This summer marks the 50th anniversary for one of the most influential Hollywood films ever: Jaws. Besides the fact that almost everyone who has watched it forever gets a little chill when they hear John Williams’s frightening soundtrack, Jaws helped invent the modern summer blockbuster. Rather than opening in just a few major cities, the film appeared on hundreds of screens across the United States in 1975.
The release followed one of the most expensive and extensive marketing campaigns for any film at the time. “It lives to kill. A mindless eating machine. It will attack and devour anything. It is as if God created the devil and gave him jaws” says the film’s narrator as viewers see underwater from the shark’s perspective before the camera cuts to a person being tugged underwater to be eaten. Time magazine featured Jaws on its cover right before it came out. The studio bought 30-second spots on prime-time TV for commercials, as well.
Jaws was a sensation. In its first two months, it broke box office records previously set by films like The Exorcist and The Godfather. The film “may be the most cheerfully perverse scare movie ever made, the disasters don’t come on schedule the way they do in most disaster pictures, and your guts never settle down to a timetable,” wrote Pauline Kael in the New Yorker. It was “one hell of a good story, brilliantly told,” proclaimed Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times.
People were scared after seeing the movie. In Santa Monica, California, youngsters were reportedly frightened to dive into the ocean. “When we saw people surfing, we said they must not have seen Jaws,” said one California resident. Shark sightings were up all over the United States. “Any fish in the water now becomes a shark,” noted a Florida lifeguard. The sale of shark darts doubled within weeks of the film’s release, according to a company that sold the product, as did other forms of shark repellant.
Director Steven Spielberg took Peter Benchley’s bestselling book and turned into a terrifying narrative about a small town called Amity Island that is terrorized by a great white shark feeding on innocent swimmers. The cast was great. Though the big shark machine looks clunky and fake 50 years later, there is something still harrowing about the moment the shark appears on screen—even in an age of CGI and cutting-edge special effects. More importantly, Spielberg found a way to frighten viewers without even showing most of the shark in the film’s first hour.
There were several critics who dismissed Jaws as an unwelcome detour from the brilliant work of independent filmmakers from that period, such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Writing for the New York Times, Stephen Farber attributed the film’s success to an unrelenting and unbearable public relations campaign that essentially conditioned viewers to like the film. “The audience that has been pummeled by Universal’s aggressive media blitz is then primed to respond to a scare show that works with the ruthless insistence of a cattle prod. … The giant success of ‘Jaws’ may encourage them to keep aiming for the lowest common denominator,” Farber wrote.
Although the quality of the social commentary in Jaws has frequently been dismissed, it offered a powerful look at 1970s America. Not only did Spielberg capture the zeitgeist of the era, but he also touched on several major issues that continue to shape the country in 2025.
Throughout Jaws, one thing is clear: There is danger lurking just beneath the water. The viewer can’t always see what is underneath the swimmers, but with Williams’s score as a guide, there is no mistaking that the characters on screen should be scared. When the ocean water turns red, those fears are confirmed as something more than just paranoia.
It makes sense that a movie about danger resonated in 1975, after the conclusion of war in Vietnam that had been built by the U.S. government on a mountain of lies and disinformation and in which thousands of Americans had died. In 1971, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a leaked top-secret study into the origins of the war, showed that what U.S. presidents told the public often didn’t match what they were saying behind the scenes. President Richard Nixon had promised to end the war after he was elected in 1968, but instead, he conducted secret military operations in Cambodia. The Watergate scandal, which culminated with Nixon resigning in the middle of his second term in August 1974, revealed the ways in which presidents lied, broke rules, abused power, and acted according to their own self-interest. The shock and trauma generated immense levels of public distrust in government institutions that continue to loom today.
