When I finally came face to face last year with the most terrifying and beloved monster of my childhood, it was suspended from cables above a stairwell in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures. It seemed smaller and less powerful than I had imagined — almost a pathetic creature, a literal fish out of water, snarling impotently at me with sunny Los Angeles as its backdrop.
Initially, this made for a disappointing encounter. Why had I found this ridiculous creature so thrilling, so frightening? Then I remembered that Jaws was never really about the shark.
June 20 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stephen Spielberg film that launched the “summer blockbuster” genre and gave generations of moviegoers at least a moment’s pause the next time they ventured off the beach and into the sea. The film is marred by scientific errors, with the depiction of shark behavior bearing little relationship to fact, the biggest one being that sharks do not intentionally seek human victims. The movie is also flawed by storytelling blindspots; women are mere props and people of color are entirely absent. The production of Jaws, with its repeated rewrites, massive cost overruns, and intense ego conflicts among the stars was one of the most disastrous in the annals of Hollywood, eventually becoming fodder for The Shark Is Broken, a recent Broadway comedy.
Yet Jaws remains a masterpiece: a horror flick featuring an unforgettable soundtrack, a stellar script, and superb acting — not by the shark but by the three men who set out to kill it. It deservedly nabbed three Oscars (for Best Score, Film Editing, and Sound), but lost Best Picture to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), and is listed 56th on the American Film Institute’s list of the top 100 movies of all time.
Few films resonate five decades later the way Jaws does. Paradoxically, the movie helped usher in an era of public fascination with sharks (there were no “Shark Weeks” before Spielberg’s mechanical predator hit the big screen). For many, it activated a broader fascination with the sea and its many beauties and dangers. Today, the waters around the fictional New England beach town of Amity would reflect a very different set of dangers. Human pollution is raising sea levels, water temperatures, and acidity. In turn, the ocean is threatening the very existence of waterfront communities, with more frequent flood tides and coastal storms of increasing frequency and power. Regulation has helped rebuild some of the fish stocks the fictional commercial fishermen of Jaws and the real ones of today rely on for their livelihoods. Yet sharks themselves are ever more endangered, by both changes in ocean conditions and the persistent plague of illegal hunting.
Globally, shark hunting is often driven by the demand for shark-fin soup, valued for its alleged ability to boost male sexual potency. And isn’t that fitting, given what Jaws is really about?
The moment of Jaws’ arrival in theaters in the summer of 1975 was, like our present time, not one of brawny confidence for the United States. Just two months earlier, Saigon had fallen to the North Vietnamese, closing the circle on a conflict that stole 58,000 American lives. The Watergate scandal was still reverberating. New York City was plunging into its fiscal crisis. The country was slogging through a painful recession triggered by the OPEC oil crisis two years earlier.
And then, to top it off, there was this shark.
As everyone who has seen the movie — OK, let’s just say everyone — knows, the story pits a 25-foot three-ton great white shark against the imaginary island town of Amity and its three defenders: Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), a former NYC cop who is Amity’s chief of police and is scared of the water; Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), a wealthy and youthful shark scientist who arrives on the scene with abundant energy and confidence; and Quint (Robert Shaw), a crude and grizzled fisherman seeking profit from the town’s peril. As many reviewers have noted, the three men who end up on Quint’s rickety trawler, the Orca, represent three typically male approaches to facing the specter of death (a.k.a., the shark). That’s the enduring value of the movie. It’s also the bit that’s most complicated to unpack 50 years later.
Hollywood’s low estimation of either male emotional depth or the audience’s intelligence makes it unlikely that the three lead male characters in a modern suspense-action film would be crafted with such nuance and vulnerability as those in Jaws.
Quint is the classic tough guy, who, with his harpoon and fishing tackle, aims to simply kill the thing. Hooper embodies intellect, and the belief that knowledge equips us to outsmart our predators. Brody is the everyman, the guy who can’t swim or drive a boat, doesn’t have any manly scars to show, and only came along because someone had to save the town, and his own children. In some interpretations of the movie, Brody is supposed to encase our primal sense of survival — a man gripped by fear who has chosen to fight rather than flee.
Quint is the first to fall, when he is forced to admit his awe of the shark (his mumbled “It’s incredible” is an overlooked moment in the film) and then abandon his violent methods in favor of Hooper’s scientific approach. Next, Hooper is rendered powerless when his technology — in the form of a poisoned lance and a metallic shark cage — fails him. In the end, it’s Brody, clinging to the mast of a foundering boat and firing off his last rounds of ammo as the shark bears down, who defeats the beast.
So what does it mean that the character representing our primal terrors is the one who prevails? This could be read as an endorsement of the politics of fear and the insular, xenophobic policies it tends to produce, embodied most recently in the embarrassing spectacle of the world’s most powerful nation designating desperately poor migrants as an “invasion.” Alternatively, it could suggest that human decency, which Brody displays throughout the film, is the most powerful survival tool we have.
It’s hard to avoid the inevitable question of how the characters on the Orca correspond to the Trump era and its profound but profoundly one-dimensional masculinity. It’s easy to picture Quint in a MAGA hat and Hooper as a blue-state coastal elite, though arguments could be made for the mirror opposite, with Quint as a “Bernie or Bust” guy and today’s Hooper as one of the tech whizzes who’s fallen in with Elon Musk.
