Editor’s Note: June 20, 1975 is the anniversary of the premiere of the classic summer ocean thriller Jaws. Author and cinephile Joseph Aisenberg looks back at a film that became one of the most phenomenal summer blockbusters — and the book it was based on.

By Joseph Aisenberg

The first ever summer blockbuster movie, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975), had its basis in the Peter Benchley bestselling novel of the same name, published a year earlier. It was almost as much a phenomenon as the movie, selling some 9 million copies in paperback (with an assist from the movie’s success); its castoffs went on to haunt used bookstores and thrift shops well into the 1990s, where I came across it so frequently I bought it, to stop noticing the damn thing. 

Well, I finally read Jaws’, and have some thoughts.

What’s Unique About the novel Jaws?

I had figured it would be an overwrought potboiler along the lines of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist. It was a relief to find Benchley hadn’t let the top of his book be gone over in quite the annoying fashion Blatty had, whose book mated generous amounts of lurid, soi disant horrors to a B-movie level religious mentality made repellent by its dull-witted earnestness.

Not that I’m saying Jaws is an especially good book. Benchley’s skills, shall we say, were a good ways off from first rate in this, his first novel. It’s no competition for the likes of John Irving, Erica Jong, Larry McMurtry, Kurt Vonnegut or John Fowels, to name a handful of decent popular scribblers from the time. It’s done with less melodrama than Stephen King’s first novel Carrie, which came out the same year, but King’s voice is far zestier than Benchley’s. 

Wit, snob and best-selling pop novelist himself, Gore Vidal, once wrote a hilarious survey of his competition, the top ten bestsellers of January 1973. In his distinctive, withering way he tried to figure out what the hell was up with the culture. While the sociology of the essay seems fairly shallow, the results were a hoot. You’ll never look at pop writing quite the same.

One observation he made at the beginning of his piece relates to the sort of reading experience Benchley’s book represents. He noted that most of the novels under discussion reflected “to some degree the films each author saw in his formative years …” Absolutely the case with Jaws. Even before Spielberg went and Hollywoodized the book, further vulgarizing it, Jaws was already a deluxe Vista Vision version of the cheap, 1950s big bug movies of Benchley’s youth (he was born in 1940). His novel is constructed the way all those movies and pulp novels were, if less professionally. Punchy action is larded with chunks of dialogic exposition, and narration. While his oceanic actions scenes are well, even beautifully written, generally Jaws has the junky no-style of most pop novels, probably meant to be consumed as longer, more involved movies. Any excessive concern with language would get in the way.

Yet it’s a billion times better than box-packing peanuts like The Amityville Horror or Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Benchley’s literary crud, as with Stephen King’s in Carrie and, all right, Blatty’s in The Exorcist, has its own shoddy integrity. King weaved references to William Faulkner and Shakespeare throughout Carrie; with Jaws, Benchley tried to convert the whiteness of Melville’s metaphysical whale into a maybe symbolic, Great White attack-shark. It’s dumb, it’s trashy, but it’s something.  

Another Vidalian point while we’re at it. From his review of two books by the once fashionable, extremely popular and racy melodramatist John O’Hara whose chatty naturalism actually seems more a direct influence on Benchley’s style than does Melville. In describing the pop of bestselling authors, Vidal said that “those writers who are the most popular are the ones who share the largest number of common assumptions with their audience, subliminally reflecting prejudices and aspirations so obvious that they are never stated and, never stated, never precisely understood or even recognized.” There’s definitely something of this in Jaws. Benchley’s book has been filled out with scads of characters, situations and observations which take bunches of things for granted. They can seem vague, unsettled; they jar against one another in odd ways. Some of the stuff may nag at careful readers — they nagged at this reader, anyway — because the meanings and probable intentions don’t wash ashore together.

It’s impossible to tell how far Benchley thought through his not-quite cardboard characters, which is where all that assuming Vidal mentions comes in. A good writer doesn’t make our minds up for us about everything, but Benchley leaves us wondering over too much. 

