analytical essay on jaws

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So the police chief famously informs the shark hunter, right after the first brief appearance of the man-eater in "Jaws." It's not simply a splendid line of dialogue, it's an example of Steven Spielberg's strategy all through the film, where the shark is more talked about than seen, and seen more in terms of its actions than in the flesh. There is a story that when producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown first approached Spielberg with an offer to direct the film of Peter Benchley's best seller, he said he would do it on one condition: that the shark not be seen for the first hour. Viewing the movie's 25th anniversary DVD, I was surprised to realize how little the shark is seen at all.

In keeping the Great White offscreen, Spielberg was employing a strategy used by Alfred Hitchcock throughout his career. "A bomb is under the table, and it explodes: That is surprise," said Hitchcock. "The bomb is under the table but it does not explode: That is suspense." Spielberg leaves the shark under the table for most of the movie. And many of its manifestations in the later part of the film are at second hand: We don't see the shark but the results of his actions. The payoff is one of the most effective thrillers ever made.

The movie takes place over the Fourth of July weekend on Amity Island, a tourist resort that feeds off the dollars of its visitors. A famous opening sequence establishes the presence of a man-eating shark in the coastal waters; a girl goes swimming by moonlight and is dragged under, screaming. All evidence points to a shark, but Mayor Vaughn ( Murray Hamilton ) doesn't want to scare away tourists, and orders Brody ( Roy Scheider ), the police chief, to keep the beaches open. "If people can't swim here, they'll be glad to swim in the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island," the mayor tells Brody, who spits back: "That doesn't mean we have to serve them up a smorgasbord." But the mayor strides on the beach wearing a sport coat and tie, encouraging people to go into the water. They do, with predictable results.

A town meeting is interrupted by the second of the film's central characters, the rough-edged, narrow-eyed Quint ( Robert Shaw ). He gets attention by scraping his fingernails down a blackboard that displays a drawing of a shark and offers his services as a bounty hunter: "You all know me. Know how I make a living." Soon after, Brody sits at home paging through books on sharks, a device that allows Spielberg to establish the killer in our minds as we look at page after page of fearsome teeth, cold little eyes and victims with chunks taken out of their bodies. (One of the photos shows a shark with a diver's air tank in its mouth, possibly suggesting where Brody gets his bright idea for killing the creature.)

The third key character is Hooper ( Richard Dreyfuss ), an oceanographer, brought in as an adviser, and useful to the movie because he can voice dramatic information. ("What we're dealing with here is a perfect engine. An eating machine.") Brody is convinced the beaches must be closed and the shark killed; the mayor stalls, and then after the shark makes the TV news, a $3,000 bounty is offered, and Amity is crawling with reckless fortune hunters.

It's here that Spielberg uses one of his most inventive visuals for suggesting the shark. Three or four men gather on a wooden pier, hoping to catch the shark. One has stolen his wife's beef roast to use as bait. They put a fearsome hook through the roast, fasten the chain to the pier, and toss in the bait. The shark simply pulls the end of the pier loose from its moorings and drags it out to sea. Effective, but even more chilling is the next shot, in which we see the floating pier turn around and move back toward shore.

Floating objects are used all through the movie to suggest the invisible shark. After Brody, Quint and Hooper put out to sea in Quint's leaky boat, they fire harpoons into the shark. The harpoons are roped to floating yellow kegs, designed to tire the shark with their lift and drag. In the crucial action sequences at the end, we are often looking at kegs and not at a shark, but the premise is so well established that the shark is there.

The screenplay, by Spielberg, Benchley and Carl Gottlieb , with contributions by Howard Sackler and a crucial speech by Shaw, does not twist itself into parables. The characters all have straightforward motivations. A little dialogue goes a long way. Individual lines stand out for hard-edged terseness:

"I'm not gonna stand here and see that thing cut open and see that little Kintner boy spill out all over the dock. "

"I pulled a tooth the size of a shot glass out of the wrecked hull of a boat out there, and it was the tooth of a Great White. "

"The thing about a shark, he's got lifeless eyes, black eyes, like a doll's eyes. When he comes after you, he doesn't seem to be living until he bites you, and those black eyes roll over white. . . . "

After all of the shark-establishing and curtain-raising scenes, the heart of the movie is in the long passage at sea, where Hooper and Brody (who is afraid of the water) join Quint on his boat. Brody is right, they need a bigger boat. Quint's boat is terrifyingly inadequate, leaky, with an engine that produces clouds of black smoke, a bridge that seems designed to topple a crew member overboard, and a harpooning platform jutting out from the bow so that a man standing on it looks like an appetizer on a kebab stick.

The best scene in the movie is the nighttime scene in the galley, where the men drink apricot brandy and Quint and Hooper compare scars. Finally Quint launches into a moody monologue, telling the World War II story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. He was one of its crew members. Of the 1,100 men who went overboard, he says, sharks ate all but 316 before rescue arrived: "They averaged six an hour."

When the shark does appear for its closeups, it is quite satisfactorily terrifying, and most audiences are too startled to ask why the shark seems prepared to inconvenience itself so greatly, at one point even attempting to eat the boat. The shark has been so thoroughly established, through dialogue and quasi-documentary material, that its actual presence is enhanced in our imaginations by all we've seen and heard.