The corruption of public officials that fueled this distrust is captured in the depiction of Mayor Larry Vaughn (played by Murray Hamilton), who refuses to close the beaches despite knowing that a swimmer has been eaten by a shark. Terrified that pushing tourists away on July Fourth weekend would be devasting to the local economy, Vaughn dismisses the warnings and assures the public that everything is fine. “It’s a beautiful day,” Vaughn says to the press, as viewers know this is not the case. The prevalence of distrust is the reason that, during his presidential campaign in 1976, Jimmy Carter promised the electorate they could trust him; in 2024, Donald Trump argued they could trust nothing in Washington—except him.
Jaws also delves into the economic insecurity that gripped the United States by the middle of the 1970s and generated anxieties that have remained central to national politics. During that time, the U.S. economy had ended a period of unprecedented growth following World War II and entered a period marred by the triple shocks of inflation, stagnation, and an oil crisis. Japan and West Germany had rebounded from WWII and were posing major challenges to core industries. Though Vaughn is depicted as an unsympathetic leader putting short-term interest above safety, he is also an elected official struggling to protect constituents who are just trying to get by in difficult times. “I’m only trying to say that Amity is a summer town,” he explains, “We need summer dollars. Now, if the people can’t swim here, they’ll be glad to swim at the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island.” From the opening credits until the grand finale, there is a palpable sense of economic desperation as the town hangs on the edge.
The film does not just capture the feeling of economic desperation, but also the tensions that those kinds of economic challenges created within the United States. One of the key storylines revolves around the hostilities and resentment between Quint (Robert Shaw), a shark hunter and WWII veteran who bootlegs his own booze and lives off the fees of each kill, and Matthew Hooper (Richard Dreyfus), a rich and well-educated marine biologist who is supremely confident in his knowledge, uses sophisticated machinery, and is uncomfortable with Quint’s rough-and-tumble approach to the sea. The fault lines between Quint and Hooper reflect the class divisions that have shaped partisan politics since the 1970s. Most recently, Trump has exploited the anger of rural, working-class Americans toward the educated and wealthier coastal “elites,” who allegedly don’t share the same values. In the end, tensions in the film are mediated by police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), as he and his comrades understand that they need to work together to defeat the threat or they will all die, which culminates in a classic scene where the three men share scars and war stories in the late evening hours. While that kind of bonding seems hard to imagine in real-life 2025, the class friction is very much alive and well.
Then there is the hero of the film. Like in 1975, many Americans in 2025 are searching for someone who can bring them to a better place. The movie’s most dramatic character transformation revolves around Chief Brody, who starts as an unhappy outsider from New York—scared of the water and capitulating to political pressure—into a fearless leader who is finally able to shut down the beaches, learns to embrace the community around him, and finally gathers the courage needed to overcome his own fears and kill the shark. Far from perfect, he is a realistic hero, someone who is flawed and needs to grow, but who ultimately gathers the internal fortitude to do the right thing to save the community.
Jaws touched on many nerves when it hit theaters and continues to do so today. At its core, the movie is a story about a community that faces immense dangers and threats to its way of life, where economic tensions are playing out among colleagues and neighbors, and where most institutions cannot not be trusted to do the right thing. All of this, a legacy of the 1970s, remains integral to American life today.
In 2025, many Americans are searching for their Chief Brody. As they watch democratic institutions be threatened and political tensions reach dangerously toxic levels, they want leaders who can make the waters safe once again. Most don’t expect someone who is perfect, nor do they assume there will be someone who knows exactly what to do. But they yearn for a hero who believes in the right values and will prioritize the long-term safety of the public above short-term interests that often feel more pressing, regardless of the bigger cost.
For any American—Democrat or Republican—who worries about the erosion of democratic institutions and norms, the abuse of presidential power, and the toxic divisiveness born from hyper-partisan warfare, Jaws offers a reminder of the massive struggle required to set the nation back on course. As Chief Brody put it, “we are going to need a bigger boat.”
The post What ‘Jaws’ Teaches Us About America—Fifty Years On appeared first on Foreign Policy.
