Jaws' legacy boasts a massive cultural and academic impact over the last four decades. Scholars have interpreted a multitude of allegories within the tale of the blood-thirsty beast terrorizing an ethically divided town. As one example, in a 1988 edition of the magazine Comics Review, journalist and film critic Neal Gabler argued that the characters of Brody, Hooper, and Quint represent a trifecta of potential ways to solve a problem: Brody symbolizes the common man; Hooper is the scientist who relies on knowledge and empiricism; and Quint symbolizes spirituality. Gabler interprets Hooper's inability to solve the problem with science, Quint's eventual downfall at the hands (or rather teeth) of the shark, and Brody's subsequent victory as the film's endorsement of the common man's approach to overcome obstacles.
In a similar vein, Peter Biskind, former executive editor of Premiere magazine (1986-1996) and well-known film historian and journalist, has noted that Brody's representation of the middle-class man illuminates a conflict of social class between him, his two counterparts, and the Amity community: Quint, ever the grizzled fisherman, is a symbol of the working class, an outcast quickly dismissed by the mayor and city council despite his competence to hunt down the shark; and Hooper, the tech-savvy but inexperienced rich boy, is similarly marginalized for being out of touch and in the way, though to a lesser extent. Biskind interprets the film as arguing for Brody to be the one to restore balance over the other two men, an endorsement of the common's man's ideological superiority.
Biskind additionally argues that Jaws maintains a certain level of post-Watergate cynicism in the wake of the Nixon administration's infamous political scandals of the early 70s, particularly in the form of Amity's greedy, ethically twisted mayor, who antagonizes Brody by making profits a priority over public welfare. Brody's irritation, Biskind argues, is an allegorical parallel to America's frustration and disillusionment with their own government. On the other hand, film critic Andrew Britton maintains that while the novel Jaws supports such cynicism, the ways in which the film's story differs from the book's help it to provide a sort of mass jubilation for the audience, a sort of "communal exorcism, a ceremony for the restoration of ideological confidence" when lone Brody succeeds in annihilating the evil before him (the shark is not aggressively blown up in the book's version of the story). With this example, Britton argues that the film actually demonstrates a measure of post-Watergate optimism.
In his 1976 article, "Jaws, Ideology, and Film Theory," film theorist Stephen Heath seems to agree with Britton, suggesting that Brody's single-handed destruction of the beast represents a triumph for the white, male middle class, "an ordinary-guy kind of heroism born of fear-and-decency." Moreover, these notions reflect Gabler and Biskind's theory that Jaws champions the "common man" as a thwarter of evil.