Spielberg's first big hit contained elements he repeated in many of his movies. A night sea hunt for the shark provides an early example of his favorite visual hallmark, a beam of light made visible by fog. He would continue to devote close attention to characters, instead of hurrying past them to the special effects, as so many 1990s f/x directors did. In "Jaws" and subsequently, he prefers mood to emotional bludgeoning, and one of the remarkable things about the picture is its relatively muted tone. The familiar musical theme by John Williams is not a shrieker, but low and insinuating. It's often heard during point-of-view shots, at water level and below, that are another way Spielberg suggests the shark without showing it. The cinematography, by Bill Butler , is at pains to tell the story in the midst of middle-class America; if Spielberg's favorite location would become the suburbs, "Jaws" shows suburbanites on vacation.

"Jaws" was released in 1975, quickly becoming the highest-grossing picture made up to that time, and forever wresting the summer releasing season away from B movies and exploitation pictures. The major Hollywood studios, which had avoided summer, now identified it as the prime releasing season, and "Jaws" inspired hundreds of summer thrillers and f/x pictures. For Spielberg, the movie was the launching pad for the most extraordinary directorial career in modern movie history. Before "Jaws," he was known as the gifted young director of films such as "Duel" (1971) and " The Sugarland Express " (1974), After "Jaws," " Close Encounters of the Third Kind " (1977) and " Raiders of the Lost Ark " (1981), he was the king.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Jaws (1975)

124 minutes

Roy Scheider as Brody

Robert Shaw as Quint

Richard Dreyfuss as Hooper

Lorraine Gary as Ellen Brody

Murray Hamilton as Mayor

Produced by

• Richard Zanuck
• David Brown

Screenplay by

• Carl Gottleib
• Peter Benchley

Directed by

• Steven Spielberg

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On the Endless Symbolism of Jaws , Which Owes Its Dark Soul to Moby Dick

Olivia rutigliano discusses punishment, redemption, and fate in her favorite movie of all time..

[This post contains spoilers for JAWS, a forty-five year old movie…]

I watch Jaws every year on the Fourth of July, in view of its timelessness as well as its seasonality. Jaws is specifically set during Independence Day. It also generally invented the ‘summer blockbuster,’ a detail which makes its 1975 premiere on midsummer’s eve seem quite significant, in hindsight. Like the shark that arrives off the coast of Amity Island in the film’s famous opening scene, Jaws arrived unassumingly at the start of the season and caused a frenzy that would ripple out far past Labor Day. It became one of our greatest filmmaking touchstones: a marvelously intellectual monster movie, an arbiter of cinematic summer, a technical origin story for the boy-genius director who would become Steven Spielberg. It is also a touch prescient. It is one of those eerie films that, to me, feels a little sibylline, a little otherworldly. It seems to sit at the nexus of everything—the past, the future, high art, popular entertainment, mythology, history—as a film whose deliverance certainly revolutionized filmmaking and scared everyone from going in the ocean, but also stands as a vessel for the summoning of mankind for reflection and atonement.

Not unrelatedly, another reason I like watching Jaws amid all the fireworks is because it localizes so many of the depressing actualities about America—the movie features a mayor who cares more about the local economy than the lives of his citizens, a medical examiner who covers up inconvenient means of death for gain, a scientist no one listens to, and in a new and relevant reflection, beaches being open when they shouldn’t be. But these aspects are not incidental to Jaws ; the film is very much a pointed criticism of our particular American condition, one which places greater value on the perks of convenience and capitalism than on human lives. Neatly dovetailing all of this is Jaws ’s constant stressing the insignificance of human civilization and the puniness of human existence in the face of nature. The name of the town is Amity Island, which is also the name of the land mass it totally subsumes; with this, and in other ways, Jaws represents humanity’s confusion between society and geology, buying into the fallacies of possession and property. I like the way Jaws does this—the shark both reveals the flimsy constructs of the human world, yet simultaneously presents an enormous construction of the human world: symbolism. In a way, the most penetrating and devastating thing the Amity residents have to deal with is not a literal shark, but the metaphorical implications brought by one.

Most simply, Jaws is about three men on a boat who hunt a gigantic, ravenous fish. In this way, and in many other, obvious ways, Jaws can easily be read as a modern adaptation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick , a novel which, in the words of David Gilbert , features “so many symbols as to render symbols meaningless.” The meaningless of symbols, or really the curiosity about whether anything actually has meaning or means anything, are also all prevalent themes within Moby Dick . In his essay on Melville’s novel, Gilbert goes on to quote the narrator Ishmael: “And some certain significance lurks in all things, else all things are little worth, and the round world itself but an empty cipher, except to sell by the cartload, as they do the hills about Boston, to fill up some morass in the Milky Way.” Like the white whale hunted for the length of the novel, the great white shark in Jaws is endless in what it might stand for and it also might stand for unknowability of what things stand for. Jaws might be an environmental parable, a fable about human greed, a document about the death of the small New England town and the New England fisherman, a horror film, and a satire or even condemnation about the potential inconvenience of facts. It stresses how inconvenient facts which concern something large and un-manipulatable like biology are ignored by political systems with much to gain by dismissing them.

While Jaws initially presents the story from another main character’s perspective, like Moby Dick , it is motivated towards everything else by its central revenge story: Captain Ahab hunts the sperm whale that bit off his leg; Quint (Robert Shaw), a grizzled Amity fisherman, longs to hunt the great white shark that has been terrorizing the island. This hunt is framed by the redemption narrative of Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), who is swayed by the town’s mayor (Murray Hamilton) away from confirming that a killer shark has attacked a swimmer—an act of cowardice that costs many their lives.

