Jaws Literary Elements

Steven Spielberg

Roy Scheider/Robert Shaw/Richard Dreyfuss

Murray Hamilton/Lorraine Gary

Adventure Thriller

English

Won Oscars for Sound, Film Editing and Original Score

June 20, 1975

Richard Zanuck and David Brown

Amity Island, a fictional island off the coast of Massachussets during a mid-1970s summer

The film has no narrator. While the perspective shifts as necessary to focus on important characters at any given moment, the audience is manipulated to see events primarily through the eyes of Sheriff Brody.

The movie navigates through several different tonal shifts that require the mood to be in an almost constant state of flux. While there is a definite intensification of the anxiety surrounding the threat of the shark as the movie progresses, at several different points the tone suddenly shifts from creature feature horror based on fear of a relentless monster to political thriller to lighthearted family drama to thrilling seafaring adventure. A light comic undertones keeps the horror from becoming too intense and the anxiety from making it a pure thriller.

Protagonist: Sheriff Brody. Antagonist: Not the shark, surprisingly, but Amity Island's Mayor Vaughn, who puts economics ahead of lives.

Despite the shark not being the actual antagonist, the major conflict is unquestionably between Brody, Hooper, Quint and the shark.

When Sheriff Brody blows up the shark by shooting at an oxygen canister lodged in its mouth.

Earlier in the film, Brody is flipping through a book about sharks to learn more about their threat. One of the sharks has an oxygen tank in its mouth, thus foreshadowing how the shark will die.

Aboard the Orca, Quint jokes that the only use for the oxygen tanks would be if the shark ate them, which of course it ultimately does.

When the three men leave the harbor aboard the Orca, we see a shot of them framed by an enormous pair of jaws in Quint's boat shack. This a brilliant instance of foreshadowing because it hints that the boat will literally be eaten by the shark near the end of the film.

The single most famous—yet misquoted—line of dialogue from the movie is a classic example of understatement. Having just come literally face to face with the shark now surmised to be perhaps 25 feet long and which has proven capable of chewing a full-sized woman and leaving behind but a few bones and tissue, Brody slowly backs away from the water and into the cabin area, where he quite calmly informs Quint, "You're gonna need a bigger a boat." The line is routinely misquoted by even those who have seen the movie countless time as, "We're gonna a need a bigger boat."

Had the mechanical shark used in lieu of using a real one actually worked, Spielberg would have been remembered, if for nothing else, for revolutionizing the use of robotics in filmmaking. Instead, he has to be content with merely perfecting rather than inventing the idea that you can create more anxiety and fear in an audience by NOT showing them the thing they fear. Jaws was also instrumental in transforming summer into a peak time for releasing movies expected to be hits, which it had never been before, based on the assumption that people don't want to waste warm summer days inside dark cinemas.

The Great Shark Hunt engaged on the Orca by Brody, Hooper and Quint is all an allusion to Moby-Dick, from Quint's madness on the subject of shark evil to the ship itself being named for a species of whale.

The greatest paradox of Jaws it that it succeeded in demonizing sharks for decades and scared millions from the water based on irrational fear of sharks, despite the fact that the man-eater itself enjoys only four minutes of actual onscreen time throughout the whole movie.

The most effective use of parallelism in Jaws is also one of the most unusual and creative examples of the device. Parallelism is simply a repetition of structure for the purpose of creating coherence in a text for the audience. While most often applied to the repetition of words or the rhythm of a phrase, it can also apply equally to the rhythm of a musical motif. The simple repetition of the E and F notes in the movie's famous theme eventually becomes an example of parallelism by serving a cohesive that links the appearance of the shark at different times and under varied circumstances literally from the opening moments to its climax.