Why JAWS is secretly a western

The themes of JAWS are well known. Fear of the unknown, being out of control, wanting to protect others.

When we examine them, we see that lots of them fit neatly into what is possibly the greatest contribution America has made to the world of cinema: The Western.

At times, it borrows themes from elsewhere but its iconography is wholly American. The landscapes, the language, the clothing and characters are all Made in the USA. And it has left an indelible mark upon the American psyche. The notion of living free and clear of others, of finding a place where you can be yourself, a new frontier that you can put your stamp upon is a powerful beacon. There will be dangers and obstacles to overcome but with grit and determination, you can prevail.

Movies romanticised the West over and over with images of colourful towns where the clanging bell on the locomotive echoed down Main Street. There were saloons with dancing girls, small town sheriffs, cattle barons and even the occasional gunfight - and not not always at High Noon either…

In ‘High Noon’, Gary Cooper’s character Marshall Will Kane is conflicted about what he should do. Should he stay and fight the villain Frank Miller, or should he leave town with his wife and avoid conflict? In the end of course, Kane chooses to do his duty as a lawman and face down the gunslinger and his gang.

Kane is a lawman who seems at times ill-at-ease in his job, the town who refuse to face up to the truth and a deadly killer arriving on the outskirts of town.

The film was enveloped in controversy due to the anti-communist blacklisting going on in Hollywood at the time and friend of Gary Cooper, John Wayne, called the movie “about the most un-American thing I’ve ever seen” even though Cooper won an Oscar for the role and The Duke accepted the golden statuette on Cooper’s behalf.

Wayne saw the movie’s primary themes of uncertainty, hesitancy and an inability for Kane to ignore his wife, seemed to fly in the face of what a man of the west should be.

For Wayne and other conservatives, ‘High Noon’ was a warning. To them it seemed to point to 1950s traditions being pulled apart by progress and new ideas. To them, this was not a good thing at all.

The fear and paranoia are mirrored the early part of the Cold War in which it was shot, where McCarthyism and the search for Reds under the Bed echo the witch hunts depicted in Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’. These references bubble beneath the surface of ‘High Noon’, much the same as Bruce the shark does in the waters off Amity, shining a spotlight on Hollywood’s failure to stand up to the House Un-American Activities Committee. At its core ‘High Noon’ is a film about integrity, duty and morality – it’s a testament to law and order. It is the same with Chief Brody, what should he do? How can he resolve this problem? He’d run from the mean streets of New York to find a quieter life but now finds himself staring into an abyss - one ringed with row upon row of sharp, serrated teeth. In the end he knows he has to fight.

Not all the rebels live on the same side of the political fence, however. Fast forwarding to the late 1960s and another man, eager to rip up the Western rule book, had just ridden into view. His name was Clint.

And that’s Clint, not Quint.

Eastwood had long been part of the sanitised version of the Wild West with his portrayal of Rowdy Yates in Rawhide on TV. It made him a big enough star, but Clint was never one to stay still and decided to broaden his appeal by appearing in spaghetti westerns for Sergio Leone. These mostly Spanish filmed features were sharper, more violent and altogether a lot more rock n roll than some of the staid, traditional cowboy capers made in the US. It cemented Eastwood as the number 1 anti-hero, a guy who should not be messed with and who didn’t waste time debating the whys and wherefores of a situation, he just muttered a few lines and then shot you.

In 1973, Clint was back on home turf, starring and directing in the movie ‘High Plains Drifter’.

His character, The Stranger appears, seemingly from nowhere, on the outskirts of an isolated town called Lago. And so begins a merciless crusade of retribution against its inhabitants. The motivation behind his actions seems to stem from the murder of the town’s sheriff - whipped to death in the street.

Before anyone knows what’s going on he’s got the town under his spell, he’s painted it red and renamed it Hell.

He is an avenging angel, sent to teach these people a proper Old Testament lesson.

The similarities between this 70s western and JAWS are quite stark.

We have a town in each film, with - it needs to be said - some pretty ruthless inhabitants who don’t like being told what to do. A killer arrives on the outskirts, emerging from nowhere and where Clint uses paint to colour the town red, Bruce the shark uses blood. He is cruel to the inhabitants, killing them and tricking them before leaving them to their fate.

Amity might mean friendship, but are the people living there all that friendly? Growing up in a coastal tourist town, I know firsthand the sometimes quite odd relationship locals have with visitors - even when the tourists bring in lots of money!

The town in ‘High Plains Drifter’ is also reluctant to accept outsiders - its definitively not a welcoming place.

So is the shark in JAWS some kind of karmic avenger like Clint’s killer? What are Amity’s sins? Is it because it’s obsessed with making money? Is it because it distrusts non-islanders? Or does it spring from the novel where Mayor Vaughn was tied to the Mob? Or maybe it’s pointing out how humans have claimed the planet as their own and now nature is starting to fight back.

It’s often claimed that Spielberg has over-sentimentalised his movies, filling them with cloying fluff that a filmmaker with a harder edge might eschew. And into the bargain, many think he destroyed cinema all together when he made JAWS and brought about the modern blockbuster.

Personally, I think he did the complete opposite. Spielberg might be a consummate commercial movie maker, he might celebrate the everyday and ordinary but within that seeming mundanity, he manages to unearth the extraordinary - and also tear down traditions.

At the start of JAWS we hear from Harry (of ‘that’s some bad hat’ fame) who scampers after Brody telling him that the local karate kids have been kicking and chopping the tops off his picket fences. What signifies wholesome, traditional 1950s Americana more than white picket fences? To the audience they say ‘stability, neatness, cleanliness’ and they should not be smashed to pieces by some young punk.

And that’s exactly what Spielberg was when he made JAWS. He was 26 years old. The new kid on the Universal lot, determined to shake things up. He refused to make the movie at the studio, he refused to use star names. He wanted to show Hollywood that things were going to change. And this continued throughout his career. He lead and others followed, he was a trailblazer. When he was told he couldn’t make a Bond movie, it didn’t matter. His buddy George had an idea that was ‘better than Bond’ and Indiana Jones was born. When just about every other alien movie was about rampaging beasts from outer space, ‘E.T’ was a story about friendship, family and healing. ‘Saving Private Ryan’ wasn’t just another war movie either, why remake ‘The Longest Day’ when you can do something that’s so much better? The first 20 minutes of his D-Day/Men-on-a-Mission classic set the bar ridiculously high for everyone else. Next time you see a war movie, listen for the bullets zipping over your head, the weird pings and ricocheting of rounds as they skim off metal and men. You’ll see that same chaos and death and it was Spielberg who did it first.

While he might’ve grown up watching John Wayne in westerns and war films, he wasn’t about to continue along that well-worn trail doing the same as everyone else, he’d dismantle the cinematic landscape of America and put it back together to suit his new world. He’d take the best from earlier generations and add in new thinking to make it fresh.

The tropes of the Western as an art form definitely informed the way JAWS ended up but his vision was to meld together tradition and rebellion and then just sell it back to Hollywood. And it worked. He took the wholesome family unit (something that he always yearned for) but instead of having them in a safe environment, he screwed around with the parameters of the plot. He looked to Everyman characters and had them take on enormous odds - just like Will Kane in ‘High Noon’ - and watched as they won out in the final reel. It was a way of changing the dynamic, of messing with a formula that had become tired and boring and ending up with something that a new generation absolutely loved. And it helped that JAWS made the studio an awful lot of money. Once he’d done that, the world knew there was no going back.

The old world was dead, there was a new sheriff in town.

Words by Tim Armitage

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