Door To Door

The next scene begins with the shot of an interior, immediately identifiable as a kitchen from the assortment of predominantly yellow plastic utensils hanging from a row of hooks on the right hand side of the frame. Slightly to the left of centre there is a glass-paned door, the frame of which is painted a pale primrose.

There are, in fact, quite a number of scenes in the movie which involve door frames. Brody typing up his report of Chrissie Watkins's death is framed by an open doorway as are Quint and his mate when they leave the Town Hall meeting. Brody and Ellen storm through an open door when arguing about Michael sitting in the boat, and she later leans against the open kitchen door as she watches her husband and son share a moment. Most famously, Brody backs slowly through the open door of the Orca's cabin before uttering his line about a bigger boat. Quint himself slides to his death through that same open door and Brody escapes a similar fate by bracing himself against the jambs. None of these images have the symbolic resonance of, say, the door frame in The Searchers or the bedroom door in The Exorcist, and - given the unavoidable fact that life involves a great deal of opening and closing of doors- there may be nothing more to this architectural pattern in Spielberg's movie than simple happenstance.

If we're really intent on looking for meaning in every detail, we might try to argue that this door motif is part of a wider visual pattern throughout the film that focuses on boundaries and barriers: from the wind-ravaged fence along the sand dune to the white picket fences along Amity's Main Street, or from the rail that secures Quint in the Orca's pulpit to the bars of the shark cage that fail to protect Hooper from the vandalising shark.

Yaahd

Brody walks with a slightly bent back across the room (another subtle piece of physical acting by Scheider) and peers out the second window overlooking the back yard. The couple's next exchange ('Can you see the kids?' 'They must be in the front yard.') implies that the community is safe enough for children to wander around unsupervised - in fact, the two Brody boys make a habit of it, playing out on their own on the dock and later evading their mother's watchful eye on the Fourth of July beach. Later Brody will make a speech to Hooper about the dangers of New York ('Kids can't leave the house. You've got to walk them to school.'), suggesting that their childrens' welfare was one of the major factors in their deciding to move to Amity.

When Ellen teases her husband about his accent ('In Amity you say yaahd.') there is a hint of metropolitan mockery in her tone. He jokingly responds with a trinity of elongated vowel sounds ('They're in the yahd not too faah from the caah.'), but in his case the mockery seems to be aimed more at himself, and his imitation of the local pronunciation -albeit a caricature- a sign of his wish to fit in. When he asks his wife for her opinion, she responds critically in an exaggerated New York accent, implying that he will always be an outsider. Of the two of them Ellen seems the least settled. Beside her on the lower shelf of the bedside table is a folded copy of The New York Times, and later in the hospital scene (after her son Michael's close encounter with the shark) she tentatively suggests a return to the city - a suggestion which her husband firmly rebuffs. It's only by the time the sequel comes around that she has established herself as a pillar of the Amity community.

The end of the couple's exchange is filmed with a hand-held camera, somewhat in the style of a John Cassavetes movie - an actor whom Scheider himself coincidentally resembles. As the director of movies such as Faces, Husbands, and A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes often cast an unerring critical eye on marriage, and perhaps Spielberg intended to ground his picture in reality with this early scene of playful marital sparring.

In The Bedroom

As the radio announcer gives the station's call sign there is a cut from the blurred rear view head-and-shoulders of the man to a shot of a blonde woman in bed. She turns sleepily on her side and seems to be on the drowsy cusp of awakening. Out of shot the man (himself only just awake) asks, 'How come the sun didn't use to shine in here?' Turning onto her back but without opening her eyes, the woman replies, 'We bought the house in the fall. This is summer.' There is a cut to a medium shot that now places the two characters within the geography of the scene - just as the opening campfire scene focused on individual character close-ups before moving to a wider establishing shot.

The man is sitting on the side of a bed to the left of the screen and looking out of the window. The woman occupies the right hand side lying in the bed. Beside her and behind the man, a rough-haired spaniel sits panting on the covers. Outside the right hand window frame we can see the neighbour's house (a wooden structure with a gable roof) on a green lawn, and beyond that a patch of the ocean. In the corner of the room, to the right of the window, there is a bedside table on which stands a yellow ashtray, an abstract sculpture and a large bedside lamp, the base of which has the same cylindrical shape as the base of the metal buoy. The pastel wallpaper has a flowery design in green and yellow, and both the curtains and the cover on the bed are different shades of yellow - a colour that will also feature prominently in the next scene.

