Jaws Film Influence

Introduction:
Binge watching movies and TV shows on Netflix until 3 o’clock in the morning may be affecting your subconscious more than you think. Film has evolved at a rapid rate since it’s birth in the 1880’s and while primarily film has been used to tell a story, it has affected the values of many people around the world (Wikipedia). Film has become a type of “Visual Anthropology”. This means that an era’s cinema will be able to display different values of a culture, important events and even nods to items that were popular at that time. Even historians are beginning to utilize film as a way to understand the past more easily and film is becoming its own sub-sect of anthropology. (Cinema: A Visual Anthropology/Observational Cinema: Anthropology,

Sometimes, a movie’s influence on people is unintentional, for example Jaws. Prior to the craze of shark movies, much fewer people were afraid of sharks but, because of the exaggerated nature of movies like Jaws, it caused people to think shark attacks are much more common than they actually are (The Effect of Background Music in Shark Documentaries on Viewers' Perceptions of Sharks). Jaws specifically, had such a strong impact on people that it influenced policy reports on shark attacks in Western Australia. (The Jaws Effect: How movie narratives are used to influence policy responses to shark bites in Western Australia) Some people have been able to successfully harness this power in order to influence the values of people watching movies through subliminal message. After interning at the Packard Campus of the Library of Congress under George Willeman and researching the impact of film on values of the viewers, it has become apparent that cinema has been able to have a significant impact on politics, human and civil

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