For at least two decades I’ve believed a rumor that the original novel Jaws by Peter Benchley has a much different ending than the Steven Spielberg movie version, which celebrates its 50th anniversary today, June 20th, 2025. At the end of the movie, Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) fires his rifle at an oxygen tank stuck in the shark’s mouth, causing a messy explosion of shark guts, just as Brody’s boat sinks into open ocean. Meanwhile, in the novel, there is no dramatic climax; instead the shark just sort of swims away. Movie shark is a menacing force, and killing it gives the audience a sense of closure and hope—evil can be overcome. Book shark is simply a representation of of the unpredictability of nature, which is evermore. The reason I use the word “rumor” is because I’ve never read the novel Jaws and I don’t know if any of this is actually true.
If you have read the novel or if you know for sure, one way or the other, don’t tell me—I don’t want to know. I’ve never looked it up because I find the alleged distinction between the two endings a useful analogue for how we deal with the discomfort of ambiguity. Not knowing is the whole point.
We like certainty in our story endings. “And they lived happily ever after” offers comfort. The Jaws movie ending tells us that the sea was calm once again, while the novel is more cautious: you never know when it’s safe to go back in the water.
I suspect that many of us say “I’m bored” when what we really mean is “I’m extremely uncomfortable with not knowing what to do next.” Not knowing what to do and boredom often seem like the same thing because both are uncomfortable. Boredom is a restless anxiety resulting from engaging in tedious activity: math homework; doing your taxes; doing someone else’s taxes; dusting each individual strip of your window blinds. On the other hand, the discomfort of not knowing what do to next doesn’t really have a name, so we call it boredom.
Real boredom is a sign that we either don’t understand the value of a task, or we don’t enjoy the task, or both. What we’ve come to call boredom is that same uncertainty that Spielberg found unacceptable in Benchley’s ending. If movie-Jaws concluded with the shark swimming away for no reason, we wouldn’t be celebrating it fifty years later, and we wouldn’t have E.T. or Indiana Jones or Jurassic Park (watch this space for more on JP in a few short weeks) or Schindler’s List and so on.
And would the world be so bad after all?
Maybe, if not for Jaws—widely considered to be the first summer blockbuster (people waited in lines that were literally several blocks long1)—if not for Jaws we wouldn’t be so triggered by ambiguity.
Isn’t wonder what we want from our greatest stories?
I love Jaws, and I’m sure plenty of ink is being spilled on it today. One unique reason I love it is because it shares a birthday with my wife (she’s much younger than the movie). Happy birthday, Laura! Here’s to another year of exploring the wonder of life.
There were half as many theater screens 50 years ago,
I was 13 years old when Jaws premiered and I saw it with my father in a 3-plex movie theatre in Santa Rosa CA. Scared me so much I swam in our community pool with my eyes wide open (when I even ventured into the water at all). Reminds me of my dad, trying to keep connecting with his four kids after a divorce, the scent of Hawaiian Tropics cocoa butter tanning oil, short shorts, tube socks. Childhood.
There's a lot of recent sightings of great whites off the cape. The newscasts use the Jaws theme when covering these stories.
Not knowing what to do/what comes next is anxiety, to me.
I an old enough to have been a teen encountering the filming of Jaws that summer. Cool shark was moored in the harbor each night.
Happy Birthday Laura!