Pulp Fiction

The sea on the second day of the hunt is as calm as the first and Benchley likens the Orca to "a paper cup in a puddle." Less Samuel Taylor Coleridge and more Raymond Chandler, the image is another of the author's  workaday comparisons (as flat as gelatin, like laundry falling from a basket etc). An admirer of Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, Benchley himself had no illusions about the artistic merits of his own work. In his third novel The Island he slyly inserts a moment of self-criticism into the text when one of the characters tosses a paperback he has just read into the ocean, reasoning that any work of popular fiction is only worth reading once.

To while away the hours of boredom on board the Orca, Brody has brought along The Deadly Virgin, "a sex mystery" he has borrowed from his deputy. Hendricks seems to have a thing for books with the word 'deadly' in the title - when he first appears in Chapter Two, he's reading a detective novel called Deadly I'm Yours. Both books are the invention of the author of Jaws, but both titles sound entirely plausible examples of pulp fiction. The name - as Tarantino's film of the same name tells us - comes from the rough, unfinished paper on which the magazines or books were printed. If tossed into the ocean, the books would no doubt quickly transform into 'a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter.' My own paperback copy of The Island got exposed to sea water the summer I read it, and its pages warped and curled.

Although we are given a tantalising glimpse between the pages of Deadly, I'm Yours (heroine Whistling Dixie defending herself from gang rape with a linoleum knife), we learn nothing about the contents of The Deadly Virgin. Brody himself never gets to finish the book - just after he goes below to retrieve his "half-read" copy from the cabin, the shark appears, and shortly thereafter the cage goes in the water. When the Orca sinks in the final chapter, the book becomes flotsam, possibly to be washed up on one of Amity's beaches as an unrecognisable pulpy mass.

Flipper

Determined to catch the shark by hook or by crook, Quint has brought along a "special treat", which he keeps stored in a green plastic garbage can. Invited to take a look, Hooper flips open the lid and sees the unborn corpse of a "tiny bottle-nosed dolphin", mutilated with "a huge shark hook". Just as a character in a melodrama will kick a dog (or do something even worse) to advertise their villainy, anyone maltreating a dolphin in a sea-faring drama is likely to be up to no good.

If sharks have got a consistently bad rap from Hollywood, dolphins have always been portrayed in a positive light, and their image as a faithful companion to man - rather like a marine Lassie - was firmly established with the Sixties TV show Flipper. Dolphin intelligence reached a new level in 1973 with the release of The Day of the Dolphin in which two "talking" dolphins are trained to become political assassins.

Quint's choice of bait and the manner in which he acquired it prompts Hooper to take the moral high ground  ("... these dolphins are in danger of being wiped out, extinguished. And what you're doing speeds up the process."), which sparks a confrontation between the two men. Quint takes a swipe at Hooper's privileged upbringing ("If you had to work for a living ..."), which will find an echo in the movie's dialogue ("I'm talking about working for a living. I'm talking about sharking."). Brody steps in to break up the argument, but Hooper, all riled up, turns on him with a condescending blue collar putdown. Brody snaps back with another line ("I don't need any of your two-bit, rich-kid bullshit.") that - in a transmogrified state - will also find its way into the movie ("I don't need this working class hero crap!"). The seething tensions between the two men finally boil over in the chapter's penultimate paragraph.

Not Like Going Down The Pond

Over a beer Brody quizzes Quint on how to catch a shark and this prompts the fisherman to tell of an earlier encounter with a Great White. Not only does Quint's story serve to establish a precedent for what will happen in later chapters ("Damn thing attacked the boat."), but it allows the author to explain the purpose of the ten hemp-wrapped wooden barrels secured at the Orca's prow. In the novel the barrels do not take on the iconic status they assume in the movie. For the filmmakers, frustrated by the failure of their mechanical effects to work at sea, the kegs were both a shorthand for the shark's presence, and an extension of the Sirkian visual motif that makes yellow one of the picture's touchstone colours.

When Quint recalls the shark's attack on his boat he compares it to being "hit by a freight train" - an image that echoes a phrase from the book's very first chapter ("the great conical head struck her like a locomotive") and prefigures Hooper's description of a megalodon ("a locomotive with a mouth full of butcher knives") in the next. As he tells it, the fisherman remains unfazed by the encounter and reserves a healthy dose of contempt for his customer, who "[screams] bloody murder" in the face of danger and - when the boat is "all tied up safe and sound" at dock - tries to claim the Hemingwayesque glory of the catch with a bribe, which is refused. The story adds another layer to Quint's character, suggesting he lives by some twisted code of honour that cannot be bought.

He goes on to explain to Brody in some detail how he plans to catch Amity's shark:

"If he takes one of the lines, there'll be no way to stop him if he wants to run. But I'll try to turn him towards us - tighten the drag way down and take the risk of tearing loose. He'll probably bend the hook out pretty quick, but we might get him close enough for an iron. And once I've got one iron in him, it's only a matter of time."

The screenplay distills Quint's M.O into a single line of dialogue ("See what I do, chief, is I trick him to the surface, then I jab at him."). In the movie the fisherman uses a Greener harpoon gun to "jab" at the shark, but in the book he hurls each harpoon - Ahab-like - with his arm.

