Jaws (1975)

Jaws remains a masterwork of commercial cinema, though its social consciousness registers at a level best described as subterranean. Spielberg's 1975 thriller operates in a register so divorced from contemporary progressive sensibilities that one struggles to locate even accidental alignment with modern cultural awareness. The film is, quite simply, about a shark. The great white shark does not care about representation matrices, nor does it pause to consider the intersectional implications of its predatory behavior. We are thus spared the burden of analyzing anything resembling social commentary.

The female representation here consists of Lorraine Gary as the police chief's wife, a character whose primary function involves worrying and occasionally appearing in domestic scenes. She is not a person so much as a narrative fixture, a reminder that our protagonist has something to lose other than his professional reputation. This is not progressive casting, nor was it intended to be. The film predates by decades the notion that women might appear in adventure narratives for reasons unrelated to their proximity to male protagonists. The supporting cast is uniformly male, uniformly white, and uniformly focused on the singular objective of killing a fish.

There exists a reading of Jaws as an oblique commentary on masculine anxiety and the erosion of American confidence in the post-Vietnam era, though such readings require considerably more scholarly charity than the film itself earns. What we have instead is a supremely crafted entertainment machine that functions entirely outside the realm of social consciousness. The shark eats people. Men kill the shark. The film ends. To score it highly on contemporary progressive markers would constitute an act of profound misreading, akin to praising a hammer for its sensitivity to color theory.