Wanted Dead Or Alive

 
The next scene begins with a close up of a notice on a bulletin board offering 'a $3000.00 bounty to the man or men who catch and kill the shark that killed Alex M. Kintner on Sunday 29th June on the Amity Town Beach.' In 1974 inflation in the US peaked at 7% and President Ford announced a Whip Inflation Now initiative to encourage Americans to exercise greater financial restraint by saving more and spending less. A 1974 dollar would be worth almost five times as much in 2011 so Mrs Kintner's offer should be multiplied accordingly if you want to get a true sense of the value she placed on her son's life. It's a rarely mentioned point of irony that it is Chief Brody - the man she blames for the tragedy - who is ultimately entitled to collect the blood money. It's fitting, therefore, that as the town's sheriff, with his pistol holstered at his hip, he is the closest character in the story to the Wild West image of the bounty hunter.

The message of the notice is unequivocal and the language is echoed in Quint's remark ('I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten.'). The offer is directed at the males of the community, and both the singular and plural forms of the noun are used. Brody will later claim during a drunken speech to Hooper that Amity is a town in which 'one man can make a difference', but in the end it is the combined effort of the three shark hunters that allows them to prevail.

As the locals gather around the bulletin board - where the sign has been pinned up to partially  mask an official looking announcement containing the word proclamation - there is still some dispute as to the veracity of Mrs Kintner's claim. One of the voices describes Alex as 'the kid who was missing at the beach' and the voice of Mrs Taft seems to be taking the Amity party line when she says, 'We don't even know that there is a shark around here.' Her use of the plural pronoun, echoing the elderly bather on the beach, again illustrates how individuals speak as representatives of the whole community.

Just as Chrissie Watkins's death was marked by a document (the coroner's report) so too is Alex Kintner's: both texts identify the manner of death (shark attack), the time (in both cases, erroneous), and the place. The text of the reward sign is clearly printed in something resembling Comic Sans font and the margins look almost justified - it's unlikely that the distraught Mrs Kintner would have been able to write with such a steady hand, and the most logical explanation for such neat penmanship is that she got Polly to do the printing.

Get Out Of The Water

There is a cut from the dolly-zoom reaction shot of Brody to a shot of a group of children staring at the red stained water. A football - one of the defining symbols of US culture - has been dropped by one of the boys and it circles in the bloody maelstrom created by the attack. This small detail suggests what the panic on the Fourth of July scene will later make explicit: that it is the American way of life which is under threat from the monster. The terrified children are positioned much closer to the scene of the attack than in earlier shots, where Alex was further out, but sometimes continuity has to be sacrificed for dramatic purposes.

The camera cuts back to the beach where a couple are seen walking down to the water and pointing. Brody races past them in the foreground, but stops at the water's edge from where he shouts commands like a basketball coach at the court's sideline. The other adults, unaware of what has actually happened, run past him into the sea. Brody moves crabwise along the beach, shouting and gesticulating and then there is a cutaway shot to Mrs Kintner - partially obscured by the legs of running adults - as she raises herself up from her towel. There follows a series of cuts that alternate the point of view from the beach and the water as parents rescue their children, including a shot of Ellen Brody looking back nervously over her shoulder as she guides son Michael to the safety of the shore. Another cutaway shot shows Sean sitting by his ruined sandcastle, calling for his brother to get out of the water. There's a final shot of a young boy being literally dragged from the sea and then we are on the beach again as the last few bathers run up the sand past Brody. The music that accompanies this scene of panic builds up a frantic rhythm and then stutters to an end.

In the aftermath we see Mrs Kintner moving through the crowd calling her son's name. When she reaches the surf she makes a full 360 degree turn and then another half turn, a physical representation of her own sense of disorientation. Placing a hand on the crown of her head to prevent the wind from blowing off her yellow sunhat, she walks up the beach towards the camera, a look of desperation on her face.
 

There is then a cut to a shot of the torn remains of Alex's yellow raft washed up in the bloodied surf. It's not clear that Mrs Kintner sees this detail. The last shot of her shows her with her sight line directed out to the ocean and not at her feet. Furthermore, the framing of the final shot (with the waves on the left of the screen and the beach on the right) would not match her point of view. The image - rather like the dog's abandoned stick floating on the water - is a potent one, and provides a bloody punctuation mark to what is one of the film's most carefully constructed scenes.

