By Alexandria Baker

It wasn’t until recently that I was able to fill in one of the most glaring gaps in my education as a self-described film buff. For all its infamy, I had never watched Spielberg’s seminal film, Jaws. I thought I knew what to expect: a big shark, a little boat, and far too many teeth. I waited eagerly for Roy Scheider as Martin Brody to declare “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” and I relished John Williams’ iconic, dread-inducing score. What I did not expect was the existential thrill that watching the film in 2020 would instill in me.

In the age of COVID-19, amid face masks, cancelled events and a blur of days working from home, there is something both deliriously satisfying and utterly horrifying in watching those beachgoing masses flock to the sea, despite the publicly posted warnings and whispered rumors of a shark in the bay. If I had watched the film prior to 2020 (“the beforetime,” as I’ve come to think of it), I may have merely scoffed at their stupidity and asserted that it was unrealistic, unthinkable, even, that anyone would so flagrantly put themself or others in harm’s way in the name of a day at the beach. And yet. With every non-masked face I encounter in public, every new sound bite that falls from on high declaring the absolute necessity of re-opening businesses, opening schools, getting people back to work, restoring the economy (despite the totally unsolved, uncontrolled pandemic raging beneath our noses) I am left to wonder how Spielberg depicted so accurately humanity’s apparently infallible belief in its own indestructibility.

Of course, Jaws is quintessentially a film about hubris. From the mayor’s insistence on keeping the beach open for the Fourth of July, to Robert Shaw’s grizzled portrayal of Quint the sea captain, to Richard Dreyfuss as the overconfident and inexperienced Hooper, hubris abounds. The one exception to this is police chief Brody—a brooding, introspective man who is anything but. He does not believe in his own indestructibility, and is in fact too preoccupied with his own shortcomings and his desire for the town’s approval to be able to effectively guide the people he is sworn to protect. Leaving aside the rather obvious parallels between Brody’s failures as a police chief and the current ongoing national movement to defund the police (which in the case of Jaws may be justified—what business does a hydrophobic, rookie police chief have trying to wrangle a wayward great white?) Brody’s fear, his paranoia, and his refusal to bow to the town’s authority is ultimately his salvation.

While any freshman film studies major could tell you that the Big Bad in Jaws is really the mayor (read: capitalism), this interpretation takes on a sharper, more painful salience when you’re watching it play out in real time before you. Just as the mayor is cowed by the demands of local businesses to keep the beach open despite the clear and ongoing threat to the population, so too have we watched this scenario play out over and over and over again in the six months since COVID-19 reared its ugly head. And, like Brody, many of us are left trying to scream sanity into a noisy room, ultimately silenced and waiting to be consumed by the capitalistic machinations that we ourselves have built.

Perhaps the most insidious instance of this capitalistic cannibalism is the Fourth of July scene. The beach is open—as the businesses demanded—packed to the gills with tourists and islanders alike. The crowded masses are attempting to enjoy the day, sunbathing and relaxing on their towels while children laugh and play in the distance. However, there is a pervading sense of wrongness about the whole thing. No one says a word about it, none of the onscreen beachgoers seem to acknowledge it, but nobody is in the water. No one wants to be the first to test the water, to offer themself up as proof that there’s nothing to worry about, even as they sit on that claustrophobic beach waiting for someone else to take the plunge. As the day wears on and dread lays like a suffocating blanket over the crowd, the mayor of Amity Island (Murray Hamilton) decides it’s time to break the tension. In what is perhaps his most despicable moment, he nudges the unassuming Mr. Posner (Cyprian R. Dube) to take a dip. Posner is understandably horrified, at first resisting the mayor’s urging and finally relenting—walking into the water like a man heading for the gallows.

And in that moment of uncertain doom, the waves lapping the shore like the hungry tongue of some wild animal (shark) we are all trapped on that beach. We, too, are mere pawns in a larger game at play, and it is a strategic game, one in which a certain amount of loss is deemed “acceptable,” and one in which the simple fact of the game’s existence means the players always lose.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We still need to discuss Brody, and the shark, and the pandemic, and the inevitability of it all.

