Super Size Me

The ferry scene concludes with an abrupt cut to a crowded beach. There is no establishing wide shot and it is only after the camera has panned and tracked across the entire beach that we get some sense of the geography of the scene. The first figure we see is that of an overweight woman. Dressed in a striped bathing costume, she strides purposefully into the ocean, the skin on her arms and legs puckered and wrinkled by folds of fat. This was no doubt intended to provoke an ironic smile, but the potential for developing the 'people as food' motif would have to wait until Jeannot Szwarc cut together a montage of plump holidaymakers snacking on hot dogs for his beach scene in Jaws 2.

Back in the 1970s obesity levels in the US were not as high as they are today, and - with the exception of a few well-fed selectmen and some beer-bellied fishermen - there is no much evidence of a weight problem in Amity. Indeed, if you look at the figures scrambling out of the sea during the Fourth of July panic, it's difficult to see any evidence of bad diet.

Did You See That?

There are three beach scenes in Jaws, each one providing a backdrop to a shark attack: the first, Chrissie Watkins; the second, Alex Kintner; the third, the unnamed estuary victim. The beach - like the darkened auditorium in which the moviegoer sits - is an arena for observation. The onlookers are forced into the role of audience, a role which precludes them from taking any action to prevent the outcome of events. In the first scene, Cassidy lies in a drunken stupour, oblivious to the horror taking place beyond the water's edge. In the second, the chief of police watches for but does not see the shark, and the only witness of the attack is not even sure what he sees. In the third, the entire community of Amity looks on as the hapless boatman is devoured, but even the grandstanding spectacle of his bloody death is not enough to hold the attention of a trio of bored girls sunbathing on the shore.

More than a geographical location, the shore (which, incidentally, is both the last word of the novel and the final image of the film) marks the division between the security of the land and the threat that lies beneath the surface of the water. Amity being a summer town, the beach is also the focus of economic transaction. The Fourth of July scene opens with examples of how the enterprising islanders are quick to turn a crisis into a sales opportunity, installing Shark Attack video games on the sea front and selling souvenir shark jaws.

The pacing and filming of each beach scene are significantly different. The first - with its relentless tracking shots - moves inevitably towards death whilst the third, burdened with multiple storylines, almost collapses under its own narrative complexity. It is in the second beach scene, however, that Spielberg manages to achieve a perfect balance and creates four minutes of tension that is unequalled in the rest of the movie.

The scene as filmed contains the essential action beats that were there in Benchley's novel: the crowded beach, the bored boy, the irritable mother - even the witness to the attack ('Did you see that?') - all are faithfully transferred from page to screen. The significant difference, however, is the presence of Brody, and it is his nervous, watchful gaze that informs the way we perceive the action. There are two parallel streams of visual information running through the sequence: the things that Brody sees (and the way he [mis]interprets them) and the things the viewer sees. This dichotomy - similar to the one Hitchcock creates between viewer and James Stewart's character in Rear Window - serves to ratchet up the tension. A dark shape in the water that might be a fin turns out to be an old man's bathing hat, and a young girl's sudden scream is the result not of a shark attack but horseplay. Brody sees evidence of the threat where there is none and yet fails to notice the key signifier - the dog's stick bobbing unclaimed in the waves - that telegraphs the presence of the shark to the viewer even before the underwater POV camera and throbbing music score make it explicit.

Barracuda

Nothing demonstrates the slippery nature of Larry Vaughn's character more that the way he inveigles Brody into keeping the beaches open. His language hovers somewhere between concern and coercion ('We're really a little anxious that you're rushing into something serious here. It's your first summer, you know.') and he speaks in the rehearsed soundbites of a practised politician ('Amity is a summer town. We need summer dollars.'). His initial  approach is to place the economic imperative above the need for civic responsibility ('If the people can't swim here, they'll be glad to swim at the beaches of Cape Cod, the Hamptons, Long Island.'). When Brody rejects this argument, the mayor enlists the help of Meadows and Santos, and the three conspirators begin to weave their cover story.

Whilst the newspaper man is adamant in his claim ('We never had that kind of trouble in these waters.'), the medical examiner is clearly less comfortable with the deception - possibly because he has seen the evidence of the girl's remains. Even as he constructs the story of a boating accident, his hesitant delivery (Well, I think possibly, yes, a boating accident.') betrays his mendacity. Just as Meadows's line will be echoed later on the dock by Brody in a moment of self-delusion ('There's no other sharks like this in these waters!'), so Santos's phrase will be thrown back in his face by Hooper ('This was no boat accident.'). Having made their contributions, the two men literally distance themselves from the mayor by moving away in the same order in which they first appeared in the earlier street scene, leaving Vaughn to draw Brody conspiratorially closer to the camera.

Vaughn is quick to develop a persuasive narrative in a series of short present tense sentences that avoid any unpleasantness ('A summer girl goes swimming. Swims out a little far. She tires. A fishing boat comes along...') and reduce the victim to a nameless cipher. Brody, growing defensive of his own position, begins to waver, and the mayor caps his argument with one of the movie's great quotes: 'It's all psychological. You yell barracuda, everybody says "Huh? What?" You yell shark, and we've got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.'

