Chapter Three of Jaws contains the first of the novel's three significant meals - the other two being the Brody dinner party, and Ellen's illicit lunch with Hooper in Sag Harbor. Brody himself seems to be an inveterate eater of snacks, rooting around in the refrigerator for leftovers and beer, and is described by his wife as being "chunky." However, he has nothing on Harry Meadows, "an immense man ... and ... the Western world's leading candidate for a huge coronary infarction." He and Brody meet to discuss the shark attack over lunch. Still feeling sensitive from his bout of vomiting in the previous chapter, Brody orders an egg salad sandwich, and a glass of milk to help calm his stomach. Meadows, on the other hand, goes the whole hog:
"...he began to unwrap his own lunch, four separate packages which he opened and spread before himself with the loving care of a jeweler showing off rare gems: a meatball hero, oozing tomato sauce; a plastic carton filled with oily fried potatoes; a dill pickle the size of a small squash; and a quarter of lemon meringue pie. He reached behind his chair and from a small refrigerator withdrew a sixteen-ounce can of beer. 'Delightful,' he said with a smile as he surveyed the feast before him."
Although there are clues a little later in the text, I had no idea what a meatball hero was and imagined it to be some kind of Scotch egg, bleeding ketchup through its pores. Any reference to a product or an item of American cuisine sounded exotic. Even the detail of the beer can size was intriguingly different. Over years of reading popular American fiction (from Stephen King to Elmore Leonard, from Carl Hiaasen to Thomas Harris) I have become familiar with a whole range of US foodstuffs (Twinkies, Hershey bars, key lime pie, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Oreos, buffalo wings, gumbo and grits) without ever trying them. Although I cannot appreciate their full social significance - just as an American reader might be puzzled by a reference to tatties and neeps in an Ian Rankin novel - I can still enjoy the everyday poetry of their names, and imagine what they might taste like.
Meadows manages to scarf down his entire meal in less than a page of text - proving that he is the true meatball hero.
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Welcome To Bedford Falls
At the beginning of the third chapter of Jaws Brody gets confirmation from the coroner Carl Santos that the girl was the victim of a shark attack, and, in a scene duplicated in the movie, types those two words into the Cause of Death space on the police report. In the book Santos is a disembodied voice on the telephone, but in the film, where he goes by the title of 'medical examiner', he is an almost Kubrickian silent presence, an emblem of the unspoken guilt of the cover-up.
The next five pages establish Amity as a parasitic community, feeding off its tourist guests. In the screenplay this is set up with typical economy in a couple of lines of dialogue ("I'm only trying to say that Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars."). Benchley's approach is less subtle ("...there was a common, though tacit, understanding in Amity, born of the need to survive. Everyone was expected to do his bit to make sure that Amity remained a desirable summer community."). The description of the town - which is filtered through Brody's own assessment - dwells on the less public-spirited members of society: dishonest contractors, vandals, drunk drivers, drug dealers and a serial rapist. The threat of the welfare check seems to hang over the community like a Damocles sword and there is an implied caste system based on wealth and colour. This is a far cry from the Amity of the movie, with its white picket fences and school marching band. The dichotomy of the text and celluloid images suggests the nightmare/reality versions of Pottersville/Bedford Falls in It's A Wonderful Life, and the disturbing opening montage of Blue Velvet.
In its need to assert control in order to maintain an illusion of harmony, Amity is not unlike that other 1975 movie community of Stepford. Chief Brody is himself implicated in the social engineering, letting well-to-do DUIs off with a warning and being complicit in the suppression of details about a series of rapes. As the novel's main protagonist and its nominal hero, he has feet of clay, and they are planted on shifting moral ground.
Although Brody is determined to take a stand and "press for full disclosure", his reasoning has a streak of callousness to it ("Still, Brody thought, one death in mid-June, before the crowds come, would probably be quickly forgotten."), and the arguments he presents to himself in his own interior monologue are those of the gambler ("The fish might well have disappeared already ... the odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high.") Like the rest of Amity's year-round citizens, he is thinking of summer dollars.
