When Jaws was released 50 years ago, it was at once something brand-new and a classic. From its jarringly simple soundtrack to its complex characters, the movie bucked the standards of previous movies to create an entirely new moviegoing experience. UVM’s Todd McGowan, Department of English, shares his unique insights on the film’s themes:
The Film’s Villain
- “…one of the things about a disaster film is it doesn't really have a villain; it's just a natural disaster. But then the villain emerges as the town’s mayor, rapacious capitalist who just cares about making money rather than about saving people.”
Masculinity
- “There's this great scene where [Brody, played by Roy Scheider] goes to get on the boat and his wife says to him, ‘Make sure you have your zinc for your job…’ it renders him kind of henpecked or whatever. But then he shows that he's the one that can destroy the shark, unlike this traditional… figure of masculinity”
Depth of characters
- “You get to know them before they're threatened… with Alex, the child who is killed, you really get a sense of his mother and their relationship. So that's one of the things I think that really works about it. I think most action films don't do that.”
Summer blockbusters
- “[The movie’s release] got delayed to summer, which back then was a dumping ground for films, and that has completely changed today. And now studios think, that's the time that people are off of school. That's the time people have time to go to the movies.”
A Driven Soundtrack
- “The soundtrack of a film, especially a horror film, is so utterly crucial to its success… It's interesting, too, that Spielberg, when Williams first played it for him, didn't like it… And [those two notes, duh-duh] basically made Williams’s career.”
Professor Todd McGowan’s books include Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy, Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets, and The Impossible David Lynch.