Frenzy

Part Three of Jaws consists of four chapters, one for each day of the shark hunt. In Moby Dick it takes Ahab three days over three chapters to finally wreak his vengeance on the white whale, and when his boat is lowered for the third time, it is into a sea of savage sharks:

" ...... for scarce had he pushed from the ship, when numbers of sharks, seemingly rising from out the dark waters beneath the hull, maliciously snapped at the blades of the oars, every time they dipped in the water; and in this way accompanied the boat with their bites [... and ...] they seemed to follow that one boat without molesting the others."

For Melville and his readers, three is freighted with religous significance. For Benchley the number of days was most likely arrived at for pragmatic reasons. Elements of the plot which required resolution on land (Larry Vaughn's pathetic farewell, Ellen's rather pat recognition of "the richness of her life", Harry Meadows's belated vindication of Chief Brody's actions) meant that the author- unlike the filmmaker- could not keep his characters at sea. In the book the Orca returns to dock each evening: Brody goes home to an increasingly hysterical wife, Quint most likely counts his money ("Cash. Every day. In advance."), and Hooper no doubt eats alone at the the Abelard Arms.     

On the afternoon of the first day Quint eviscerates a hooked blue shark, slitting its belly "from anal fin to just below the jaw". The fish's entrails - red, white and blue, like the colours of the American flag - tumble into the ocean "like laundry falling from a basket." Tossed back into the sea the dying fish snaps at and devours its own innards, and the blooming "cloud of blood" attracts more sharks until - just like the ocean around Ahab's whaleboat - the water is boiling with them:

"Brody couldn't tell how many sharks there were in the explosion of water. Fins crisscrossed on the surface, tails whipped the water. Amid the sounds of splashes came an occasional grunt as fish slammed into fish. Brody looked down at his shirt and saw that it was spattered with water and blood."

The description of this feeding frenzy invites us to make direct parallels with the dog-eat-dog mentality of Amity's parasitic community. As Harry Meadows put it in the previous chapter: "The host animal comes every summer, and Amity feeds on it furiously, pulling every bit of sustenance it can ..."

Brody's stained shirt becomes an emblem of his own culpability- just as  Norman Bates's bloodied hands are an emblem of his suppressed guilt.

Readers who have been paying attention will know that the feeding frenzy is also indicative of something else. Back at the beginning of Chapter Seven Hooper invokes the book's working title when he explains to Brody: "If there was a big white in the neighbourhood, everything else would vanish. That's one of the things divers say about whites. When they're around, there's an awful stillness in the water." The presence of the sharks making a lot of commotion around the Orca means that Mr Whitey is unlikely to make an appearance in this chapter.

Chum

 
Novel and movie come together in a single image at the beginning of the shark hunt: a chum slick drifting away from the stern of the Orca across a languid ocean. In the movie, the scene of the boat's departure from dock fades into a close up of the water dyed red with the blood of fish guts. It's a dramatic image and is later referenced in Quint's Indianapolis speech ("... you hear the terrible high-pitched screaming and the ocean turns red ..."). For those familiar with their Shakespeare, it's also suggestive of some lines of Macbeth's:

'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.'

If the beginning of the third part of the novel has any literary ancestor, it is Coleridge rather than Shakespeare. Benchley's descriptions of a sea "as flat as gelatin [with] no whisper of wind to ripple the surface" and the boat "drifting imperceptibly in the tide" recall lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

'Day after day, day after day,
We stuck, nor breath nor motion;
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean.'

Benchley describes the chum as an "oily slick", which seems more realistic than the movie's pints of corn syrup. In the novel it is Hooper who has the job of keeping the slick going. Brody sits in the fighting chair, baking in the sun and fighting back a feeling of nausea from the "stench of the fish guts". Quint is on the flying bridge and is described through Brody's eyes - much in the same way that Ahab is first seen by Ishmael on the raised quarterdeck of the Pequod.

In the movie, of course, the figures are rearranged: Brody gets the unpleasant task of ladling the chum, Hooper fiddles scientifically with a green box (the purpose of which is never explained), and Quint lounges in the fighting chair, just as he remained seated for his dramatic first appearance in the town hall. Spielberg will later use the geography of the boat (the deck, the bridge, the mast and the pulpit) and spatial relationships to create dynamics between his three protagonists. The requirements of plotting  and the reality of filming at sea will also force him to take liberties with the Orca's fixtures and fittings. Benchley tells us that the fighting chair is "bolted to the deck", but in the movie it vanishes once it has served its purposes in the early rod and line scenes. It's a testament to the filmmaking that this glaringly obvious continuity error is rarely remarked upon.

The Single Most Important Thing

Taking his cue from Aristotle's Poetics, William Goldman - who is perhaps as famous for his musings on the craft of scriptwriting as he is for his own screenplays - said, "The single most important thing contributed by the screenwriter is structure." In the late Seventies writers such as Robert McKee and Syd Field realised that there was more money to be made teaching people how to write screenplays than to be got from writing the scripts themselves. Their pronouncements on the three act structure, plot points, subtext, the hook, action beats and character development have become mantras for Hollywood executives, and their books (Screenplay and Story) are treated as scripture by screenwriting neophytes. So pervasive is the belief in story structure that it has even trickled down to the cinemagoing public via reviews and studio promotion. Listen to any press interview with an actor or actress on a press junket and see how long it is before they use the word 'journey' to describe their character's development.

