I Got No Spit

The cage goes in the water and Hooper gets ready to go in the cage. He pulls on his neoprene suit and - with Brody's help - straps on his airtank. Before climbing into the cage he rubs spit on the inside of his face mask to prevent the glass from fogging up when he is underwater. In the movie Hooper's mouth is too dry with fear and when he jokingly admits to having no saliva Quint gives him a look of begrudging respect. In the novel there's a similar moment between the two men when Hooper tells Quint to be ready with his harpoon and the fisherman replies, "I'll do what I'll do [...] You worry about yourself." Otherwise, Quint remains aloof from the preparations, puncturing any notion of heroism on Hooper's part with cynical putdowns ("I should have brought weights," said Hooper. Quint said, "You should have brought brains.") and gallows humour ("How much air does he have?" [Brody] said. "I don't know," said Quint. "However much he has, I doubt he'll live to breathe it.")

Armed with his camera and bang stick, Hooper kneels on the gunwale and then remembers that he needs one more piece of equipment: his lucky tiger shark's tooth "rimmed in silver". The charm is "an exact duplicate of the one he had given Ellen" at the Brodys' dinner party. When he presents her with the gift he tells the story of how he came across it in Macao:

"I passed through there a couple of years ago on a project. There was a little back-street store, where an even littler Chinese man spent his whole life polishing shark teeth and mouding the silver caps to hold the rings. I couldn't resist them."

Delighted with the gift and impressed by the exotic-sounding anecdote ("I don't think I could place Macao on a map if I had to."), Ellen fails to read the subtext of Hooper's remark - that he most likely bought a boxful of the charms and has been using them as part of his seduction strategy for the past two years. He goes on to describe the dangers of carrying the tooth with him ("It's like carrying an open-blade knife around in your pocket."), which could be read as an early foreshadowing of his eventual fate.

Having thrown the Hooper/Ellen romance overboard, the movie has no need of sentimental lucky charms. The preparations for the dive and Hooper's suiting up are really just camouflage. What Spielberg really wants to plant in the audience's mind at this stage is the tank of compressed air that Brody will later use for target practice.