Public policy expert hails 50th anniversary of movie Jaws (even with flaws) for helping sharks

Independent

27-05-2025

When Steven Spielberg's smash hit film Jaws opened in theatres in June 1975, it kindled a worldwide panic about shark bites that led many sharks to die by human hands.
But as the original summer blockbuster nears its 50th anniversary, an expert on the politics of shark attacks has said it also deserves qualified praise for getting more people involved with shark conservation.
Jaws 'provided the justification for, and weakened push-back against, all the anti-shark public policies that followed," acknowledged Chris Pepin-Neff, a public policy lecturer at the University of Sydney, in an article for Scientific American on Monday.
"Yet, at 50 years old, Jaws is also a celebration of sharks, creating a fascination that helped lead to more than two generations of new shark researchers,' he writes.
For nearly 20 years, Pepin-Neff has been studying how politicians in Australia and beyond respond to shark attacks, including how they draw on filmic examples to justify their actions — a phenomenon Pepin-Neff calls the " Jaws Effect.'
They argue that interventions such as shark hunts, anti-shark netting, and baited traps do little to keep swimmers safe and do great harm to marine wildlife, propping up a false belief that the ocean can be governed by human institutions.
"Initially, the movie's biggest impact was to portray shark bites as intentional "attacks" on swimmers," Pepin-Neff wrote. "[This] fictional story of the human-shark relationship ... has been one of the most successful Hollywood narratives in motion picture history.'
The public 'believed this story of intentionality so completely that every shark bite was essentially a murder, and every shark a potential murderer, and the beach was the scene of a crime by a deviant monster against innocent beachgoers,' he notes.
Shark populations have dropped drastically over the past few decades, and the film reportedly inspired a short-term burst of trophy fishing off the coast of the US.
However, it's not clear how much Jaws had to do with the overall decline, because sharks are hunted commercially to make shark fin soup in far greater numbers than are killed for sport – or 'retaliation' or fear.
Either way, Pepin-Neff also notes how many people involved with the making of the film later became strong advocates of shark protection, such as diver and documentarian Valerie Taylor and scientific consultant Leonard Compagno.
Peter Benchley, who wrote the original novel that Spielberg's film is adapted from, spoke out frequently in support of sharks and wrote a book arguing that humans caused them more trouble than the other way around.
'Please, in the name of nature, do not mount a mindless assault on an endangered animal for making an innocent — however tragic — mistake,' he wrote in an open letter in 2000, urging Australians not to kill a shark that had recently killed a human.
'This was not a rogue shark, tantalized by the taste of human flesh and bound now to kill and kill again. Such creatures do not exist, despite what you might have derived from Jaws.'
Spielberg too has said he "truly regrets" the impact Jaws had on sharks, joking that they might be "somehow still mad at [him] for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975.'
"Today, humanity has grown to have a better appreciation for all sharks, even those that swim near the beach," concluded Pepin-Neff. "We owe some of the public sentiment that it's 'safe to go back in the water' to Jaws.