No character actually puts into perspective the inconsequentialism of human hang-ups in the face of the natural world, and the simultaneous symbolic potential of absolutely everything, like Quint, whom Martin eventually forces Mayor Vaughn to hire, in order to trap and kill the shark after too many people have died in the water. Brody, Quint, and Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), a wiseacre oceanographer, board Quint’s creaky boat to go find, chase, and destroy the shark. For a while, their chafing dynamic allows Jaws ’s political wisdom to seem temporarily backgrounded for the sake of interpersonal conflict. Hooper is a young, wealthy scientist who depends on gadgets in addition to know-how, Quint is an older, working-class sailor who relies on experience (and is contemptuous of Hooper), while Brody is a middle-aged, seasick city cop in galoshes and carrying his own holstered pistol; none of their methodologies align. But then, one night, they sit in the galley of the boat and, sparring lightly, start comparing the scars on their bodies.

Quint shows off his missing tooth, which was knocked out during a fight. He makes Hooper feel a lump on his head, which he got on one St. Patrick’s day in Boston. These two continue at this for a little while. Hooper’s scars are all marine (a moray eel bit through his wetsuit, he was scraped by a bull shark while he was taking aquatic samples, etc), while Quint’s are more varied. He demonstrates that he can’t extend his arm fully since losing the semi-finals of an arm-wrestling contest at a San Francisco bar, where he celebrated his “third wife’s demise,” and peels up his pants to show a thresher shark wound on his leg. Quint’s scars are the proof of a lifetime spent brawling, while Hooper’s are all aquatic and reflect his passion for his work.

Then Brody, who has been shy and silent so far, asks Quint about a scar on his arm. It’s the spot of a tattoo removal—a tattoo that had commemorated Quint’s service on the U.S.S. Indianapolis, the World War II ship that was on its way from delivering the Hiroshima atom bomb parts, when it was torpedoed and sank. “Eleven hundred men went into the water,” Quint recounts. “Didn’t see the first shark for about a half hour.” Here, he carries the film’s gravest scene—uttering a slow, haunting monologue about the week he spent floating in the Pacific Ocean in his life jacket, waiting either to be rescued, or eaten by a swarm of sharks. “Because the mission had been so secret,” he explains, “no distress signal had been sent.” He describes seeing, and hearing, his friends get attacked in the feeding frenzy around him, while waiting for his turn to die. But he is one of the few who makes it out alive. “Eleven hundred men went into the water,” he repeats, concluding the story, “three hundred and sixteen men come out. The sharks took the rest. June the 29th, 1945.” He adds, “I’ll never put on a life jacket again.”

Quint knows what it’s like to feel that his life is insignificant—forgotten by civilization, and left at the mercy of an unfeeling natural world. But his speech does more than provide the monster movie with tragic gravitas; it ushers in a spiritual dimension. When the shark comes to Amity (on one night in the very end of June, 1974) it is almost thirty years since Quint’s life was spared by the sharks while floating in the Philippine Sea. Rather like Moby Dick ’s Captain Ahab, who spent his life chasing the whale that had once bitten off his leg, Quint has squandered the life he was effectively gifted back by the sharks that day. Like Ahab, Quint should have died from his encounter, but he didn’t. Both men do not see this as the blessing that it is.

Both men waste their lives, then, on petty things: (between the two of them) revenge and brawls and divorces and grandiose pursuits to destroy the creatures that haunt them. Ahab hates the whale. Quint hates sharks. When Brody hires him, Quint’s disinfecting a full row of shark teeth, likely from a fresh kill, to mount on his wall along with the rest of his enormous, creepy collection of shark jaws (which foreshadows, in a way, what will happen to him).

In light of Quint’s backstory, it is plausible that the massive, highly-intelligent, vaguely-supernatural-seeming shark is, much like Ahab’s White Whale, an angel of death, coming to claim Quint after his wasted and vengeful life, at the dawning of the anniversary of his survival. Or maybe, dovetailing with Moby Dick ’s themes of predestination, there is no free will in Jaws and a shark circles back to claim Quint, because this has always been his fate and he can never escape it.

On the boat, in the film’s third act, the conditions of Quint’s near-death in June of 1945 begin to recreate themselves—as the shark drags them further out to sea, beginning to dismantle their vessel, Quint destroys the radio while Brody tries to call to shore for help. He sees the orange life jackets hanging in the corner and refuses to put one on. When he does die, he is killed in the same manner as one of the friends he had mentioned in his story—bitten in half below the waist. And after the shark sinks his teeth into him, it hauls his body back down into the depths, where it will rest forever.

Reading the shark as a kind of divine agent, and specifically a punisher, allows Jaws to become a film ruled by, of all things, the notion of salvation—which is a highly individualized concept. The fascinating argumentative logic of Jaws enforces that small human problems are inconsequential, but also that humans, small and unimportant though they may be, have individual roles which can bear great meaning. After all, the film’s shark problems technically begin in 1945, when a group of men mobilize to initiate the launch of a planet-destroying bomb—an act controlled by a small number of people, but with enormous consequences for earth. It tracks that the torpedoing of the Indianapolis and the tragic mauling of its sailors by nature itself, is positioned as a kind of punishment for their part in mankind’s hubristic effort to play God. Quint is marked by this event (literally, as the scar-comparison scene shows), and its implications will chase him. He realizes this, too. His destruction of the radio and refusal to put on a life-jacket suggest that he knows there is no point in trying to escape. Like Ahab, the maddened Quint doesn’t care what happens to the others on the ship. This is his battle.

