Jaws

“Summers were bad times for Ellen Brody, for in summer she was tortured by thoughts she didn’t want to think—thoughts of classmates now married to bankers and brokers, summering in Amity and wintering in New York.”

Ellen is “tortured” by the idea of the life she might have led if she was not bound to Brody and Amity. She dislikes what her presence in Amity says about her: That she was not smart or strong enough to survive in the big city. Summers remind her of the diminished ambitions of her small-town life, creating within her the desire to explore the alternative life she could have had.

“The stink of vomit reached Brody almost instantly, and he knew he had lost his struggle.”

Brody cannot maintain control of his body’s natural disgust around a corpse, despite his best efforts. The struggle against the self to maintain control will continue to haunt Brody as he fights against the external, elemental force of the shark and the internal, human paranoia which festers in his mind. The world sickens Brody, and he struggles to keep control of himself in this difficult time.

“Those considerations were the touchiest part of Brody’s job, forcing him constantly to assess the best means of protecting the commonweal without compromising either himself or the law.”

Brody’s life is a series of compromises. He can open the beaches and save the town financially, but doing so will place individuals’ lives at risk. Brody is asked to balance the safety of individuals against the survival of the community. There is no easy solution available to him.

“He felt at once betrayed and betrayer, deceived and deceiver. He was a criminal forced into crime.”

Facing pressure from the community leaders, Brody opened the beaches; he thus feels responsible for the resulting deaths. He wants to feel betrayed by his community, but he's overwhelmed by his conscience. Brody wants to view himself as the victim, but his guilt makes him feel like the perpetrator.

“In his adolescence, Brody had thought of those shirts as badges of wealth and position.”

The brand name shirts are a symbol of the material division between Amity residents and the summer people. When Brody tries to adopt their wealth and privilege for himself, the identity chafes. The shirt is uncomfortable and ill-fitting in a symbolic sense; Brody cannot be disingenuous, and he cannot abandon his Amity roots. His attempt to redefine his identity through commodification fails as he is still fundamentally the same person.

“We'll find one another, all right. But not today.”

Quint and the shark are seemingly destined to confront one another. Like the shark, Quint is a force of nature. He is humanity freed of the shackles of society, given over to the violence and necessity of the sea. While men like Brody and Hooper wrestle with their consciences, Quint waits for his inevitable showdown with his ultimate enemy.

“Experience would make the difference.”

In their first meeting, Brody takes a juvenile pride in assuring himself that he could beat Hooper in a fight. He is so invested in society’s idea of masculinity and toughness that he needs to assure himself that, for all Hooper's intelligence and wealth, this newcomer is still subservient to him in a way. However, “experience” becomes irrelevant in the showdown with the shark. Brody, the man who knows the least about the shark and the ocean, survives while Hooper and Quint both die.

“It was an ‘I'm all right, Jack’ attitude, a social machismo that equated wealth with effeteness, simplicity with goodness, and poverty (up to a point) with honesty.”

Brody has an awareness of the performative nature of his masculinity. Brody understands the hollow nature of the idea. But to abandon this concept now would undermine his own sense of identity.

“No mortal man's going to catch that fish.”

To Minnie Eldridge, the shark is an immortal being rather than a single fish. It is a physical embodiment of evil, rather than a living creature. A single fish can be killed but the ideas that the shark represents—of a vindicated punishment inflicted on the sinful town of Amity—cannot be defeated.

“It was like giving an alcoholic the keys to a distillery.”

Hooper's obsession with sharks is, in his own words, an addiction. Like so many forms of addiction, his love of sharks is self-destructive. Hooper cannot extricate himself from the shark and he cannot abandon it, even when he sees the danger it presents. This addiction will compel him to enter the cage, a decision which results in his death.

“He was depressed, for he saw something ominous in this dinner party.”

Like the Fourth of July weekend in Amity, the dinner party is a celebration, but a brooding menace lurks beneath the surface. For Amity, that menace is the shark. For the dinner party, the menace is Ellen's dissatisfaction with her marriage. Brody, surrounded by ominous news about Amity, recognizes the same sense of palpable dread in both cases. 

“Every time she drew a breath she savored the smells around her. Her eyes jingled with a symphony of tiny house sounds – creaks and rustles and thumps.”

