One of the perennial questions of political philosophy is the relationship between man and nature. Is nature fundamentally hostile to life, or does it—instead—make all we cherish worthwhile? For all their disagreements, thinkers as different as Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau all saw man’s relationship with nature as a fundamental, perhaps the fundamental, problem of politics. But despite the ever-present character of this problem, contemporary American society has increasingly become uncomfortable with questions about it. The modern blockbuster—defined as it often is by stories of superheroes, fairy tales, and sci-fi universes—so often speaks to us not about the frequently uneasy relationship between man and nature but about the human capacity to transcend the limitations of our natures, to become whatever it is we want to be.
At first glance, Jaws would seem to be a most unlikely candidate for a film that seriously considers man’s place in the natural world. Released 50 years ago in the summer of 1975, Jaws was a film that captured the imagination of the nation, all but inventing the summer blockbuster and forever pervading popular culture. Even those who have not seen the film are undoubtedly familiar with the classic shark motif by the Academy Award-winning composer John Williams, as well as the ominous warning relayed late in the film: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” To many, Jaws is a film whose universal appeal, financial success, and presence in our cultural memory bespeaks a lack of depth. The truth is that the appeal of Jaws rests in its able handling of problems that are universal to the human experience and political life. Jaws confronts the frailties of human nature, the precarious yet valuable position of civilization, the limitations of democratic politics, and the human capacity for virtue in the face of adversity.
Jaws follows Martin Brody, played by Roy Schneider, whose simple and contented existence as the police chief of a small New England town named Amity Island comes to a halt with the discovery of a mangled, mutilated body on the beach. In the film’s famous opening, a young woman named Chrissie Watkins had gone skinny dipping and been attacked and killed by a great white shark. Her would-be male companion—so drunk that he could not even make it into the water before having passed out—slept uselessly on the shore while the young Chrissie lost her life. The film’s dramatic opening sets the tone for all that follows. As innocent young people die, hedonists are unable or unwilling to do anything about it. The pleasures of civilization sometimes coexist uneasily with a world where so many natural forces threaten us.
Chief Brody is a good man swept up in these events. His very first scene establishes him as a man devoted to the traditional family. He is happily married to his wife, Ellen, and he is a good father to his two children. In one of his earliest scenes, Brody chides his son for playing on a dangerous swing set in their yard. The lives and safety of his family are of the utmost importance to Brody. But, in this case, the danger resides in his own yard, foreshadowing the far more serious problem of the shark that is to confront the whole town later. Lying out of sight deep beneath the ocean waters, there is a threat to the well-being of Amity Island’s citizens in the form of the shark, a force of nature that is—as photographs of Megalodon teeth early in the film suggest—a throwback to an ancient, prehistoric era, one before the rise of democracy, civilization, or even true politics. The very same ocean that had given life to Amity Island’s comfort and guaranteed its position as an affluent, tourism-heavy community now presents a threat to its very existence.
A shark can never be mollified through the ordinary procedures of liberal democracy.
Having seen the body of Chrissie, Chief Brody rightly concludes that the death was caused by a shark, and he attempts to close the beaches. He is challenged, however, by the mayor of Amity Island, Larry Vaughn. Mayor Vaughn is the quintessential politician. Slimy and self-interested, the mayor’s principal concern is not with the safety of the citizens he was elected to serve but instead with preserving Amity Island’s status as a wealth-generating tourism attraction. “Amity is a summer town,” he says, and it needs “summer dollars.” Having convinced, or possibly bribed, the town coroner to falsify the events of Chrissie’s death as a boating accident rather than a shark attack to avoid public panic, Mayor Vaughn embodies the dangerous tendency of elected officials to sacrifice truth on the altar of expediency.
In 1975, the nation was troubled by the twin crises of Vietnam and Watergate, and it was in no mood to trust its political officials. It is therefore no surprise that, in a film from this era, we see a marked cynicism about government. What is surprising—however—is the very depth of Jaws’ skepticism about the capacity of elective politics to save us. In the 1970s, most Americans resented the alleged corruption and power-seeking of their national officials as well as the big city machine politicians, but they still generally regarded the governments of smaller-scale communities and towns with a measure of trust and appreciation. Mayor Vaughn, as the product of small-town America, a secluded island community seemingly insulated from the corruption of the great urban centers and the machinations of Washington politics, should be immune from the temptations that befell controversial figures such as Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Richard Daley. Mayor Vaughn reveals, however, that the problems facing American politics do not reside simply in distant capitals or great financial cities. They touch the very heart of the nation. Even a small town as romantic and isolated as Amity Island can be moved, by the power of self-interest, apathy, and excessive individualism, to elect to high offices persons of low character.