But Moby Dick is not only the story of the doomed captain caught in a cycle of his own destruction; it is also about the one left to tell the tale. If Quint is Ahab, than Brody is Moby Dick’ s narrator Ishmael, the sole survivor of the voyage after the whale breaks apart their boat, and who is found floating in the water, clinging to the remains of the wreckage.

Jaws offers its Ishmael a chance of redemption in a way that is irrelevant to Moby Dick ; Ishmael is a bystander in the quest for the White Whale, but Brody must participate in the vanquishing of the great white shark. Amity Island’s microcosm of earthly problems helps communicate the profound effects simple choices can have; indeed, explaining why he uprooted his family to beachside New England, Martin Brody declares “in Amity, one man can make a difference.” Therefore, just as the shark is there to collect Quint, it is also there specifically to be vanquished by Brody—a man who had been very aware of the coastal presence of a man-eating shark but did not override pressure from a local, desperate politician to keep the beaches open. At this early point in the film, Brody has a chance to save many lives, and effectively passes this up. “I heard,” says Mrs. Kitner, the mother of a little boy who is (preventably) eaten by the shark during a crowded beach day, “that a girl got killed here last week, and you let people go swimming anyway.” He won’t make this mistake again, recognizing an opportunity for redemption, when he sees it. This is the ultimate difference between Brody and Quint and it does suggest that the universe of Jaws is indeed controlled by free will.

Going out on the boat, despite a longstanding fear of the ocean, Brody has the opportunity to undo his initial wrong. The end of the film involves a showdown between Brody and the creature on the wreckage of the vessel, the Orca (another name for a killer whale, which, like all the whales in this essay, is not actually a whale). At this point, Quint is dead, and Hooper (hiding in safety after his own brave confrontation with the shark) is irrelevant. Brody blows up the shark, shooting a rifle into a tank of compressed air that he has wedged inside the shark’s mouth—erupting a small mushroom cloud of guts and blood on the surface of the ocean. The explosion looks particularly atomic; as though it has embodied some connection to the U.S.S. Indianapolis ’s mission, this whole time. The shark’s death signifies a symbolic completion of Brody and Quint’s debts, but it also emphasizes, briefly, hopefully, that a single individual has the power to repay the accumulated damage of many who came before.

These are universal themes, but Jaws, like Moby Dick, is a story that is specifically American, and within that, about New England, the oldest region of the country. Indeed, the film commemorates the Fourth of July—the day which is credited as the very founding of America. The ending of Jaws offers a hopeful reading about the future of the country, whose legacy is otherwise presented as highly destructive, in everything from military campaigns to local capitalism. The arrival of the shark may cause “a panic… on the fourth of July,” as the mayor says, but the giant hoard of vacationers who swarm Amity Island during the Fourth of July weekend are another kind of plague: an overwhelming mass of individuals developing and overrunning the natural world for their own pleasure. The shark, which causes the crowds to recede, might be there to check humankind, to prevent the full takeover of nature by people. But it also might be there to check America, the country which leads the world in humankind’s insistence on the superiority of man over the natural world.

Or perhaps, relatedly, the shark is asserting nature’s ultimate control over the region; the swimmers taken by the shark (a teenage girl, a little boy, a dog, and two middle-aged men) are plausibly sacrifices, prices society has to pay if they insist on going in the water, at all—invading a habitat they have no biological need to occupy. Indeed, when we finally see the shark for the first time, it’s while the men are on the boat, and the three crewmembers agree that they have never seen a shark so enormous. Quint shoots three barrels of air into it, and the shark is strong enough to pull them back under. And the shark is incredibly intelligent—it has strategized how to isolate the boat in dangerous open water, and it methodically strips it down. “Smart fish,” Quint remarks, but this is an understatement, and he probably knows it. One of the film’s original taglines compared the shark to the Devil, but, like the White Whale, it also might very well be a God.

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Analysis of the Movie Jaws: Narrative Elements Utilized in the Movie

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Jaws analysis

Q  Analyse the ways in which the director builds suspense and scares the audience in the film JAWS

Lights, camera, action! Those were probably the first signal words given by Steven Spielberg as he directed the film JAWS. Set at Amity Beach in America, Jaws tells the story of a great white killer shark and of the three men who try to capture and kill it. The film was based on a true story of a series of shark attacks in New Jersey. Spielberg chose to set the film on the 4 th  of July because it is the American Independence Day. The director effectively uses music, camera techniques, tension and showing the power of the shark to build the suspense and mind-blowing terror which made JAWS the first ever summer block buster.