How is the book different from the hit movie Jaws?

The book differs from the movie enough, I think, that it’s worth summarizing in detail. A young woman goes skinny dipping off the seemingly idyllic shores of Amity, a Long Island resort town, and is killed by a shark. When Sheriff Martin Brody, a local boy made mediocre, discovers her mutilated corpse he decides to close the beach.

Amity’s mayor, Larry Vaughn, in a back door meeting with Brody, insists it stay the hell open. Vaughn threatens to dismiss and replace Brody if he tries to close the beach. In spite of himself, Brody complies. Next day a child is killed; a couple other folks get it too. The local newspaperman, in cahoots with Vaughn at first, throws Brody under the bus, reporting that he, Brody, personally claimed it’d be perfectly perfect keeping the beach open. The mother of the kid and a widow of one of the other victims confront Brody and blame him, hard, causing him pop novel guilt — meaning he feels responsible for something the reader knows damn well he couldn’t have done anything about, thereafter driving him to seek unnecessary redemption, portrayed with little urgency, in any case. 

Next, ichthyologist and shark expert Matt Hooper is called in. This pretty, 25 year old know-it-all isn’t just a vessel designed for info-dumps. He’s also a hunk stud whom Brody’s wife, Ellen, is hot for.  She had coincidentally dated Hooper’s preppy older brother before marrying and becoming the mother of three narratively useless children. As the dread of more attacks sets in, Amity, whose economy is a hundred percent driven by tourism starts to fail in every way.

Not only does Mayor Vaughn insist the beach be opened for the all important 4^th of July holiday, so do Amity’s desperate merchants. And since the shark’s been lying low, conveniently not killing anyone, Brody just seems hysterical insisting everything remain shut down indefinitely. Kinda like with Covid, only our leading scientist in this case, boy wonder Hooper, rival for Brody’s wife’s affections, sides with all the safety-second, money-minded folk of Amity, assuring everyone the shark’s almost certainly moved on by now. Well, he hasn’t. When Jaws nearly kills another kid (sadly this one survives) it’s decided the town’s only economic hope lay in hiring big gun, mercenary, salt-crusty, deep sea fisherman Quint. This character, awkwardly introduced in a small sub-chapter well before he gets pulled into the action, is a pleasing blend of the old man from Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea and of course Captain Ahab, minus the obsession and plus a few swear words. “I see your cock!” he screams at Jaws before harpooning him the first time.

Brody and Hooper join Quint on his boat, The Orca, where they hunt for the shark and work through personal conflicts. That is when Hooper and Quint aren’t battling to see who can dispense more information about sharks and fishing. Day two of the quest, Hooper, who had wanted to study the shark, insists on trying to confront Jaws the scientific way. He goes under water in a protective cage he’s brought along, to get the thing with a special gun. Like the myopic scientist in The Thing From Another World (1951), Jaws murders his ass. The shark batters its way into Hooper’s cage and munches him whole in a marvelously done scene. Anyway, Quint, who didn’t like Hooper, is shaken by his death for reasons which don’t make much sense despite the seriousness of the circumstances (he didn’t give two craps when told Jaws had eaten a kid) and thus determines to get that dang shark free of charge (he’d been soaking Amity for four hundred bucks a day despite his usual fee of only one-hundred and fifty). Brody says he’s all in on payback with Quint.

Day three on The Orca, Brody becomes convinced that Jaws is consciously trying to take out our brave duo. Quint finally harpoons the willful son of a bitch, his plan being to lodge several harpoons in the shark’s bulk. Ropes tied to these harpoons have been attached to flotation tanks. Given enough tanks, Quint explains, Jaws will be forced to remain on the water’s surface fighting them and having his life force drained.