The next five pages establish Amity as a parasitic community, feeding off its tourist guests. In the screenplay this is set up with typical economy in a couple of lines of dialogue ("I'm only trying to say that Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars."). Benchley's approach is less subtle ("...there was a common, though tacit, understanding in Amity, born of the need to survive. Everyone was expected to do his bit to make sure that Amity remained a desirable summer community."). The description of the town - which is filtered through Brody's own assessment - dwells on the less public-spirited members of society: dishonest contractors, vandals, drunk drivers, drug dealers and a serial rapist. The threat of the welfare check seems to hang over the community like a Damocles sword and there is an implied caste system based on wealth and colour. This is a far cry from the Amity of the movie, with its white picket fences and school marching band. The dichotomy of the text and celluloid images suggests the nightmare/reality versions of Pottersville/Bedford Falls in It's A Wonderful Life, and the disturbing opening montage of Blue Velvet.
In its need to assert control in order to maintain an illusion of harmony, Amity is not unlike that other 1975 movie community of Stepford. Chief Brody is himself implicated in the social engineering, letting well-to-do DUIs off with a warning and being complicit in the suppression of details about a series of rapes. As the novel's main protagonist and its nominal hero, he has feet of clay, and they are planted on shifting moral ground.
Although Brody is determined to take a stand and "press for full disclosure", his reasoning has a streak of callousness to it ("Still, Brody thought, one death in mid-June, before the crowds come, would probably be quickly forgotten."), and the arguments he presents to himself in his own interior monologue are those of the gambler ("The fish might well have disappeared already ... the odds might be good, but the stakes were prohibitively high.") Like the rest of Amity's year-round citizens, he is thinking of summer dollars.
Monday, March 7, 2011
I'm Talking About Ethics
Chapter Three of Jaws lays the groundwork for the story's main conflict between capitalism and altruism. The latter is an ethical doctrine that says individuals have a moral obligation to help others even at the cost of their own self-interest. Capitalism is driven by the imperative to generate wealth and operates within a framework that by necessity - in Marxist terms - subjugates the proletariat for the good of the bourgeoisie.
Superficially, these two opposing ideologies are represented by the characters of two of Amity's public servants: the chief of police and the mayor. In fact, both men are driven by self-interest. Brody's desire to close the beaches comes not from a true sense of altruism but from a sense of duty ("Suppose - just suppose - we don't say a word, and somebody else gets hit by that fish. What then? My ass is in a sling. I'm supposed to protect people around here, and if I can't protect them from something, the least I can do is warn them that there is a danger.") Larry Vaughn professes to be speaking for the community at large ("The Fourth of July isn't far off, and that's the make-or-break weekend. We'd be cutting our own throats."), but when challenged admits to a personal interest ("I'm under a lot of pressure from my partners.")
Brody's capitulation is secured when Vaughn threatens to remove him from his job. Vaughn weights his argument with specious reasoning, perversely suggesting that the right thing to do is to keep the beaches open ("...if you won't do what's right, we'll put someone in your job who will."). Brody's decision is really a pragmatic rather than a moral one.
A lot of critics have noted the parallels between Jaws and Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People. In Ibsen's play Thomas Stockman, the doctor of a health spa on the south coast of Norway, discovers that the waters which provide the town's main source of income are contaminated. When he tries to make the information public, everyone turns against him. In Act One the town's mayor makes a statement that could well have come out of Larry Vaughn's mouth: "The individual ought undoubtedly to acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community - or, to speak more accurately, to the authorities who have the care of the community's welfare." The play ends on a note of ambiguity with Stockman, now completely ostracised by his fellow citizens, declaring: "The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone."
In Benchley's novel Brody is drained of all physical strength at the end of the book and screams "an ejaculation of hopelessness" as he anticipates his own death. His survival is not earned - as it is in the movie - by an act of heroism, and his solitude - far from being a symbol of moral integrity - is an indication of what awaits him on shore.