Probably, the most well known music in cinematic history is that of the E and F note composed by John Williams. Spielberg trains the audience to associate this music with the presence of Jaws by playing it whenever the shark is around or when he is about t attack. He uses this music piece combined with silence to create tension and suspense in the audience. A good example of this is in the first scene a t the start of the movie. It starts with a very relaxed atmosphere of a large group of people chatting and sitting round a camp fire and we can hear someone playing a harmonica in the background. Spielberg has purposely created this sort of atmosphere to make the audience feel calm. The scene continues on to show a girl and a boy running off towards the shore. As they head away from the group, the chatter of the people fades and the only sound we can hear is that of the drunken boy trying to catch up with the running girl who had already reached the ocean. A long shot is used to show the girl entering a serene and calm beach with only the sound of the bell from the buoy. The boy on the other hand has fell unconscious from all his heavy drinking on the beach. This leaves the girl all on her own as she swims towards the deep end of the water. Suddenly the E and F note starts to play and the atmosphere becomes very intense as a point of view shot is used to portray the sight of the shark from under water. At this point the audience becomes very anxious and alert-expecting something dramatic to happen. The POV shot ends and a normal shot is used to show the surface of the water and all the audience see is the girls head bobbing up and down in the water. First her head jerks forward twice and she begins to scream and yell in pure agony and pain. Her body swivels from left to right and then she is pulled under water. By now the audience knows that she has been eaten by the shark. But then as suddenly as the girls scream started it stops just as quick and the sea looks just as it was before – serene and completely harmless. This sudden contrast between the music and silence is used by Spielberg to put the audience a t the edge of their seat. Another example of this contrast is towards the end of the movie where the three men Brody, Quint and Hooper are at sea in the cabin of the ship. In this scene they are all very drunk while they tell the stories of their body scars. The atmosphere is very tranquil as Quint tells the story of his encounter with sharks in world war one with his fellow soldiers. Then they all sing “Show Me the Way to Go Home” noisily. Spielberg does this the audience feel very amused and not expecting anything to go wrong which makes what happens next a surprise. Due to their loud singing and desk banging the three men do not realize at first that the shark has started to attack their ship, bashing repeatedly on its side. Spielberg does not use music to signal the audience so they will always be uncertain of when JAWS will attack, keeping them on the edge of their seats. When the shark leaves all is quiet again as before like nothing has happened.

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Spielberg also uses astounding camera techniques to create anticipation and terror in the movie. They were the ground breaking camera techniques for the 70’s. An ideal example his camera techniques is the scene of the second shark attack. At the beginning a medium shot (MS) is used to show a robust woman walking into the sea from the beach. The setting is very sunny and cheerful with the hustle and bustle of the people on the beach. Spielberg purposely makes it look this way to lull the audience into a false sense of safety so they would not expect a shark attack at any moment. A medium tracking shot is used to follow a boy who just came out of the water. In the background we can see a lot of cheerful people on the beach sunbathing. Again, Spielberg wants his audience to feel comfortable. The camera then closes up on Brodie’s side profile and we can see him surveying the sea with a worried and apprehensive look on his face. Spielberg then uses a variety of shots to show the beach and the calm sea with the robust woman floating in one of its parts. The camera zooms in on a medium shot. Behind her we can see what seems to be a shark fin coming towards her. But in fact it is a red-herring because the fin happens to be a swimming old man with his black hat at the surface. A close up shot is used to show Brodie’s agitation as he watches this. A medium shot is then used to show a screaming girl in the ocean who is being dragged under water. This too is a red herring because it’s not the shark that has got her. It is actually her boyfriend. Spielberg uses these red herrings to scare the audience into thinking something is about bad is about to happen. An over the shoulder shot is then used to show a teenager looking for his dog out on the water. This part creates tension f the audience because it makes them think “What had happened to the dog?” Spielberg then uses one of the most phenomenal shots he has created called a point of view shot. The shot portrays the vision of the shark under water as it swims around looking for his next victim as the music relating to it starts to build up. The POV shot carries on to show the leg of a boy (Alex) sticking out of his float from underwater. By this point the audience know that the boy is the sharks next victim and they feel horrified and anxious waiting for it to happen. The camera then switches into a medium shot of the surface of the water where the boy is about to be devoured and all we can see is a glimpse of a huge grey fin as the sea turns red and a fountain of blood sprays upwards. Spielberg has not showed the shark’s full form yet on purpose to terrify the audience even more so they don’t know how big an extent of damage the shark can do. An extreme close up shot then show’s Brodie’s expression of dreadfulness prior to what he has just witnessed. Spielberg uses his reaction to make the audience feel unsettled.

An additional way Spielberg creates terror in the audience is by showing the power of the great white. Every time the music kicks in the audience are trained to expect the shark’s destruction. However, there are two occasions in which no music is played as a signal. Spielberg does this as well to furthermore terrify his audience. In terms of showing the damage the shark can d there are two worthy examples. The first being that of the two men on the jetty. Later on after the second shark attack the two men row on to an isolated area f the coast of the beach planning t catch the shark and win the $300,000 prize. They climb on to a jetty and with them they have a long iron chain and huge chunk of meat. They hook one end of the chain to the meat and the other end is tied to the jetty. Then they throw the meat into the ocean and wait for jaws to fall prey to their trap. Unfortunately when the shark does bite on the roast it yanks it so hard that half of the jetty comes off taking one if the men with it. Luckily he is able to narrowly escape from the assault of the shark. The second example is when Hooper is lowered into the sea in an iron so-called shark proof cage t fire a poisoned dart at jaws. Sadly the shark rams the cage so hard that its iron bars bends so much that he makes a hole in it. After this he chews the bar of trying to eat Hooper. But he is able to escape by hiding behind one of the corals. The cage wasn’t shark proof after all. This makes the audience feel it is so strong that nothing can hold it off. It is unstoppable. Spielberg also uses the character’s reactions to panic the audience even more. When the shark began to consume Alex, an extreme close up shot is used to show Brodie’s terrified reaction to it which makes the audience empathize with him and therefore feel as terrified as he does. An alternative instance of Spielberg's use of empathy is when Hooper was being attacked in the iron cage. The camera zoomed in a close up of his face and even with goggles on we could still see a look of horror in his eyes.

