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.