The machinations of Amity's local politics and the murky morality that feeds them were, of course, being played out in the national political arena. The Watergate break in took place in 1972 and was in the news all through that year as Benchley was working on his first draft.
Superficially, these two opposing ideologies are represented by the characters of two of Amity's public servants: the chief of police and the mayor. In fact, both men are driven by self-interest. Brody's desire to close the beaches comes not from a true sense of altruism but from a sense of duty ("Suppose - just suppose - we don't say a word, and somebody else gets hit by that fish. What then? My ass is in a sling. I'm supposed to protect people around here, and if I can't protect them from something, the least I can do is warn them that there is a danger.") Larry Vaughn professes to be speaking for the community at large ("The Fourth of July isn't far off, and that's the make-or-break weekend. We'd be cutting our own throats."), but when challenged admits to a personal interest ("I'm under a lot of pressure from my partners.")
Brody's capitulation is secured when Vaughn threatens to remove him from his job. Vaughn weights his argument with specious reasoning, perversely suggesting that the right thing to do is to keep the beaches open ("...if you won't do what's right, we'll put someone in your job who will."). Brody's decision is really a pragmatic rather than a moral one.
A lot of critics have noted the parallels between Jaws and Henrik Ibsen's play An Enemy of the People. In Ibsen's play Thomas Stockman, the doctor of a health spa on the south coast of Norway, discovers that the waters which provide the town's main source of income are contaminated. When he tries to make the information public, everyone turns against him. In Act One the town's mayor makes a statement that could well have come out of Larry Vaughn's mouth: "The individual ought undoubtedly to acquiesce in subordinating himself to the community - or, to speak more accurately, to the authorities who have the care of the community's welfare." The play ends on a note of ambiguity with Stockman, now completely ostracised by his fellow citizens, declaring: "The strongest man in the world is he who stands alone."
In Benchley's novel Brody is drained of all physical strength at the end of the book and screams "an ejaculation of hopelessness" as he anticipates his own death. His survival is not earned - as it is in the movie - by an act of heroism, and his solitude - far from being a symbol of moral integrity - is an indication of what awaits him on shore.
The machinations of Amity's local politics and the murky morality that feeds them were, of course, being played out in the national political arena. The Watergate break in took place in 1972 and was in the news all through that year as Benchley was working on his first draft.
Sunday, March 6, 2011
On The Beach
In the second chapter of Jaws - which ends with the discovery of the remains of the first victim - Benchley inches his narrative forward, but is more interested in building the back-story and attempting to develop 'local colour'. Over fourteen pages we are given a breakdown of Amity's police roster and a complete history of Martin and Ellen Brody's relationship - the former presented through the character of Patrolman Hendricks, the latter detailed by an all-knowing authorial voice.
This approach was - and still is - typical of the popular novel, and when done well - as in the best of Stephen King - can build up an effective interaction between individuals and the community they live in. Benchley does it with a heavy hand, spreading the local colour a little too thickly. Where the screenplay establishes the Brody marriage with a jokey exchange in the bedroom, the novel rakes up the couple's entire past, signposting it along the way with indications of the feeling of dissatisfaction that will eventually point Ellen in the direction of infidelity.
Spielberg went on record as saying that none of the characters in the book were very likeable, and it is difficult to argue otherwise. Jaws the novel is not a 'feel-good' book in the way that Jaws the film is a 'feel-good' movie, and had the filmmakers been more faithful to the book's tone, I think it unlikely that they would have had a blockbuster on their hands. But the mean-spirited nature of the original does capture something of the time, when America was losing a war, and about to lose a President to corruption.
The discovery of the first victim's remains on the beach prompts one of the books most unusual images when Hendricks looks down at the "mass of tattered flesh" that has been washed up in the surf and thinks that "the woman's remaining breast looked as flat as a flower pressed in a memory book".
