The movie was never for the faint of heart. The Los Angeles Times chief film critic, Charles Champlin, harpooned it. He was horrified by the severed limbs; “Jaws,” he wrote, “is nightmare time.” As for Spielberg: “Intimacy is not yet his strength.” Of course, Champlin missed the point. Seventies America was high on cocaine and disco and thoroughly disenchanted with almost everything else, which is to say no one was particularly interested in intimacy. It was a paranoid decade, a decade in which shark attacks resonated, as such a thing could stand for any number of demonic threats.

In 1975, the country was reeling from the oil crisis, inflation of 8%, and a battered economy. That year saw two assassination attempts on the president and ended in an act of terrorism as a bomb exploded at New York’s LaGuardia airport, killing 11 — a crime that to this day remains unsolved. America was no longer captain of the ship, master of her fate. The Grammy-winning song of the year was “The Way We Were”.

The tone of the movie is set from the opening scene: sun sinking into the ocean behind a bevy of beach-guitar-strumming, pot-smoking, long-haired college students, blissfully unaware that one of their crowd will soon be destined for dismemberment. There was something satisfying in that realization that the Age of Aquarius was about to get its just deserts. Saigon had fallen and Richard Nixon along with it, suggesting that America, naked and vulnerable, was swimming through dangerous waters in a sexed-up haze, gloriously ignorant of the savage appetites lurking beneath the surface. Of course it’s the Fourth of July. Of course it’s an allegory.

In the face of clear and present carnivorous danger, the ambitious mayor and his well-fed lawyer sidekick spew pure greed. “We need summer dollars,” rumbles Murray Hamilton, who had caught Spielberg’s notice by playing Mr Robinson in The Graduate, in yet another Seventies harbinger of American decline.

Soon, yet another corpse sinks into a blood-stained sea, but these are not the crimson beaches of America’s bravest, sacrificed for world democracy on the sands of Normandy or Iwo Jima, the men Spielberg would glorify in Saving Private Ryan. The shark-chomped bodies of 1975 were the first articulations of what would come to be called American carnage. The cop, the child, the old-salt sonofabitch, the naked hippie doing water ballet — the beast from the deep knows no difference. Not even fancy college kids who had escaped the draft were safe.

Peter Benchley was one of those fancy college kids who dreamed of writing the Great American novel. His grandfather, the journalist and novelist Robert Benchley, had been a stalwart of the Algonquin Round Table of New York’s finest wits, along with Dorothy Parker and Harpo Marx. Yet Peter had found little success in the writing world. He was about to quit when he came across an interview with a Montauk sport fisherman who once hauled in a 3,427-pound Great White.

Jaws was Benchley’s last attempt to make it as a writer — and the resulting novel was smattered with faux-deep social commentary and small-town drama, including a sprinkling of the mafia and a dash or two of adultery, none of which would survive the great sausage-making of what would be heralded as the first Hollywood blockbuster. Benchley’s total advance from Doubleday was a meager $7,500.

While Benchley was laboring over drafts, another drama was unfolding 3,000 miles to the west, where Richard Darryl Zanuck, reeling from the failure of 1967’s Doctor Dolittle, was in the midst of losing his job as president of 20th Century Fox. He was fired by his own father, company founder Darryl F. Zanuck, which may have sparked Richard’s fascination with claustrophobic dramas of men intent on out-manning one another and killing the monstrous father beast. But as is generally the case with nepo babies, Zanuck fils landed on his feet. He became partners with the erstwhile head of his story department, David Brown, and the collaboration promptly blossomed into 1974’s Best Picture, The Sting.

Zanuck and Brown suddenly had some money to invest, which is why before Benchley’s novel ever hit bookstores, they could afford to see if they could develop the book into a screenplay, rustle up a director and a few actors, and make a movie. They spent $175,000 for a book that still didn’t have a title — which, in retrospect, was a bargain. Twenty minutes before the deadline, Benchley finally came up with the word that summed it all up. And just like that, Jaws hit the bestseller list and remained there for the next 44 weeks.

Zanuck was not the only one to have understood that this was the key to the American zeitgeist. The pages also landed on the desk of young Spielberg, who was disappointed to discover another director, Dick Richards, had already got his hands on it. Luckily, Richards made the mistake of repeatedly referring to the shark as “the white whale” in front of Benchley, who, instead of being flattered by the comparison with Melville, became incensed. The macropredator was the whole point — not some humpbacked vacuum cleaner of microscopic krill.