Although it's not the only way to write a movie script -Stanley Kubrick, for example, preferred an approach that used six to eight non-submersible units - the three act structure remains the dominant force in Hollywood scriptwriting. Conveniently, Benchley's novel is divided into three parts, the final third being devoted to the shark hunt. The book's structure does not completely dovetail with the film, but it's fair to say that Benchley provided the filmmakers with their main action beats.

Jaws had millions of readers on its initial publication, all of whom read it without images of Spielberg's movie interpretation to distract them. For those who come to the book in the wake of the film, the response is usually one of disappointment. Perceived wisdom (if that's what internet forums are) seems to be that Spielberg performed some act of alchemy by transforming the leaden prose into cinematic gold. But, of course, it's not that simple, and, as we sieve through the final seventy three pages, we'll discover plenty of rich nuggets.

On The Side

Chapter Ten ends with a brief coda. There are three similar short passages in the novel, all of them composed mostly of dialogue between peripheral or unnamed characters. The first comes at the end of Chapter Five and is a bedtime conversation between a father and son, who clearly belong to Amity's underclass. The boy asks his father to tell him a story about sharks, but the father worries that it might give him nightmares and opts for Peter Pan instead. The second - at the end of Chapter Seven - is an exchange between a boy and his date. The boy has lost his summer job because of the downturn in the tourist trade and is thinking of making a quick buck by dealing drugs.

The third - which brings Part Two to a conclusion - is a coversation between deli owners Paul Loeffler and his "plump, pretty" wife Rose. Their speech - peppered with interrogative cadences ("They don't have fish in Pennsylvania?") - identifies them as a Jewish couple in Amity's WASPish community. Having sold eighteen pounds of bologna and probably similar quantities of Swiss cheese as sandwich fillings to curious tourists, they decide to close up fifteen minutes early.

These three bite-sized vignettes are served on the side of the main order of the narrative and mix local colour with social commentary. Beyond the worries of the main characters (Brody's fears of emasculation, and Larry Vaughn's stuggles to get out of hock) there are other citizens of Amity who have been affected by the presence of the shark.

Stand By Your Man

Eleanor Vaughn  - the mayor's wife - appears across just two pages of the novel and remains nothing more than a voice at the end of the telephone line. We can picture her in the large Tudor style mansion that her husband's shady business dealings have bought her, sitting by the phone waiting for the police chief to return her call. Within a few sentences we learn that she is painfully shy and quite naive - two elements of her character that have made it very easy for her husband to keep her in the dark. Larry Vaughn has come home, shut himself up in his study and crawled inside a bottle of scotch. Eleanor clearly suspects something is wrong, but like the president's wife after whom she is most likely named, she is prepared to stand by her man. In a parallel scene two chapters later, Larry Vaughn will pay an unexpected visit on Ellen Brody and seek solace from her while raiding the liquor cabinet. So one woman's husband reassures another man's wife and one man's wife reassures another woman's husband - it's a small piece of narrative geometry that shows Benchley did not just throw the novel together.

You All Know Me

There are twenty seven chapters of Moby Dick before Captain Ahab makes an appearance on the quarter-deck. Like James Bond, Ahab's reputation precedes him, and when Ishmael first describes him it is with a mixture of fear and awe:

'He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness.  His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini’s cast Perseus.  Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish.  It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded.'

In the movie Quint's appearance - like Ahab's - is a wonderful coup de theatre. Scratching his nails on a chalkboard, he creates a sound like the "high-pitched screaming" of a shark victim, prefiguring his own fate just as the childlike chalk doodle behind him does. His speech - delivered between bites on a cracker - is a masterpiece of economy, and achieves a sort of poetry through its rhythms ("I'll find him him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten.") and workingman's vernacular.

In the book - even though Benchley follows Melville's example and keeps the character in the background until the end of Chapter Ten - Quint's entrance is a little underwhelming. Brody looks him up in the phone book - where he is listed enigmatically only by his surname - and gives him a call. In choosing the name itself, perhaps Benchley was intending to suggest something of the abrasive nature of the character, or perhaps referencing other hard men with similarly-sounding names such as Flint or Clint. It's unlikely that he was thinking of the character of Peter Quint, the ghost in Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

Strictly speaking, Quint's first appearance comes on page sixty eight, in one of the several random codas with which Benchley ends some of his chapters. There he is described as "a tall, spare man" and - like The Man With No Name - seems to be a man of few words. He makes one prophetic statement about the shark ("We'll find one another, all right. But not today.") and then disappears from the text until page one hundred and ninety five when he picks up the phone. Quint's use of the plural pronoun we implies that fisherman and shark are fated to meet whereas in the film the use of the singular pronoun ("I'll find him....) suggests more the nature of a quest.

Clearly Quint has a reputation that extends beyond Amity. Bill Whitman of The New York Times has heard of him. Whitman returns in Chapter Ten so Harry Meadows can lecture him on the parasitic nature of the town's relationship with its summer visitors and also to cue up some more National Geographic-type speeches from Hooper. Hooper himself has already formed a low opinion of Quint ("You'd really do business with this guy?"), which one assumes must stem from some kind of fore-knowledge about his questionable attitudes towards ocean wildlife.