This happens, but before it does Quint dies like Ahab, for the sin of capitalist gouging. His leg gets caught in one of his harpooning ropes and Jaws drags him into the ocean. Like The Pequod, Quint’s ship, having suffered a straight-on attack by Jaws, then sinks, leaving Brody, Ishmael-like, to float back to shore. Not on a coffin though, but a floatable cushion. Jaws makes a half hearted attempt to chase Brody, but finally Benchley, his maker, hits his off button. “Through the stinging saltwater mist [Brody] saw the fish sink in a slow and graceful spiral, trailing behind it the body of Quint—arms out to the sides, head thrown back, mouth open in mute protest.” Quint ends a nearly Christlike hero. It should be noted that Brody did almost nothing throughout but witness the grand gestures of others.

While all this stuff is exciting, fully worth the read, the earlier parts of the book, and for long stretches, often make one’s eyes glaze over. Benchley’s inexperience as a novelist shows in his labored techniques. At the beginning, right before the skinny dipper chick’s boyfriend reports her disappearance, the night cop on duty is casually exposited upon for awhile. He then gives Brody a wakeup call about the girl.  When Brody gets off the phone the narration remains with him and creakily goes into biographizing mode. Once we’re caught up with Brody’s character-conflicts he heads to the bathroom and the narration stays behind, alone with Ellen in the marital bed, to grope her past awhile before eventually rejoining Brody and following him through his day’s investigations — this sort of head-hopping, following the dictates of Henry James, is now considered bad form. Other goofiness: in the scene where Mayor Vaughn secretly meets with Brody to make sure he’ll keep the beach open, he inadvertently drops that he’s got secret partners (mobsters) in his real estate business, which Brody then becomes determined to suss out for the novel’s unnecessary C-storyline. 

Though Vaughn’s slip of the tongue is dumb, it’s forgivable. What’s not is Benchley’s having come up with no dramatic way to integrate this Watergate-esque sub-plot of local political corruption into the rest of the book. At the end, while Brody’s busy on The Orca trying to catch Jaws, we’re told in passing that the mob dudes Vaughn had been involved with, the ones who forced him to keep Amity’s beach open despite the threat, because they had something on him, have left the pathetic man financially ruined, and he’s moving on, goodbye. This comes out during a desultory and inexplicable exchange between Vaughn and Brody’s wife Ellen, obviously crammed in to tie up a loose and, mostly, unused end. The mob guys never even appear in the story for confrontation, though Brody is told that one of them had killed his, Brody’s, cat in front of one of his, Brody’s, useless uncharacterized children, as a warning that he, Brody, not scare off the July 4^th beach crowd, trying to protect them too zealously. Now, these mob dudes along with the shark are the villains of the piece yet have been used as mere background filler, stretching Hitchcock’s concept of a McGuffin to the limit. Meaning this business is only there to keep Jaws’ conflicts conflicting, but Benchley, unlike Hitchcock, didn’t have the wit or chops to know how to use such machinery as machinery or a vehicle for deeper thematic concerns. 

Where does the novel lose its footing?

And there are so many ideas Benchley doesn’t follow through on. For instance, we’re told fairly early Brody doesn’t know how to swim. Our first thought is: weird a guy who grew up on an island somehow never learned to swim. It’s possible of course, but the mention is so gratuitous hawkeyed readers will assume it’s going to come back when the character’s in a pinch. One wonders, how though? Seems like, jumping in the water with a monster shark would get one killed even if one didn’t drown. I figured okay, maybe the Swimming Problem will arise after stupid ole Jaws has been dealt with and the boat sunk, so we get a little last-minute Stephen King as Brody fights his way back to dry land.

Sure enough, when tough-as-nails Quint is called in to save the community’s economy from Jaws, Brody volunteers to go out with him for the hunt. Skeptical, because rascally old salts are always cynical bastards, Quint wants to know, can Brody swim? He lies, saying yes, and we wade through the third part of the book, waiting. Quint dies. Orca goes down. Now it must come. Only Brody doesn’t get thrown overboard and is never even in danger of drowning. What the hell? I suppose, it’s good when a story isn’t set up like a giant clockwork toy, but why bother with the expectation if no suspense was to be wrung out of it? Or did Benchley think just having Brody willingly get on the Orca at all was itself the payoff? If so, boy was that lame.

