I was fourteen or fifteen, working at the Blockbuster Video in North Arlington, NJ. I had a gig as the movie critic for a local newspaper in Kearny, The Hudson Press, operated by a local tax attorney out of the back room of his office, up the street from my house on Magnolia Avenue. One day I decided to write an article called “My Ten Favorite American Movies.” The Godfather was on there. All That Jazz and Fiddler on the Roof were on there. Glengarry Glen Ross was on there. All the President’s Men was on there. One of the amazing things about that list from 1996 or 1997 is how similar it would be to the list I would construct now, nearly thirty years later.
Most notably, my favorite movie at fifteen is still my favorite movie at 43: Steven Spielberg’s work of cinematic perfection, Jaws. And oddly, even though I have two degrees in cinema studies from NYU and am currently a cinema studies-adjacent PhD student at Rutgers, I have not written about Jaws in any significant way since that piece from my teenage years. So today, with the 50th anniversary of the film’s release to be celebrated this coming Friday (it was released June 20th, 1975), I seek to remedy that.
I remember being at Blockbuster when my column published. An older woman came into the store carrying the paper. She had circled nine of my top ten and wanted to rent them all. The only film she left out was Jaws. “You’re going to rent nine of my ten, but not number one?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “I don’t want to see a movie about a shark.” I didn’t have a canned response to such a reductive statement, but I winged it. “It’s not about a shark. It’s about survival.” She rented it. I’d love to end this story with her tearfully returning to the store, thanking me for expanding her cinematic horizons. But no joke, I never saw the woman again. Maybe she died in a fiery crash on the way home. Maybe she hated the whole list and changed video stores to avoid eye contact with me? Both seem plausible to me.
Why have I spent my entire life thinking about Jaws? Surely, I should have ventured off into an obsession with some late career/underappreciated Godard or early aughts Mumblecore or covered my bedroom walls in Hou Hsiao-hsien posters by now. But I haven’t. Because despite my aesthetic appreciation of a wide variety of cinema, the emotional detachment is often a dealbreaker, ladies. (That’s one for the 30 Rock fans out there.) Even as an academic, I cannot bring myself to spend valuable time studying films that seem to be produced as academic or intellectual exercises; films made with inspiring intention that receive little attention. What has continued to amaze me about Jaws is how much I find in it, and how what I find continues to align with my burgeoning interests.
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Jaws is American drama. What is Quint’s obsession with sharks, borne of his experiences on the USS Indianapolis, but a continuation of Captain Ahab’s irrational stalking of Moby Dick? What is the film’s structure – a lone voice of integrity fighting against bureaucratic/capitalist forces – but a modern adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People? (Ibsen, August Strindberg and Anton Chekhov are often rightfully credited with establishing the aesthetic and thematic foundations of what is known as “American” drama.) Cinema is often referred to as a visual medium, and to a degree that is true. But Jaws proves the power of the written word on screen; its most exacting, emotional moments exist in the dark hull of the Orca, and those scenes rival the best work of Miller, Williams, Wilson, Shepard.
When I’m asking what my academic focus is, I often respond, “American political cinema” and Jaws is inherently political. It is a film about government corruption. It is a film about how political persuasion can influence media and medical establishments. It is a film about how capitalist anxieties will always usurp public health concerns. Even when Mayor Larry Vaughn admits to Chief Brody that his “kids were on that beach too,” he is still mumbling his intention to save August for the corporate interests of Amity Island. In Jaws, nobody can be trusted, and in that regard, it brilliantly fits into an era of 70s paranoia cinema that includes The Conversation, Three Days of the Condor, The Parallax View, Marathon Man, etc. The shark may be responsible for the blood in the water, but who is responsible for allowing the shark to feast?
Jaws is Hollywood history. Yes, a lot has been made about its status as the “invention of the blockbuster” but, to me, the film represents the emergence of one of our most important, and underappreciated, filmmakers. Spielberg isn’t cool in critical circles and isn’t worthy of discussion in most academic ones. (Thankfully, my friend and former teacher Dana Polan disagrees and his brilliant book on Close Encounters of the Third Kind is an absolute MUST READ.) But in my estimation, he is one of the most subtly political artists of modern Hollywood. I urge you to revisit his representations of ambivalent vengeance in Munich, including a final haunting sequence wherein he rests his camera on the specter of the fallen Trade Center. Or consider his magnificent remake of West Side Story, and its subtextual criticisms of New York City urban “renewal” in the middle part of the twentieth century. How can anyone believing in 2025 and not recognize the political foresight of films like A.I. and Minority Report? Is Spielberg an entertainer first? Absolutely. But so was Shakespeare.
Jaws is an American masterpiece by an American master. And I haven’t even written about John Williams’s score, or Robert Shaw’s iconic performance, or the masterful Indianapolis speech, a collaboration between Shaw, Howard Sackler and John Milius. I haven’t indulged my love for that girl pointing to the pond and yelling “Shaaaaaa….shaaaaark” or Mrs. Kitner’s devastating slap. Hooper, quit playing with your dinghy. Foreground my ass! Let Polly do the printing! It’s only an island if you look at it from the water. Jaws is a movie of magical moments. In culmination, they are a moment in movie history.
I have read Carl Gottlieb’s exquisite Jaws Log. I have seen the documentaries. I even saw the play on Broadway in 2023. One of my best friends in the world, Eric Mason, still knows that he can text me about any second of the film on any day and elicit an immediate response. Jaws has been the most important part of my cinematic life, a life that continues to develop every day. Happy birthday, old friend.