In the movie Quint's terms of employment are established in two scenes. The principal sum of ten thousand dollars is put on the table at the town hall meeting. The finer details of the contract (a per diem of $200, the apricot brandy, the Iranian caviar and the colour TV) are hammered out with Brody in Quint's boathouse. The chief eagerly agrees to all the captain's demands like a rock star's manager who has been given a list of outrageous riders. Quint's playful needling of Brody and his blue collar resentment of Hooper establish the uneasy triangle of relationships before the three men set out on the hunt.

In the book Brody feels that he is being ripped off ("Come on, man. Why are you holding me up?"). When Quint tells him he needs an "extra pair of hands" on board, Brody volunteers himself for the mission and is stung by the fisherman's derision ("You? Ha!"). Tellingly, Quint says, "I'm gonna need a man with me", and, with his manhood questioned, Brody has no option but to step up. Hooper also signs on for the voyage with an ironically prophetic phrase ("I'll probably live to regret it."). The fish expert has little faith in the fisherman and sneers: "He doesn't even have a mate? What a half-assed operation." Not much of Chapter Ten makes it into the movie, but at least that compound adjective was preserved, albeit in a different context.

Over and Out

 
Way back at the beginning of Chapter Two we are told that Hendricks "had served in Vietnam as a radio man, and [...] was fond of military terminology." So it's no surprise that in Chapter Ten he insists on correct voice procedure when using a walkie-talkie to communicate with Brody. ("Just procedure, Chief. Keeps things clear. Over and out.").

In fact, you don't have to have done any trigger time to know the lingo. Come In, Loud and Clear, Roger, Wilco, Copy That, Say Again, Over and Out are all common currency thanks to their use in countless war movies. There's something distinctly atmospheric about the crackle of a walkie-talkie and the background chatter of official communications. It serves as a background soundscape during the cardboard fin sequence in the film, and Spielberg himself provides the voice of the Amity Point Life Station coastguard who calls the Orca at the first sighting of the shark. The director would go on to use air traffic control communications to brilliant effect ('Do you want to report a UFO? Over.') in an early scene in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and in the same year George Lucas would add frantic radio exchanges ( 'Cut the chatter, Red 2. Accelerate to attack speed.') to amp up the excitement of the space dogfights of Star Wars.

The two-way radio can also be a means of highlighting the distances between people as they try to communicate. No one knew this better than Stanley Kubrick, whose movies are full of strangely disjointed exchanges - some face to face, others via radio waves. In The Shining a radio provides the only link between the snowbound Torrances and the outside world. When Wendy Torrance speaks to a state trooper, she - like Hendricks - uses the correct voice procedure, but mixes it with a folksy idiom more suitable for a neighbourly chat over a picket fence ('Boy, this storm is really something, isn't it? Over.'). It's a typically subtle moment of semiotics that helps to illustrate just how isolated the character is. Kubrick's epic horror film was released in 1980, and in that same year another movie - also destined to build an enormous cult following - gave us a long overdue spoof, which has become the radio voice procedure equivalent of baseball's Who's On First?

In the frantic moments as the shark closes in on young Jim Prescott, both Brody and Hooper abandon their walkie-talkies, and resort to a more primitive means of communicating. Running and screaming.

The TV People

By the Seventies television had become firmly established as the prime news medium of America. National trsgedies and triumphs were broadcast live into the nation's living rooms and everybody 'was getting lost in that hopeless little screen.' Lyndon Johnson was of the opinion that the images of war from Vietnam - known as the first television war - had a profound effect on the way the conflict was perceived at home. When Walter Cronkite called for a U.S withdrawal after the 1968 Tet Offensive, the President said, 'If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country.'

When Hollywood started to make movies about Vietnam towards the end of the Seventies, the film or TV camera crew quickly became a trope of the genre, allowing characters to break 'the fourth wall' and look directly into the camera. In Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola himself appears in a cameo as a filmmaker, shouting directions to combat soldiers ('Don't look at the camera! Keep moving!'). In Full Metal Jacket the camera operator at the open Vietnamese grave is director Stanley Kubrick's daughter Vivian.

In Jaws the TV reporter cameo went to author Peter Benchley, whose broad shoulders and thick-framed glasses made it look as if Clark Kent from The Daily Planet had wandered onto Amity's South Beach. Perfectly cast though he is, it's unlikely that Benchley would have thought to write himself a walk-on part when he was working on the manuscript. In the movie the TV reporter is never named and has only a few seconds of screen time. In the book he introduces himself as "Bob Middleton, Channel Four News", and, like The New York Times journalist Bill Whitman from Chapter Four, he seems preoccupied with his own self-importance ("Wait'll I think of something profound to say.").

The cameraman gets lucky and shoots some dramatic footage of the shark ("a sharp blade of brownish gray that hovered in the water") as Jim Prescott staggers out of the water. Middleton tries to manipulate the moment ("Can we do that again?"), but has to make do with a mess of footage and an uncooperative interviewee in Chief Brody. Lester Kraslow, who has come all the way from Queens to see the shark, is unimpressed. "Didn't look like much to me, just a fin [.....] I bet the whole thing was a put-on for them TV guys."