In Gore Vidal’s sociological sense, probably more interesting than the monster shark is the book’s B-plot involving Brody’s wife Ellen cheating with Matt Hooper, who otherwise is a device for excreting Benchley’s shark research. The shark facts are enjoyable though. I loved learning about ancient dinosauresque megalodons. This junk tumbles out of Hooper’s mouth reminiscent of the spiels of so many hunky 1950s movie scientists, like in The Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954). Every time Benchley sets Hooper’s mouth loose it makes one nostalgic for rubber reptile monster suits, goofy big bug heads and exotic tropical settings obviously built in studio. Though Jaws does derive from these films it more resembles, and maybe unconsciously, The Birds, Alfred Hitchcock’s sly revision of those sci fi horror flicks. The Birds is an apocalyptic scare movie, which underneath is a character study about alienated people trying to connect. Hitchcock gleefully thwarted most viewer expectations. There are no scientists, no important government people; nobody brings out atomic weapons which fail or comes up with an effective decoy in the end, to disperse the plague. The Birds is the work of a master; whatever one thinks of the film, one can sense the thinking that went into it. Hitch knew what he was doing leaving things ambiguous and maddeningly unresolved. Benchley flounders. 

While there are no government scientists in The Birds it does, however, have the fantastic Mrs Bundy (Ethel Griffies) whose “avocation,” as she crisply informs the heroine played by Tippi Hedren, is ornithology. She discourses awesomely upon the nature of our fine feathered friends while trying to light a cigarette; keeps letting the match burn down to her fingers, because she can’t shut the hell up long enough to actually smoke. Anyway, her points are: There’s wayyyy more birds than people, so if they got together for a war that’d be it for humanity; also, different species of birds working together frankly goes again’ nature…that is, she insists, it’s impossible.

Folks, we’ve crossed over into a world where something very weird is going on, something which may be downright “preternatural” as Hooper later describes Jaws’ behavior, admitting that the Great White may somehow have slipped outside the strictures of known science.

Hooper’s explanations as to what this means exactly are the usual blah-blah gobbledygook, and don’t sound particularly “preternatural” to this naturally obtuse reader. If only Hooper had been given some witty comic business to accompany his lectures, like Mrs Bundy’s wonderful match, cig, beret and terrifying demeanor. As in Hitchcock, Benchley’s science-signaling is done to let us to know that he knows that these goings on are nonsense, so we can relax and enjoy the show assured he’s not just lazy or stupid. It’s supposed to make the batshit of it all work for instead of against the proceedings, give his tale a touch of mystery, art. But Benchley’s too much the literal minded naturalist for his irrationalistic, fable-like preparations to get a real grip on the reader’s imagination. He doesn’t have the drive to mystify. This thing would require the poetic rhetorical resources of a Hawthorne or, yes, Melville to transcend the junkiness and hypnotize readers out of their common sense far enough to believe in the idiocy. Benchley’s hard ass realism makes everything concrete though, and that’s good, because he doesn’t give two hoots about anything other than Jaws as an exciting man eating monster; his inability to make the shark an ambiguous symbol of something or other, despite his efforts, helps the book succeed in a way Moby Dick didn’t, as a good yarn. 

I go into this because Hooper’s being an agent of exposition affects how he reads. Spouting text-bookese so often he comes off as very foursquare, like 1970s TV, stiltedly earnest. It’s jarring when he turns out to be more than that; starts talking dirty and sleeps with Brody’s wife. Basically it’s a stock character’s doing and saying things so far outside his purpose that the pulp narrative center of the tale feels like it might not hold, which is interesting. It would have been more so if Benchley had a prankster’s spirit, if he’d thrown a few oddball touches at us as Hitchcock did in The Birds. I guess the infidelity material is what’s odd here, cluing us in to Benchley’s responses to the cultural changes of the early 1970s; what he thought was becoming socially acceptable.