Vertigo

The shot of a struggling Alex Kintner being pulled under by the shark is obscured by billowing clouds of his own blood, just as the mutilated corpse of the shark will later obliterate the screen with a cloudy red. The camera cuts to a shot of Brody's reaction. He is positioned in the dead centre of the screen with his wife immediately behind him. On either side of the frame are grassy sand dunes, and in the background, separating the land from a strip of blue sky, are the blurry slats of the same kind of fencing that dominated the movie's opening scene. The shadow of a beach hut darkens the bottom left corner of the frame.

In the novel Brody learns of the second attack by telephone, experiencing first a 'twinge of unease [in his] stomach' before feeling 'flushed, almost feverish.' The film reproduces this sickening sensation through a camera movement in which the character and the background seem to be operating in different dimensions. The image pushes in towards Brody so that his head and shoulders occupy marginally more of the frame. At the same time the strip of sand behind him seems to stretch like rubber. In contrast to the movement towards the seated figure of the chief, there appears at the same time to be a movement away from his position that allows elements previously unseen (such as the side of one of the beach huts) to become visible within the frame.

It doesn't require any great technical knowledge of film making to know that if you move a camera closer to an object, it will occupy more of the image space, and that if you move it away from the object it will show more of the surroundings. What this shot - known as a dolly zoom - does is combine the two concepts into a single image, creating a distorting push-me-pull-you effect. The shot was first used in commercial cinema by Alfred Hitchcock for scenes in Vertigo to convey the paralysing effects of Scottie Ferguson's fear of heights. Hitchcock explained the origin and the development of the idea to Francois Truffaut in the Sixties:

'I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me. I tried to get that into Rebecca, but they couldn't do it. The viewpoint must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed as it stretches lengthwise. I thought about the problem for fifteen years. By the time we got to Vertigo, we solved it by using the dolly and the zoom simultaneously [...] so that's the way we did it, and it only cost us nineteen thousand dollars.'

Interestingly, although Vertigo was released in 1958 there were no immediate imitations of the effect by other filmmakers. In fact, Jaws was the movie that helped establish it as a device for conveying shock, and it has been much used since then - to the extent that today it has become enough of a cliche to be the object of irony. Spielberg used the shot in later films (including E.T and Schindler's List) and it was also employed by John Landis for the moment when Michael Jackson is transformed into a zombie in his Thriller video.

Brody's moment of vertigo is accompanied by a distorting string effect in the music score, just as Hitchcock had used Bernard Herrmann's frenzied harp glissandi to underline the drama of his shot. The distorted perspective not only induces a feeling of unease in the viewer, but also serves to highlight Brody's own sense of helplessness. He is literally rooted to the spot, momentarily unable to move.

There Will Be Blood

The death of Alex Kintner is swifter but bloodier than that of Chrissie Watkins. The shark rises from the depths, ignoring the legs of the child bathers and homing in directly on the raft and the kicking limbs that propel it. (It's said that the reason surfers are often attacked by sharks is that the outline their boards and outstretched limbs form closely resembles the image of a seal in distress.) On the soundtrack the throbbing cello music - punctuated with shrill flute figures - pulses faster as the camera closes in, and just as it seems it is about to collide with the boy's knees there is a cut back to the surface. In the foreground is a group of splashing children and beyond them in the middle distance we glimpse the shark taking the boy. The image lasts only three seconds. What we see is what Nigel Andrews in his analysis of the scene calls 'a windmilling flurry of dark movement.' There's not enough time - certainly on a first viewing - to make sense of the visual information, and this is underlined by the fact that the one witness on the beach, who rises from his spot next to Mrs Kintner, cries out, 'Did you see that?'

Careful re-watching with the aid of the freeze frame does, however, refute Andrews's claim that  'you can see Jaws again and again and still not work out the components of that abstract ballet.' In fact, the conical shape to the right is clearly that of the shark's huge snout and is a ghost of the image of pictures taken on set that show the filmmakers' original intention of showing more of the mechanical shark before technical problems determined otherwise. Perhaps to make up for the absense of the monster, Spielberg felt the need to provide a gushing fountain of blood and to add to the horror by cutting to an underwater close up of the boy drowning in his own gore.
 

Commenting on why he eventually vetoed a longer and more explicit version of the attack on the estuary victim, Spielberg expressed a sense of reserve ('It was too bloody so I cut it out.') although the outtake footage, which can be seen as a DVD extra, seems quite tame when compared to the Scanners-like explosion of blood and guts that ends little Alex's life.