Although there is a certain truth to the phrase (barracudas do occasionally injure bathers), it's such a piece of bizarre logic that Brody seems to accept dumbly. The line will, of course, come back to bite the mayor in the rear when the very scenario he warns against is realised. For the moment, though, he is in command and - the boy scout swimmers conveniently forgotten - orders the ferryman to take them back to the other side of the bay.

Conspiracy Theory

By 1975 the Watergate scandal had exposed political corruption at the highest level of government, and the nation's sense of distrust of those in power was being reflected in popular culture. Some movies (The Parallax View, Chinatown and The Conversation) addressed the notions of conspiracy head on whilst others (The Towering Inferno, and, of course, Jaws) exploited the prevailing mood of the country mainly for narrative purposes. Whilst Larry Vaughn is often seen as the movie's emblem of Machiavellianism, it is, in fact, the shadowy figure of the medical examiner who best represents everything that is rotten in the state of Amity.

In the novel he is a voice on the end of the phone. His name - Carl Santos - sets him apart from the community's predominantly WASPish population, and his brief conversation with Brody (with whom he is on first name terms) suggests that he is probably of the same generation as the chief. In the movie, he is an old man, clearly past retirement age but still clinging on to his office. In appearance - particularly the thick-framed glasses that conveniently mask his face - he resembles Henry Kissinger, but in his awkward body language he reminds us of a perspiring Richard Nixon. There's even a hint of Nixon in his line 'I was wrong. We'll have to amend our reports.'

When he climbs out of the car and stands behind Brody, he puts one foot defiantly on the ferry's kerb, but when pressed for a revised opinion ('Boat propeller?'), he folds his arms defensively and pushes his glasses back up his nose. As the mayor tries to persuade the police chief of the need to keep the beaches open, the medical examiner literally turns his back on the discussion and distances himself from it by walking to the end of the ferry. Later, when forced to confront his own duplicity ('This was no boat accident!'), he makes the same defensive arm gesture and looks down.

Smorgasbord

Brody nervously paces the deck and takes a drag on his cigarette. A car horn sounds behind him but - preoccupied by the swimmers - he ignores it and does not even turn as the ferry rocks under the weight of the boarding vehicle. First out of the car on the passenger side is the Mayor, followed by Meadows from behind the wheel and the medical examiner from the back seat. The three men converge on Brody as he tosses his half smoked cigarette over the side. Another man - later seen on the beach 'trying to absorb some of the sun' - climbs out of the far side of the vehicle with Hendricks, and the two of them remain in the background engaged in conversation. Hendricks, in keeping with his boyish character, leans on the roof of the car and grins innocently as he looks on at his boss having his arm gently twisted.

Although the talky scene that follows is filmed in one take from a static camera, there is an energy to it generated by three interacting kinetic elements: the movement of the background as the ferry crosses the bay, the carefully planned choreography of the actors within the frame, and the overlap and interplay of the dialogue. Later in the movie a companion scene - also shot in a single take - will play out between Brody, Hooper and Vaughn in front of the defaced billboard.

In the ferry scene Vaughn has the upper hand and Brody is literally pressed up against the fence, hemmed in by the mayor and his factotums. Not only do they physically surround the chief, but they also gang up on him with words. When Brody directs a question at Vaughn, Meadows answers it. When Vaughn invites the medical examiner to give his opinion, he puts the words ('Boat propeller?') into his mouth. Brody initially resists the pressure ('That doesn't mean we have to serve them up as smorgasbord.'), but quickly gives in to the combination of Vaughn's professed avuncular concern (the gentle hand on the arm, the use of the Christian name) and the presentation of a plausible alternative reality ('A summer girl goes swimming...'). Meadows's comment ('It's happened before.') provides Brody - the urban man with no experience of watery deaths ('What the hell do they usually do? Wash up or float, or what?') - with a convenient precedent. The chief of police finally begins to capitulate with the telling line: 'I'm just reacting to what I was told.' And, of course, the very next scene on the beach shows exactly that: Brody reacting rather than acting.

In the later scene in front of the billboard the balance of power has shifted. Brody and Hooper speak almost as one, their dialogue overlapping as they run off a litany of facts about shark attacks. The Mayor is on the defensive and walks away from the two men, clutching at straws ('You don't have the tooth?') and trying to deflect the assault with irrelevancies ('Sick vandalism.') and snide remarks ('Love to prove that, wouldn't you?'). As in the ferry scene, Brody employs a food reference ('If you open the beaches on the fourth of July, it's like ringing the dinner bell.') to predict the consequences of keeping the beaches open.

In both scenes Larry Vaughn wears the same jacket decorated with a distinctive anchor motif. This magnificent item of wardrobe not only says something about his vanity, but also serves as an ironic comment on his character: there is nothing stable about the shifting conscience of this small town politician.

