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The movie Jaws is 50 years old this summer. Its effect on the cinema landscape has been enormous: It launched the career of Steven Spielberg, ushered in the age of the summer blockbuster, and marked the beginning of the end of the gritty “New Hollywood” era.
It is the story of a shark attacking the good people of the fictional island community of Amity, Massachusetts, just as the summer beach season is starting. The protagonist is Police Chief Brody who fled New York with his family and has worked on the island less than a year.
As I shared at the Catholic Film Club podcast, here are seven lessons we can learn from Jaws.
First, Jaws warns: Something out there hates us.
In my cinema class at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, I teach about what each Hollywood genre says about love and justice. The horror genre is frightening because it says we have an unstoppable adversary who has no love, an unfair sense of justice, and no mercy.
That thought scares us because it is true. On screen, that adversary is a clown in a sewer, a vampire in the night, or zombies in the streets. In real life — and in the most frightening movies — it is the devil.
That is what the shark is in Jaws: An unjust adversary who will stop at nothing to kill what we love.
Second, Jaws says: Don’t stray from the right path.
Horror movies are at their most scary when they prick our guilty consciences, echoing the voice inside us that says, “You should be punished for what you did!”
The movie Jaws opens with the silhouetted figure of a skinny-dipping woman leading a drunk companion to the water’s edge before she meets her demise. Does her sin mean she deserves a violent death? No. But our guilty consciences warn us that this is where sin leads.
Third, Jaws reminds us that we are too willing to sacrifice precious things to Mammon.
Besides the shark, the mayor is the biggest antagonist in Jaws — or perhaps mammon, the god of money, is. Amity’s leader refuses to close the beaches, prioritizing the money he will make from the Fourth of July weekend over safety. Which means he literally sacrifices human lives to mammon, proving Jesus’s dictum from the Gospel, “You cannot serve both God and mammon.”
Fourth: In Jaws, family is our greatest motivator.
Halfway through Jaws, Chief Brody changes from prey to predator. After his son is threatened by the shark he has a “Now, it’s personal” moment and decides to go after the shark.
The moment is even more powerful, though, because it happens after a mourning mother in the movie has slapped sense into him, angry that he did nothing when it was her son, not his, in danger.
He learns a lesson at the heart of Christianity: Kingdom virtues are family virtues, and the motivation that we feel to protect our own children is what we should feel toward all children.
Fifth: Jaws says you have to face your fears to overcome them …
Famously, in the movie Jaws, Chief Brody is afraid of the water, and has to overcome that fear in order to fulfill his vocation. Maybe the authors had some kind of Jungian archetype in mind with Chief Brody’s fear, and the real story is that he must face the deepest fears that lurk in his unconscious.
We all have to face our fears to overcome them. It is easy, especially in our day, to escape our deep wounds and root sins with a life of superficial pleasures. But our fears, unexamined and our sins, unconfessed, will only re-emerge to terrorize us for the future.
Sixth: … but, in real life, there are some fears you should never face alone.
If water is “the unconscious” in Jung, it’s something much worse in Scripture: It is the tohu wa bohu — the chaotic watery deep at the beginning of Genesis that later terrorizes both Noah and Jonah. But if Chief Brody is meant to be a hero rushing alone into the tohu wa bohu to overcome the Leviathan, he is making a grave mistake.
St. Augustine says that only the Church can go safely “among the waves of the world, among the beasts, both small and great. Christ on the wood of His cross is the Pilot.”
The fact is, when there is a shark in the water, you should get to safety. Spiritually, we live in shark infested waters, so we had better get in the boat with Jesus.
7. Last: Home isn’t home until you fight for it.
In one small moment in the movie, after Chief Brody has decided that he will go after the shark himself, he tells his wife to take their son home.
“Back to New York?” she asks, assuming he is giving up on their new home.
“No. Home here,” he answers, declaring his intention to fight for their new home.
We need to make the same decision to fight for the place and the people we love. Only those who sacrifice feel at home in the world.
