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To understand the numerous connotations and myths induced by the representation of the Great White Shark in Jaws, an understanding of the history of human’s relationship with animals is crucial. ...
For hundreds of years, humans and animals functioned together in this manner, and this co-dependant relationship wouldn’t change until the onset of great technological advances in the mid-Twentieth Century. ... Baring in mind that people do not come into direct contact with the vast majority of creatures in the world, their experience of them will come solely in the form of the various medias.
The most basic understanding of the role of the Great White Shark in Jaws is that it relieves the viewer of the guilt sometimes felt because of the industrialization of society and its taking over and polluting the natural world. ...
Jaws, however, offers a completely different route to ease the guilty conscience people may have with regard to animals. ...
By offering such an unrelenting, vicious killer as the Great White Shark, Spielberg is giving the audience something to truly hate and fear, fitting in to the eco-threat themes adopted by many horror films. ... Jaws would fit into the second category, for there is no human-related cause that sets the shark on its path of death. In essence, Jaws embodies the invasion-narrative so common to the horror genre.
‘At its most simple, the invasion narrative is all rampage: the monster appears out of the blue [literally in the case of Jaws], goes on the rampage, is faced with the customary combination of expertise and coercion and… is finally returned to the unknown’ (Tudor, 1989, p.90-91)
Put into this category, the shark is clearly a menace, set up for the audience to want dead from the first scene. There seems to be no ambiguity in this portrayal of the shark, it is a killing machine, haunting the Amity community indiscriminately. However, this is a very basic interpretation and a deeper examination is necessary to fully comprehend the symbolism behind the shark’s presence.
Arguably the most recognizable theme that the Great White Shark in Jaws entails is that of the dreaded ‘Other’, or as Rushing and Frentz claim,
‘The overdeveloped shadow’ (1995, p. ... On numerous occasions in Jaws, we hear the shark being described as a machine. When Hooper is trying to persuade Mayor Vaughan to close the beaches, he describes the shark as “A perfect engine…an eating machine… All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks”. By describing the shark in such a manner, Hooper is effectively reducing the character of the Great White Shark to something that the audience will recognise – a product of technology. As Quirke acknowledges, the scene in which Hooper and Brody cut open the Tiger Shark is essential to our understanding of the shark as a symbolic representation of technology in modern society. By finding a crushed tin-can and a car licence plate in the stomach of the shark, the audience is given the impression that sharks enjoy metal-dinners, allowing them to appear to the audience more machine-like than living, breathing creatures (Quirke, 2002). There is a degree of irony in the fact that, whilst the Great White could be read as a metaphor for destructive technology, the shark used in the film was a mechanical reproduction (apart from a couple of scenes where footage of a real shark was used) that regularly failed to work.
Approximate Word count = 2697
Approximate Pages = 10.8
(250 words per page double spaced)
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