Jaws
2 4 8 T he keynote of Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws is an immitigable contempt for everyone and everything. It is the post-Watergate best seller, a novel of complete disillusionment, cynicism , and despair, which arouses and exploits, with dazzling efficiency, every phobia of the middle-aged, middle-class, menopausal American male. The mayor has sold his soul to the Mafia; the country is racked by threats of economic recession, unemployment, racial violence; law and order is disintegrating; the environment is being polluted; everyone is motivated by greed and self-interest. The hero, Police Chief Brody, is worried about his spreading middle and his ability to attract his wife, who yearns for the upper middle classness from which she descended to marry him and who seduces the young, rich, predatory intellectual who loves sharks.The novel is intensely mysoginistic and,most striking of all,intensely anti-youth: young people are either “Aquarians” or complacent zombies, both types being regarded with equal scorn and both inseparable,in Benchley’s mind,from drugs and promiscuity.The shark is progressively identified with everyone including, finally, Brody himself. There are hints throughout that it is some sort of retribution for sin, a vengeful materialization of the ills of America, which include everything from rampant black rapists and ax-murderers to avaricious storekeepers who don’t object to Amity becoming a garbage dump if there’s profit in it. What is genuinely disturbing and subversive in the novel is constantly trivialized by the shrill,simplifying generalizations of its symbolism and by its perverse refusal of any alternative to a culture it shows to be corrupt. We are invited, instead, to immerse ourselves in Brody’s mounting sense of inadequacy and outrage, his dread of youth, women, effete culture, anarchy, permissiveness, and personal impotence. The novel—and its success—are symptoms of the failure of psychological and cultural confidence. The tone and purpose of Steven Spielberg’s film are as far from this as it is possible to be. The new Jaws (1975) might best be described, perhaps, as a rite: a communal exorcism, a ceremony for the restoration of ideological confidence. The film is inconceivable without an enormous audience, without that exhilarating, jubilant explosion of cheers and hosannas which greet the annihilation of the shark and which transform the cinema, momentarily, into a temple.Annihilation is the operative word. It is not enough for the shark to be killed, as it is in the book, only two feet from a helpless, hopeless hero whose two companions have already been devoured, and who has, himself, been implicated too disturbingly in the tensions which the shark has released. The film monster has to be, literally, obliterated. Evil must vanish from the face of the earth. Jaws (1979) 13 Chapter 13.indd 248 1/17/12 10:49 AM 2 4 9 j a w s Crucial in this change of strategy is the removal of the adultery subplot and with it all trace of conflict within Brody’s (Roy Scheider) family. Stephen Heath has discussed the film in terms of an unresolved displacement of sexuality onto the shark. (“Jaws,” 513) It seems to me, rather, that the extraordinary concentration of erotic imagery in the opening sequence (the double row of wooden fencing; the boy’s repeated remark, “I’m coming! I’m coming!”; the phallic marker-buoy) suggests the shark’s temporary usurpation of sexuality, this tying in with the central theme of male territorial rivalry and with the fact that, once the shark has been established as“masculine energy”in the first attack, sexual connotations are conspicuous by their suppression (in comparison both with the novel and the horror genre). “Possession of the phallus” is the essence of the territoriality theme, and the ending perfectly resolves it, potency being transferred, by right of conquest, from the supreme representative of destructive lawlessness to the policeman’s rifle. Similarly, Heath’s comment that after the girl,“all the victims are male and the focus is on losing legs,” while not actually untrue (although only one leg is lost), significantly distorts the film’s emphasis, which is that the shark attacks a woman and children—that is,the home,the family,the basic unit of American democracy.(“Jaws,”513) Thus, although a man is killed in the pond sequence, the thematic point here is to stress, by abstention,the near-death of the hero’s son in a secluded pool where he has been sent for safety. This...
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