More complicated is what would become of Brody, the principled cop who rarely carries a gun and, interestingly, does not have an American flag on his police uniform. One could see him as a Never Trumper, or as one of those nice-enough guys you know who, like 55% of male voters, backed Trump in 2024 — although you both choose not to talk about it between innings at your softball games.
To wit, the narrative of Jaws is on some levels a test of Brody’s soul: Just what kind of man is he, really? There are moments in the film where Brody is clearly as afraid of Quint as he is of the shark. It’s a fear of the brutal version of the world that Quint represents. It’s also a worry that Quint could be right — a valid but uncomfortable doubt to witness, one of those abysses that also stares back into us. Does Brody master his fears before he overcomes the shark, or is he merely a slave to them, like the guys who conceal-carry their way to feeling safer in the world?
If Jaws were filmed today, its archetypes of masculinity would likely be different, for better or worse. Clearly, some men of 2025 are more comfortable expressing emotion than their 1970s counterparts were, and a few even have the vocabulary to do so articulately. Yet it’s an understatement to say that the evolution hasn’t been uniform. There was certainly plenty of misogyny in 1975, with most working-age women not working outside the home, workplace sexual harassment not yet recognized as a problem, and even fewer women in positions of political power than today. But the modern backlash to those modest advances seems more toxic than its disco-era antecedent: frenzy feeding on revenge porn and incel fury. And even if real-life men are a lot more complicated, Hollywood’s low estimation of either male emotional depth or the audience’s intelligence makes it unlikely that the three lead male characters in a modern suspense-action film would be crafted with such nuance and vulnerability as those in Jaws.
Thinking about the masculine allegory in Jaws doesn’t overlook the fact that the movie was just plain scary. Whenever the film comes up, people instinctively note how old they were when they first saw it, and for how many months or years afterward they were afraid to go swimming in the ocean.
By the time I watched Jaws, however, I was already terrified of the water. This wasn’t the fault of Hollywood horror but rather the product of a very ordinary accident at a pond in Maine, when I was 5. As I clung to a flotation device in six feet of water, my dad dove under and his wake knocked me into the drink. Unable to swim, I stood on the muddy bottom of the pond, raised my hands so my fingertips might be visible, and looked up at the sun shimmering through the ripples above. I was probably down there for no more than a few seconds, but at the time I was sure it was going to be the last moment of my life. Then I felt my dad’s hands around my upper arms, lifting me back to the world.
The incident shaped my internal self forever, and inhibited my summer activities for years. I never blamed my father for it, though. I guess even in my pre-school mind it was always clear to me that the water was bigger than him or me, as it was bigger than the trio on the Orca. That’s the point.
The ultimate value of the masculine taxonomy in Jaws is not in its depiction of male types or the conflict among them. It’s in the few precious moments of desperate harmony Brody, Hooper, and Quint forge in the face of impending doom. The three men join in drunken song to drown out Quint’s pain after he relates the ghastly (and basically true) tale of sharks attacking hundreds of sailors in the water after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis as World War II was drawing to a close. As the shark mauls Hooper’s cage below the waves, Brody and Quint struggle, futilely, to bring him back to the surface. And after the shark invades the fishing boat and Quint begins sliding toward his gruesome death, Brody tries to grasp his hand to save him.
None of these efforts offers a chance at victory; that cinematic shark would have kept coming no matter what. But there’s some form of mutual salvation in each act, and even in failure. If you had to go up against a killer shark, you’d choose any of the three aboard the Orca over Amity’s slimy mayor, Larry Vaughn, the other important male character in the movie.
Indeed, Jaws is not really about which version of manhood “wins” — after all, Brody’s victory is the product of a very fortuitous meeting between an oxygen canister and a high-velocity bullet — but rather the fact that all of the varied forms of masculinity play some role in humankind’s survival. Without Hooper’s scuba tank and Quint’s rifle, Brody would just have been another piece of shark food. The truth discovered on the deck of the Orca seems too obvious to mention, but somehow often gets drowned out in our pop culture and culture wars: There is more than one way to be a man, even a good man.
In the six years since his death, I’ve come to realize that my father was, in a good way, the most Brody man I ever met: a low-key family guy of simple habits and persistent decency. Yet behind his large-frame glasses and his daily outfit of short-sleeved dress shirts and drab neckties there was also the Quint of a Vietnam vet and former bouncer, and the Hooper of a man who read widely and thought deeply (while talking very quietly) about the world beyond our two-story Colonial in a small Connecticut city.
Each man, like my dad and probably yours, and me and maybe you, hosts some unique and shifting mix of Quint, Hooper, and Brody, and other types besides. All of those internal men are human. Most of them are imperfect, yet essential. Together, they help us outswim the multiplying challenges of the external world. They sometimes even equip us to outlast the toxic creatures who also lurk in our selves. There are predators aplenty. Against all the sharks of today and tomorrow, men will need an even bigger boat. ❖
A 50th anniversary screening of Jaws celebrating the classic film and the current real-life battle to save our oceans and sharks will take place on Saturday, June 21, at Cinema on the Sound, on City Island, in the Bronx. There will be information from shark experts and local environmental organizations, and Narragansett Beer (that’s the can Quint crushes). Click here for more info.
Jarrett Murphy is an emergency-room nurse and freelance journalist. He was a Voice staff writer from 2004 to 2007.
