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.