Predictably, the decision of Mayor Vaughn to keep the beaches open leads to still more tragedy. The young boy Alex Kitner is killed by the shark in broad daylight, and the town finds itself unable to ignore the problem any longer. The islanders convene in that most ancient of American democratic symbols—the New England town meeting—and they demonstrate a lack of respect for the seriousness of their situation. Making light of the shark attacks and focusing primarily on their hope to win the bounty attached to killing the shark, we can here see that the rot of corruption has afflicted not only politicians but also ordinary citizens, threatening that most American of practices—democratic self-government. Set during Independence Day in a New England town that evokes images of Pilgrim democracy, the local self-government of Amity Island has been hollowed from its original purpose of religious, democratic community and has instead become self-absorbed, defined by idleness and money-seeking. Jaws reflects a reverence for the old America—the America of the Founders and of the Pilgrims—but it also suggests that the threats it faces penetrate its core so deeply that it cannot be saved by the typical practices of liberal government, such as democratic elections, governmental legislation, or economic programs. A shark can never be mollified through the ordinary procedures of liberal democracy.
It is in this important scene that a very unordinary man, Captain Quint, is introduced. Obsessed with the shark, Quint is Jaws’ answer to Captain Ahab of Moby Dick fame. But while both seamen share an obsession with hunting and killing great maritime beasts, Captain Ahab and Captain Quint are more different than first meets the eye. Ahab was said to have had “the blood of the American fathers in their veins,” suggesting an ancient lineage and a powerful sense of rootedness in the nation’s history and traditions. Quint, however, is not noticeably animated by a concern for traditional values or patriotic loyalty. His appeal to the townspeople of Amity to enlist his services to kill the shark appeals not to patriotism or to the common good, but to their self-interest: “Gonna stay alive and ante up,” he queries, “Or ya wanna play it cheap, be on welfare the whole winter?” Throughout the film, Quint is abrasive and pragmatic. He is single-minded in his obsession with sharks, and he makes a living as a sailor hunting and killing them. He is an individualist, with no visible attachments to kin or family, or even to the community of Amity Island to which he belongs. Even his love of the American national community, which he served with valor during World War II, was perhaps shattered by his experience on the USS Indianapolis. Abandoned by his own government because the secrecy of its mission to deliver the Atomic Bomb was deemed more important than the survival of the Indianapolis sailors, Quint comes away from the sinking only with a single-minded desire to enact vengeance by hunting down those sharks who once hunted him.
Quint’s pitch to the townspeople, however, falls on deaf ears, at least initially, as the mayor promises to take his proposal “under advisement.” Chief Brody decides, however, to call upon his aid. It is shortly thereafter that we are introduced to Matthew Hooper, a scientist from the Oceanographic Institute who has spent his life studying sharks. As the citizens of Amity Island embark on a failed attempt to hunt down and kill the shark, and as Brody and Hooper uncover clues as to the species of shark that is on the prowl, still more death mounts on the beach. As the islanders look on helplessly, with three people dead—all young—and with still more threatened, it becomes clear that only a skilled shark hunter such as Quint will be up to the task. Even Mayor Vaughn comes to recognize the precarious situation of the town, signing his name to the contract to enlist the services of Quint for a pretty penny. What changed his mind was the near-death of his own son, who was within striking distance of the shark when it devoured its third victim. “My children,” he says, “were on that beach too.” It is because the shark’s primary victims are teenagers and children that even its most corrupt officials are stirred to act. Threats to the family must be neutralized.
