The Child As Father To Man

A paternal role reversal is illustrated in the dinner table scene between Chief Brody and his youngest son Sean in the form of gestural mirror-play. Directly following the scene in which Mrs. Kintner publicly shames Brody for her son’s death by slapping him, the film cuts to a sepulchral Brody sitting across from his own son, drunk and silently wallowing in a shame so deep he cannot speak. Here Brody, immersed in an emasculating despair, shrinks to child-size, and Sean, as his father’s pocket-mirror, becomes the symbolic representation of that regression to infantilism. As a mock child, Brody’s fears are physically caricaturized (using symbols) and copied by his son. In Brody’s urge to evade responsibility as police chief, father, husband, and shark fighter, a mirror-image is produced and Brody becomes the little boy looking into it. The role reversal, with its early signs of Spielberg’s man-boy leitmotif—fully fleshed out in Close Encounters and ET— is complete when Brody asks his son, who has become the father, to “Give us a kiss.” While Antonia Quirke has argued that Brody asks his son for a kiss because he is too ashamed to ask his wife, I would argue that Brody asks his son because in that moment he is not a man and therefore seeks paternal, rather than marital, solace. And finally, the monster gurn Brody makes at his son, and that his son mirrors back, is the monster maw (death) Brody fears in the shark.

Hunt in The Water (The deleted version)

Whenever anyone but the three male leads go out to look for the shark, they come up empty-handed. When half of Amity’s local fisherman and resident misfits go hunting for the water monster (Dirty Harry-style) to collect the $3,000 Kintner award and do not so much as even spot the otherwise ubiquitous killer, it is proven that the movie’s shark is not a literal monster but a symbolic one. Not just anyone can catch it, or even see it for that matter. For, as Quint points out at the schoolhouse meeting, it’ll take $3,000 just to find him.

The Shark Is Still Working

Since Jaws is a movie about men, it’s not surprising that its fan base, which the three-hour (still unreleased) documentary The Shark Is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws testifies to, consists primarily of men (white men) too—ranging from directors, producers, and screenwriters to actors and viewers. When Carl Gottlieb was interviewed for a six-part, year-long tribute to the films of Steven Spielberg on the blog talk radio program Movie Geeks United! and asked if, during the production of Jaws, he believed in Spielberg’s talent as a director, Gottlieb states that he believed in “Spielberg’s commitment to movies.” Given that tapes and DVDs weren’t available back then, explains Gottlieb, a director’s body of work was often inaccessible. If, he informs, you wanted to watch a movie, it had to be a projected screening at a film studio or at someone’s house in Laurel Canyon. And if you wanted to collect commercial film, he laughs, you had to break the law.