''Psycho'' is less complex, and less rewarding for the audience, than the metaphysical dread that informs ''Vertigo.'' And fear, it should be said, is potentially more dangerous than many other emotions: wielded by demagogues and propagandists, it can be hugely destructive. But it doesn't have to be, and it doesn't have to be moronically simple, either. ''Jaws'' is the proof.

Although Mr. Spielberg's technical prowess is ideally suited to the horror genre, his temperament really isn't. He brings a rather sunny outlook to extremely dark material, a contrast that weirdly enhances the paradox at the center of Mr. Benchley's story: the juxtaposition of summertime fun and sudden, violent death. (In ''Jaws,'' a day at the beach isn't exactly a day at the beach.) Mr. Spielberg doesn't merely juxtapose those elements but seems rather to unite them; they meet, somehow, at the horizon.

What struck me as I watched ''Jaws'' again recently (there's a good letterboxed video but no DVD yet) is how much more humor and beauty Mr. Spielberg brings to it than it really needs to be an effective genre piece. The interplay of the three men in the boat is often hilarious (think, for example, of the improvised-looking scene in which they drunkenly compare scars), and even the most shocking bits of carnage are so elegantly conceived that they have a sort of perverse wit. For all the relentless, terrifying momentum ''Jaws'' builds up, it's an unusually companionable horror picture: it doesn't oppress viewers with claustrophobic atmosphere or try to wow them with special effects. As far as I can tell, there isn't a single process shot in the movie. The ocean and the clear sky are allowed to be themselves, and so are the three sensibly apprehensive men who move through this gorgeous setting in search of the beast. ''Jaws'' makes fear look natural -- which of course, it is. In this picture, we understand terror so well we can even laugh at it.

I don't mean to denigrate ''Jaws'' by making it sound profound. This is not the sort of picture that wants the audience to think too hard. It's a visceral-experience movie, and its distinction, I believe, is that it's truer to the experience of physical fear than any other horror movie, before or since. I also wouldn't want to claim that the film's influence hasn't been a little pernicious. We'd all give a lot, I'm sure, to have been spared the overbearing action-and-horror fests of the past 25 summers (including, prominently, Mr. Spielberg's own ''Jaws'' knockoff ''Jurassic Park''). But it's time to let ''Jaws'' off the hook. Like the great white, it is what it is, and does what it does with extraordinary efficiency and power. And so what if most of its descendants have been terrible? If every summer movie were as good as ''Jaws,'' none of us would ever get to the beach.