by Nelson
There’s never going to be a definitive answer to the age old “what’s the greatest movie of all time?” question. The answer is entirely subjective. As I’ve said before, different people with different perspectives and experiences are never going to come to a unanimous consensus. I get that, and I accept it.
But if you think Jaws is anything less than amazing, you don’t know a damn thing about movies.
One of the things that fascinates me so much about Jaws is that, despite how appealing the idea of a killer shark movie is (and despite how many have been made), this is the only one that is actually any good. For that matter, it is basically the only great killer shark saga ever, and it’s leagues above even the more passable ones that have followed, even if Benchley’s novel does have some totally unnecessary soap opera-esque tendencies that Spielberg’s epic wisely avoids. The story of a shark that terrorizes a resort town run by politicians unwilling to accept the imminent danger until it swims up and bites them in the ass is the template for all shark stories. Unless you’re going for all out ridiculousness, you’re pretty much doomed to imitate the master if you’re trying to come up with a workable shark saga.
So, let’s look at some of the reasons this movie is, unquestionably, one of the greatest movies ever made.
Jaws doesn’t waste any time getting down to business. A drunk guy follows a beautiful girl on an ill-fated swim. We get some darkened but decidedly non-PG shots as Chrissie strips off her clothes and dives into the ocean. Moments later, the audience is subjected to one of the most terrifying sequences ever caught on camera. To this day, I will not set foot in the ocean at night because of this sequence. Even getting in a pool at night tends to freak me out, as visions of Chrissie being mercilessly flung from side to side while screaming and pleading for her life play on a loop in my head until I finally get out of the damn water. One of my favorite little touches in this scene comes when Chrissie manages to grab onto a nearby buoy, and the attack momentarily stops. There’s a sadistic, miniscule glimmer of hope right before Chrissie is pulled under for the final time. Absolutely terrifying.
I don’t know if I can name a movie other than Halloween that manages to do more with less, and, in the case of Halloween, I’m talking budgets. In the case of Jaws, I’m talking the fact that the shark barely worked because some genius didn’t think the salt water would have any impact on the mechanics of the beastly fish. A production focused on a shark that can barely even use said shark seems hopelessly doomed, but thanks to Steven Spielberg’s fairly simplistic workaround, Jaws is about ten times more effective than it would have been if the thing had worked as planned. For the first half of the movie, we don’t see the creature at all, only the damage it creates. Watching the idiot fisherman who tries to use his wife’s holiday roast to hook the shark desperately swim away from a detached dock that we can only imagine is being carried by a monstrous creature of the deep is so much more scarier than seeing a fin or having the shark rise up from the depths would have been.
I can’t name a favorite character in this movie. I love them all, and I absolutely love the three leads equally. Chief Brody, Matt Hooper, and Quint are so much fun that I’d watch them hang out on dry land and read the phonebook. The scene where Hooper comes to the Brody home to inform the chief isn’t just one of my favorites in the movie, it’s legitimately one of my favorite scenes in cinematic history. Hooper helping himself a half finished plate, “My husband tells me you’re in sharks,” and, of course, Chief Brody filling an extremely large glass to the brim with red wine and refusing to let it breathe shortly before declaring that he’s the chief of police and can do whatever he wants is among the best character moments in the movie
Other than the shark, Mayor Larry Vaughn is the movie’s biggest villain. But how can you hate a man with such a wide array of completely amazing blazers? He responds to an interviewer’s question about the recent shark attacks by reminding him that “Amity, as you know, means ‘friendship,’” as if this fact is somehow, some way relevant to the recent fatalities. He’s more concerned with the “paint happy bastards” who add a fin to the town’s “Welcome to Amity” billboard than he is with the literal man-eating monster stalking the beaches of Amity Island, and he manages to take six separate words and combine them into one when he snarls his refusal to have Brody and Hooper cut a tiger shark open because he doesn’t want to see Alex Kitner “SPILLOUTALLOVERTHEDOCK!”
For over twenty years now, I’ve been swapping Jaws quotes with some of my best friends, and there are no signs of this ever stopping. I’ve had entire conversations with people consisting of nothing but lines from the movie. From “This was no boating accident” to “I’m gonna draw ‘im into the shallow. Draw ‘im into the shallow water. I’m gonna draw ‘im in and drown ‘im,” and, of course, “We’ve got a panic on our hands on the 4th of July!” this is one of the most quotable movies I have ever watched. Am I only scratching the surface with the quotes I mentioned? Of course. There’s hardly a line in this film that isn’t wonderfully quotable, especially if you’re trying to work it into everyday conversation. I cannot tell you how many looks of confusion randomly breaking out into “Farewell and Adieu” at inopportune times has earned me over the years, but I can assure you that I’ll never stop doing it.\
As a grad student, I was required to attend and present at several poetry/reading sessions hosted by the school. Students would take poems, passages from fiction, and sometimes even Bible verses up to the podium and read them out loud. My first reading was the lyrics to Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money.” The second time out, though, I read the entirety of Quint’s Indianapolis speech. I’m not sure if there is a more gripping or better delivered monologue in all of cinema.
There’s nothing about this movie that isn’t great. There’s nothing about this movie that isn’t perfect. The performances, the score, the themes it explores, and the effect it had on audiences are all the stuff of legend. It’s an absolutely timeless movie that will never, ever not pack a punch, no matter how many scientists or folks on Discovery’s Shark Week try to assure folks that these fish don’t really want to eat them alive while they plead for mercy. As long as people get in the water, Jaws will always keep its status as one of the greatest and most terrifying movies ever made.
Doubtfire 