Along Comes Mister Whitey

After gliding by like "an angel of death", the shark swims away from the cage until it becomes "a spectral silver-gray blur" at the very edge of Hooper's vision. Up to this point the shark's movements have been almost languorous, but as it turns it begins to accelerate, its "tail thrusting vigorously". Great Whites can reach twenty five miles an hour in open water, but it's unlikely that the shark would have been able to reach this speed over just forty feet - the maximum visibility in the murky water. When it rams the cage with its snout it has gathered enough velocity to bend the hollow aluminum tubing of the bars out of shape. Hooper loses his mouthpiece and sucks in a lungful of salt water, which momentarily disorientates him. He looks down to see the shark's giant head lunging for him. Hooper feels "as if his guts were being compacted" as the jaws (with a bite force of over 9,000 Newton at the tip and around 18,000 at the back hinge) close around his torso. The last thing he sees is the black eye of the shark "gazing at him through a cloud of his own blood." Recent research suggests that the strength of a shark's bite is related not to its overall length but to the size of its head. Benchley's fish has a head "four feet across" so it's fair to assume that it would be able to chomp down with the power of a Death Star trash compactor.

Hooper's death is described within a sentence - unlike that of the first victim who took two long paragraphs to die -, but its immediate aftermath is gruesomely protracted. Like a cat with a dead mouse, the shark keeps hold of its prey and, when it surges up out of the water in a predatorial display of power, Hooper's body "...[protrudes] from each side of its mouth, head and arms hanging limply down one side, knees, calves, and feet from the other." Just as with the description of Chrissie in Chapter One, Hooper has been broken down to a number of body parts. His corpse is subjected to one final indignity when Brody shoots three rounds from the rifle, and the third bullet strikes Hooper in the neck.

In the original movie script the unnamed estuary victim (played by stuntman Ted Grossman) met a similar fate, dying in the clamped jaws of the shark. The scene was filmed, but Spielberg thought it was "too bloody" and cut it out. Hooper, of course, survives in the movie, able to squirm out of the cage and swim to the sea bed thanks to some creative editing. Given the Hawksian bond Spielberg had established between the fish expert and the police chief, it was never likely that either of them would end up as fish food. Besides, the director had dramatic real life footage of a Great White tearing apart an empty cage that was simply too good to pass up.