The New Yorker:

Richard Brody
A film critic who has been contributing to the magazine since 1999.

In the summer of 1975, as a newly minted high-school graduate, I went to the movies one night because that’s what you did on a date. We picked “Jaws” because that’s what everyone was going to see. At the time, movies rarely made an impact on me; it wasn’t until a few months later, when I went off to college and was exhorted there by a friend to go see a campus screening of “Breathless,” that the art form instantly became my main passion. “Jaws” may well have been the last movie I saw casually, and that’s how I experienced it—wondering what, other than the effective jump scares, the fuss was all about.

But fuss there was. We went to see it a week or two after it opened, at a nearby Long Island theatre, which was packed, and the audience was predominantly young. I remember “Jaws” as the first movie that had a nearly universal appeal among my peers. This surprised me—it had nothing of rock music or youth culture (it was no “Tommy”), and it was centered on adults, yet it nonetheless felt far more familiar than other Hollywood films did. Only after my conversion to the art of cinema, my immersion in critical discourse, and my viewings of Steven Spielberg’s subsequent films was I able to put my finger on what’s distinctive about his movies: their kinship with television. Though I didn’t have the concepts or the vocabulary to name it at the time, the story and the tone of “Jaws” had reminded me of TV, which I and my whole generation had been watching pretty much constantly since early childhood. That’s what made Spielberg our contemporary.

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