What Jaws Got Wrong

The Atlantic

26-06-2025

In a cramped, $50-a-month room above a New Jersey furnace-supply company, Peter Benchley set to work on what he once said, half-jokingly, might be 'a Ulysses for the 1970s.' A novel resulted from these efforts, one Benchley considered titling The Edge of Gloom or Infinite Evil before deciding on the less dramatic but more fitting Jaws. Its plot is exquisite in its simplicity. A shark menaces Amity, a fictional, gentrifying East Coast fishing village. Chaos ensues: People are eaten. Working-class residents battle with an upper-class outsider regarding the best way to kill the shark. The fish eventually dies in an orgy of blood. And the political sympathies of the novel are clear—it sides with the townspeople, and against the arrogant, credentialed expert who tries to solve Amity's shark problem.
In June 1975, 50 years ago this month, the movie version of Jaws was released in theaters and became the first-ever summer blockbuster. Though the film retains Benchley's basic storyline—shark eats people; shark dies a bloody death—it turns the book's politics upside down. Benchley wrote the first drafts of the screenplay adaptation, but the script was thoroughly revised by his co-writer, Carl Gottlieb, and the result led the novelist to send an ornery letter to one of the film's producers, detailing his qualms with the film's plot and the characterization of its protagonists. Although Benchley didn't explicitly mention disapproving of how the film handles class, the movie's differences from its source material are hard to miss. In the novel, Benchley portrays Amity as a community trying to maintain its dignity in the face of shark-induced uncertainty and the people who live there as mostly noble, if unpolished. But the film, directed by Steven Spielberg, shows little patience for Amity's fishermen and small-business owners, a perspective that at points seems to devolve into contempt.
The differences in the political orientations of the two works become especially clear when you compare the portrayals of three main characters: Brody (played in the film by Roy Scheider), the top cop trying to save Amity; Quint (a wizened Robert Shaw), the local fisherman paid handsomely to help him; and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), a hotshot shark scientist who—unlike the other two men—is highly educated and independently wealthy.
In the novel, Brody—'strong, simple, kind'—is Amity-born, Amity-bred. The paycheck-to-paycheck Brody family operates on a strict budget, living on coupons and discounted meat. His class anxieties are a through line in the novel, as revealed in his constant conflict with Hooper, who is rapacious and sleazy. The tension between these two men is not just socioeconomic but also educational. 'What do you know about ecology, Brody?' Hooper says at one point. 'I bet all it means to you is someone telling you you can't burn leaves in your back yard.' Hooper is similarly dismissive of Quint, balking when Brody suggests hiring the experienced but terse and anti-environmentalist fisherman to help find the shark. 'You're joking,' he sneers. 'You'd really do business with this guy?'
The film, however, dispenses with these frictions. In the movie, Hooper is far more genial than in the novel, and is largely depicted as in the right. Brody is a recent transplant from New York City, living a seemingly idyllic life in Amity with a home on the water. Although he is not college educated, his primary virtue is that he defers to people who are. And he becomes a foil for Amity's working people, who in the film are largely portrayed as unpleasant or obtuse, or at best well meaning but shortsighted. Quint, charmingly weathered, comes off more favorably than the other townspeople, but his folk wisdom is far less exalted than Hooper's scientific knowledge.
The film features an indelible town-hall scene in which Brody pushes for a beach shutdown, nearly causing the townspeople, worried about losing their livelihood, to riot. The chief's promise to 'bring in some experts' does little to calm the locals, who are apparently immune to reason. In a different scene, a knuckleheaded islander uses his wife's holiday roast as shark bait, nearly killing himself in the process. In yet another one, a crowd of camo-clad and rain-slickered townies pile into dinghies, off on a shark hunt rendered as a bacchanal of idiocy. They overload their boats, slopping chum everywhere and throwing explosives in the water in their bumbling bid to kill the big fish. The ostensible reason for their fervor is the $3,000 bounty on the shark's head, because they, being down on their luck, could use it. Instead of portraying this as the act of financial desperation that it is, the movie makes the working stiffs the butt of its joke.
None of these scenes appears in the book. The film also omits several plotlines from Benchley's novel that humanize Amity's working class, including one where a local teenager gets fired from his job at a tourist spot and decides to sell drugs to make up for his lost wages so he can pay for college. He seems to determine that a brief life of crime is preferable to a long one of clawing in a world where a degree is more and more essential. 'That's quite a choice, isn't it?' the young man tells his date as he considers what to do. 'College or jail.' (Missing, too, from the film: any mention of Amity's Black community, which gets a fairly nuanced portrayal in the book.)
Movies take liberties with their source material all the time. But the differences between these two works matter because they anticipated a fight that has arguably defined American politics since at least 2016, between a technocratic managerialism that champions college education and a nostalgic workerism that aims to defend and restore stable blue-collar employment and tends to resent members of the highly educated class.
Jaws was released just as critics and political theorists were examining the growing impact of degreed experts on the United States' economy and culture. The author Barbara Ehrenreich, who in 1977 coined the term professional-managerial class with her then-husband, observed that whereas professional-class jobs represented an estimated less than 1 percent of American employment before 1930, they came to comprise about a quarter of all workers by the 1970s, a proportion that has swelled in the decades since. If there is a lesson latent in Jaws, it is that the film was too bullish by half about the new credentialed class. Many of the great quagmires of the 21st century—the global War on Terror, the 2008 financial crisis, the opioid epidemic—unfolded in no small part because of mistakes or negligence by highly educated people in positions of power.
Perhaps nowhere is the contrast between book and film more apparent than in the latter's treatment of Jaws 's violent conclusion. In the book, Hooper's faith in his own brilliance and expensive technological devices predestines him to be eaten by the shark. Quint—with rather little help from the police chief—vanquishes the great white but is killed in the process. The image Benchley leaves us with is one of the townie dying for the town, Quint vanishing into the sucking blue, his arms spread like Christ. Only Brody is left alive. And if he acquits himself admirably throughout the ordeal, his reprieve is not a function of his own heroism, but of Quint's. Benchley also considered calling his book The Survivor —and as Brody swims to shore, one gets the sense that in the end, he is more witness than protagonist, a man whose last job is to tell the people of Amity of their fisherman's bravery and the out-of-town college boy's foolishness.
Compare this with the movie's ending. Quint, the film's only poor main character, is also the only main character to die. He tries and fails to kill the shark, in no small part because he underestimates his quarry, and then is swallowed whole. Brody, who blows up the shark by shooting at a scuba tank that has become lodged in its mouth, saves the town. The film winds to a close with the police chief and the biologist, the two out-of-towners, triumphantly swimming to shore as the sun rises on a new Amity, replacing Benchley's original paean to the virtuous American worker with the film's implicit antipopulism.
The film's final message is clear enough. Quint, the dead avatar for the town's fishing-village past, must give way to the urban transplants with their polished middle-class morality and impressive degrees. Progress dictates that the experts, and those who listen to them, win the day. Benchley, however, seems to have sensed the trouble that lay ahead as the country transitioned to quasi-mandatory higher education. His vision is clear in another grisly image that the book furnished us with but that failed to make it to the screen: a dying shark, gutted and thrown back into the sea, its mouth opening and closing as it feeds unwittingly on its own entrails.