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“Jaws” as Class Conflict
The problem with sharks is they’re just too sharp. If only they could be captured safely, their teeth filed down a little to blunt them, and released, they would then only gum their human victims. This strategy is left unexplored in Jaws, lauded as the first great summer blockbuster, and the highest-grossing film of all time until it was supplanted by Star Wars two years later.
The first problem is the title, so general as to be meaningless. Doesn’t every animal except the lamprey have “jaws?” As Steven Spielberg pointed out, the word was familiar but not in regular use at the time. This allowed the film to appropriate the word and become inextricably linked with it.
I can’t comment on the DVD, Blu-Ray, VHS, or streaming version since I only saw this film once, in the theater, shortly after it was released. I also read the book. Spielberg made the decision to scrap most of the sub-plots in order to concentrate on the shark, the shark, the shark, a cutting-edge animatronic robot named “Bruce.” It’s a shame, because one major theme of the book was that unmentionable topic, class differences.
The novel was my first exposure to the concept of “summering.” No one where I grew up in Los Angeles “summered” anywhere, and no one else “summered” where we lived — it was an East Coast phenomenon. The book made a clear distinction between “summer people” and…