Kraslow's scepticism was very much of its time. As TV audiences had grown more sophisticated in their understanding of the medium, so suspicions of manipulation had become commonplace. Back in 1957 the British current affairs programme Panorama had been able to fool its viewers with an April 1st broadcast about the Italian spaghetti harvest. But by 1974 television audiences had become jaded and suspicious - nothing, it seemed, was what it seemed. That year Bill Kaysing published We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle and was the first to suggest that the moon landings had been faked. There were even sceptics who started the rumour that the landings had been filmed on a Hollywood soundstage by Stanley Kubrick, an idea which itself was adapted into a movie. Given Kubrick's penchant for multiple takes and extended shooting schedules, this particular conspiracy theory seems more unlikley than most.

Like You're From New York

When Lester Kraslow struggles up the dune of Amity's private beach with his family in tow, he joins that select group of the novel's characters who would never make it into the movie. Like Minnie Eldridge, Daisy Wicker and Morris Cater, he got written out of the story in an early draft. "Grossly overweight ...[dressed in] khakis, a T-shirt, and basketball sneakers", Kraslow speaks with "the unmistakable accent of the Queens Borough New Yorker". This phonological detail would be transferred to Brody in the movie, who is gently chastised by his wife for not being able to master the islanders' broad vowels ('In Amity you say yaad.').

Kraslow drives a Winnebago, is married to a woman with fat wrinkled thighs, has two whiney boys called Benny and Davey, and says "shit" a lot. Vulgar, outspoken and with a large chip on his shoulder, he seems to be modelled on another opinionated resident of Queens, Archie Bunker. Had the character of Kraslow made it on to the screen, it's unlikely that Carroll O'Connor would have been approached to play the part. He had become so firmly associated with his TV creation that no American audience would have accepted him as anyone else. A more likely bit of casting would have been Clifton James, who had just played Sheriff J.W. Pepper (another heavily-accented bigot) in Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun.

You Can Check Out Anytime You Like

When Brody calls Hooper at the beginning of Chapter Ten, he tries to picture his room at the Abelard Arms.  His imagination - like that of Dr Bill Harford - is fuelled by jealousy. However, the picture Brody's suspicious mind creates of his own possible cuckolding is no dream fantasy, but a vision of "a small dark garret, a rumpled bed, stains on the sheets, the smells of rut." This may be an accurate visual representation of the motel room where Ellen and Hooper had sex, but it surely cannot be an accurate picture of Amity's oldest and most prestigious hotel.

The Abelard Arms Inn may not be as recognisable in the popular consciousness as the Overlook Hotel, the Hotel Earle, the Hotel Del Coronado, or even the humble Bates Motel, but we learn quite a bit about this fine establishment over the pages of Benchley's novel. We are told that shark victim Morris Cater was staying there the weekend of the nineteenth and twentieth of June (Chapter 4), and when he got chewed up in the surf perhaps it was Matt Hooper who took his vacant room. We know that meals are included in the price of the room (Chapter 10) and it's unlikely that butterfly lamb or gazpacho are on the menu. We also learn that the inn has been run as a family business for three generations (Chapter 9) and, given that the current owner is "a frail old man" called Ned Thatcher, is soon likely to pass into the hands of a new proprietor. We are told by the night clerk that Hooper is staying in Room 405 and so we can suppose that the Abelard is of a reasonable size.We even know the hotel's telephone number of four descending figures (six-five-four-three) that Ellen Brody has committed to memory.

All this we can glean from the text, but there is one piece of information that is never stated. Was Benchley's choice of name for the hotel just a random selection, or was he attempting some sly symbolism when he named it after the medieval French scholar Peter Abelard? Are we supposed to see some echo of Ellen and Hooper's doomed love affair in the tragic story of Abelard and Heloise?

Only Connect

Any future scholars interested in unravelling the lines that connect the book with the film would do well to make Chapter Ten of Jaws a subject of particular scrutiny. Although the chapter's key scene of a swimmer being snatched from the jaws of death did not make it into the film, it clearly provided the scriptwriters with raw material.

In the movie it is Brody's elder son who ends up in the water with the shark. In the book a teenager goes swimming to win a ten dollar bet and narrowly escapes being eaten. This scene probably also inspired the moment in the film when a fisherman tries to claim the three thousand dollar bounty using a holiday roast and a length of chain and is menaced by what we think is the shark but turns out to be just the tide.

In the book a family drive all the way over from Queens to see the shark. In the movie, Amity is swamped by curiousity seekers with out of state licence plates ("Those aren't my people! They're from all over the place!").

In the book Brody, Hendricks and Hooper make up "the triangle of a watch". The chief patrols the private  beach while his deputy keeps an eye on the public beach and Hooper single-handedly covers the ocean in the Flicka. In the movie there are lifeguards, medics, a whole flotilla of shark-spotters, and a coastguard helicopter buzzing the over-crowded coastline.

The filmmakers could have saved a large chunk of their budget ($64 a head for each extra, for starters) by filming the scene that Benchley had written, but they knew that they had to deliver a visual spectacle of mass-panic that an audience fed on a diet of disaster movies had come to expect.