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Essays on Jaws

Choosing the perfect jaws essay topic.

When it comes to writing an essay on Jaws, the iconic 1975 film directed by Steven Spielberg, it's important to choose a topic that not only interests you but also offers ample opportunity for analysis and discussion. Whether you're a film studies student, a fan of the movie, or simply someone looking to explore the themes and messages within Jaws, selecting the right topic is crucial to producing a compelling and well-researched essay.

The Importance of the Topic

The topic you choose for your Jaws essay will determine the direction and focus of your paper. A strong and thought-provoking topic will not only capture the attention of your readers but also provide you with plenty of material to work with. Whether you're examining the film's use of suspense, its portrayal of masculinity, or its impact on the horror genre, your chosen topic will shape the overall quality and depth of your essay.

Choosing a Topic

When selecting a topic for your Jaws essay, consider what aspects of the film interest you the most. Are you drawn to the character development, the visual effects, or the social commentary present in the movie? Additionally, think about what you want to achieve with your essay. Are you looking to analyze a specific theme, compare Jaws to other films, or explore its cultural impact?

Once you have a clear understanding of your interests and goals, consider how you can narrow down your focus. Jaws is a rich and multi-faceted film, so it's important to choose a topic that is specific enough to be manageable within the scope of your essay. Look for angles and perspectives that haven't been extensively explored, and consider how you can offer a fresh and original take on the film.

Recommended Essay Topics

Character analysis.

• The Characterization of Chief Martin Brody in Jaws
• An Exploration of Quint's Role in Jaws
• The Evolution of Hooper's Character in Jaws

Themes and Symbolism

• The Symbolism of the Shark in Jaws
• Exploring the Theme of Fear in Jaws
• The Portrayal of Masculinity in Jaws
• Film Analysis
• The Use of Cinematography in Jaws
• An Examination of the Soundtrack in Jaws
• The Influence of Jaws on Subsequent Horror Films

Social and Cultural Impact

• Jaws and the Birth of the Summer Blockbuster
• An Analysis of Jaws as a Cultural Phenomenon
• The Legacy of Jaws and Its Influence on Popular Culture

Comparative Analysis

• Jaws vs. Other Steven Spielberg Films
• Comparing Jaws to Other Classic Horror Movies
• Jaws and Its Impact on the Monster Movie Genre

These essay topics offer a starting point for your exploration of Jaws. However, feel free to modify and customize them to suit your interests and goals. By selecting a topic that resonates with you and allows for in-depth analysis, you can craft a compelling and insightful essay that showcases your understanding of this iconic film.

Remember that the key to a successful Jaws essay is to choose a topic that not only inspires you but also offers ample opportunity for discussion and analysis. With the right topic in hand, you can delve into the world of Jaws and uncover its many layers of meaning and significance.

A Review of The Horror Movie Jaws

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Depiction of Collective and Individual Ideologies in The Films Jaws and They Live

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Example Of Essay On Jaws Film Analysis Report #4

Type of paper: Essay

Topic: Cinema , Film , Movies , Water , Design , Public Relations , Music , Security