Brody himself is a study in contradiction. Fluctuating wildly between his alienation from the other islanders, his moral duty to protect them, and his own deep-seated need to be liked, be assimilated, be one of them, he is a man at odds with himself. And in many ways, the pandemic has turned us all into Brody. The cautious among us don our masks religiously, wash our hands until they are raw and red, stash hand sanitizer in every nook and cranny of our homes, hoard toilet paper and food, and stay barricaded inside, for fear that any attempt to live life would end in our inescapable, irrevocable demise. Just as Brody avoids the water, alienating himself from the people around him, so too, does the gripping fear of the pandemic drive us not only to self-isolate from one another, but it necessarily demands that we condemn any and all who do not follow our lead. And despite the fear, suspicion and pettiness that bubbles to the surface, these emotions are well-founded. Brody was right to fear the water—the shark was just beneath the surface, even though it was not visible to those on the shore.

If the mayor is a famished economy demanding to be opened, and the shark is death, doom, despair (of the pandemic, by the pandemic, for the pandemic), then Brody is a solitary mask-wearer at a crowded mall, attempting to do the right thing even while he is forced to contend with the futility of it all. Like so many of us, Brody instinctively knows the right course of action to take. He tries to close the beach, tries to keep his own child out of the water, and yet the inexorable tow of the islanders drags him under. Against the might of the mayor and the town council, he is rendered nearly powerless—only when the human toll of the shark continues to rise, and he reconciles his own culpability in neutralizing the threat does he finally take action.

If Jaws teaches us one thing, it’s that in order to really live, we must be willing to confront our fears head-on. For Brody, it’s not just the fear of the shark—it’s his fear of what others will think of him when he exerts his authority over the town, when he assumes the mantle of leadership over the people of an island on which he is technically a stranger. But as straightforward as this message may seem, in the world of coronavirus, none of the answers are simple. Unlike Brody, we cannot harpoon the virus. We can’t single-handedly set out on a quest to destroy it, and—having confronted the fear within ourselves—return to shore victorious, changed for the better having overcome the monster in the deep. We may search for inspiration elsewhere, in Hooper’s fearless (if reckless) thirst for knowledge and adventure, or in Quint’s grizzled cynicism about the whole thing, but neither of these men are ideal role models for us, either.

Taking Hooper’s approach, we’d likely eschew any and all personal protective equipment and risk our own lives in a brazen bid for knowledge. Maybe we’d learn something, maybe the researchers studying the virus could create a vaccine a little bit faster, but it’s equally as likely we’d only catch the virus and make things worse for those around us. Likewise, Quint’s cynicism borders on the nihilistic, and his fatalistic approach to the shark (“I’ll never put on a life jacket again,”) would see us living on hoarded goods, separated from friends and family, until boredom or ennui got the better of us.

No, in the pandemic we must all find our courage like Brody, and be willing to wade out into the water, even though our shark is invisible. But more than that, we each must assume culpability for the deadliness of the virus. Like Brody drunkenly cutting open the belly of a tiger shark in the dead of night, we can’t turn away from the horrors COVID has inflicted on the world. We cannot simply shrug our shoulders and pretend it’s not our problem, ignoring the pleas of those around us for safety, security, protection, even a shred of humanity. Instead, we have to do what we know is right, even when it scares us, even when it could cause dislike and pettiness to fester in those around us. Our shark can’t be beaten by brute force, that much is a fact. But our shark feeds every time we give into the animalistic survival instincts that tell us to cut our losses and run. Instead of trying to slay a pandemic that we are ultimately powerless against, we need to take our cue from Brody and first slay the fear within ourselves. We must learn that there are no “acceptable losses” in the course of the pandemic—and that no system, even one that used to serve us well, is worth more than a human life. We must stop playing a losing game. And we must remember that we are not swimming alone.