Director: Steven Spielberg
Writers: Peter Benchley, Carl Gottlieb
Actors: Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton
Runtime: 124 mins.
1975
Spielberg was the Trojan Horse through which the studios began to reassert their power.
-Peter Biskind
Scene: a watercraft, floating in the ocean. Despite Brody's warnings, Hooper dons his scuba equipment and dives into the water to investigate an abandoned fishing boat. This vessel without a captain must have been attacked by the great white shark that has been causing trouble in the small island community of Amity. As Hooper sinks beneath the waves and approaches the boat, the audience also has a sinking feeling. Surely this would be the ideal time for the shark to attack? Hooper is totally vulnerable in the water. We mentally berate him for attempting this investigation while the boat's hull comes into view. A large chunk twice as big as a human head is missing. Hooper stares into the blackness for a while, sees nothing... but discovers an enormous tooth lodged at the edge of the hole. He examines this tooth and begins spinning about in the water, looking over both shoulders, making sure nothing unsavory is approaching. We become nervous, but we see nothing. Nothing but a close-up of that black gaping hole, the only place from which the shark surely cannot emerge. We hold the shot for a few moments... and a waterlogged human head bursts into frame, accompanied by a drastic musical sting. Hooper panics and lets the tooth drop into the depths of the ocean.
I've just described one of the most sublime jump scares I have ever encountered. If you haven't seen the movie, I hope That doesn't ruin anything for you, but the truth is even folks who have seen Jaws countless times can't help but jump out of their shoes when they see this part. I describe it so minutely not because I think I can recreate the experience in any meaningful way, but because I wanted to illustrate all of the tiny details that contribute to making this scare work. Everything in this scene is constructed to play our expectations like a fiddle. We know something scary is going to happen in the water. We have a precise series of expectations during the scene, each of which is foiled in turn. We think the shark will show up? It doesn't. We think something will pop out of the hole? It doesn't... yet. The discovery of the tooth puts us off the scent. Hooper's flailing puts us off the scent. The pacing puts us off the scent. Then, finally, much like the cold-blooded titular menace itself, the film pounces on us when we are most vulnerable. This is superb genre filmmaking at its crackling best. This is vintage Spielberg.