Hendricks's reaction on discovering the grisly flotsam is to vomit, and this seems a realistic detail. Where the film naturally only implies this, Benchley almost revels in it and ransacks the thesaurus for alternative words and phrases ( "he vomited .... spilled his guts into the sand .... retch ..... he had stopped puking .... his breathing rattled with phlegm .... he felt bile rise in his throat...").
Whether by design or not, Benchley here introduces a vomiting motif that - along with its obverse eating motif - punctuates the narrative. In Chapter 3, when Brody discusses the shark victim over lunch with Harry Meadows, the two motifs come together in one sentence: "Brody was in the midst of swallowing a bite of egg salad sandwich, and he had to force it past a rising gag." In the dinner party scene of Chapter 7 Brody experiences the same sensation: "He had started to chew a piece of meat when another wave of nausea hit him." In Chapter 12, on the second day of the hunt, Hooper's reaction on seeing the shark is described in terms of a guttural response: "What he saw sucked from him a throaty grunt ...".
Just as the shark chews up and spits out its victims, so some of the novel's human characters are subjected to a metaphorical mastication. Larry Vaughn by his mob partners, Martin Brody by the fear of being cuckolded.
This approach was - and still is - typical of the popular novel, and when done well - as in the best of Stephen King - can build up an effective interaction between individuals and the community they live in. Benchley does it with a heavy hand, spreading the local colour a little too thickly. Where the screenplay establishes the Brody marriage with a jokey exchange in the bedroom, the novel rakes up the couple's entire past, signposting it along the way with indications of the feeling of dissatisfaction that will eventually point Ellen in the direction of infidelity.
Spielberg went on record as saying that none of the characters in the book were very likeable, and it is difficult to argue otherwise. Jaws the novel is not a 'feel-good' book in the way that Jaws the film is a 'feel-good' movie, and had the filmmakers been more faithful to the book's tone, I think it unlikely that they would have had a blockbuster on their hands. But the mean-spirited nature of the original does capture something of the time, when America was losing a war, and about to lose a President to corruption.
The discovery of the first victim's remains on the beach prompts one of the books most unusual images when Hendricks looks down at the "mass of tattered flesh" that has been washed up in the surf and thinks that "the woman's remaining breast looked as flat as a flower pressed in a memory book".
Hendricks's reaction on discovering the grisly flotsam is to vomit, and this seems a realistic detail. Where the film naturally only implies this, Benchley almost revels in it and ransacks the thesaurus for alternative words and phrases ( "he vomited .... spilled his guts into the sand .... retch ..... he had stopped puking .... his breathing rattled with phlegm .... he felt bile rise in his throat...").
Whether by design or not, Benchley here introduces a vomiting motif that - along with its obverse eating motif - punctuates the narrative. In Chapter 3, when Brody discusses the shark victim over lunch with Harry Meadows, the two motifs come together in one sentence: "Brody was in the midst of swallowing a bite of egg salad sandwich, and he had to force it past a rising gag." In the dinner party scene of Chapter 7 Brody experiences the same sensation: "He had started to chew a piece of meat when another wave of nausea hit him." In Chapter 12, on the second day of the hunt, Hooper's reaction on seeing the shark is described in terms of a guttural response: "What he saw sucked from him a throaty grunt ...".
Just as the shark chews up and spits out its victims, so some of the novel's human characters are subjected to a metaphorical mastication. Larry Vaughn by his mob partners, Martin Brody by the fear of being cuckolded.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
May Be Too Intense For Younger Children
I first saw Jaws at a matinee screening at an ABC cinema on Tuesday 30th December 1975. One of my younger brothers, who like me had been caught up in the marketing hype, insisted on coming along. I tried to convince my mother that the film would scare him - not so much out of a sense of altruism, but because I preferred seeing films on my own - but she saw through my thinly disguised expressions of concern.
