Chapter Five is one of five chapters in Jaws that opens with a description of the weather. The Jaws film shoot was notoriously plagued by changeable weather, which played havoc with the continuity. If like me you are a paid up member of the Cloud Appreciation Society, you can have a lot of fun spotting the way the clouds behind the Orca change from cirrus to cumulus and back to cirrus again within a single scene. But you don't have to be a cloud geek to admire the shot of Quint silhouetted against a buttermilk sky of altocumulus.
Whilst it can only infuriate a filmmaker on location, weather is there for an author to command. It has provided literature with some memorable opening sentences from the sublime to the ridiculous but it can be difficult to write about without descending into a meteorological tangle.
Benchley's occasional weather reports are accurate enough and he knows his clouds (" ...puffy cumulus clouds meandered across the sky beneath a high blanket of cirrus") but, like many an author, he takes descriptions of nature as a cue to wax poetical: "..the cloud cover had begun to disintegrate, like pieces fallen from a jigsaw puzzle. Sunlight streaked though the gaps, stabbing shining patches of blue onto the gray-green surface of the sea."
In the novel there are occasional grey skies, and scattered showers, and fog. Bad weather gives Hooper an excuse to have lunch with Ellen Brody, who on the day of her infidelity sits like a modern day Jane Eyre looking out of a rain splashed window.
In the film the sun always shines, as unreal as the cartoon image beaming down on the girl in the bikini in Amity's public service message. The town won't make summer dollars unless it has summer weather.
