Jaws: Moby Dick meets The Office

Would you rewatch Jaws without the shark?

Counting the many viewings in my youth, the many more as a college “film enthusiast,” and the couple viewings as an adult, I’ve seen Jaws over a dozen times. I recently went to my first viewing on the big screen, the 50th anniversary showing (but they show it every summer). I arrived with my older son and some friends at a local single-screen theater, a neighborhood cinema that serves food and beer from a counter facing the screen (so you don’t have to miss anything while you get your Narragansett), takes only cash (and runs on the honor system when the ATM is down), features an owner who dresses up like Quint (complete with his homegrown sideburns) and plays Jaws trivia with the crowd before the showing. It was a terrific viewing, and a reminder that Jaws is more than a blockbuster shark spectacle.

It is a simple story. A great white shark zeroes in on a small beach town on Fourth of July Weekend as thousands of tourists are arriving. A new Police Chief, Brody, clashes with the Mayor about closing the beaches. A bounty is offered to any fisherman who can bring in the shark. The new chief is joined by a marine biologist, Hooper, specializing in sharks as we learn of more victims. They join up with a grisled old fisherman, Quint. Together they go on an epic fishing trip to take down the shark.

One could imagine a film full of shark and seafaring action might be exciting (if gruesome). But what makes Jaws worth watching–and rewatchable?

Jaws is not about the shark. It’s about the characters reacting to a mysterious menace that is beyond their understanding–not unlike the white whale in Moby Dick. Through the suspense and mayhem, we sense something bigger lurking under the water. More than that, the depiction of the characters and their interaction is where we take delight in the film–much like why one might rewatch The Office. Everything fades behind the characters.

The Office took care to make each character likeable at some level, despite their (many) flaws. Michael, Dwight, and Andy–all intolerable at times–are all eventually brought into the center of the action and rendered in a way that makes them accessible and even–at times–likeable. Each of the key characters in Jaws is brought to the fore and given enough life that the audience comes to like them all and to believe they matter to each other. There is no bad guy.

You won’t find it in any list of greatest comedies, but Jaws is funny. Its most famous line, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat” brings laughs at the height of the action. There are many comic moments throughout. Quint’s “Hooper drives the boat, Chief,” as Chief Brody is forced to shovel chum for the shark; Hooper’s attempt to trick Chief Brody to climb out on the bow so he can get a picture of the giant shark with a person in the frame “for scale;” and the irresistible camaraderie of their singing of “Show me the way to go home,” all bring levity to the adventure and draw us into the world of the film.

And like The Office, Jaws doesn’t need a shark.

The making-of story is often told, how the mechanical shark (named “Bruce” on set–not in the movie) never worked the way the director Steven Spielberg intended, resulting in much less screen time for the outsized fiberglass fish. The audience missed out on many more images of the great white bearing his teeth and thrashing beside rafts, boats, and helpless children. Our loss is our gain, however, as Jaws ended up a better film for it. In fact, Jaws could be edited down even further. The shark attacks are on screen for just moments and revealed at a distance (but for the first and the last—and one occurs off-screen). It would be an artsy move to cut out the shark attacks entirely: no dorsal fin, no blood in the water, no teeth at all. Just the awareness of menace and the aftermath. I’m not convinced it would be a better film without the shark, but it would not suffer much.

The fisherman Quint (Robert Shaw) steps into full Ahab mode (never go full Ahab) before the end of the film, smashing the radio and assuring that he, Chief Brody, and Hooper must face the monster alone. This climax occurs shortly after Quint reveals his injuries from an earlier shark attack. Like Ahab, vengeance is a source of his mania. Quint’s cabin is full of so many shark trophies (literal “jaws” of various sizes), one wonders if he had any time for commercial fishing. Always grinning through the chaos (revealing his teeth as the sharks do?), Quint enters his own kind of frenzy in pursuit of this shark.

Chief Brody (Roy Schneider), like Ishmael, has fled his normal life to head toward the sea. He is a new police chief in a touristy beach community (Amity New York, filmed on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts), and he is inexperienced on the water. The audience sees the film through Brody’s eyes. Moby Dick spends a chapter on Cetology and several chapters on paintings of whales, documenting the kinds of whales and their characteristics, an extended litany of knowledge about whales that fails to capture the real meaning of the white whale at the center of the novel. In Jaws, Brody stays up late reading an encyclopedia of sharks (complete with pictures), at one point telling his wife, “You know, nobody even knows how old they are?” The evil they have encountered is beyond their ability to understand–even for the scientists.

Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), the scientist, completes the trio tasked with confronting the shark. Hooper anticipates Dwight from The Office more than he imitates anyone in Moby Dick. His nerdy know-it-all character loves sharks as much as Dwight loves bears. “I do. I love sharks,” he says. According to Hooper, great white sharks “are a miracle of evolution. An eating machine. All they do is swim, eat, and make baby sharks.” But Hooper’s explanation doesn’t explain the “why.” Why this beach? Why at this time? Why the Kintner boy? And when on the water hunting the shark, he offers no explanation for why the great white seems to be targeting them.

While Spielberg doesn’t dwell on them or bring them to the foreground of the story, there are some big ideas lurking beneath the surface in some moments of Hollywood’s first summer blockbuster spectacle.

The highlight of all of these moments is when the three mates are sharing stories and drinks, singing and laughing together before the final attack. This portrait of friendship in the midst of struggle may be the movie’s finest moment. The emotions of the audience sway like the boat as the conversation takes a grim turn. Quint tells the story of the sinking of the USS Indianapolis in shark infested waters. The tragedy occurred just after delivering the atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima. The evil that can be wrought by man is juxtaposed with the evil wrought by nature. The problem of evil has returned on the heels of camaraderie and good cheer.

But no one comes back to Jaws to confront the problem of evil–or to be reminded of Moby Dick. It’s not the technical achievements either, the famous dolly zoom, the open water cinematography, or even John Williams’ iconic ominous score. And while laudable, the depiction of courageous action and perseverance in a crisis is not the reason. We cheer the triumph over the shark, of course, but as the credits roll, there is a sense of loss knowing that there will be no more camaraderie and no spin-off comedy series (titled The Bigger Boat?) where we could spend more time with Quint, Hooper, and The Chief.