Spielberg got the job. He hired Robert Shaw to play the manliest of men — that is, the most homicidal — as a farcical send-up of the Hemingway man. Richard Dreyfuss became the preppy ichthyologist, and Roy Scheider became the New York cop, a stand-in for the urban everyman, now on notice that being a landlubber didn’t exempt you from the horrors of the deep.

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At the film’s first screening at the Medallion theatre in Dallas, the audience cheered and screamed — and one of them vomited. What followed was a tidal wave of publicity, with Jaws merch of every sort, from trading cards to beach towels. It was a kids’ movie — the bloodiest ever — and the gory opus summarily grossed more than $470 million worldwide (at that point, the top-grossing film of all time), and established its place in Hollywood iconography. Pauline Kael gushed: “The film belongs to the pulpiest sci-fi monster-movie tradition.”

As it turns out, old men and the sea never get old. Fifty years after the closing credits of Jaws, the model of what Kael called the “primal-terror comedy” has endured: shark eats man, shark eats ship, shark gets blown to smithereens. Swap shark for evil alien or mechanical dinosaur. Rinse, repeat. It’s horror. It’s comedy. And what is striking is that after half a century, the two have become one, which is perhaps a reflection on American culture more generally, arching from one hysterical pole to the next.

In October 1975, Spielberg was asked at the San Francisco Film Festival whether he would direct Jaws II. “Making a sequel to anything is just a cheap carny trick,” he responded (don’t mention Jurassic Park). Of course, Spielberg’s opinion hardly mattered. What ensued was a school of fishy spawn: Jaws II, Jaws III, Jaws: The Revenge, Cruel Jaws, Santa Jaws.

Beneath it all lurks the secret of the movie’s extraordinary staying power. It was then, and remains to this day, a metric not only of American fear but of American aggression, a foreshadowing of a future not only of Hollywood big-budget gore-bloated extravaganzas, but of a country declining into numbness that only the most sensational of spectacles could touch. Hollywood was the first to perceive that our taste for apocalypse, once the niche purview of melodrama, had expanded its market.

Half a century later, we don’t know whether to laugh or cry as we swim, if only a little less innocently, into the depths. Because as it turns out, no one cares about old men and the sea. It’s the Great Whites, symbol of American paranoia, predation, and violence, which adorn our whiskey bottles and popcorn buckets. D.H. Lawrence had it right when he commented: “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.”

He didn’t say it was a shark.

Sammy Fabelman lives in suburbia between two poles, real and metaphorical: his artist mother, who makes music, and his scientist father, who makes machines. Both parents are, in their own ways, thwarted and incomplete: his mother cannot have her art — she is a pianist, but gave it up to raise her children — and his father cannot have his family, because he is a workaholic. Sammy learns, as artists do, to create a world he can control.

He can change the world by filming it: change its emphasis; change his place in it. Sammy films, without realising it at first, his mother’s touch on his father’s best friend during a camping trip and learns that she is unfaithful. The insinuation — and this is the most self-aware thing in The Fabelmans — is that cinema is a poisonous medium: eat from the tree of knowledge and be cast out of paradise. But Sammy collapses to its incredible power to transform. The antisemitic bully of his schooldays in Arizona becomes a hero through Sammy’s lens, so much so that even the bully is humiliated by it. Sammy makes him small by making him big and sends him back to the world with his shame.

The shame, though, was Spielberg’s: in making The Fabelmans he is collapsing to the very power that he describes. Why can he not be honest about the scale of his ambivalence? According to his biographer, Joseph McBride, Spielberg was so ashamed of his Judaism he once pretended he did not know his own grandfather. “And suddenly,” Spielberg said, “my grandfather, with the yarmulke, comes out of our house, two houses down, and yells: ‘Shmuel! Shmuel! [Steven’s Hebrew name]. I’m not answering him. I’m pretending I don’t know him. I’m denying that name. My friend is saying, ‘He’s looking your way. Does he mean you?’ They point at me, and I’m saying ‘No, it’s not me’.”

Like all 20th-century American Jews, Spielberg grew up among stories of the Shoah — his parents talked about it constantly, inappropriately. I suspect this unimaginable loss was magnified by the loss of his family’s happiness, which shattered when his mother’s adultery was exposed: apparently by him. He was spoiled, though. “We never said no,” his mother Leah said in an interview. “Steve really did run us. He called the shots.” He describes her too: “We never grew up at home, because she never grew up.”

So, a shattered, gifted child: making himself big where he was once small. His sister Anne wrote the script for Big, in which a 12-year-old boy is given the body of an adult. He is fearful — what else could he be? Spielberg’s films are about anxiety. The truck (Duel) or the shark (Jaws) will kill you. Or the suburbs will: your own home. Suburban children are terrorised in Spielberg’s work. Their alien friend (though Spielberg is both Elliott and E.T.) is threatened; corpses rise from the ground (Poltergeist). He was very afraid as a child: “I used to be afraid of my hand shadow.”