The man nods in response to his wife's answer, and in the gesture Roy Scheider manages to convey both an acknowledgement of the seasonal variation of light and his own foolishness at not realising it. As we will learn over the course of the narrative, his character is a man not entirely comfortable in a non-urban environment, and it's fitting that his very first line of dialogue should reflect this essential trait. It's also telling that one of his last lines in the movie ('I think the tide's with us.') suggests that he has in some measure adjusted to his natural surroundings.

A more obvious reason for this initial exchange between husband and wife is to establish them as newcomers to the community, a fact that the Mayor will later use to attempt to undermine Brody's authority ('It's your first summer, you know.')

Match Point

The first scene ends with a shot of the ocean. The water once again glitters invitingly under the moonlight and the buoy has already resumed its regular toll in response to the tide. The image lightens as the texture of the sea changes - the mass of water before us seems appreciably greater, the waves are choppier and there is a light mist upon them. The dark low mass of land and the tilted metal structure of the buoy have faded imperceptibly away, and we realise that we are looking at a different section of the ocean in the early morning light. This dissolve is one of two such transitions in the movie (the other anticipates the bloody end to the shark hunt by overlaying a close-up of a chum slick on the Orca's departure from dock). Unlike the startling match cut that indicates the passage of millions of years of evolution in Kubrick's 2001, Spielberg's 'match fade' (with the horizon aligned in both shots) suggests that only a few hours have passed.

Our view of the ocean is obscured by the out-of-focus silhouette of a man's head seen from behind. Although film critic Stephen Heath misremembered this transition in his 1996 re-evaluation of the film (believing the blurred figure to be that of the boy on the beach), there is enough visual and auditory information - a more distant sound to the ocean coupled with the background chatter of a radio announcer - to establish that there has been a change of location. The frame crops the man's head at about eye level as he looks out at the ocean. He is seeing what we are seeing and so immediately establishes himself as the eyes of the audience - the character through whom we will experience the action of the film.

In the light of the scene that has just occured, there is a grim irony attached to the first words from the radio announcer ('...with local fishing reported good.') whilst his next statement ('Amity boat rental yards opening early to prepare for the annual season rush') provides an early indication of what the Mayor will later state explicitly ('This is going to be one of the best summers we've ever had.'). Although this information is unlikely to be processed on a first viewing of the film, it must clearly have been designed as a kind of early subliminal message. After the announcer gives the station's call sign ('This is WISS'), the volume of his chatter (which continues to play under the scene) is dialled down on the soundtrack until it becomes just another background sound - like the waves on the beach. Occasional words (visitor) and phrases (ten year high) can just about be distinguished and the perky upbeat tone further suggests a mood of community optimism.

Watery Death

As Chrissie treads water her long hair sways over her shoulders rather like the thin seaweed in the film's opening shot. The music on the soundtrack quickens as the camera approaches from below, pruriently aiming between her gently scissoring legs. There is a cut to a surface head and shoulders shot of the girl, who is smilingly unaware of the danger below. This shot is slightly raised above water level, no doubt to better record the reaction shot of first surprise then fear as she is pulled violently downwards. On the first tug Chrissie's head is jerked backwards but remains above the surface. Her initial expression - with the eyes turned downward to the right and her mouth open - is one of incomprehension. The camera cuts to a tighter close up as the second tug pulls her head violently back and under the water. When she emerges her eyes are wide with fear and she gives a series of terrified gasps. We have just time to register her reaction before she is pulled completely under for the third time. The camera remains on the disturbed water for an agonising three seconds before the girl's head erupts with a scream.

