A compelling double bill that recontextualises the heroes and villains of Jaws.
For the launch of BFI’s Stephen Spielberg season and his new film Disclosure Day, Jaws was screened at the IMAX, preceded by the new documentary Shark Kingdom (in 3D!).
Shark Kingdom is an eloquent and cinematic piece that highlights the crucial role sharks play in maintaining delicate marine ecosystems. As a top predator, their role in the food cycle is indispensable for maintaining balance, not to mention their contribution to combating climate change through their carbon storage. There are over 500 species of sharks; 37% are under threat of extinction, almost exclusively because of fishing. Unsurprisingly, human beings remain the biggest threat to the balance of the animal kingdom. Sharks, by contrast, pose very little threat unless you get in their way.
Screening Shark Kingdom and Jaws in a consecutive double bill presents a compelling thesis: Jaws, despite its filmic mastery, is reconfigured as a monument to male chauvinism and bureaucratic cowardice. The shark is never the primary threat. And Jaws did a terrible number on sharks: it did not raise their profile so much as cultivated a culture of fear and vilification they did not deserve.
The film is over 50 years old, so I shan’t relay the plot. It is financial greed and ego that motivate the men who hold authority on Amity Island, which is economically dependent on their annual 4th July beach celebrations. After the first and second shark attacks, Police Chief Martin Brody does a measly job of trying to convince other authority figures to close the beach to swimmers as an obvious protective measure. The idea of respecting what is essentially sharks’ turf (the sea) and sticking to the land for a stint never occurs to these men as a legitimate option. So, as usual, they opt for territorial domination: kill the sharks. It’s a kind of marine colonialism: subjugate the native beings to create a more hospitable environment for oneself.
Ernest Hemingway and Herman Melville ought to pay for their crimes against big fish. And by extension, all of us who suffer from the typically male obsession with dominating and destroying these big fish. Indeed, there is an ongoing internet joke mocking the frequency with which men on dating apps are seen triumphantly dangling a freshly caught fish. It’s all pathetically phallic. Jaws is the late 20th-century equivalent of these Hinge terrorists. Just slightly more attractive.
This is not a criticism of the quality of the movie itself. It has all the hallmarks of excellence; indeed, it is. Phenomenologically, it is fantastic: terrifying and thrilling in equal measure. Moreover, Jaws – at least the first half – is testament to a lost art: the art of capitalising on the audience’s own imagination; the libidinal powers of suspense. It is a masterclass in harnessing the terrifying potentiality of what cannot be seen (albeit in part because of animatronic failure in a more primitive age of cinema). To quote the philosopher and film critic Harry Styles: Jaws ‘feels like a movie’.
Framed by the prelude of Shark Kingdom, it takes a distinct lack of empathy not to feel significant distress on the part of the shark. He is a monster only because he is a threat to human life when they happen to cross his path, not for the love of the game, but merely because of his primal instincts as a top predator. Rather than respect this and retreat, the pathetic little men go in search of the apparent villain. The second half of the film is a war of attrition against the unsuspecting shark, until the climactic moment of its complete annihilation. It is difficult to join the celebration of the murder of a creature as fantastic as the Great White Shark, merely because the film posits a zero-sum game of us vs them. For me, at least, the most distressing aspects of the film are not the burgeoning threat of limbic amputation and sharky murder, but the display of men, drunk on the poisonous cocktail of arrogance and incompetence that they so dearly favour.