We’ve all got movie blind-spots, even those of us that consider ourselves pretty culturally aware. Until the past year, I’d never seen such cinema classics as Raging Bull, Lawrence of Arabia, or Sunset Blvd., and A Clockwork Orange, The Seventh Seal, or On the Waterfront still remain on my ever-growing list of movies I have yet to see. So trying to catch up on everything from film’s past, while still trying to keep up with everything worth seeing that’s currently being released, is like bailing out a sinking boat with a paper cup.  But still, there are some movies it sometimes shames me to admit that I’ve never seen, but sometimes you just need to bite the bullet and say it:

Until now, I’d never seen the original summer blockbuster, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.

Was it what I’d expected? In some respects, yes: it was a movie about a giant killer shark, terrorizing a New England island resort.  The fact that the shark remains unseen for most of the movie, due to the malfunctioning mechanical model, forcing Spielberg to make due with point-of-view shots, an excellent score and the viewers’ imaginations has become the stuff of Hollywood legend. The movie provided its full quota of fast approaching fins, terrified screams and bloody shark mayhem, not to mention one of the best jump-shocks I’ve ever seen, what Ebert would dub a “bruised forearm” moment. What I didn’t expect, though, was the level of real human drama, the amount of quality small, intimate moments, or how much the tone of the movie echoed the style of the New Hollywood of the late 1960s, and its descendants, the Film School Brats, of which Spielberg was a member.

I was fairly familiar with the famous opening scene, where a skinny-dipping young woman is murdered by an unseen monster, dragged back and forth from beneath the water. But the impact of when her body is found, where the camera instead lingers on the police and bystander reactions for a long time, leaving you to envision the grisly remains, was truly effective, even to me, calloused and seasoned by years of Hollywood gore.  Later scenes, when more of the victim is revealed, all you see is a hand, a swath of hair, and several small crabs scavenging on her unseen corpse, further shook me, as did the scene where Richard Dreyfus’ character examines her remains at the coroner’s office, and he simply removes a small tub from a freezer.  The terror of those scenes have nothing to do with what you see, but from what you don’t.  It all relies on what is left to your imagination, inflated by the actors’ performances, on the way the color drains from their faces.  What’s happened is so terrifying and ghastly that the camera can’t even bear to look at it.

I was very impressed by how little the movie actually felt like a summer blockbuster, though it was a pioneer in that respect. The naturalism of the performances, especially Roy Scheider’s as Police Chief Brody, bring a level of humanity to the film that diffuses to every character. Even though we don’t really get to know most of the victims, it feels like the shark is eating actual people, and we feel for them and their family.  They are not simply fish food or plot devices, meant to drive the story along. The shark attacks are not simply something that happens, but real events with real human consequences. The several scenes with people shouting over each other add to both the tension and verisimilitude, where a modern film would rely on big ‘splosions and speedy cuts every half second. Even the set design served to humanize the townspeople and potential victims – Brody’s office, and the room for town meetings, were cramped, crowded and uninviting.

This movie, however, could not survive the barrage of market testing, focus groups, or endless studio tampering that most major studio releases, and especially summer blockbusters, must go through today. Though by no means a boring film, or even slow, its pacing is decidedly deliberate, and even stately by today’s break-neck standards of “no one must have any time to breath” velocity. And a third act that is simply three Freudian concepts riding a boat with a giant phallic/vagina symbol hunting them from beneath the ocean’s surface?  We’d lose Robert Shaw’s famous monologue about the USS Indianapolis.  We’d lose the incredible scene between Scheider and his youngest son at the dinner table. The shark would appear fully on screen, in all its CGI glory, no less than 15 minutes into the film, with none of the effective innovation and trickery that Spielberg was forced to employ. I may be late to the party on this one, but I can still be an old fart, complaining about how they don’t make ‘em like they used to.

So I did it: I’ve now seen Jaws, and lived not only to speak long-windedly about it, but to truly love it.  One more movie crossed off the ever-growing list. I hope this to become a fairly regular feature as I catch up on those classics that everyone in the world seems to have seen except me.

So what are some of your movie blind-spots?  What classic or ubiquitous films have eluded you, because of circumstance or choice, for all of these years?

Evan Mather works at a suburban Chicago high school, as a Library Assistant and co-sponsor to the film club. He currently attends school and hopes to eventually earn a Masters in Library Science. He enjoys consuming as much culture as possible and then vomiting it up onto the internet for others to read about.

Print PDF

Related Posts:

• No Related Posts