Clamped in the jaws of the unseen shark Chrissie is dragged across the width of the frame from left to right. There is a cut to another shot at water level as she is shaken from side to side like a rag doll being worried in a dog's mouth. The violent and unnatural movements of her body are in sharp contrast to the earlier graceful shots of her swimming silhouette. The water seems to be almost boiling around her, threatening to wash over the camera lens.The sounds of her screaming ('Oh God, please help me.') and the splash of the turbulent water make it almost impossible to hear the music score, which too seems to be thrashing about uncontrollably. There is a cut to an image of the boy on the beach in a posture of repose, lying on his back with his knees raised, making it clear that the girl's cries for help are going to remain unanswered. The next shot is of churning water in which only Chrissie's head and arms can be seen, flailing wildly as she cries out (somewhat unnecessarily) 'It hurts.' There is then a cut to a slightly wider shot as the girl's body is propelled across the surface of the ocean in a white plume of foam towards the buoy, which has been seen in each shot as a point of reference.

In a brief respite from the attack Chrissie clings on to the lower floatation structure, gasping, 'God, oh, God.' The bell mounted within the buoy's metal frame gives an agitated death toll as the shark comes back to take her. There is a final cut to a medium shot at water level as the girl is pulled from her mooring and dragged towards the camera. Her head is thrown back and her final screams ('Oh God, please help me.') are literally drowned out when she is pulled under for the last time. The camera holds the shot of water before cutting back to a final profile of the recumbent boy, sleeping in the sussurating surf.

The scene may not be a realistic depiction of a shark attack (as critic Gordon Gow noted in his Films and Filming review), but it is a perfectly realised visual representation of the primal fears that the film taps into. Indeed, so effective is this opening scene that none of the later attacks come anywhere near as close to its nerve-shredding intensity. After Marion Crane's shower murder in Psycho, Chrissie's demise is probably cinema's most famous watery death. There are, however, more differences than similarities between the two scenes. Although both combine voyeurism and violence, the suggestion that the character's death is a form of punishment for promiscuity is more relevant to the overall thematic design of Psycho than Jaws. One interpretation of the scene is that the shark attack is a perversely violent form of intercourse - the shark representing the phallus and the girl's screams an ugly parody of orgasm. However, there is nothing in the rest of the film to support this reading. Chrissie is just a summer girl who swims out a little far and then a shark comes along. It's true that there is a treacherous sexual undertow to Peter Benchley's original novel, but, with the exception of the mildly titillating nude shots of its opening, the movie eschews any such subtext.

The death of Christine Watkins is essentially there to kick start the story: the audience has had no time to empathise with the character with the two minutes of screen time she has been given. The brutal murder of Marion Crane, on the other hand, effectively stalls the narrative of Psycho and allows the director to transfer the audience's sympathies to the story's villain without them even realising it.

Technically, the scenes also differ. Hitchcock famously pushed the editing envelope by assembling a forty five second murder sequence out of seventy individual pieces of film. He used the appropriately named technique of cutting to create a level of violence never before put on film. Spielberg, on the other hand, uses a series of static shots in which the victim is dragged and pulled from side to side of the frame.

Bond Girl

The first underwater POV shot of Chrissie swimming on the surface is accompanied on the soundtrack by a rippling harp effect underscored by the menacing throb of a cello. In film scoring the first instrument is commonly associated with the sea: if you stroke its strings to create a glissando, it sounds like the rush of water. The music has a briefly ethereal quality to it, emphasising the notion that on entering the sea the girl has transformed into a mythical siren. Her body is seen in silhouette swimming diagonally across the screen and interposing itself between the viewer and the moon. The languorous stroke of the girl as seen from below is slightly at odds with the less elegant crawl we see in the next shot from the surface, suggesting that the images are of the two different performers Susan Backlinie and Denise Chesire.

The iconic image recalls the silhouettes of the female form that title designer Maurice Binder used for the Connery and Moore Bond movies - in particular, Thunderball where lithe naked girls perform underwater acrobatics against a blue background. The technique that Binder employed was a classic burlesque tease that suggested nudity without actually showing it. In Jaws the day for night post-production preserves the actress's modesty and hides what - according to movie legend - was explicitly on display in the original rushes.

When there is a cut to a medium head and shoulders shot of Chrissie treading water, we notice for the first time that she is wearing gypsy earrings. It's a curious detail: is it there to hint at the free-spirited wild child nature of the girl, or is it something for the light to play on? If you look closely at the classic image of Chrissie's death that was used for the movie's publicity you can just about make out one of the silvery hoops on her left ear.