well now i'm thinking about the cultural impact of jaws and how glad i am that i was taught to interact with it differently.
like, to me, jaws isn't "sharks are malicious man-eaters!!". it's "sharks are wild animals and need to be respected. if *you* fuck around and disrespect them, you will find out. but that's on you, not them."
and there is text backing that up! (this is gonna be specifically pulling from the movie, as that's what i'm more familiar with off the top of my head and was the far more influential work. no one's read the book. and that's fine- the movie's better anyway)
in the scene where hooper, the first character we meet who knows anything about sharks, looks at what was found of christie's body, he says something along the lines of "sharks are perfect machines. all they do is eat, sleep, and make baby sharks".
when he and brody cut open the tiger shark, he emphasizes how they'll eat absolutely anything as he pulls out license plates and other trash. in both scenes, there's not even the slightest implication that there's any thought into what they're eating. they aren't malicious. they don't seek out people to eat.
when he first gets to amity, his suggestion is to close the beach. it's not an enemy that needs to be killed, it's an indiscriminate predator. cut off the food supply, and it'll leave. the shark doesn't specifically want to be hanging around and eating people.
it's not until the mayor puts profits over people refuses to do that that that things escalate. it's human greed and disrespect that cause further loss of life. and that's backed up when mrs. kintner confronts the mayor, specifically saying that her son died because the mayor refused to close the beach. she didn't blame the shark. she blamed the mayor, and that's framed as a justified response.
even quint, with his beyond traumatic experience surviving the uss indianapolis, doesn't attribute malice. his description is haunting as it doubles down on hooper's earlier description of them as mindless. they have dead eyes. like a doll's eyes. those men didn't die because they were human and the sharks liked that, they died because they were horribly unlucky and easy prey.
yes, there were still things the movie did to undercut that, like michael in the boat, bc it is still a thriller, but the vast majority of the "sharks are man-hunters" was all from uninformed hysteria. the people who have dedicated their lives to sharks, in their own ways, were like "that's not how they work."
there's also how brody fits into all of this as a stand-in for the audience (for better and worse), but this is already so long, i'll just wrap it up.
the movie is very clear in its message of "if they had closed the beaches, the shark would not have stuck around for the sake of hunting people. it would have moved on in search of other prey. because it is a carnivore and that is what they do."
it is (mostly) not the fault of the film that that's not what people at large took away from it.
thank you for coming to my ted talk that literally no one asked for
titsay
baratheonpilled
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
