Jaws

Matt Hooper is a disruptive force in Amity. In many ways, he embodies everything the people of the town dislike. Hooper is a wealthy young man. He has inherited a large amount of money from his father and, as a young man, he took regular summer vacations in a seaside resort town just like Amity. Furthermore, he is an academic. His intellectual knowledge of the sea stands in stark contrast to the local, earned wisdom of fishermen like Quint. Such local people view Hooper academic credentials as an indicator of his arrogant, pretentious attitude: They have similar knowledge, but they believe Hooper, with his college education, sees himself as superior. Through his very existence, Hooper conflicts with Amity as he represents a form of material success that the town can never hope to achieve.

Despite coming to Amity to help them with the shark, he never wins the town’s approval. No matter how helpful he is, he remains a wealthy outsider who is not to be trusted. This attitude is illustrated through Brody’s immediate dislike of Hooper. While they should be on the same side, Brody’s initial instinct is to assure himself that he could defeat Hooper in a fight.

Hooper’s outsider status makes him an attractive target for Ellen's discontent. In many ways, Ellen is like Hooper. She once dated his older brother, and she shares Hooper's connections to the “summer people”. She, too, feels distant from the people of Amity. While the local people may consider Hooper to be an enemy, Ellen sees him as an ally. Hooper recognizes Ellen's disquiet and doesn’t hesitate to have sex with her. To Hooper, the affair is a way to fight back against the people of Amity. However, he’s immediately affected by the consequences; Hooper struggles to keep quiet, provoking Brody into a brief attack when he makes a veiled reference to the affair. Hooper regains control of his pettiness, however, and commits to finding the shark. He puts his emotions aside and commits to helping the people of Amity even though they seem to hate him.

In the final chapters, Hooper’s outsider status is reconsecrated. He is positioned as the ideological opponent of Quint, the defender of the ecological laws and regulations Quint rejects. Furthermore, Hooper cannot see past the shark as a product of nature. His love and respect for it manifests as a need to film it, and he defends its actions as divorced from morality or other human concerns. Hooper views the destruction and death wrought by the shark as a byproduct of nature, whereas the locals view it as an awful period in their history. Hooper is “addicted” to sharks, and consequently cannot empathize with the townspeople’s suffering. Like all addictions, his love for sharks is self-destructive. The use of the shark cage exemplifies this. Hooper wants to get as close as possible to the shark and he hubristically believes that manmade metal bars will protect him. In his final moments, Hooper is confronted with his mistake. He is bitten in two, killed by a creature that fascinates him in defense of a town that dislikes him, and survived by a police chief who loathes him.

Ellen represents the cultural conflict in Amity. As the daughter of a wealthy family who vacationed in Amity and then moved to the town after her marriage to Brody, she has crossed the cultural divide that defines the town. Rather than fitting into both worlds, however, she feels out of place. For some of the local people, she remains an anomaly. Ellen feels as though she has never truly been accepted as an Amity resident, even though she has lived in the town for many years. This sense of alienation fills Ellen with a yearning to understand what life might have been like if she had not moved to Amity. For all her love for her husband and her children, this great unknown is too tempting for her as she imagines what her life might have been like if she had remained in the social surroundings of her childhood. She may have been wealthier, more ambitious, perhaps even happier. Once this thought takes root in Ellen’s mind, she cannot get rid of it. It grows and metastasizes in her thoughts, threatening to undo her years of happiness and sink her into an all-consuming depression.

When Ellen meets Hooper, she is confronted with a direct view into the world she left behind. She decides to have an affair with Hooper to resolve the tension that festers in her mind. Notably, she is the instigator. Ellen invites Hooper to lunch, she instigates the sexual tension, and she initiates the affair. She is not especially attracted to Hooper, but rather what he represents. Hooper himself is inconsequential: As the little brother of a former boyfriend, he simply embodies the world she might have joined. Brody is irrelevant to the affair for similar reasons. Being with Hooper is Ellen’s opportunity to experience an alternative future in which she did not marry Brody. The affair has little to do with sexual attraction, or her romantic feelings for either man; it is a means of exploring what could have been.

The affair, Vaughan’s departure, and Hooper’s death have a dramatic impact on Ellen. The shark attacks, and everything that occurs as a result, make Ellen realize that her doubts about her past choices are irrelevant in the grand scheme of life in Amity. Her anxiety suddenly seems pointless when her lover is dead, her mayor is abdicating, and her husband is venturing out on a deadly mission to capture a killer shark. The guilt and shame Ellen feels is not just for betraying her husband, but for prioritizing her feelings in a world where so much is at stake. She feels selfish and self-interested, embarrassed that she should feel the need to satisfy her own urges while others are risking their lives and their livelihoods in the name of others. Ellen never tells Brody about the affair, as her shame is totalizing. Brody returns to Ellen as a changed man, but he will arrive home to find Ellen a changed woman.

Quint is an enigmatic figure who is teased early in the novel but who only comes into focus in the final stretches of the battle against the shark. Quint emerges as a parody of the nihilistic capitalism that motivates the people of Amity to open the beaches when they know that a shark is patrolling the waters. The people of Amity are willing to risk lives for the local economy, so Quint turns their demands around. He knows how desperate they are, so he charges double his normal fee to catch the shark, even though the money is inconsequential to him. As Brody observes, he is a man uniquely wedded to his position in life. There is no way to imagine Quint other than a seaworn middle-aged man who chases sharks for a living. Even if the capture of the shark made him rich, his life would not change. Quint thus reflects the greed of the profit-driven townspeople, holding up a mirror to their own vices and flaws while living his life in the same way for different reasons.

Like the shark, Quint is an elemental force. He is devoid of questions of morality and consequence; he only thinks about the hunt and the immediate moment. He loathes Hooper’s academic intelligence and pretentious defense of the laws, as such ideas are in direct opposition to Quint's natural understanding of the world. He knows that there is a shark in the waters, and he believes it is his fate to defeat it. He does not care about the money, and he never really did. For Quint, the true reward is the pursuit. He craves the opportunity to pit himself against nature's greatest challenge. He and the shark function as narrative parallels, inextricably linked: The shark must hunt relentlessly to survive, and in turn, Quint must hunt the shark. Quint and the shark are locked in an elemental battle between opposing forces, and they die locked in this same conflict. They sink down into the ocean together, forever joined in the battle that defined them, returning to the elements which they encapsulated in their fight.