"Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow [...] Through the breach, they heard the waters pour, as mountain torrents down a flume."
With a curse of Shakespearian intensity Ahab darts the whale with another iron:
"Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee [...] thou damned whale! Thus, I give up the spear!"
and then, in a moment so swift that you have to read the passage twice to register what has just happened, Ahab is pulled overboard by a fouled line:
"The harpoon was darted; the stricken whale flew forward; with igniting velocity the line ran through the groove; - ran foul. Ahab stooped to clear it; he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck, and voicelessly as Turkish mutes bowstring their victim, he was shot out of the boat, ere the crew knew he was gone. Next instant, the heavy eye-splice in the rope's final end flew out of the stark-empty tub, knocked down an oarsman, and smiting the sea, disappeared in its depths"
The Pequod disappears beneath the waves:
"And now, concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lance-pole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight"
In the book's brief epilogue (which, through an editorial mistake was left out of the first English edition, and so made a nonsense of the first person narration) Ishmael, the sole survivor, is saved by Queequeg's coffin:
" ...the coffin like-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks."
This was the template for Benchley's finale. The shark, provoked into a fury by the harpoons in its flanks, shatters the Orca's stern ("Water poured in over the transom."), and Quint curses the fish ("God damn your black soul!") as he throws his last harpoon. His left leg becomes entangled in the line and, after a brief desperate struggle for the knife, he is "pulled slowly down into the dark water." The Orca disappears beneath the waves (" ...the bow raised even higher, then quickly and soundlessly slid beneath the surface."), and Brody, the sole survivor, is saved by an improvised life buoy ("A seat cushion popped to the surface next to him, and Brody grabbed it.")
It's clear from the above comparison of the two texts that Benchley had lifted his action beats from Melville's novel. One significant difference is that while Melville seems to suggest Ahab is dragged to a watery damnation, Benchley's final image of Quint's body ("...arms out to the sides, head thrown back, mouth open in mute protest.") implies the fisherman has been transformed into a Christ-like figure.
The film follows a completely different trajectory for its climax. Just as the shark makes a meal out of Quint, so Spielberg makes a meal out of his death scene, with Robert Shaw coughing up pints of corn syrup and thrashing around in the rubber jaws like Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood's Bride of the Monster. When he is finally pulled under the surface, the fisherman's arms are outstretched in a pose that suggests a crucifixion.
Benchley balked at Spielberg's idea for an explosive ending when it was explained to him, and it's no wonder. It would, after all,be patently absurd to think that (a) you could lodge an air tank into a shark's mouth, (b) the shark would obligingly keep the tank in the corner of its mouth like a stogie, and (c) you could then make the tank explode with a well-aimed shot from an old Garand rifle that had been immersed in sea water. Benchley was right to call the ending unbelievable, but Spielberg was equally right to know that he could get away with it.
There is one detail in the novel that is preserved in the film's climax: the shark gets close enough for Brody to look it directly in its black eye, which - in another one of Benchley's commonplace similes - is described as being "as big as a baseball". In the movie the shark smashes through the window of the Orca's half-submerged cabin and, like Norma Desmond at the end of Sunset Boulevard, leers into the camera for its close-up.