Ellen is tired of being Brody’s working class helpmeet. She figures she deserves to bone a hot 25 year old who wears brand name shirts as a way to re-connect with her wealthy background, which she’s felt cast out of since marrying Brody; she’s remained an outsider in Amity as well. The situation isn’t quite convincing or satisfyingly developed, but goes so much against the grain of pop writing (i.e. Ellen isn’t made shrewish) it’s compelling. Erica Jong once noted that any time a woman cheats in literature, either her kid dies or she does yet, refreshingly, Ellen isn’t punished for her transgression — there’s never even a confrontation scene between husband and wife (more un-used dramatic potential alas). Rather, poor Hooper’s the one who gets it in the terrific scene mentioned above.

Jaws and Hitchcock’s The Birds – Similarities?

Incidentally, his death also resembles an aspect of The Birds. Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), Bodega Bay’s school teacher, had moved to Bodega from San Francisco hoping to stay close to hunky ex-boyfriend Mitch Brenner (Rod Taylor). This makes her Tippi Hedren’s only rival for Mitch’s affections; in due course the birds fix that. Like Hooper, she dies heroically. She saves Mitch’s kid sister Cathy (Veronica Cartwright) from a swarm of birds, pushing the girl into the house while she’s left outside to be pecked to death. Hooper’s ending works the same way, as respectful rival removal. Benchley puts in a funny detail when Brody first meets Hooper. He sizes the ichthyologist up, thinking that while Hooper’s young and has a good physique, he, Brody, is certain he can take the dude in a fight, something that actually occurs a couple hundred pages later.

In the final act of the book, Brody correctly accuses Hooper of sleeping with his wife (though he doesn’t know for sure) and they fight on Quint’s boat. He nearly chokes Hooper to death before stopping himself so that Jaws can finish the job later. If only Benchley had handled Brody’s fear of the water with such consistency. Anyway, if you see Jaws’ killing Hooper as enacting Brody’s feelings of jealous rage (the way the birds get rid of Pleshette for Hedren) this gives you an in on how to read the shark as other than a pestiferous sea monster: Jaws represents Brody’s murderous urges, a thing out of his subconscious oceanic anxieties about his wife, Amity and his place within it.

And this too seems Birds-y. Hitchcock and his screenwriter Evan Hunter played with several possible ways of reading their bird apocalypse; no final answer was given, but at one point a woman in Bodega Bay’s restaurant gets in Hedren’s face and accuses her of being somehow responsible. “YOU’RE EVIL!” She shrills. “EVIL, EEEEEEVILLL!!” Hedren slaps the crap out of her, shutting her the hell up, very therapeutic for viewers. Clearly we’re not meant to literally believe Hedren’s character is evil, yet there’s something to it. We’d suspected ourselves: Melanie just is responsible. The bird attacks are her personal poltergeist, cropping up almost always in relation to her subconscious needs. Bodega, we’re told, is weirdly the center of the bird attacks: because she’s there, of course!

And each assault seems designed to get Hedren and Taylor closer and closer to the Bone Zone. A gull hits her head early. This lowers Taylor’s defenses so they can talk like people and gives him a chance to ask her to dinner. The attack at the children’s birthday party the next day keeps Hedren from returning to San Francisco as planned, because Taylor suggests she stay to another dinner first. Birds coming down the Brenner’s chimney during the meal then mean that Hedren just has to remain in Bodega Bay at least another night and so on and so forth until Taylor’s cold ass mother Lydia, after a final attack on Hedren, significantly taking place in sister Cathy’s girlie bedroom, finally is forced to accept her into the family. Benchley hasn’t worked out his shark attacks with this kind of fine-tuned precision, partly because his monster isn’t able to come to his characters with the mobility of Hitch’s birds, and partly because Benchley doesn’t seem completely in control of what he’s doing. 

