by Sam Weller
When I was eight, my mother took me and my three older siblings to an old movie house in Oxnard, California to see Jaws. The film had only been out for a few weeks but already had generated considerable buzz. The film perfectly captured the paranoid, post-Watergate zeitgeist of the mid-1970s.
And while it may seem a questionable parenting choice to take an eight-year-old to see a mortifying film about a twenty-five-foot great white shark terrorizing a small, eastern coastal community, that kind of stuff was de rigueur for the children of Generation X.
Like so many in my generation, I grew up riding in a car with no seatbelts, surrounded by clouds of cigarette smoke. I pounded my first beer at the age of ten, after school, sitting in a beanbag chair watching an episode of Speed Racer.
If the men and women who saw their heyday during World War Two are the “Greatest Generation,” Gen X is the “Self-Reliant Generation.” I roamed the hills of Malibu, California on summer days alongside my friends. We had no cell phones, no location sharing apps—just a general edict to come home sometime before dark. Lots of Gen Xers were free-range kids, roaming unaccounted for until nightfall.
We watched, on live television, as Evel Knievel jumped over thirteen buses at Wembley Stadium in London, crashing and breaking his pelvis, fracturing two vertebrae and breaking his hand. Badass and bad-to-the-broken-bone, Evel refused a stretcher, exiting the stadium without assistance.
So, seeing Jaws at the tender age of eight was standard operating procedure for a kid in the mid-70s.
A popular meme circulating on social media perfectly sums up Generation X:
If you wonder why Gen X are the way we are, just remember that our teachers hyped up a space shuttle launch and then it blew up on live TV. No counseling. No hugs. No explanation. They just wheeled the TV out of the room and then went back to teaching class.
All that said, Jaws, strangely enough, took a subtle psychological toll on me. Growing up near the beach, I certainly developed a low-key case of galeophobia—an irrational fear of sharks. And I wasn’t alone. A study published in Hektoan International: A Journal of Medical Humanities concluded that a majority of individuals who watched Jaws when they were young were significantly influenced when it came to their beachgoing habits. Jaws freaked out a towering fraction of an entire generation. How many films can make this claim? Beyond its cultural significance, Jaws is a cinematic masterpiece on multiple fronts. But the film also, ironically, sounded the death knell for the golden era of “New Hollywood.” As perfect a movie as Jaws is, it marked the end of one of the finest periods in cinematic history, an era that gave us Easy Rider, The Godfather, Chinatown, among many others.
We all know the Jaws storyline. Based on the 1974 Peter Benchley novel, a great white shark attacks swimmers near the beach community of Amity Island. With the Fourth of July holiday fast approaching, local government officials try to assure residents and tourists alike that the waters are safe. They are fearful of losing the almighty tourism dollar. As the attacks persist, the local police chief, played with cool intensity by Roy Scheider, joins forces with a whip-smart marine-biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a salty old sea captain (Robert Shaw). They head out on a harrowing mission to find and kill the ravenous predator.
Most of us know the production story by now. The mechanical shark built for the film was plagued with problems, forcing director Steven Spielberg to rewrite the screenplay on the fly. The shark simply did not work, forcing the young director to keep the sea-beast off screen, inadvertently employing the Hitchcockian rule of suspense—to afford the audience information the characters do not have. This use of suspense is no better exemplified than in the film’s opening sequence as the young woman at the beach party has run off for a night swim and we see her from the shark’s point-of-view, her legs and arms gently treading water. Throw in John Williams’s iconic, intense two-note musical theme, and we are collectively freaked out. We know immediately the shark is beneath her, and she is completely unaware. Inadvertently, keeping the shark from view turned into a cinematic coup de maître. We don’t see the shark until we reach the film’s eighty-second minute. In fact, for the entire two hours and four minutes of the film’s runtime, the shark’s total screen time is roughly four minutes.
Jaws was a mirror of the time in which it was released. After a decade of complete political and social tumult, music, television, and movies reflected a deep mistrust of authority. Jaws, with the Amity mayor doing his best to downplay the shark attacks in order to keep beaches open for the Fourth of July, reflected the era. Americans had endured over a decade of assassinations of its political and civil rights leaders and a horrific, prolonged war in Vietnam. Shock and fear had become a part of the cultural psyche, playing out with regularity on the nightly news. Jaws brilliantly manipulated our collective paranoia.
And while often categorized as a thriller, Jaws is, without question, also a spectacular and frightening horror movie, replete with a man-eating monster and a fair bit of gore. The film is part Creature from the Black Lagoon and part Moby Dick. And it is this second, literary component that elevates the film to classic status. The use of characterization is sublime. Police Chief Brody, Matt Hooper, and Quint utilize classic, contrasting archetypes. Brody is an outsider, a New Yorker thrust into an unexpected sea-quest. He moved his family to pleasant Amity Island to flee the dangers of urban living. He is also, importantly, an aquaphobe.
Matt Hooper is the young, cocky intellectual, a scientist from the Oceanographic Institute, an academic who represents science and modernity pitted against brute nature.
Quint is modern Ahab. Obsessed, scared and grizzled, a World War Two veteran who survived horrific shark attacks during the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in July, 1945. As always with a great story, it is its human component—the characters—that elevates a narrative to masterpiece status.
Jaws was the first film to gross over $100 million dollars at the box office. Universal Pictures completely reinvented movie marketing with the film, saturating primetime television with the largest national TV ad campaign in motion picture history. The result was the creation of the “summer blockbuster,” a marketing phenomenon that persists to this day. Jaws relied on mythic characters with the human motivations and decidedly human flaws too often lacking in today’s CGI, ADHD, festivals of flash. Too many modern summer blockbusters rely first on Computer Generated Imagery and special effects before characterization.
Jaws, and its unprecedented marketing campaign, unintentionally marked the end of the “New Hollywood” movement that had begun in the late 1960s with countercultural films like The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, and Easy Rider. The era had been driven by auteur directors such as Francois Truffaut, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, among others. Jaws showed studio executives they could rake in far more cash through escapist, high-budget popcorn films, a trend that has persisted throughout much of the 2000s. While Jaws was an auteur masterpiece, upon its release in 1975, the film inadvertently ushered in the blockbuster era. Two years later, another movie would seal the fate of “New Hollywood,” a new film awash in mythic archetypes. A film from a galaxy, far, far away.
The success of Jaws and its role in the birth of the blockbuster, ironically, had nothing to do with special effects. In fact, it was the failure of the effects and the depth of its characters that helped catapult it to become one of the greatest horror movies ever made.
Jaws impacted every generation who flocked to theaters to see it, certainly not just my own. But Gen X came of age during a time of deep political mistrust, economic instability (gas shortage, anyone?), and daredevils risking their very mortal existence on live television. Jaws reinforced our skepticism, and reflected our resilience, dark humor, and self-reliance. As a result, the film helped define our generational identity, illuminating the very fact that much lies beneath the surface. Twenty-five-foot sharks come in many different forms.
Sam Weller is the two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning authorized biographer of the legendary author Ray Bradbury. Sam has written for Slate, The Paris Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, National Public Radio and many others.
Weller’s collection of gothic weird fiction Dark Black was published in 2020 by Hat & Beard Press and was hailed by Pulitzer prize-winner Daniel Kraus (Angel Down), National Book Award winner Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown), and #1 New York Times author Gillian Flynn (Gone Girl).
Follow Sam on Bluesky @samwellerauthor@bsky.social or on his web site www.samweller.net. Find his other Whisper House Press-published work in Costs of Living.
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