The year 2020 marks the 45th anniversary of a film that had a multiple impact on Hollywood cinema: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). The film’s marketing strategy – an unprecedented massive media coverage and intensive advertising – and the saturation-booking distribution – the film opened in more than 400 US theatres – made it the model for and progenitor of today’s blockbusters. Jaws is said to be one, if not the pivotal film that ushered in the New Hollywood, a re-organisation of the American film industry characterised by the adoption/normalisation of the narrative and stylistic innovations of the auteur-driven American New Wave of the late 1960s/early 1970s under novel horizontally-integrated marketing strategies. John Williams’s score had an essential role in making the film a memorable item in American cinema, as well as a historic landmark.
The music to Jaws, first of all, undertook the protagonist’s role that the chronically-defective animatronic shark puppet had been failing to fulfil. For the first half of the film, contrary to the original plans, the shark could not be shown for such technical reasons, but the music succeeded in making the monster’s off-screen presence powerfully felt nevertheless, to the point that the music became itself a central character in the film. Stylistically, the musical choices – largely attributable to the composer’s own intuitions – took a radical turn from the musical style that had dominated in Hollywood since the mid-1960s: in more than a decade, the film was the first mainstream film with a contemporary setting that did not include any interpolated song or pop scoring. Contrary to the 1960s trend of combining each film designed to be a box-office it with a tie-in song in order to enable a synergistic cross-promotion and a safer double stream of box-office/record-market revenues, Jaws featured an entirely symphonic score. Even in the Fourth of July montage sequence that would have been the perfect place to advertise some ‘surf music’ song, we find instead a Baroque-like symphonic pastiche. The score not only employed a symphonic orchestra, but Williams also wrote the music utilising such classical film-music devices as leitmotifs, swashbuckling fanfares, and even Mickey-Mousing – the shark is scored with a leitmotivic menacing motto but also with the notorious ostinato, which is a dramaturgically-ingenious extended use of Mickey-Mousing.
Jaws presents interesting parallelisms with King Kong (1933): as Max Steiner in that classical film managed to make the Kong puppet believable through his music and at the same time demonstrated the narrative power of non-diegetic scoring, so Williams with the score to Jaws gave substance to the mostly non-visible shark and revived the classical Hollywood music style, launching what I have called a ‘neoclassical’ style. If the neoclassical style fully flourished with Star Wars (1977), which was the manifest and resounding reaffirmation of symphonic scoring and the zenith of film-music neoclassicism, it was Jaws that prepared the soil and sowed the necessary seed for that flourishing.
2020.
Music Seminar Series at Dublin City University, School of Theology, Philosophy, and Music, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, 3 November 2020