Make Him An Offer He Can't Refuse

Brody arrives home after the Town Hall meeting to a tearful wife, a traumatised son and a dead cat. Frisky - "a big husky tom" - has been whacked in his own front yard by a mobster, whose trouser leg he probably brushed against just before he had his neck snapped. When Brody lifts the lid off the garbage pail, he sees that the family pet's head "had been twisted completely around, and the yellow eyes overlooked its back". It's a description  that weirdly recalls the image of a possessed Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Brody races over to Vaughn's house - "a large, Tudor-style stone mansion" - and throws the cat's corpse into the mayor's face, and there is a brief reprise of the two men shouting at each other. The chapter ends with a final phrase - "the gnarled bundle of bone and fur" - that manages to be both pathetic and poetic, and seems almost reminiscent of T.S Eliot.

The Mafia, of course, has a well-established system of using dead animals to get its message across. The canary placed in the mouth of an informer is a warning to others not to 'sing'. The dead fish is a way of letting you know that someone has been done away with. The horse's head in the bed is the quickest way of getting a green-light from a Hollywood studio head. The cat with a broken neck is another way of saying "Be subtle."

A Few Select Men

At the beginning of Chapter Nine Chief Brody is summoned to a meeting of the Board of Selectmen and makes his way to Amity Town Hall on Main Street. The building is a much more impressive piece of architecture than the cramped and cluttered council chambers of the movie: "The rooms inside the town hall were as preposterously grandiose as the exterior. They were huge and high-ceilinged, each with its own elaborate chandelier." This sounds more like a room in which James Bond might be briefed before going out on a mission. Indeed, like Bond, Brody has time for some casual chatter with the "wholesome pretty" secretary before being ushered into the Mayor's office.

As soon as he walks in the room, Brody knows that the deck is stacked against him. The four selectmen are just that: men selected for the task of supporting Larry Vaughn. Hooper, standing apart from the group and looking out to sea, is on hand to offer expert advice on water temperature. The single item on the meeting's agenda is whether or not it is safe to open the beaches. The text is punctuated with the language of the casino and the racetack ("it would be a gamble ... hoping for a continuing draw ... a calculated risk ... worth taking ... playing the odds ... I'm betting it won't").

Brody seems more concerned about the apportion of responsibility ("Who's taking the blame this time?") than worrying about the potential victims of fresh attacks. Nevertheless, he is at least prepared to make a stand. Just as he's drawn his line in the sand ("You can have my job anytime you want it.") an urgent phone call from Harry Meadows calls him out of the room. In a moment of Nixonite eavesdropping the mayor listens in on his office extension as the newspaperman outlines Amity's shady realty deals until - unable to handle the truth - he shrieks down the phone, "You're a goddamned liar, Meadows!" The meeting breaks up, and Brody and Vaughn get into a huddle to broker a deal that will see the beaches open but patrolled.

By the time this scene reached the screen it had - like the discovery of Ben Gardner's abandoned boat - gone through a number of significant changes. Relocated from the opulent interior of the town hall to a bluff overlooking the ocean, Brody and Hooper - speaking as one in carefully choreographed overlapping dialogue - try to make Vaughn see what is literally before his eyes (the threat of the shark represented on the billboard). With a simple piece of misdirection ("But you don't have the tooth.") and a sly dig at his opponent's own ambitions ("Love to prove that, wouldn't you? Get your name in the National Geographic.") the mayor shows his political chops and wins the debate.

Anti-Climax

Ellen gets home from her tryst at 4.30. Those watching the clock know that she arrived at Banners restaurant at 12.30 and had to wait fifteen minutes before Hooper arrived. By the time they were ready to order it must have been close to one. The restaurant was practically empty and so their food came quickly. At a conservative estimate they had probably paid the bill and left by 1.30. How long would it take them to find a suitable motel where the walls weren't made of "Kleenex and spit"? Let's be generous and say thirty minutes. Then maybe another twenty minutes to register as husband and wife, and a few more minutes to "scout around". So by the time they're alone, it would be two thirty in the afternoon. Given that Ellen needs a minimum of twenty minutes to drive home, that gives the lovers about ninety minutes.

Ellen and Hooper's "coupling" is seen through Ellen's eyes, as a memory after the fact, and it's presented as a violent, atavistic act - described in the text as "an assault". Ellen falls asleep with images of Hooper's climax playing on a loop in her head, and is woken by her husband. Their conversation continues as Brody goes into the bathroom to relieve himself, and Ellen contemplates the capacity of the male bladder. And so the chapter ends with her husband holding his flaccid penis in his hand whilst Ellen's mind brims with images of another man's erection.

Leatherette

If the most memorable moment from Jaws the movie is that of the shark's head rearing up out of a fresh chum slick, one of the novel's unforgettable images appears on page 150 as Ellen Brody - seated opposite Matt Hooper in a dark restaurant - begins to get hot and bothered:

"She felt hot, flushed, and sensed that her mind was floating somewhere apart from her body. She was a third person listening to the conversation. She had to fight to keep from shifting on the Leatherette bench. She wanted to squirm back and forth, to move her thighs up and down. But she was afraid of leaving a stain on the seat."