The sensory stalking of the shark and its prey is mirrored in Ellen's extramarital pursuit of Hooper. Like the shark, her senses are heightened, and she can detect the slightest changes. Like the shark, Ellen seems very much in control of the situation. And like the shark, Ellen's actions threaten Brody's world.

“But you're here to do a job, not go galavanting around all those country clubs you used to belong to.”

Brody accuses Hooper of failing to do his duty. There is a sense of dramatic irony here, as the social transgression of failing to help the town is echoed in Hooper's affair with Ellen. Brody's accusation posits Hooper as a disruptive outsider, an accusation that the audience (and Hooper) know to be valid.

“The cat's head had been twisted completely around, and the yellow eyes overlooked its back.”

The murder of the cat illustrates the differences between human-driven and nature-driven violence. The shark kills out of instinct and hunger; it has no conception of morality. The man who kills the cat, however, acts in a deliberately provocative way, with full awareness of the immoral cruelty of his actions. In this way, the humans, rather than the shark, are the real monsters.

“But for a whole lot of things there's just no good or sensible answer.”

For all the science, history, and convention of their society, the characters cannot explain why a shark would suddenly begin to terrorize their small town. Whether the shark attacks are pure chance or the result of some great moral transgression in the town becomes irrelevant, as either proposition has chilling consequences. Either nothing matters, and they are simply victims of a brutal, uncaring world; or they are being purposefully punished for their transgressions and immorality. None of the characters seek an answer to this question.

“You got no other place to go.”

Quint puts morals or obligations aside, reducing the desperation of the townspeople in his demand for money. He explicitly states that this is not because of the danger of the shark but because he knows that he is the only person capable of helping the people of Amity. As such, he demands twice his normal rate. Quint turns the same capitalistic, nihilistic outlook that drives Amity right back around to it.

“I don't like to see things die for people's amusement.”

Hooper claims that he does not like to see anything die for the amusement of others. Though he does not direct the statement at Brody, the police chief cannot help but interpret Hooper's words as an insult. People died because Brody acquiesced to the town leaders' demands to open the beaches for tourists. In a literal sense, the people killed by the shark died in the name of amusement (and the profit derived from these amusements).

“But don't tell Quint he can't catch a few fish to help him make a living.”

Quint operates outside the legal and moral boundaries of society. He does not feel beholden to the rules which govern the lives of others as he does not consider himself to be a part of society. Only a person like Quint, freed from the trappings of society, could stand a chance against something so completely beyond the realm of human comprehension.

“Driving to the dock, Brody had heard on the radio that the pollution in New York City had reached a crisis stage—something about an air inversion.”

The references to environmental destruction represent the theme of nature’s revenge. The humans have poisoned the natural world to such an extent that nature has begun to fight back. The shark, specifically, represents the ancient, unknown depths of nature’s power. Its attacks on Amity, regardless of whether it's driven by some divine force or purpose, function as a form of vindicated retribution.

“That fish is a beauty. It’s the kind of thing that makes you believe in a god.”

Hooper admires the shark as a perfect killing machine while Quint dismisses the shark as an unintelligent animal. These two positions create a binary dichotomy, two completely different ideological interpretations of the shark. Brody is in the middle, torn between each man’s competing views of the shark.

“You're going to die a rich man, Quint.”

Quint claims to be motivated by money but he has nothing that he would spend it on. If Quint made thousands of dollars, he would continue to live the same life because this is all he knows. The money becomes a way to measure the importance of the task, justifying his pursuit of the creature. Ultimately, he disregards money completely, as the hunt itself gives his life purpose.

“The man is dead.”

Quint reduces Hooper's death to an elemental battle of man versus beast. In death, Hooper becomes more of an idea than an individual. This linguistic framing of the battle suggests that Quint views the hunt for the shark as something deeper and more substantive than a simple attempt to kill a fish. The fight against the shark is a battle between man and nature that Quint is determined to win.

“Matt Hooper, the young oceanographer from Woods Hole, was killed as he tried to kill the beast single-handedly.”

The newspaper article is a eulogy not just for Hooper, but for the entire town of Amity. The town cannot possibly face up to the evil that the shark represents, and the entire hunt now seems pointless. The article also fumbles key details. Hooper states that he is not an oceanographer, but an “ichthyologist” (81). Furthermore, he did not die “single-handedly” as he was fighting alongside Quint and Brody. These errors are an example of how the local press is mythologizing the death of Hooper—and, by extension, Amity.