#56 ‘Jaws’
Blood, Beaches, and the Monster That Was Capitalism All Along
Jaws (1975) is the movie that taught America to fear the ocean, worship the white male savior complex, and internalize that every crisis can be solved by blowing something up. It’s often hailed as the first summer blockbuster, and fair enough—it’s tense, brilliantly paced, and built with Spielbergian precision. But under the salt spray and the John Williams hysteria is a deeply gendered, class-anxious morality play in which masculine authority is valorized, female voices are silenced, and nature exists solely to be conquered or killed.
Our story begins when a young woman is violently devoured by a shark—though don’t expect much of her beyond the screaming and flailing. Her death is the inciting incident, not a tragedy: she exists purely to justify the escalation of male action. Enter Chief Brody (Roy Scheider), a cop who hates water but loves order. He tries to close the beach, but is overruled by the town’s real villain: the mayor, a capitalist in a checkered blazer who cares more about tourist dollars than human lives. This is Jaws's real genius: the shark is terrifying, but it’s greed and denial that keep the blood flowing.
The three-man hunt that follows—Brody, oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), and shark-hunter Quint (Robert Shaw)—is framed as a last stand of rugged masculinity. They bicker, drink, and compare scars like war veterans in a Hemingway fever dream. It’s testosterone on the high seas. The problem? No one else in the film gets a word in. Women exist solely to worry, warn, and weep. Mrs. Brody is there to remind the audience that our hero has something to live for, but heaven forbid she actually go near the boat.
Hooper, the nerdy marine biologist, brings science to the table—but he’s treated as comic relief until he proves he’s man enough to hold his breath in a shark cage. Quint is the grizzled captain, obsessed with vengeance since surviving the USS Indianapolis—his monologue is iconic, yes, but it’s also the emotional high point of the film, centered squarely on his trauma, not the townspeople’s terror. Meanwhile, Brody is positioned as the “everyman” hero: hesitant, humble, ultimately heroic because he’s the one who pulls the trigger.
And the shark? A faceless, female-coded creature of appetite. She's not just a predator—she’s unnatural. Too large, too angry, too persistent. She terrorizes an entire community for daring to relax. And how is she dealt with? Not through understanding or respect for the ecosystem—she’s blown to hell in a fiery, phallic climax that’s less about survival than domination.
Yes, Jaws is expertly made. Spielberg turns the ocean into a haunted house. The mechanical shark’s refusal to work forced the film into suspenseful brilliance. But let’s not ignore the message riding beneath the waves: when the system fails, send in three men, one boat, and a rifle. Women stay home. Scientists shut up. And nature must be subdued, one explosion at a time.
4 out of 5 oxygen tanks
(One for the directing. One for the score. One for the slow-burn terror. One for Robert Shaw monologuing like a sea-soaked Macbeth. The missing star? Devoured along with the idea that maybe the real monster wasn’t the shark—it was the unchecked entitlement of men playing God with a harpoon and a hangover.)