Once inside your head, this kind of detail is difficult to dislodge, and it gets caught up with all the other threads of trivia that are snagged in the memory. Years ago I read an article in The New Yorker - ironically, I forget by whom - lamenting the fact that Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Emily Dickinson get tangled up with advertising jingles, catchphrases and movie dialogue. She (and I seem to remember the author was female) quoted the very passage above, despairing that it lived in her memory alongside an image of sunlight glinting on a jar of honey from a picnic in Anna Karenina.

It's not difficult to sympathise with her. My own head is full of useless trivia that takes precedent over useful information. I can't tell you what the speed of light is, but I do know that the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs. I can't speak German or Spanish, but I can recognise Klingon, Romulan and Na'vi. I can't perform CPR, but I would be willing to administer an adrenalin shot to the heart if I had a Magic Marker pen.

I also know a thing or two about Leatherette. A form of artificial leather, it is made by covering a natural or synthetic fabric base with polyvinyl chloride (PVC). It can be used as a book binding, as upholstery inside a BMW, as a finish on an SLR camera, as clothing (both conventional and kinky), and, of course, as seat covers.

Unlike real leather, Leatherette is not naturally porous and does not allow air to pass through it, which is why a car seat can often feel hot and sticky on a summer's day. Hence Ellen's fear that the natural process of female sexual arousal might stain the seat.

Wanna Get Drunk and Fool Around?

Sliding into one of the restaurant's corner booths, Ellen orders a gin and tonic and downs half of it as soon as the waitress brings it to her table. She has another with Hooper when he arrives and contrives to drink a third by deliberately delaying her choice of meal. In a Molly Bloom-like internal soliloquy, she wonders whether the booze will affect either her judgement or her tongue, and then - echoing the porter in Macbeth - worries "about alcohol increasing the desire but taking away the performance." The one thing she doesn't seem concerned about is whether the alcohol level in her blood is likely to impair her driving ability. As she shares a bottle of wine with Hooper, their conversation becomes increasingly explicit, and so too do Ellen's thoughts as she imagines them both as Ballardian victims of a road accident, caused not by DUI but by a fantasy of mutual masturbation.

In 1938 Professor Rolla N Harger invented the breathalyser and his home state of Indiana became the first to establish a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) of 0.15% as a means of defining impairment - a figure that remained the legal limit until the early Seventies when it was reduced to 0.10%. Officers believing a driver to be intoxicated could use a Field Sobriety Test (FST) to confirm their suspicions. In the 1950s when Roger Thornhill was charged with drunk driving in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, FSTs were far from sophisticated and the test was not always consistently applied. The Grand Rapids Study of 1964 demonstrated that a BAC as low as 0.4% was enough to increase a diver's likelihood of being involved in an accident, and it was this study that led to the eventual tightening of the law in the Seventies.

Peter Benchley - like many of his contemporaries and like the characters of his book- would have thought nothing of getting behind the wheel of a car after a few drinks.

Sexed Up

From Samuel Richardson's Clarissa to any number of current chick-lit titles, sex has always been an essential ingredient for a successful bestseller. Poet Philip Larkin famously wrote: 'Sexual intercourse began / In nineteen sixty-three / (Which was rather late for me) / Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP.' Larkin himself dabbled in mild erotica as an author and in hardcore porn as a reader. There has always been pornography for those who want to find it - either under the counter or on the top shelf - but it wasn't really until the Sixties that sex began to establish itself in mainstream popular culture. Ian Fleming's Bond novels - which had a first publication run from 1953 to 1966 - marked a transition phase. The books were known for their sex, snobbery and sadism: there were plenty of opportunities for Bond to engage in foreplay and indulge in a post-coital cigarette of Balkan and Turkish tobacco, but the sexual intercourse itself always took place between the chapters. Fleming's descriptions are never more than titillating, and there's even an element of the bodice-ripper in his style. Bond gets aroused but the reader is never asked to picture his erection.

By 1973 all false modesty had been discarded. That year saw the publication of Jacqueline Susan's Once Is Not Enough, a trashy potboiler that included the mass rape of a convent of nuns by Nazi soldiers and climaxed with heroine January Wayne participating in an explicitly described orgy. I found a paperback copy of the novel by my parents' bedside and read parts of it - the parts that Mary Whitehouse would have called 'mucky.' It was always easy to find these bits in any book that circulated around school: you could either let the book fall open at the page where the spine was most cracked or identify the sections from the darker edge of the well-thumbed pages. Strangely though, the one abiding image I retain from the book is of a Coca Cola bottle that the young January takes from the refridgerator in the kitchen of her uncle's Rome apartment. To be able to take a bottle of pop from the fridge without having to ask seemed to me to be the height of decadence.

Guilt Trip

Brody wakes the morning after the dinner party to find the bed beside him empty. Ellen - already decided on her course of action - sits by the window, her mood reflected by the weather. Even the "[rain]drops sliding down the glass" seem to have a lachrymal quality about them. Although her husband is aware of her "subdued sad" mood, he does not suspect the cause of it, and their brief exchange threatens to start another fight between them.

