Jaws is a 1975 horror adventure film about a killer shark that unleashes chaos on a beach resort, leaving a local sheriff, a marine biologist, and an old seafarer to hunt the beast down.
“With a year-round average of 9,190 population, the quiet vacation-town of Amity Island has had quite a past – the “shark attacks” of ‘74 completely crippled all town business. Two years later Mayor Vaughn reopened the suffering Island in 1976 and since, Amity Island has been a huge vacation and sightseeing spot due to its world class Captain Jake’s Amity Boat Tours. Just ask yourself, is it really safe to go back into the once shark-infested waters?” – Amityboattours.com
Growing up in the tourism driven county of Cornwall, which for those not up to speed on their UK geography is way down at the bottom of the rain soaked shores of England, there was something about the quiet resort town of Amity Island that really resonated with myself, no doubt because it represented the small coastal towns which surrounded the area I lived. The film Jaws is itself a bonafide cult classic, Steven Spielberg’s masterful direction turning a throwaway summer blockbuster into a psyche-scaring experience that still to this day has me overly cautious about swimming in the ocean and well, deep swimming pools.
Filmed on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, it stands in for Long Island since the production called for “a vacation area that was lower middle class enough so that an appearance of a shark would destroy the tourist business.” At the same time the surrounding oceans with their sandy bottom which never dropped below 35 feet (11m) for 12 miles (19 km) which enabled the crew to operate the mechanical sharks beyond the sight of land when they worked. Still, the production was continually plagued with technical issues with Spielberg calculating that out of every 12 hours they would average only four hours actually filming.
While audiences might have been wowed by the slow burn tension of never getting to the see the shark until three quarters of the way through the film and then somehow still terrified by the sight of a giant rubber shark, the real strength of the film is the believability of the island and its inhabitants. Characters become were more than disposable shark chow, especially as Police Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) is forced to battle the mayor’s office nearly as hard as the shark, which has decided to make Amity it’s new feeding ground. To this extent the tone of the film is very similar to Peter Benchley’s novel, surprisingly devoting more time to developing its characters than the shark. Focus shifts to the shark hunt much later, which makes up the final quarter making it the one part that Spielberg would keep as he reworked the novel into something more cinematic.
Amity as a location is the sort of place that seems like so many tourists spots to have found its moment in time and since refused to move on as its a land of sandy beaches and white picket fences. However, when we look at Amity Island here we have a location where the surface a battle for control is constantly being waged between Police Chief Brody and the Mayor’s office. Brody, is a former New York cop who moved to Amity wanting a quieter and safer place to raise his family despite having no love for the ocean. Of course we then get the classic line from marine biologist Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss): “It’s only an island when you look at it from the ocean.”
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Still viewed by many of the locals as an outsider, Brody is appears not fit for the place doing things by the book rather than consider what’s best for the island. Of course the flipside of this is that Brody is doing what he’s doing because he does care what’s best for the people on the island as he is a natural protector not only for his family but all who fall under his district as the chief of police. Unfortunately it’s a desire that doesn’t line up with what is best for the island’s finances, a factor that puts him in constant conflict with Mayor Vaughn (Murray Hamilton) who, along with his staff are portrayed as the greedy fools standing in the way of Brody being able to handle the situation.
It’s through Brody we also get a lot of the slice-of-life moments that really bring Amity to life as we see him dismiss messages left for him about the various small town crimes, like the local karate club students testing their skills on fences of the nearby neighbourhood. These are delivered by his secretary in such a way that you get the impression these are the most major crimes that face the island. It is only further reinforced by Brody having to make beach closed signs himself because such an issue has never happened on the island before.
Due to the framing of the film, the mayor might be viewed as the antagonistic element of the film, especially when he refuses to listen to Brody’s concerns. Furthermore, we are setup to root for Brody and as a result despise anyone who is standing in his way but if we pull the focus back and look at the bigger picture, Mayor Vaughn’s choices can be justified. Vaughn knows that Amity is a tourist town and as such doesn’t need tourists being scared off by the idea of a man eating shark lurking in the water especially with the 4th of July celebrations. This is a town pay day, carrying them through the rest of tourist season.
The idea of a failed tourist season, much less the town being branded “Shark City” is unquestionably the worst situation possible, potentially losing not just one tourist season but any and all future tourism. In the book however, such noble concerns are undermined by the fact that the mayor owes money to the mafia, whom he plans to pay off using money skimmed from the summer tourist takings. This was cut like much of the source material for the film.
So determined to protect the town, Mayor Vaughn forces the coroner to reassess his initial autopsy and change the cause of death from shark attack to boat accident as the council attempts to quash the issue. The very public devouring of Alex Kinter (Jeffrey Voorhees) by the shark sends the local fishermen into a frenzy, sparked by his mother offering a bounty for the shark. Once more though Mayor Vaughn is quick to try and close the killer shark issue, seizing the capture of a large tiger shark to scapegoat for the deaths ignoring the advice of Hooper for fear that anything might interfere with the 4th of July celebrations. Needless to say as much as he and the other council members might want to bury their heads in the sand and pretend everything, it soon changes, finally giving them no way to hide from the situation facing them. It should be noted though that Mayor Vaughn would ultimately spin the situation into his re-election by making it seem that it was his idea to hire fisherman Quint (Robert Shaw) to finally rid the town of the killer shark.
Quint is unquestionably the wild card element at play here with the shark hunter memorably played by Shaw, who interestingly wasn’t Spielberg’s first choice, having originally wanted to cast either Lee Marvin (who preferred to fish for real) or Sterling Hayden. Spielberg also considered casting local Craig Kingsbury in the role had he met him sooner and ultimately would cast him to play Ben Gardner, who would also be highly memorable in the film as one of the best scares when his decapitated head plays peek-a-boo.
Quint is every bit the hired gun in this situation, quick to offer his services for $10,000 instead of the offered $3,000, no doubt knowing exactly what is lurking in the waters. Quint clearly a resident of the island, but also a bit dismissed in the the same way Brody is as an outsider. He is also a man with no loyalty to anyone bar himself with a dislike especially for men in positions of power. He subsidises the tourist dollars he makes from his chartered shark fishing tours with whale oil and moonshine businesses that, along with his shack (revealed in the book) he has won numerous challenges from both the mayor’s office and his rival fishermen. Using layman’s legal knowledge he gained from books, these smaller details sadly are lost in the film version where he is generally viewed as being a troublesome necessity for the town’s tourist trade and certainly when it comes to dealing with this killer shark.
While Jaws might unquestionably be one of the most influential movies ever made, especially if you stop to consider that there are still killer shark movies being released (not to mention three sequels). There’s also Bruno Mattei’s unofficial part 5 Cruel Jaws and a huge range of nature runs amok movies that can all be traced back to Jaws. However, none of them have since managed to capture the sense of a believable community like the Amity much less the power games within. No matter the politics and whether who was right or wrong, the question remains: is it really safe to go back in the water.