‘Jaws’ turns 50. It changed pop culture and our perception of sharks

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By Scottie Andrew, CNN

(CNN) — We hardly see the cartilaginous villain of “Jaws” before it tears through a skinny-dipper, a dog, a little boy and an overconfident fisherman.

It takes nearly two hours to finally watch the great white shark leap out of the water to swallow the gruff veteran Quint. Until then, we only really catch its dorsal fin before victims are ripped under the waves as the water around them turns the color of ketchup.

“Jaws” is credited with inventing the summer blockbuster. It inspired decades of creature features and suspenseful flicks. It kickstarted a whole subgenre of shark-centric horror (with diminishing returns). It also inflamed our fear of sharks as man-eating monsters, said Jennifer Martin, an environmental historian who teaches at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

“I’m struggling to think of a parallel example of a film that so powerfully shaped our understanding of another creature,” she said. “They were killing machines. They were not really creatures. They weren’t playing an ecological role.”

Fifty years on, “Jaws” preys on our existing fears of the oceanic unknown. The film even briefly influenced the popularity of shark-killing tournaments after its release, Martin said. But it also enticed marine biologists and researchers to better understand the deranged shark at its center.

Real white sharks are not as large as the demonic fish in “Jaws,” nor do they hunt humans for bloodsport. But they are certainly intimidating, and they do occasionally bite the odd swimmer, sometimes fatally.

“Being bitten by a wild animal, and in particular one that lives in the ocean, was frightening for us already,” said Gregory Skomal, a marine biologist who has spent decades studying white sharks. “That’s really what I think ‘Jaws’ did — it put the fear in our face.”

Who wants to feel like prey?

When “Jaws” premiered to an invigorated public in June 1975, most of the research on sharks focused on preventing shark attacks, Skomal said.

“We knew it was big, it could swim fast and we knew it bit people,” he said. “So those aspects of the film are fairly accurate, just exaggerated.”

White sharks like the toothy menace of “Jaws” already had a reputation for violence by the time the film premiered, Skomal said: There had been recorded attacks on fishermen and scuba divers in Australia and surfers in California.

But sharks didn’t evolve to feed on humans, Skomal said: They’ve existed for at least 400 million years — they predate dinosaurs by several hundred million. Sharks only encountered people in their waters in the last few thousand years, since we started exploring by sea.

Though there’s some disagreement, most shark researchers believe shark attacks are a case of mistaken identity: A shark may confuse a person for prey. They typically take a bite, realize their mistake and move on, Skomal said.

Not so in “Jaws.” The film’s shark dispatches his victims with purpose, munching on some body parts while leaving a head or arm as a warning to any who dare swim in his waters.

“That’s one of the reasons the film is so powerful,” Martin said. “None of us want to look like food.”

How sharks went from ‘garbage eaters’ to ‘man-eaters’

In the decades before “Jaws,” white sharks weren’t considered to be among the ocean’s most fearsome predators.

In the early 20th century, many sharks were thought of as “garbage eaters,” Martin said: Coastal cities dumped their garbage in the ocean, and clever sharks learned to anticipate the barges’ arrival. Sharks, city dwellers thought, were “not very beautiful, not very commercially important,” Martin said. “An animal that’s in an in-between space — sort of a pest, sort of dangerous.”

After some misbegotten attempts to fish sharks commercially, humans started to invade the waters where sharks hung out, and sharks graduated from pest to predator. With the popularization of maritime activities like scuba diving and surfing in the mid-20th century, people were spending more time underwater, which meant they were more likely to bump into a shark, Martin said.

“There were so many more humans in there,” said Gavin Naylor, director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “It was just a matter of time before people got nobbled.”

Previously, shark tales were mostly traded between fishermen who encountered them on the high seas. Now, with more people exploring “shark-infested waters,” run-ins with sharks were getting picked up by local newspapers. A particularly scary documentary, 1971’s “Blue Water, White Death,” which featured a tense confrontation with aggressive white sharks, also helped shape our view of sharks as creatures to be feared, Skomal said — but “Jaws” cemented it.

The glee with which Amity Island’s fishermen hunt would-be killer sharks wasn’t totally fictional, either. Shark fishing tourneys already existed in the US prior to the success of “Jaws,” but the film brought new publicity to the competitions and the sport of hunting “trophy sharks,” Martin said.

“The killing of these animals became sanctioned, approved of, as a result of the film,” Martin said.

Peter Benchley, who wrote the 1974 novel upon which the film was based, expressed some regret that some audiences viewed sharks as man-eating monsters because of “Jaws,” a work of pure, pulpy fiction.

“’Jaws,’ the movie particularly, sparked a spurt of macho madness,” he told southwest Florida’s News-Press in 2005. “People were running around saying, ‘Hey, let’s slaughter sharks.’”

Benchley later spent many years steeped in shark advocacy.

Sharks are just plain cool

Most contemporary audiences left “Jaws” cheering for Chief Brody after he successfully exploded the monstrous shark (and overcame his fear of the open ocean, to boot!). But even scaredy cats couldn’t deny that big old shark was fascinating.

“They are charismatic,” Martin said. “They command our attention through their size, the way their bodies are shaped, their morphology, their behavior. But the big part of it is their ability to turn us into food. We don’t like to be reminded of it, but we are food in an ecosystem.”

Our morbid fascination with white sharks’ ability to kill us drove the success of “Jaws” and, eventually, decades of “Shark Week,” Discovery’s annual TV marathon that always features programs about fatal run-ins with sharks. (Discovery and CNN share a parent company.)

“We’re drawn to things that could potentially hurt us,” Skomal said. “And sharks have that unique history of being an animal, to this day, that can still harm us. The probability is extremely rare, but it’s an animal that’s shrouded in the ocean environment. We’re land animals.”

In the intervening years between the advent of shark fishing tournaments and our present, when dozens of nonprofits exist solely to serve shark conservation efforts, researchers have gotten to know the creatures beyond their enormous teeth.

“The negative perception of sharks at the time — which was tapped into and exacerbated by ‘Jaws’ — I think has definitely changed into fascination, respect, a desire to conserve, a desire to interact with and protect,” Skomal said.

Now that we better understand their role in our underwater ecosystems — at the top of the food chain, they maintain balance by keeping the species below them in check — we can better appreciate white sharks (while maintaining a healthy dose of caution in waters they occupy), Martin said.

Appreciation for sharks is especially important since several sharks species’ populations have been on the decline, largely due to overfishing — sharks are often accidentally caught and killed.

So it’s perfectly wonderful to love sharks and want to protect them, said Naylor — just don’t get too comfortable around them.

“Sharks are becoming the new cuddly whales,” he said. “They’re not. They are predaceous fishes that are efficient. They don’t target people, but in certain conditions when water is murky, they make mistakes.”

Need reminding of the potential dangers sharks can pose? Just watch “Jaws.”

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