I don't think he was particularly scared or scarred by the film. This might have been down to the fact that, having drunk a jumbo cola, he needed to go to the toilet just as Matt Hooper was getting ready to check out Ben Gardner's boat, and so missed the film's most intense moment when the hapless fisherman's head popped out of the shattered hull. He came back to his seat, puzzled by the fact that I - like the character on screen - seemed to be gasping for breath.
Jaws was given an A certificate in the UK. Before the ratings system was overhauled in the early Eighties, there were four main categories: U, a universal category, was for family films; A was the equivalent of today's PG, and meant that parents may not wish children under the age of 14 to see the film; AA was suitable for those aged 14 and above; and X was suitable only for adults. Like a packet of cigarettes, Jaws carried a health warning on the poster: May Be Too Intense For Younger Children. This legend - which itself was a great marketing ploy - appeared at the bottom of the block of text that listed the production credits in the standard condensed MoviePoster font, and was further heightened by the more aggressive tag line ('The terrifying motion picture from the terrifying No. 1 bestseller.') above the title.
Before James Ferman, Director of the British Board of Film Classification, approved the rating of an A certificate for Jaws, he consulted a psychiatrist, concerned that the film's intensity might give younger children nightmares. "What's so bad about nightmares?" asked the psychiatrist. "It's just kids working through their problems." During Ferman's tenure the number of films that were either cut or banned in the UK fell from 40% to 4%. He gained a reputation for being a liberal and often crossed swords with Mary Whitehouse, Britain's self-appointed guardian of morals, particularly over the rise of the video nasty in the early Eighties. Ferman himself rejected the label and, in an article he wrote for The Independent shortly after he retired, he stated his position. " There is no room for 'libertarians' at the BBFC, since freedom must always be balanced with responsibility. Above all, there is the duty to prevent harm to potential viewers, especially children, as well as harm by such viewers through antisocial influence." Indeed, it was his concern that the images from another Spielberg film might be too disturbing for children that prompted him to demand 24 different cuts before he would grant it an A certificate. The film was Raiders of the Lost Ark.
I don't think he was particularly scared or scarred by the film. This might have been down to the fact that, having drunk a jumbo cola, he needed to go to the toilet just as Matt Hooper was getting ready to check out Ben Gardner's boat, and so missed the film's most intense moment when the hapless fisherman's head popped out of the shattered hull. He came back to his seat, puzzled by the fact that I - like the character on screen - seemed to be gasping for breath.
Jaws was given an A certificate in the UK. Before the ratings system was overhauled in the early Eighties, there were four main categories: U, a universal category, was for family films; A was the equivalent of today's PG, and meant that parents may not wish children under the age of 14 to see the film; AA was suitable for those aged 14 and above; and X was suitable only for adults. Like a packet of cigarettes, Jaws carried a health warning on the poster: May Be Too Intense For Younger Children. This legend - which itself was a great marketing ploy - appeared at the bottom of the block of text that listed the production credits in the standard condensed MoviePoster font, and was further heightened by the more aggressive tag line ('The terrifying motion picture from the terrifying No. 1 bestseller.') above the title.
Before James Ferman, Director of the British Board of Film Classification, approved the rating of an A certificate for Jaws, he consulted a psychiatrist, concerned that the film's intensity might give younger children nightmares. "What's so bad about nightmares?" asked the psychiatrist. "It's just kids working through their problems." During Ferman's tenure the number of films that were either cut or banned in the UK fell from 40% to 4%. He gained a reputation for being a liberal and often crossed swords with Mary Whitehouse, Britain's self-appointed guardian of morals, particularly over the rise of the video nasty in the early Eighties. Ferman himself rejected the label and, in an article he wrote for The Independent shortly after he retired, he stated his position. " There is no room for 'libertarians' at the BBFC, since freedom must always be balanced with responsibility. Above all, there is the duty to prevent harm to potential viewers, especially children, as well as harm by such viewers through antisocial influence." Indeed, it was his concern that the images from another Spielberg film might be too disturbing for children that prompted him to demand 24 different cuts before he would grant it an A certificate. The film was Raiders of the Lost Ark.
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