This weekend is Memorial Day weekend, the official kickoff to the summer "Blockbuster" movie season. Its hard to believe that 1975 saw the birth of this phenomenon, with the ultimate summer smash JAWS. What better way to celebrate the start of summer than with some ruminations about this definitive moment in popular culture...
The JAWS phenomenon kicked off after the massive success of Peter Benchley's novel, and it was still riding high on the bestsellers list when the film (already notorious for an extremely difficult, and budget-busting, shoot) opened on June 20, 1975... Lines stretched around city blocks for weeks, as this extremely well-marketed film ingrained itself in our collective consciousness, and came to define Event Cinema. By tapping into our primal fears of the unknown, coupled with well-defined and masterfully played characters that we could all identify with, JAWS managed to both thrill and terrify, and still make us chuckle here and there. With a grizzled old sea-salt with a vendetta, a book-smart marine biologist who finds himself out of his league, and a hero who hated the water joining forces to topple the ultimate boogeyman, JAWS resonated with its global audience, and managed to transcend its genre and become a modern classic.
Abetted by John Williams' classic score, Steven Spielberg's breakout film becomes a swashbuckler as well as a monster movie, with action sequences that rival (and surpass) much of what followed in its wake. It is Hitchcockian in its approach to terror, in that what is implied actually scares more than what is shown onscreen, and the shark doesn't make its debut onscreen until well into the film (a not-exactly-bargained-for benefit of the near-impossibility of working with the laboriously constructed mechanical shark...).
Though it spawned 3 sequels (the serviceable JAWS 2, and the wretched JAWS 3D and JAWS: THE REVENGE), nothing before or since has surpassed the original in sheer terror. Naysayers (and revisionist thinkers) blame this film for the shameless commercialization of the film industry, for placing boffo box-office biz before all else, and for the breakdown of American cinema's artistic aspirations. JAWS lit the fuse, perhaps, but the fact that this ultimate underdog (It barely managed to complete production) went on to become the first film to crack the coveted -but-never-quite-reached $100 Million mark only adds to its cache. And it has gone on to define Summer Cinema, both financially and thematically.
And it defined my life in 1975. But that's another essay...
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