Steven Spielberg's Jaws Analysis

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The iconic scene is engraved in everybody’s minds: a woman goes out for a midnight ocean swim and the ominous music starts. A fin appears, skimming along the surface before it silently disappears beneath the waves. The woman’s expression becomes frightened as something brushes her leg. Then, she disappears. A few seconds later her head bursts through the surface as she lets out a bone chilling shriek, only to be pulled back under the dark water, never to be heard from again. This is the infamous opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s classic 1975 thriller, Jaws. But is this really the true nature of sharks?
The short answer is no. The film transformed sharks into vengeful killing machines, bent on slaughtering anything that entered the water. Before the release of Jaws in the summer of 1975, sharks were viewed in a much different light than they are today. People did not let the thought of sharks stop them from entering the world’s oceans. Part of the reason was that most Americans believed that the dangerous species existed somewhere else. Jaws, however, quickly vanquished this reassuring belief. Contradictory to other horror flicks, the “monster” in Jaws was real, and one that could attack in seemingly ordinary places.
Besides setting the stage for the popularized image of the shark, the …show more content…

In recent years the ocean’s top predator is dancing on the brink of mass extinction mainly due to overfishing, finning practices, and weak or nonexistent regulation policies. While sharks kill only a few people per year, humans kill around 100 million sharks per year. In 2014 the International Union for Conservation of Nature released a report stating that more than 30 percent of the 64 species of sharks and rays are threatened and 24% are near-threatened with extinction. The iconic and feared great white is included in that 30

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