“The thing about a shark... he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes.”
On June 20, 1975, a movie directed by an unknown, arrogant kid, entered the theaters a small, troubled little picture, and left them months later the undisputed champion of the Box Office, the largest moneymaker of all time, and a motion picture legend. If it has done nothing else in the thirty-five years since its release, Jaws has ensured that nine out of ten people who enter the ocean each summer inevitably hear somewhere in the back of their minds an ominous piano playing the eerie, alternating two notes (EF, EF, EF) that have come to represent approaching danger. Since that historic summer in '75, sharks have been the unchallenged superstars of our summer vacations. And Jaws has remained a genuine horror classic.
Forget the progressively worse sequels. Forget the cheap knock-offs (Piranha) and attempted CGI remakes (Deep Blue Sea). These only work to lessen the quality and impact of the original. While generally and unfortunately remembered as merely a movie about a shark that eats a bunch of people, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws is, upon closer examination, a near perfectly made film. Divided into three distinct acts, the movie is a masterpiece of slowly rising tension, a brilliant examination of the fear of the unknown, and a model tale of man versus nature.
One of the genius decisions made by Spielberg during the production of the movie, was to show the shark as little as possible. This would be unheard of today. If Jaws were made today (please, oh please let the rumors of a remake be untrue), you can be assured that a big, beautiful and up-close CGI great white shark would be one of the first things to appear on the screen. A monster movie without the monster? What production company would approve of that today? However, go back and watch the original film and you will not see the actual shark until a good hour into the movie. What Spielberg realized then, and what helps to make Jaws so much more than a mere monster movie now, is that the idea of the shark “somewhere below us” and the anticipation of its arrival and imminent attack are much more terrifying than the shark’s actual appearance. As Hitchcock once said, “Fear lies not in the bang, but in the expectation of it.”
Now Spielberg would be the first to admit that a great deal of what I just gave him credit for was the director simply rolling with the punches. The truth is that the shark basically didn’t work most of the time. Spielberg loves to tell the story of the shark’s first day on the set. Upon entering the water, this million-dollar robot quickly swished its tail twice, swam out into the Atlantic and promptly sank to the bottom of the sea. On only his second film, Spielberg was working in an era when computers could not make anything possible during post-production, and I imagine the young director thought at that moment that his career sank to the bottom of the ocean right alongside his film’s star. But the best directors of that time could prove themselves by using the tools that were available to them, filling in the blanks with innovation and talent, and always putting the story first. Spielberg proved to be one of the most innovative and talented storytellers in film, and has gone on to become the most successful and beloved director of all time. His genius ensured that even when the shark was not on the screen, we were still thinking about it and wondering when it was next going to attack.
In the years since he made the film, Spielberg has gone on to create some of our favorite and most remembered movie images (E.T. flying in front of the moon; Indiana Jones running from the giant boulder; a stampede of life-like dinosaurs). He’s won two Academy Awards for best director, and made one of the most powerful, beautiful, and important movies of all time (Schindler’s List). But for my money, his genius has never been as purely cinematic or had such a primal and raw impact on film as it did thirty-five years ago during the production of the masterpiece known as Jaws.
Happy anniversary to Jaws and to Steven Spielberg.
And until next week, here is my hope that we all find our Shangri-La…and a bigger boat. Good night.
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