Cinema is a solution to this, and this explains his monomania, and his skill. It is an act of survival. “I had no way to sublimate or channel those fears until I began telling stories to my younger sisters. This removed the fear from my soul and transferred it right into theirs.” Later he found a bigger audience. “One of the best ways to cope with it [fear] is to turn it around and put it out to others. I mean, if you are afraid of the dark, you put the audience in a dark theatre. I had a great fear of the ocean.” After Jaws, we all did. The great white shark was collateral damage.

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An obvious theme develops across his work: this man is preserved in childhood. He “can always trace a movie idea back to my childhood”. The mother is tortured; the father is lost. There are few politics in Spielberg’s films, and there is no sex. The sex scene in Indiana Jones is a man having sex with his mother. “Where,” she asks him during foreplay, “doesn’t it hurt?” Sometimes the child finds the absent father. In the final Indiana Jones film, I thought the grail was his father. Indiana says to Henry: “We never talked…”

And like a child, Spielberg is covetous, often unkind. He bought one of the Rosebud sleds in Citizen Kane, but he wouldn’t help Orson Welles, its creator, get work. Julia Phillips, his producer on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, called him “a writer fucker”. He can be amazingly obtuse, because he has lived his life in Hollywood and because he is always transmitting. He was so confident he would be nominated for the best director Academy Award for Jaws, he invited a news crew to film him watching the nominations. Only four came, including editing: no best director. According to Phillips, he had the editor, who won the Academy Award, kicked off his next film.

He had a public adolescence in 1993, with Schindler’s List: his acknowledgement of his Judaism. “The experience of making Schindler’s List made me reconcile with all of the reasons… I hid from my Jewishness,” he said in a 2017 documentary. “And it made me so proud to be a Jew.” Even so, it is a film about Jews non-Jews can live with, because it is about non-Jews: Oskar Schindler and the commandant Amon Göth.

It was Schindler he identified with, of course, as David Thomson noted: the morally complex showman, the maker of enamel, then souls. “The closest Schindler’s List comes to art may be in aiding Steven Spielberg to back into the upheld coat of his own mysterious, brilliant, actorly nature.” Again, it came from his childhood. He told The Jerusalem Post that the antisemitic school bully “never became my real friend. I was able to stop some of the hatred by, in a way, doing what Schindler did. Which was to charm him and make him a conspirator… Schindler consorted with the enemy, and he got what he wanted.”

He had wanted to film in Auschwitz but was forbidden. I had thought — how could he even ask? — but then I read about him: he is Steven Spielberg. He felt he could. His fake concentration camp outside Krakow is still there. I have seen it. I think he did Jews a real disservice with Schindler’s List, though unconsciously: his Nazis are glamourised while his Jews are a mute and terrorised mass.

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Remember the last scene: the imposition of a redemptive ending, which felt more horrifying than anything that went before? How could he make such a film and then miss the point of it? A film-maker friend saw a rough cut of Schindler’s List: he reported no music, no child in a red coat, and no redemptive ending. He thought it was a masterpiece. But that is Spielberg. He cannot stop editorialising because he does not trust the audience, only himself. “I am the audience,” he said.

The usual complaint about Spielberg is that, a gifted child making cinema for less gifted children, he has turned cinema from the sophisticated art form of the Seventies into an anaesthetic. Pauline Kael said the problem isn’t Spielberg but his acolytes: “It’s not so much what Spielberg has done, but what he has encouraged. Everyone else has imitated his fantasies, and the result is an infantilisation of the culture.”

His response to this is typically hurt: “I think some people would like me to make a movie that explores the dark side and provides no easy answer to make the audience feel better when they return to their cars. If those critics want more pain in my films, they can give me $2 million — that’s all it would take to make a film about pain — and I’ll make that movie.” I like to think that the only thing standing between him and greatness is his self-deception — his insistence on his own affability — but the awful thing is I know he could make it. And I wish he would.

I wonder how much he understands himself: The Fabelmans, despite its beauty, suggests not at all. His wife, the actress Kate Capshaw, who starred in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, once asked him what happened to her career. “He said, ‘You weren’t supposed to have a career. You were supposed to be with me.’” It’s what happened to his mother precisely: it was the source of her anguish. He says so in The Fablemans. But I am not surprised that he forgets this. His films don’t deal with the characters’ relationships with one another. They deal with Spielberg’s relationship with himself. His work looks ever backwards to the glittering, and limiting, landscape of the child.