Some of Brody’s mixed feelings, and maybe Benchley’s too, emerge during an enjoyable, lengthy chapter in which Ellen gives a dinner party, inviting some of Amity’s classier couples, hoping to impress good looking Hooper. Brody, sensing what’s going on, that’s he’s not swank enough for his wife as opposed to Hooper, insists Ellen bring in a single girl for the young lad. She invites one Daisy Wicker, a difficult character with long straight hair who wears no makeup and has an attitude. She talks about pot-laced Gazpacho (the food Ellen serves would have been quite exotic in 1974) and laughs over having once accidentally fed an elderly relative marijuana brownies.

At one point, Daisy and Brody have a conversation. Daisy asks him if he feels alienated from everybody because his job is, basically, telling people they can’t do things; she all but calls Brody out as a pig. He proceeds to act boorishly, which does in fact alienate Brody from everyone at the party. And his crappy behavior gives Ellen what she needs to justify allowing herself to meet Hooper for lunch out of town the next day, where they’ll be able to get it on without tongues wagging. Benchley provides Ellen with an almost ritualistic dressing and perfuming of her lady parts, as fascinating in its way as any of the fishing info which Quint will lay down. By the way, a thing funny thing Gore Vidal noticed as a recurring device in 1973’s best sellers was something he called The Mirror Scene, in which a nubile lass contemplates her voluptuosity before a mirror. And what do you know folks? Benchley has one of his own. 

“There was a full-length mirror in the bedroom, and she stood before it, examining herself. Were the goods good enough?…She stood straight and admired the contours of her breasts.” 

When Brody finally presses Hooper about what he, Hooper, was really doing the afternoon he was schtooping Ellen and Brody had been unable to reach either party, Hooper claims he was banging Daisy. Brody knows this is a lie though, because he’s heard through the grape vine that Daisy’s a lesbian, “She’s not even AC-DC,” Brody is told by a local gossip. “She’s just plain old DC.” Did Ellen know that? Is that why she invited Daisy to the party for Hooper? I hope Benchley meant to imply this. I figured Daisy was destined to become another topless meal for Jaws, but after the party she never reappears. What do we make of her? Is Daisy okay by Benchley’s standards or a Bad Person? He’s not clear. Seems like he’s writing against Amity’s provincial attitudes but also like he’s not quite okay with modern open mindedness either.

This then plays into whatever it is Benchley’s trying to make of his shark other than that it’s just a shark. Let’s go back to the beginning — while Brody was investigating Jaws’ first victim, the skinny dipper, he worried, what if tourists, Amity’s main source of income, were afraid to rent places for the summer because of the death? This even before Mayor Vaughn voices concern. We’re told there had been much anxiety the previous year, because of a black man busily raping local ladies who, when the man was caught, presumably — Benchley isn’t quite clear on this — refused to testify against him. Why? Is it because of the stigma against rape victims generally or because it was viewed as especially awful that the attacker was black? While Benchley never says the victims were white, given the way he characterizes the milieu it seems a safe assumption (Gore Vidal’s unstated subliminality working overtime here). Frankly I’d have forgotten this incidental rapist (mentioned only twice) but for the freaky way Benchley chose to close out the book’s first part. 

Racial aspects of Benchley’s novel?

Brody goes to sleep after another tough day of shark-related horror and the author cuts to an anonymous household where a black man asks his son what sort of story he’d like to hear before going beddy-bye. The kid says he wants to hear about sharks eating people (obviously bad news travels fast on Amity). The father tells his son that this will give him nightmares. The kid insists he’s not afraid; says he’d punch out any shark that tried to eat him. “’No shark is going to try to eat you,’” the father responds. The kid asks, “’Why not? If I go swimming I bet one would. Don’t sharks eat black people?’” The dad shuts this down, suggesting they read Peter Pan instead. With that, part one ends. And that father and son never appear in the book again. And there are no other specifically black characters in the book either. Why? What does it mean? The linking of Jaws to fairytales seems obvious enough, but the child’s question, “Don’t sharks eat black people?” adds a significant socially conscious note which is never followed up on, like so much else in the book. 

