‘Jaws’: The Monster Movie With Moby Dick Connections Turns 50
It’s 1974, and producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown share a few drinks with author Peter Benchley at New York’s 21 Club.
Benchley is about to hit paydirt and fame with a story about a monster shark that terrorizes a small community on the fictional island of Amity.
His novel is yet to be published. But it caught the eye of Zanuck and Brown, who snapped up the rights to the unpublished novel from Mike Medavoy at ICM before any of their rivals could.
Their gut instinct would lead to the first Summer Blockbuster and the biggest blockbuster film until Star Wars dethroned it in 1977.
Brown and Zanuck needed to use that same instinct to choose the right director. Based on Medavoy’s suggestion, Zanuck and Brown had selected a director. The person in question just needed to convince Benchley that he was the man for the job.
In he strode. But it wasn’t Steven Spielberg. The man standing in front of them and the one hired for the job was Dick Richards, who won the gig based on the success of his 1972 western The Culpepper Cattle Co.
Richards began his pitch, discussing his approach to the film. But soon the trio noticed a recurring problem: Richards kept referring to the shark as a whale!
Zanuck recalled the meeting:
“He says, “Now, this is wonderful to have this small town terrified by this whale.” And I say, “wait a minute, you mean ‘shark’.” And he says, “Oh yes, yes.: And I could see that Benchley, who was working on his fifth drink, had his eyebrow raised.
So, Richards went on to tell more about how he would approach the story, and again he said, “Then when the whale attacks the boat…” and I shouted, “Shark! Shark!’”
After the meeting, Zanuck told Medavoy that Richards wasn’t right for the job. Both Zanuck and Benchley agreed that understanding the difference between shark and whale was an important point to get right, if you were to make a movie about one.
By now, this Dick Richards anecdote is legendary in Hollywood lore.
We’ll never know why, specifically, Richards referred to the shark as a whale. One can assume he knew the difference: one is a fish and one is a mammal. Richards might have been confused with another famous story which actually inspired Benchley to write Jaws.
That story, of course, is Hermann Melville’s Moby Dick.
Benchley and Steven Spielberg both acknowledged that Melville’s classic novel was a touchstone for Jaws–both the novel and the movie.
On deeper comparison, the parallels are numerous, both thematically and in specific details.
In numerous interviews, Benchley noted how Melville’s exploration of man versus nature and obsession resonated with his own story. We see this explored through the characters. The small-town community and its cast of characters mirrors the crew of the whaling ship, the Pequod.
Both stories follow a similar arc: initial encounters with the creature, mounting evidence of danger, with more and more of the creature revealed throughout the story. Then, a hunting party is mounted and a final confrontation with beast where obsession leads to destruction.
The white whale of Moby Dick and the white shark of Jaws possess extraordinary size compared to their real-life counterparts, emphasising the odds they’re against, and the futility of man against nature.
Captain Ahab drives his men to destruction. Like grizzled fisherman Quint in Jaws, Ahab is driven by past trauma. His previous encounter with the white whale resulted in a severed leg replaced by an ivory pegleg. Fueled by vengeance, Ahab will stop at nothing to kill Moby Dick.
Quint, similarly, survived the real-life sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in World War Two. Thousands of sailors went into the sea; hundreds were eaten by sharks. But Quint survived and has his own wounds to show. And when he encounters the great white shark, the aquatic beast arouses obsession in him. He takes his crew–Sheriff Martin Brody and oceanographer Matt Hooper–on a journey that sinks his boat and almost kills them.
Quint is a clear analogue to Ahab. And like the Pequod’s captain, Quint is killed by the beast he pursues.
Quint, however, is not the primary character in Jaws.
Sheriff Brody is.
Like the novel, the film is not just about a shark terrorizing a small community. Both Benchley and Spielberg use the story to explore the relationships between the residents of the community. To a greater degree than Spielberg, Benchley uses the shark attacks to explore local politicians’ greed over people’s safety, government and business interests against public welfare, and how fear and economic pressure shape collective decision-making.
The trio of Quint, Brody, and Hooper represent different class dynamics. The working-class Quint, the middle-class Brody, and the wealthy Hooper represent different class perspectives.
Benchley borrowed Melville’s technique of using the sea creature as both literal antagonist and symbolic force. The shark, like Moby Dick, represents nature’s indifference to human concerns, the limits of human control. It’s relentless. But not unstoppable, as Benchley gives the story resolution when Brody kills the shark.
Benchley is less successful in his exploration of man versus nature than Melville. But his expertise came in his descriptions of the shark and its brutal attacks, which did influence Spielberg visualization of similar scenes in the movie after the animatronic shark broke down.
Still, Jaws functions almost as a modern retelling of Moby Dick, updating the whaling ship setting to a 1970s beach community. But his novel is Melville-lite. Ultimately, it’s a great adventure story, but more in the vein of Jack London’s Call of the Wild than Moby Dick.
