<P> Critics such as Neil Sinyard have described similarities to Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People . Gottlieb himself said he and Spielberg referred to Jaws as "Moby - Dick meets Enemy of the People". The Ibsen work features a doctor who discovers that a seaside town's medicinal hot springs, a major tourist attraction and revenue source, are contaminated . When the doctor attempts to convince the townspeople of the danger, he loses his job and is shunned . This plotline is paralleled in Jaws by Brody's conflict with Mayor Vaughn, who refuses to acknowledge the presence of a shark that may dissuade summer beachgoers from coming to Amity . Brody is vindicated when more shark attacks occur at the crowded beach in broad daylight . Sinyard calls the film a "deft combination of Watergate and Ibsen's play". </P> <P> Jaws has received attention from academic critics . Stephen Heath relates the film's ideological meanings to the then - recent Watergate scandal . He argues that Brody represents the "white male middle class--(there is) not a single black and, very quickly, not a single woman in the film", who restores public order "with an ordinary - guy kind of heroism born of fear - and - decency". Yet Heath moves beyond ideological content analysis to examine Jaws as a signal example of the film as "industrial product" that sells on the basis of "the pleasure of cinema, thus yielding the perpetuation of the industry (which is why part of the meaning of Jaws is to be the most profitable movie)". </P> <P> Andrew Britton contrasts the film to the novel's post-Watergate cynicism, suggesting that its narrative alterations from the book (Hooper's survival, the shark's explosive death) help make it "a communal exorcism, a ceremony for the restoration of ideological confidence ." He suggests that the experience of the film is "inconceivable" without the mass audience's jubilation when the shark is annihilated, signifying the obliteration of evil itself . In his view, Brody serves to demonstrate that "individual action by the one just man is still a viable source for social change". Peter Biskind argues that the film does maintain post-Watergate cynicism concerning politics and politicians insofar as the sole villain beside the shark is the town's venal mayor . Yet he observes that, far from the narrative formulas so often employed by New Hollywood filmmakers of the era--involving Us vs. Them, hip counterculture figures vs. "The Man"--the overarching conflict in Jaws does not pit the heroes against authority figures, but against a menace that targets everyone regardless of socioeconomic position . </P> <P> Whereas Britton states that the film avoids the novel's theme of social class conflicts on Amity Island, Biskind detects class divisions in the screen version and argues for their significance . "Authority must be restored", he writes, "but not by Quint". The seaman's "working class toughness and bourgeois independence is alien and frightening...irrational and out of control". Hooper, meanwhile, is "associated with technology rather than experience, inherited wealth rather than self - made sufficiency"; he is marginalized from the conclusive action, if less terminally than Quint . Britton sees the film more as concerned with the "vulnerability of children and the need to protect and guard them", which in turn helps generate a "pervasive sense of the supreme value of family life: a value clearly related to (ideological) stability and cultural continuity". </P>

How big was the shark in the movie jaws