Maybe it connects with some editorializing Benchley did earlier, when setting up the attack on the beach, where the child of a lax, recently divorced woman is chomped by Jaws dithering on his raft. Benchley gives us revealing descriptions of his beachers in third person. “These were not Aquarians,” Benchley writes. He means not filthy hippies. “They uttered none of the platitudes of peace and pollution, or justice or revolt. Privilege had been bred into them with genetic certainty.” Like I said, pretty revealing stuff. And a little later: “None of which is to say that they were either stupid or evil. If their IQs could have been tested en masse, they would have shown native ability well within the top ten percent of all mankind. And they had been, were being, educated at schools that provided every discipline, including exposure to minority group sensibilities, revolutionary philosophies, ecological hypotheses, political power tactics, drugs and sex. Intellectually, they knew a great deal. Practically, they knew almost nothing.” 

These affluent country clubbers visiting Amity of a summer, among whom Hooper must be counted, may be eugenically superior creatures, Benchley says, but their insulating privilege has made them self-absorbed, complacent; leaves them open to attack. Therefore, a harsh answer the black father might have given his son is, “No. In this world sharks don’t eat black people, because we can’t afford to let our guard down enough for the sharks to get us. White folks take it for granted they’re invulnerable; we know we’re not.” That’s the liberal interpretation. It recalls Ta Nahesi Coates’ questionable idea in Between You and Me that conditions forced on black people, though horrible and unjust, at least keep them abreast of certain mortal realities while the American Dream indulged by whites is death-denying delusion. 

And this reading fits neatly together with an idea suggested in part two of the book that Jaws is a punishment for Amity’s colonialist capitalist sins. This comes from the woman who runs the post office, Minnie Eldridge (her last name by the way is a homonym of eldritch, meaning strange, unearthly, hideous and ghastly). Stern Miss Eldridge is the keeper of Amity lore. From her we learn that the town was named after a woman convicted of witchcraft; that many eerie happenings occurred there hence, including a fire in 1843 which burned down every building in town but the church. More or less establishing Amity as what Stephen King would call a Bad Place, and those always draw monsters. At one point Brody brings Minnie up to Hooper.  “She says [the shark’s] God’s will, or something like that. We’re being punished for our sins.”

Interestingly, Minnie never said that. Brody’s extrapolated the moral from her history lessons — because that’s what he believes? Hooper shrugs at the idea, saying it’s as good an answer as any. The man of science here casually agrees the shark is maybe God’s emissary sent to right wrongs. Attractive as this reading is though, you can’t quite liberal your way out of Benchley’s subliminal innuendo that Jaws and black crime seem to derive from the same evil forces motoring nature itself; which is bad for the bottom line. Whites, open to attack, like the slavers in Melville’s bizarre novella Benito Cereno, are destined never to know what hit ‘em.

_{Have an essay or think piece on movies, the history of cinema, profiles of film directors or actors, or exploration of a popular movie genre? Contact the Movie Talk column today at Freelineorlando@gmail.com.}

Joseph Aisenberg is an Oklahoma-based writer, film critic and historian. His noted works include the critical film analysis Brian De Palma’s Carrie: Studies in The Horror Film, which was nominated for The Bram Stoker Award, horror’s premier literary award. Aisenberg is also a regular contributor to film magazine Bright Lights Film Journal, has provided commentary tracks for Shout Factory’s 4K/BluRay steelbook special edition of Carrie, and is also the author of numerous other stories and novels. Freeline Media happily welcomes his contributions here.

Check out Joseph Aisenberg’s contributions to Freeline Media:

• Bloody Rabbit Review: A Wily Comic Nightmare
• A Christmas Eve Story Review: A Holiday of Darkness
• Short Fiction: “Motherhood’s End”
• Short Fiction: “Folk Art”
• Short Fiction: “An Old Friend”
• Sontag’s Song Of Herself: Thoughts on Cinema