I'll see you on the beach

Rating: Null/10 (4 June 2010)

"Violent, nasty, crude. There was nothing in the picture (Jaws) that was personal to me. It was a calculated movie. I made each cut with glee, knowing the effect that it would have on the audience. I don't ever want to be involved in another picture like that." – Steven Spielberg
Beginning with point of view shots of a "killer" stalking a group of naked teens, "Jaws" is part of a group of slasher flicks released in the 1970s and late 60s ("Black Christmas", "Targets", "Blood Feast", "Psycho", "Birds", "Halloween", "Peeping Tom", "Chainsaw Massacrew", copious zombie flicks, "Scream Bloody Murder", "Silent Night, Bloody Night" etc).
Like many of these films, "Jaws" is at times a cruel, dehumanising film, focusing entirely on relentless audience manipulation. Take, for example, the difference between Pal's "War of the Worlds" and Spielberg's 2005 remake. The difference between the two films is that Spielberg identifies with the aliens, just as he identifies with the shark which terrorises tourists in "Jaws". Spielberg is the shark/alien/camera trying to scare the wits out of us. Nothing else engages his interests.
Many filmmakers operate in an imaginative space somewhere between artist (giving formal expression to his/her ideas and feelings) and entertainer. Spielberg, however, is entertainer incarnate. Yet he is a curiously joyless, sadistic entertainer, always holding in severe check emotions of his own that he doesn't trust. This results in the saccharin and sentimental quality of his films. Films that rely on bogus feelings rather than searching out and expressing genuine emotions.
Unsurprisingly, two of Spielberg's great loves are John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock. Spielberg is like a hybrid of the two, the reactionary tendencies of Ford merged with the gleeful sadism of Hitch, with a little Capra hypocritically thrown in as penance. In one scene in "Jaws", music from Ford's "The Quiet Man" is played, whilst elsewhere Spielberg hits us with Hitchcock's "Vertigo Zoom". The film's all-male hunt against an unseen enemy further recalls Ford's "The Lost Patrol", whilst its elaborate last act recalls "Lifeboat". And of course "Jaws" is a virtual remake of "Creature from the black Lagoon", from which it takes its famous "duh duh duh" musical score, as well as numerous scenes, shot for shot. But most of all, "Jaws" beats the path of "The Godfather", a film that pioneered, in Hollywood, the pornographic technique of manipulating the audience into a state of delighted anticipation of each subsequent but oh-so-artful act of violence.
Prior to "The Godfather", Hollywood films generated, or at least tried to generate, concern for their vulnerable characters. With "Jaws", though, Spielberg appeals instead to the basest elements in our nature; in his hands, we cannot wait for the shark to claim another victim. Indeed, beginning with "Jaws", Spielberg made cold-hearted audience manipulation, in various guises, his signature track. Since then, the whole way in which popular entertainment operates has coarsened, the social and political consequences of which have been enormous. Of course Spielberg was simply part of an emerging trend. The true model for the cold-blooded cinema that "Jaws" exemplifies can be found in another time and place. The Third Reich created the approach; in its propagandistic works, audiences were encouraged to savour each new incidence of derision and abuse that befell Jewish characters.
Thematically "Jaws" is light (the shark's effects on local trade are quickly dismissed in favour of mechanical thrills). Where the film excels, where it breaks away from the 50's monster and 70's slasher genre, is in its masterful final act. Here, the haunted house goes out to sea in search of the slasher, our adventurers picked off "Halloween" style (with the genre's obligatory false-deaths) before a Moby Dick modelled showdown.
It is here where the film's characters - police chief Brody, goofy marine biologist Hooper and Quint (Robert Shaw), an Ahab-like fisherman who is obsessed with slaying the beast – develop. The last of these, Quint, is given a long histrionic speech, written by John Milius, in which he reminisces about a WW2 experience that plunged him into shark-infested waters (the passage links the film to pulpy movies of the 1950s, where atomic energy upsets Nature). Spielberg's inability to keep a reign on his older actors (Shaw was frequently drunk) and the input of Milius' pen (the rest of the film was written by Benchley, Gottlieb and Spielberg) created a mutiny of sorts, the result being the most well-drawn characters in Spielberg's filmography.
Ultimately, though, "Jaws" is a middle class, cosy version of "Moby Dick". The monster cathartically dies (Melville's whale survives), Quint is killed, and post-War virtues survive, Brody doggy-paddling back to his wife and family. Like "Deliverance" we are offered versions of threatened manhood, only here, Quint, a self-reliant, working-class, antiquated, thoroughly sexist, ruthless, raunchy and mad figure, is seen to be the anachronism. Quint is too powerful, too independent of traditional social ties, too prone to excess, too much a symbol of bourgeois independence, as dangerous to the social fabric of Amity's comfortable "liberalism" as the shark itself, and so he is cast aside.
In Spielbergland, paternal authority must always be restored, but not by Quint. Hopper and Brody on the other hand, are the mirror images of Quint. They are symbols of technology, genteel, inherited wealth, whilst the shark ultimately becomes another Spielbergian guarantor of domesticity. Be it dinosaurs, aliens, terrorists, Nazis, sharks, trucks, Germans, slave-traders or pirates, Spielberg's "monsters" are all symbols of paternal/national duty. Slay the beast for country and family, and all will be well. Family values, patriarchy, a kind of middle-class submissiveness, must always be restored. And this is the offencive thing about all of Spielberg's films: the absolute insistence on taking on the responsibilities of fatherhood, and thus restoration of a 1950s nuclear family, as an unquestionable and totally redemptive gesture.
8.9/10 - Worth multiple viewings.