Fifty Years of Jaws

By Safina Center Writer-in-Residence Paul Greenberg

Five decades after five famous fictional attacks were filmed, it’s time to name the real victims.

Great White Shark. ©Carl Safina

Pop quiz: Can you name all five human victims in the film Jaws? With a little googling you probably could. Because those five mauling and swallowings, filmed fifty years ago this year, have probably had more influence on the sub class elasmobranchii that contains the 500 species we loosely term as “sharks” than any other humans who ever lived. Can you name the 500 species of shark with whom we share this planet? Probably not. And you probably wouldn’t even bother to look them up.

That namelessness leads to increased victimhood is a truism in any mass killing. So it leads us to an essential question: who is the victim in Jaws, the great white shark or the people it eats? For the last five years I’ve been teaching a course in New York University’s Animal Studies Program called “The People Versus the Sea” and this question ends up being squarely in our sights every time it comes up around mid-semester.

Today, as Jaws approaches the ripe old age of 50 its necessary to point out that the deaths of five fictional people (and a dog—remember Pipit?) pale in comparison to the number of real sharks killed in the period between when twenty-six-year-old Steven Spielberg (yes, twenty-six) directed the film and today. In 2021, the authors of a paper available via the National Oceans and Atmospheric Administration concluded “since 1970, the global abundance of oceanic sharks and rays has declined by 71% due to an 18-fold increase in Relative Fishing Pressure. This depletion elevated global extinction risk to the point where three-quarters of this functionally important assemblage of iconic fishes are now considered threatened with extinction.”

Is it any wonder then that my Gen Z students find so little to empathize with the five random, fictional people who die in the maw of a plastic shark in Jaws? When even Peter Benchley, the author who wrote the book that brought Jaws to Hollywood, issues a mea culpa and pleads the case of the 100 million sharks killed every year, one wonders when Hollywood might finally present the ravages humankind visits upon animals that, for the most part, try to leave us alone.

Sharks as we would recognize them have been in the oceans for more than 350 million years (450 million if you include their immediate evolutionary shark-ish predecessors).

In less than a 700th of that time our species has made quick work of them.

With our victims far too numerous to count (let alone name) I think it’s fair to say that it’s time for a role reversal.