As soon as she is alone in the house, Ellen begins to make her elaborate preparations. In these there are interesting parallels with the details of Marion Crane's flight from Phoenix in Psycho. Both women are exposed to the observer (i.e. reader/viewer): Ellen showers and then stands naked before the mirror to assess her looks; Marion - no doubt fresh too from a shower that we can see in the background - has changed into black bra and panties. Once dressed, she too contemplates herself in the mirror in an attempt to stare down her own conscience. For both women there is a moment of doubt before the final decision. We get inside Ellen's head as she asks herself: "Were the goods good? Would the offer be accepted?". Marion says nothing, but Hitchcock's camera work and Bernard Herrmann's nagging score tell us all we need to know. On Marion's bed - beside the envelope of stolen money - is an open suitcase full of clothes. Ellen packs a plastic shopping bag with the items she will need to carry out her deception.

Marion has already got off early from work by pleading a migraine. Ellen tells her supervisor that "her thyroid was acting up again ... and she was getting her period." She sneaks out of the hospital and drives to a gas station in Sag Harbor, where she asks to use the ladies' room. Here she guiltily changes from her work clothes into a lavender summer dress, "looking at her reflection in the mirror above the sink." In a similar scene in Psycho Marion Crane counts out the money to buy a used car in a futile attempt to allay the suspicions of a highway patrolman.

Both women eventually arrive at cheap roadside motels although the respective fates they meet after having a meal are, of course, quite different. There is, nevertheless, something violent about the way Hooper climaxes. There's even a sentence that seems to echo the iconic music that underscores Marion Crane's death:  "From his voice there came a gurgling whine, whose tone rose higher and higher with each frenzied thrust."

The key difference between these two parallel journeys is that Ellen Brody goes through with her 'crime' whereas Marion Crane resolves to pull herself out of the private trap she has created. Her conscience, however, comes too late to save her. Despite a brief "twinge of shame" that strikes Ellen on page 154, she remains unrepentant.

It's extremely unlikely that Peter Benchley actually modelled his chapter on the early structure of Hitchcock's film, but the duplication of imagery - like guilty reflections in a mirror - is intriguing.

Guess Who's Coming To Dinner

The dinner party scene of Chapter Seven gives an indication of what Jaws might have been like written as mild satire, as Benchley had originally intended. It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but it does have elements of a comedy of manners. Ellen's desperate attempts to impress her guests - the silverware, the tulip wine glasses, the fancy menu and French wine - are undermined by her husband's boorish behaviour. Brody is more comfortable with a blue collar supper of a bologna and cheese sandwich and a beer than gazpacho soup and butterfly lamb. He serves his wife's drink with his thumb in the glass, mispronounces the wine as he serves it (Mount Ratchet) and is genuinely bemused when Ellen (mis)uses the French word for corkscrew.

Brody feels threatened by the presence of Hooper in his house and from the start of the evening is a begrudging host. He is further enraged by Daisy Wicker's hippy philosophy and her pot and grass stories - as a late-blooming flower child, Daisy is appropriately named. His anger builds to an almost psychopathic fury. "That Wicker bitch was right about one thing, Brody thought as he slashed the meat: I sure as shit feel alienated right now." He takes refuge in the bottle and, using the alcoholic's tactic of taking two drinks for every one he serves his guests, gets drunk.

Some of these elements did find their way into the movie - Brody's lack of knowledge about wine ("You might want to let that breathe") and his slightly slurred speech - but they are played for laughs. In the film Brody gets endearingly tipsy, but in the book he is an ugly drunk, teetering on the edge of violence.

Funny How?

According to Peter Benchley's editor Tom Congdon, the first draft of Jaws started out on "the wrong track" by aiming for a comic tone. Perhaps Benchley felt an obligation to carry on the family tradition. His grandfather Robert Benchley made a successful career out of a dry metropolitan sense of humour without even seeming to try very hard. He was part of the Algonquin Round Table, whose members included Dorothy Parker, George S Kaufman, and Harold Ross. Ross was the famed editor of The New Yorker - required reading for sophisticated city dwellers - and Benchley's pieces in that magazine made his name. He dabbled in a film career, appearing in among other things Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent, and produced a series of spoof How To ... shorts, one of which (How To Sleep) won an Academy Award. His humour was self-deprecating, rather gentle and eminently quotable:

'Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing.'

'There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don't.'

'I do most of my work sitting down; that's where I shine.'

'I have tried to know absolutely nothing about a great many things, and I have succeeded fairly well.'

He liked to present himself as being slightly befuddled by the sophisticated circles in which he moved. On visiting Venice for the first time, he sent a telegram to Harold Ross that read: 'Streets full of water. Please advise.'

His son Nathaniel followed in his footsteps and became a professional author. He wrote books for children, a biography of his father, and a number of novels - the most famous of which is the gentle Cold War satire The Off-Islanders. He served in the U.S Navy during the Second World War and, had the USS Indianapolis not "delivered the bomb" and helped end the conflict, he would most likely have seen action in the Pacific. He survived the war and lived to see his son Peter's success with Jaws, even suggesting a title - Who's That Noshin' On My Laig? -when the book was in manuscript form.

With such a pedigree, it's not surprising that the third writer in the family should try his hand at comedy. The instincts of his editor -'humour isn't the proper vehicle for a great thriller' - were probably right, but it seems that by steering Benchley away from the comic, Congdon succeeded in draining any residual humour from the book. In contrast, the movie makes its audience laugh and scream. As Pauline Kael - film critic of The New Yorker - rightly observed in her review, it is 'one of the most cheerfully perverse scare movies ever made.'