Words: 1100

Published: 01/18/2020

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In the 1975horror movie Jaws, sound and music are just as much characters in the film as the titular shark; always in the background, present to convey the tension and sense of horror that the human characters feel as they defend the beaches of Amity Island from a giant killer shark. Because of the director's artistic choice to deliberately obscure the shark from view for most of the movie, much of the work is done by the sound and music (the score composed by John Williams). Many sound effects in particular contribute to a sense of reality, and a feeling of being there. The constant sound of the crashing waves and the din of beach activity in the sound design is incredible and subtle. While Brody, Hooper and Quint are hunting the shark on the Orca, the creaking and clanging of the boat's planks and machinery are extra bits of authenticity placed in the background to provide extra immersion to the audience. The sound design of Jaws is also used to accentuate the visual image as well, regardless of the reality of the scene. For example, in the climax of the film, when the shark is finally killed by Brody, there is a faint sound of an animalistic roar as the carcass sinks down into the ocean. This lends a much more mythical and mysterious element to the shark, despite that sound not being able to come from anywhere natural in the scene. There are many instances of unusual emphasis being placed on sound within the movie to great purpose. For example, when Brody starts to become more and more aware of the dangers of the shark, despite the dismissals of his concerns by the greedy mayor of Amity Island, he starts to overreact in his duties. In one scene, a screaming group of children instills in Brody the same fear as the audience; however, this tension is then diffused by discovering that the shark is in fact a child's prank. This helps to place Brody in a desperate position, showing the stresses the job is taking on him as he attempts to safeguard the citizens despite the mayor's lack of concern. In the film, images and sounds complement one another quite nicely; the cinematography and the sound design work together well to create moments of calm and tension in equal measure. Often, one of the most important elements of the sound design in a film is how it uses silence; Jaws does this to great effect. Because the film is often so silent, with merely calm ocean sounds and the creaking of the Orca, or the sounds of frolicing children, the sudden crash of the shark bumping into something, or grabbing someone, is incredibly shocking and effective. This also goes along with the visual image, as the shark itself will often wait to pop into frame just in time for the sound or the score to come in. It cannot be said that one element dominates over another, as both work together to create these effects. The treatment of dialogue in Jaws is incredibly interesting, as it furthers the director's philosophy of keeping things low-key and quiet, for the sake of keeping the audience off-guard for the scare. Most of the dialogue is mumbled or delivered in very naturalistic ways, with very little theatricality (with the exception of Robert Shaw's Quint or Dreyfuss' neurotic Hooper). This helps to ground the film in a reality, and also lull the audience into a false sense of security with their low voices. One particular example of its effectiveness is when Brody is chumming the water, not looking, and complaining in a low voice about Quint's orders. Because we are so focused on trying to hear what Brody is saying, the shark jumping out of the water catches us off guard. The low volume, workmanlike dialogue also helps to convey the themes of ordinary, working-class men fighting against this unknowable force of nature. Besides the sound design, however, one of the biggest stars of Jaws is its musical score, which provides nearly as much character and nuance to the shark as the puppet itself. The inimitable Jaws theme, with its threatening two-note motif, uses time and rhythm in an interesting way to personify the unstoppable and ever-encroaching nature of the shark itself. Its frequency of use in the movie does merit discussion, but it is neither overused nor underused - in fact, it is used just as many times as it is required to serve Spielberg's mission statement that the film scare you through deliberate alleviation of tension and unpredictability. For example, the theme is used in the beginning of the film, synced with the first shark attack and the credits, to establish the audience and make them familiar with it. Then, the theme is constantly used whenever the shark actually appears, to inextricably link the audience's expectations of seeing the shark while hearing the theme. However, this motif is then subverted in the aforementioned chumming scene, where the shark pops out of the water. This is the first (and only) time the theme is not played along with the shark's appearance; because the audience has been trained to expect the theme with the shark, the shark showing up without the theme is unexpected, and therefore extremely startling. The musical score is far from overdone; it is incredibly utilitarian, but purposefully so. The simple two-note motif is used as the backbone for the theme, to provide just that small amount of dissonance in the sound of the film to keep the audience just slightly on-guard when it is heard. The amount of music used (though it is sometimes sparing) works perfectly with the film itself, as those integral moments of silence allow the presence of music to be more meaningful, and allows Spielberg to do more with those moments of silence, building tension for the inevitable strike of the shark. During Quint's speech about his time on the Indianapolis, there is no musical score at first; this allows Shaw's flawless and searing performance to shine through. Near the end of the story, Williams allows merely small string sections to creep in at the end of the speech, with the occasional French horn note. Williams and Spielberg knew exactly when (and when not) to use the musical score in the film, creating the kind of chilling tension that only comes from nearly total silence.

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Guest Essay

A Federal Judge Wonders: How Could Alito Have Been So Foolish?

By Michael Ponsor

Judge Ponsor is a senior judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 after serving 10 years as a federal magistrate judge.

The controversy about the decision to fly an upside-down American flag outside the home of Justice Samuel Alito recalls St. Paul’s admonition that while some things may be lawful, “not all things are helpful.”

I can offer no opinion as to whether the flag display at the justice’s house was unlawful. I won’t even opine whether my flying the flag upside-down at my house would have constituted a violation of the code of ethics that binds me and all federal judges — except the justices.

To me, the flag issue is much simpler. The fact is that, regardless of its legality, displaying the flag in that way, at that time, shouldn’t have happened. To put it bluntly, any judge with reasonable ethical instincts would have realized immediately that flying the flag then and in that way was improper. And dumb.

The same goes for the flying of an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at Justice Alito’s vacation house along the New Jersey shore. Like the upside-down flag, this flag is viewed by a great many people as a banner of allegiance on partisan issues that are or could be before the court.

Courts work because people trust judges. Taking sides in this way erodes that trust.

In four decades as a federal judge, I have known scores, possibly hundreds, of federal trial and appellate judges pretty well. I can’t think of a single one, no matter who appointed her or him, who has engaged or would engage in conduct like that. You just don’t do that sort of thing, whether it may be considered over the line, or just edging up to the margin. Flying those flags was tantamount to sticking a “Stop the steal” bumper sticker on your car. You just don’t do it.

Assuming it is true that it was Justice Alito’s wife who raised the inverted American flag, apparently in response to some provocative behavior from a neighbor, I do sympathize. (How the “Appeal to Heaven” flag came to be flown at his house is not known.) Being a judge’s spouse is not easy. On the one hand, a person should not have to forfeit the right to free expression at the marriage altar. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable to expect a spouse to avoid embarrassing a loved one or complicating his or her professional life. This is true not only for Supreme Court justices but also for people in many walks of life.

Let me offer an example. About 25 years ago, I presided over a death penalty case involving a nurse charged with murdering several of her patients at a Veterans Affairs hospital in Western Massachusetts. It was a tough case, regularly on the front pages of our local papers. Let’s say my wife was strongly opposed to the death penalty and wished to speak out publicly against it. I’m not saying this is true, but let’s imagine it. The primary emotional current in our marriage is, of course, deep and passionate love, but right next to that is equally deep and passionate respect. We would have had a problem, and we would have needed to talk.

In this hypothetical situation, I hope that my wife would have held off making any public statements about capital punishment, and restrained herself from talking about the issue with me, while the trial unfolded. On the other hand, if my wife had felt strongly that she needed to espouse her viewpoint publicly, I would have had to recuse myself from presiding over the case, based on the appearance of partiality.