Solitary Man

The shot of Brody watching the boy scout swimmers places him on the left side of the frame against a backdrop of grey utilitarian buildings and a chain link fence abutting onto a wall of concrete breeze blocks. This is no longer the picture postcard image of Amity but a more blue collar view of a working community. Brody, looking anxiously towards the sounds of the activity in the water, has his right hand behind his back and then reveals it to be holding a cigarette on which he takes a nervous puff. As the ferry -a flat-bed craft open both aft and stern - approaches, he gives the pilot directions, and there is another shot of the kids in the water, this time from a different angle that reveals them to be very close to the beach where a small crowd - possibly of parents - stands watching.

 

The image of Brody waiting nervously by the dock - a man incapable of taking action - has a visual echo in the town hall scene when the motel ownner bluntly asks him 'Are you going to close the beaches?' The reaction shot of Brody as he answers the question in a tone of lame apology places him alone in the frame in front of a large window that looks out onto another grey utilitarian building. Nigel Andrews in his analysis of this scene in his pocket movie guide draws an interesting comparison with a similar shot of James Stewart sitting silently before a corner's [sic] court in Vertigo. In that movie Stewart played a man whose fears forced him to be an observer of rather than a participant in the narrative and prevented him from acting when most needed. The link between the two characters of Martin Brody and Scottie Ferguson is, of course, visually implied by the celebrated track in/zoom out shots that signal the realization of their worst nightmares - for Brody witnessing the second shark attack from the beach, and for Scottie climbing the bell tower.

Red Alert

The ferry scene opens with a long shot of a stretch of water, a strip of beach in the background and beyond that green vegetation. Two marker buoys with red flags are positioned close together on the right of the screen with a third on the far left. On the right side of the frame a group of six swimmers can be seen splashing vigorously in pursuit of a man in a red tracksuit rowing a red boat. It's quite possible that this is the same red boat that will be capsized by the shark in the pond and if it is then the estuary victim was Amity's local scoutmaster.

 

Red has long been visual shorthand for danger. Hitchcock drenched the screen in it to convey hysteria in Marnie and even inserted a few crimson frames to the otherwise monochrome Spellbound for maximum dramatic effect. Brian de Palma's Blow Out, M.Night Shayamalan's The Sixth Sense and The Village, and Douglas Sirk's Written on the Wind are a few of the titles that immediately come to mind when thinking of the use of red as a visual signifier.

Spielberg made a decision early on in pre-production to avoid the colour as much as possible so that when the ocean turned red in the shark attack scenes the impact would be all the greater. In transferring Jaws from the page to the screen the most significant adjustment in the colour scheme was to make the Orca's barrels bright yellow - in Benchley's original novel they are red. Yellow is the preferred colour for safety and rescue equipment at sea because of its high visibility, and for the same reason is commonly used as a background to warning signs. The movie exploits this safety/threat binary through its use of the colour and conditions the viewer to respond to it with a growing feeling of unease.

Loading Zone

Brody comes out onto the sidewalk in front of the hardware store just as Hendricks arrives in the police jeep. As soon as the chief spots the vehicle, he makes a 'pull over' gesture with the wooden stakes he's holding under his right arm and the deputy comes to a halt by the kerb just beyond a spot that is marked LOADING ZONE in pale yellow paint. Perhaps it was the presence of such prohibitions on the streets of the movie location (the junction of Walter Street and Main Street in Edgartown) that gave Carl Gottlieb the idea of working the motif into the script.

Hendricks brings news of one of the 'water activities' Brody has asked for ('a bunch of boy scouts out in April Bay doing their mile swim for their merit badges') and the chief immediately devolves responsibility for the sign making to the deputy - with the proviso that Polly does the printing. Hendricks's sulky response ('What's the matter with my printing?') is one of several moments in the movie that identifies his character as a man-child, well-meaning but naive. Brody gets into the jeep from the passenger side and sidles over on his rear to get behind the wheel.  It's an ungainly action, but it serves to save precious seconds of screen time and the need for a repositioning of the camera. Besides, if you look at movies from the Forties and Fifties, it seemed to be common enough practice. Detective Arbogast does it, for example, in Psycho when he returns to the Bates Motel  even though he is exiting the vehicle.

As Brody drives away, a voice off-screen calls 'Hey, chief' and there is a cut to a dapper looking man emerging from one of the buildings across the street. Mayor Larry Vaughn is the third and final member of Amity's political triumvirate to be introduced in this fashion. Coming down the steps behind him are the medical examiner and Meadows, who is in conversation with a Teamster-looking type next to be seen at the town hall meeting. Clearly, the powers-that-be have taken no time in getting into a huddle to discuss strategy. On the porch a young woman in a green shirt and yellow slacks is wrapping patriotic bunting of red, white and blue around one of the building's columns. Vaughn calls again after the departing police vehicle and this time his tone has an edge to it. The brief expression of thwarted authority that crosses the mayor's face as one of his public servants fails to heed his call tells us everything we need to know about this scheming politician.

In a reverse shot we see Hendricks crossing the street, laden down with the sign making equipment, and the mayor joins him at the centre of the intersection just as the local marching band swings past on a practice run. The deputy has to shout over the noise in order to make himself heard. It's both an aural and visual representation of the movie's dilemma: the two men are surrounded by organised jollity and as the band plays on no one takes any heed of the potential threat.