Naturally, the final half of the film focuses on the hunt for the shark that is undertaken by our three main cast members: Quint, Hooper, and Brody. Each person represents a different aspect of American civilization. Quint is a quintessentially democratic man—individualistic, committed to equality, and devoted to liberty, especially the freedom represented by the seas. He looks at Hooper with a very suspicious eye, considering him to be a college-educated city boy and a man of privilege and wealth rather than a true sailor who is attuned to nature. Hooper is a scientific man, one whose expertise and life of study of sharks has brought him wealth and status, but that has left him—Quint suggests—dangerously uprooted from nature. The two men initially clash, for they could not be any more different in class, temperament, and background. The populist Quint regards himself as a “working class hero” against the urbane experts and elites such as Hooper. Hooper is called from outside the town, while Quint is a local—albeit a hermit and a loner. Hooper is a man of great wealth, whose yacht would not be out of place in the nation’s wealthiest communities, while Quint prides himself on his spartan and simple sailor’s life. And yet, despite their vast differences, they ultimately develop a mutual respect for one another. The two connect over a shared fascination with sharks as well as common experiences, such as manly adventures on the sea. What began as a socialistic depiction of inevitable class conflict between a working-class populist and a wealthy elite soon becomes an illustration of how unity of purpose and sympathy of interest can transcend class divisions and cause friendships even in the most unlikely of places.
Let us remember, with Chief Brody, that while local self-government and ordered liberty have their difficulties, in the end they create a civilization worth fighting for.
And yet, it is neither Hooper nor Quint who plays the most decisive role in the demise of the shark. It is Chief Brody, the film’s greatest embodiment of traditional republican values. As a police chief, he represents in his very profession the Founding intention to create a “nation of laws, not of men.” He is an upholder of law and order and, as depicted in his earlier clashes with Vaughn over whether to keep the beaches open, a man who sincerely wishes to protect his community. And yet, the Americanism of Brody lies deeper still, for of all our characters, he expresses the most concern for the ideals of the American Dream. Brody is not obsessed with sharks, or even a lover of the water. Neither scientist nor sailor, he is a happily married man who came to Amity Island seeking a better life for his family. He fled from the violence and corruption of New York City and found an American Arcadia in Amity Island. It was, as he explains, a place where “one man can make a difference,” a place where his wife and children could live in safety without fear of murder, theft, or rape. It was, in short, a place that seemingly embodied the very best of the American values that are celebrated on Independence Day: local democracy, individual liberty, and civic virtue.
Now, with these values threatened, both by the killer shark and by the corruption of Amity’s politicians, Chief Brody has to face his fear of the water in order to defend the American way of life. While Hooper’s effort to slay the shark using the power of science comes up short in the finale, and while Quint finds himself devoured by the very creature he had hoped to display as his greatest trophy, it is Chief Brody who ultimately—through his resourcefulness and persistence—brings the shark to heel. Perhaps it is the case that Brody was the only one who could have killed the shark. His battle was waged not because of personal fascination or fanatical obsession, but instead because it was motivated by a simpler yet still more powerful desire to sustain his community’s way of life, to restore ordered liberty to the town of Amity Island, and to make it a place that would be safe for his family and community once more.
Jaws ends not on a pessimistic note but on a hopeful one. It was a film that explored the tendency of democratic politicians to act in the name of self-interest rather than the common good; that depicted local democracy in the New England town meeting not as a particularly deliberative event but instead as facetious; that showed how the representatives of democratic equality and scientific expertise alike were unable to defeat a powerful force of nature such as the shark. Though we pride ourselves on the advancements of our civilization, sometimes the threats that are closer to nature—both human and beastly—are the ones that most threaten us. Just as the shark is motivated only by nature’s call to “swim and eat and make little sharks,” so too do the humans of the story, such as the mayor and many of the townspeople, often exhibit traits that are in-keeping with the darker, more Machiavellian aspects of human nature, such as self-interest and hedonism. Like the American Founders, Jaws recognized that these qualities are not up to the task of sustaining a free society that depends upon more virtuous qualities such as selflessness and spiritedness.
As Chief Brody triumphs over the Great White, and as he and Hooper swim to the safety of the scenic Amity beachfront, we are left to consider not only the threats posed to American democracy and its serious limitations, but also the capacity of ordinary citizens like Brody to confront them and to preserve what is best in their traditions. Today, the nation is beset by many threats—political, economic, and cultural—that, like the shark, sometimes lurk invisibly beneath the surface of the waters. While we often turn to our elected officials, intellectuals, specialists, and obsessives to solve our problems, Jaws reminds us that, in the end, it is often those of more ordinary virtues such as Chief Brody, embodying qualities such as personal responsibility, family devotion, and self-sacrifice, that do the brunt work of upholding our civilization. The 50th anniversary of Jaws comes at a moment when the benefits of American republicanism are less apparent than they used to be. Let us remember, with Chief Brody, that while local self-government and ordered liberty have their difficulties, in the end, they create a civilization worth fighting for.