However this issue came out, by the way, I certainly would not have had the temerity to claim that my wife and I never discussed the problem. Any protestation of this sort would have provoked raucous laughter from our circle of friends. They know very well that we talk about everything.

Did Justice Alito and his wife discuss the issue of the upside-down flag before it went up? I don’t know, of course. But I do know they should have. And I know that some other method should have been found to express the couple’s unhappiness with their neighbor’s possibly crummy conduct.

The court recently adopted an ethics code to “guide the conduct” of the justices. One of its canons states that a justice should “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” That’s all very well. But basic ethical behavior should not rely on laws or regulations. It should be folded into a judge’s DNA. That didn’t happen here. The flag display may or may not have been unlawful, but as far as the public’s perception of the court’s integrity, it certainly was not helpful.

Michael Ponsor is a senior judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. He was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1994 after serving 10 years as a federal magistrate judge.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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by Steven Spielberg

Jaws character list, martin brody.

Martin Brody is the Chief of Police of Amity Island. He is married to Ellen Brody and they have two sons, Michael and Sean. Brody is not a native of Amity Island and, in fact, does not really care all that much for island life. He is drawn into the great white shark hunt that takes up most of the second half of the film as a result of bringing in oceanographer Matt Hooper as a specialist to fill in his ignorance of shark attacks. His initial response following the discovery of the first victim is to shut down access to the beaches, but caves in to political and business pressure from those who fear such measures will destroy the summer vacation revenue on which many in Amity depend. After little Alex Kitner is killed by the shark as the direct result of ignoring his own better instincts and cowing to the island’s special interest, he hires Capt. Quint to take Hooper and him out to sea to hunt the shark down and kill it, which he does by shooting a compressed oxygen canister inside the shark’s mouth and blowing it to smithereens.

Matt Hooper

Matt Hooper is a young, wealthy oceanographer to whom Chief Brody turns to confirm that the first known victim of the shark was indeed the victim of a shark attack and not the gruesome result of a boating accident. Brody and Hooper bond over a shared repugnance toward Amity Island Mayor Larry Vaughn’s almost-comical rejection that the island’s residents and tourists are in very real and serious danger from an enormous rogue shark.

Capt. Quint

Capt. Quint is the grizzled owner of the charter fishing boat the Orca who Chief Brody hires to take him and Hooper on a hunting expedition to track down and kill the ravenous shark terrorizing beachgoers on Amity Island. Quint was one of the few surviving members of the USS Indianapolis , the ill-fated naval vessel charged with the secret mission of delivering parts to be used in making the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima which was torpedoed and sunk on its return journey, leaving the 900 crewmembers that survived the bombing to fend for themselves for four days in shark-infested waters.

Larry Vaughn

Larry Vaughn is the Mayor of Amity Island who actively obstructs and even derides the efforts by Sheriff Brody to protect residents and tourists by closing down the beaches until the shark responsible for the attacks is captured and killed. Only after his own children are threatened by the shark’s voracious appetite does he finally start to put people ahead of profits. If Jaws has a human villain, it's Mayor Vaughn.

Ellen Brody

The Police Chief’s loving, supportive, and occasionally very funny wife. Such a description of Mrs. Brody is quite at odds with the character portrayed in the novel on which the film was based. Author Peter Benchley’s subplot about an affair that develops between Ellen Brody and Matt Hooper was mercifully jettisoned to maintain the focus of the narrative strictly on the shark.

Chrissie Watkins

Teenage Chrissie Watkins is the first victim of the shark's ravenous appetite. From her brief time on screen, she is characterized as free-spirited and adventurous, hoping to skinny-dip drunk with a cute boy she met on the beach, but who winds up the unfortunate first meal of Amity's great white problem.

Michael Brody

The older of Martin Brody's two sons, Michael seems to love going in the water and playing in his boat with his friends. He is nearly made a meal when the shark attacks a man in the local estuary, but escapes with a mild case of shock.

Young and impressionable, Sean is Chief Brody's toddler age son. He is juxtaposed as a symbol of innocence against the backdrop of the shark's second gruesome beach attack. His adorable mimicry of his father's actions shows how much he looks up to him.

Hendricks is Amity's Deputy and an assistant to Chief Brody as he deals with the chaos that the shark's attacks bring to the island.

Jaws Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Jaws is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Title of Book

From the screenplay:

A riffly blur, color alternating with black and white. The dizziness stops on a book page showing a black and white rendering of eight species of shark. The banner at the top of the page reads: THE KNOWN AND REPUTED MANEATERS....

I think that this was the tag line for the movie version of the book. It says so much with so little. The line implies that there is something very dangerous in the water that can strike just when we think it is safe to enter the water. It implies...

I think the suspense comes when the reader is told what a wonder the shark is. They are in many respects superior to man. This builds up the mystique of the shark which adds suspense when we actually encounter them in the book.

Study Guide for Jaws

Jaws study guide contains a biography of director Steven Spielberg, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• Jaws Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for Jaws

Jaws essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of the movie Jaws by director Steven Spielberg.

• From "Jaws" to Contemporary Film: Is Fauna More Savage Than Flora?
• A Mass of Individuals: A Comparison of An Enemy of a People and Jaws

Wikipedia Entries for Jaws

• Introduction