Jaws: Fear and Loathing on the Fourth of July

50 years since its release, this horror classic is one of cinema's best portraits of America

“This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable.”

Hunter S. Thompson, 1972

The Fourth of July, with its parades and fireworks, is one of the most inherently cinematic of American holidays. There’s no shortage of films set against the backdrop of America’s birthday, from Independence Day to I Know What You Did Last Summer, but none of them capture the essence of America quite like the original summer blockbuster, Jaws.

With 2025 marking the 50th anniversary of the film’s release, this is the perfect time to plunge back into this horror classic and see what lurks beneath the surface.

Subsequent shark movies have sometimes relied on plot devices like deep sea research bases or even sharknados to get their characters within the vicinity of killer sharks, but Jaws is remarkably honest about why people keep ending up on the menu.

They won’t stay out of the water.

Regardless of the danger, they just can’t resist the siren call of warm waters and sand between their toes.

Like in every good monster movie (real sharks are animals, but this one is definitely a monster), Jaws takes a moment to paint a lurid picture of just how fearsome this beast is. In a desperate bid to get the beaches of Amity Island closed while a man-eating shark is on the prowl, the movie’s resident shark expert Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) bombards the town’s mayor with Great White factoids — its scientific name, the size of its teeth, its predilection for gobbling up swimmers. This impassioned info-dump glances off the dense skull of Mayor Larry Vaughn. Instead of quivering in terror, the mayor glares at Hooper, annoyed but unmoved as he hears facts that conflict with his chosen reality.

The resort town’s economy runs on summer visitors, and Vaughn isn’t going to scare business away during the lucrative Fourth of July weekend. He keeps the beaches open despite strong evidence that a Great White has claimed the waters around Amity Island as its feeding grounds.

As the audience, we’re squarely in Hooper’s corner when he declares, “I’m not going to waste my time arguing with a man who’s lining up to be a hot lunch.”

A side note on the Mayor of Jaws

It’s a testament to actor Murray Hamilton’s talent that he made Vaughn into a memorably loathsome antagonist, considering he shares a movie with one of cinema’s most iconic creatures.

Watching The Graduate for the first time, I jabbed my finger at the screen when Hamilton made an appearance, declaring, “It’s the Mayor of Jaws!”

He was a talented character actor, but to me he’ll always be the Mayor of Jaws.

In most films, Vaughn would’ve been shark bait. I’m not going to admonish other movies for sacrificing their craven side-villains for the audience’s amusement (I happen to adore Joe Dante’s giddily gory Piranha, after all), but Jaws gives Vaughn a more suitable fate. He’s forced to live with the consequences of his negligence. By the time Brody strong-arms him into hiring a shark hunter to kill the Great White, Vaughn is a broken man, struggling to string together a coherent sentence in his defense.

At least, until the vastly inferior sequel. Much has been made of the fact that Vaughn is still Amity’s mayor in Jaws 2, presumably having won re-election despite the shark fiasco. In an era when Watergate was still a recent memory, audiences may have found the idea of a politician skating past a massive scandal implausible, but this plot point feels right at home in the 2020s. Of course people would vote for Vaughn again. After all, as he babbles, he was only acting in the town’s best interests.

Anyway, that’s enough about the Jaws sequels. I once saw a store selling a DVD 4-pack of all the Jaws movies next to a standalone copy of the original for the same price, and that adequately sums up their value.

Anyway…

Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), the police chief of Amity, is the only person who shares Hooper’s concerns. A recent transplant to the island (and a confirmed landlubber), Brody is struggling to adjust to his new home. Just before one of the iconic shark attack scenes, we see him sulking on the sand as other beachgoers frolic in the waves . The so-called Amity islanders flaunt their sun-kissed skin, while Brody stays covered up under a dark T-shirt. Even off-duty, he remains on task, scanning the waves for the telltale sign of a dorsal fin as various locals hassle him with inane requests and attempts to make conversation. Like a gunslinger in an Old Hollywood western, he’s clearly out of place around the people who look to him for protection.

Despite all their differences, Hooper and Brody immediately bond over the only thing they have in common: they’re both completely isolated in a sea of beach town yokels and greedy capitalists. In the end, the task of killing the Great White falls to this pair and their unlikely ally, the salty old misanthrope Quint (Robert Shaw). They aren’t the only ones that set out to slay the shark — nearly every numbskull with a boat gives it a try — but they’re the only ones who seem to know what they’re doing. All the others succeed in doing is dredging up an innocent tiger shark.

When Hooper identifies the species of the shark, a fisherman shows his ignorance in what remains one of the funniest line readings in film history:

Jaws is a movie about people who are surrounded by idiots. Nevertheless, they’re willing to put their lives on the line to ensure those idiots aren’t eaten by a shark.

Exasperating as the denizens of Amity Island are, the movie never prompts us to root for their demise. The shark’s victims are generally innocents who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Quint, the film’s tragic anti-hero, is the only character whose death feels like the fitting consequence of their actions. If the shark only had a taste for bad people, perhaps we wouldn’t be so eager to watch it explode at the end, but the movie shows us that the Great White is more likely to munch on a random skinny dipper than a corrupt politician.

The three men at the center of Jaws are all outcasts to varying extents, each an island in his own right. Hooper and Quint are natural enemies — one a wealthy, stuck-up college boy, the other a working man with little respect for the wisdom of so-called experts. Brody generally plays the peacemaker between these two extreme personalities, but even he has his limits, like when a power-tripping Quint smashes the ship’s radio. None of them is permanently right or permanently wrong. Each of them is a fool at times, and sooner or later has to rely on the fools by his side.

There’s a million different facets through which to understand Jaws, but its love-hate relationship with the community of Amity Island feels particularly relevant on the Fourth of July. Jaws doesn’t shy away from depicting American society as greedy, stupid and often self-destructive, but it still expects us to sympathize with the sunburned masses who go swimming in shark-infested waters.

This Independence Day, consider kicking back and enjoying one of the finest horror/adventure films ever made. Gaze at the breathtaking cinematography, laugh at the effortlessly funny dialogue, take in the soundtrack you’ll be humming for days — and remember that your neighbor doesn’t deserve to be chomped in half by a shark.

Probably.