WhyJaws is interesting

Hi!!!! I’m Summer DeWitt and I’m studying the influence of film on public opinion and action.

One of the big movies I talked about before is Jaws, but I want to talk about it even more because I did more research and found some ways this movie has impacted our environment negatively that I found super interesting. 

After the release of the movie there was a large increase in men trying to prove themselves to be “strong and manly” by going fishing for large sharks in the 1980s. There was an enormous amount of very large sharks being taken out of the water and misused leading to fatal decrease in sharks. This ended up leading to an increase in the practice of shark finning which is the practice of slicing the fins off of sharks. This is detrimental because even though slicing the fin off the shark won’t kill the shark, their regeneration is extremely slow so they wouldn’t survive if they ended up back in the ocean without their fins. So ultimately the growth in popularity of the movie Jaws led to the practice of shark finning becoming popular which was detrimental to the shark population.

Because of the movie Jaws, all the news headlines began to make a shift towards headlines that posed sharks as threats, when really the chance of being eaten by a shark was 1 in 3.7 million. There is a better chance of someone dying from a sinkhole on the beach than a shark in the ocean.

Although it was a great movie, Jaws really set in motion an explosion of testosterone in the fishing world and mass amounts shark finning found in the world today.