Pippet

There is a brief cutaway shot of Michael and Sean Brody running down the beach before the camera is back on their parents. Ellen, playfully addressing her husband as Chief Brody, moves behind his chair and proceeds to give him a neck massage as an MOR song plays on the radio. Their positions will be reversed in the later scene when Ellen tries to take Brody's mind off the shark books he has been reading by leaning back against him. Just as Brody succumbs to his wife's coaxing, there follows an abrupt series of cuts of the children playing in the water. Each cut is timed with a splash to develop a staccato rhythm. This is then contrasted with a low angle shot of the beach that frames the boy in the lemon polo shirt on the left and young Sean Brody on the right.

Sean is making sandcastles and singing ('Do you know the muffin man?') to himself. The boy in the lemon shirt is standing in the surf, turning to the left and to the right and calling his dog's name. The camera then cuts to a medium shot of the upper body of the boy in profile against an empty expanse of green/grey sea. As he calls 'Pippet! Come on, Pippet!' he turns to face the ocean and presents his back to the camera, the yellow of his shirt providing a subliminal signal for danger. To leave us in no doubt as to Pippet's fate, there is a cut to the stick bobbing on the water, and then a cut to below the surface, which the throbbing music on the soundtrack makes immediately clear is a POV shot of the shark.

Given the size of its bite radius, it's quite likely that the fish could have swallowed the labrador in one gulp and ingested it before it realised it was covered in fur. Then again, one of the principal components of a Great White's diet is seal, and seals have fur. Being a dog lover, Spielberg (whose own hound Elmer played the role of the Brody's spaniel) would never have thought of showing a canine death, but he was also canny enough to know that less is often more, and that the simple shot of a stick floating in the waves was enough to goose the audience up a little.

Aquaphobia

There is a low angle shot of the group of children splashing into the sea with Alex Kintner further out, revolving on his raft. The next shot shows Brody from a slightly different angle, one which accentuates the diminishing perspective of the orange and white striped beach huts that stretch the width of the screen behind him and end at a green-roofed pagoda. Mrs Taft sits with her arm around her husband on the left of the screen and the two of them look smilingly on at the children at play out of shot. An elderly man in blue bathing trunks and black bathing cap (earlier mistaken for a shark fin) comes and sits in front of Brody and begins drying his drooping chest with a yellow towel. There is a cut to a reverse angle behind Brody that positions the back of the chief's head on the right of the frame with the elderly bather just right of centre and the splashing children in the water dominating the left.

The old man's single line of dialogue ('We know all about you, chief. You don't go in the water at all, do you?') is the first specific reference to Brody's aquaphobia, which his wife will later try to psychoanalyse ('I guess it's a childhood thing.'). The use of the first person plural pronoun suggests that the old man is speaking on behalf of the whole island (indeed, Amity's population up to this point does seem to be well represented by elderly white males), and also tells us that in such a small community no secrets can be kept for long. Brody's reaction to the old man's playful needling seems unnecessarily harsh: he uncrosses his leg, shifts his chair to the left and dismisses him with the line, 'That's some bad hat, Harry.' He will similarly dismiss his wife's later attempts to explain away his phobia ('There's a clinical name for it, isn't there?') with a curt put-down ('Drowning.), which suggests he remains sensitive about his weak spot.

It's a matter of record that some of the dialogue in Jaws was improvised in rehearsals and then worked into the script proper by Carl Gottleib, Brody's 'bigger boat' line being the most oft-quoted example. I can't help feeling that the 'bad hat, harry' remark was another piece of improv. The line has taken on a life of its own outside the film as the name of Jaws-fan Bryan Singer's production company, whose production credit logo - which appears at the end of every episode of House, M.D - reproduces the scene in a Beavis and Butthead style animation.

Parenthood

As Taft returns to his own wife and child, Ellen Brody offers her husband some words of comfort. The framing of the shot, with Brody on the right of the screen in profile and Ellen facing him at a right angle, is one of several such devices in the film that places the wife in a supporting role. In most of her scenes, Ellen is there to provide her husband with either an offer of physical relief ('Wanna get drunk and fool around?'), food (at the dinner table) or medical aid ('The Blistex is in the kit.'), and to defer to his authority ('Michael! Did you hear your father? Out of the water! Now!').

With her strapless swimsuit cropped by the lower part of the frame, Ellen's naked shoulders recall those of the shark's first victim. Her floppy straw hat and Jackie O sunglasses give her the appearance of a glamorous mom. Her headgear may, in fact, be a detail designed to contrast her with the rather frumpy Mrs Kintner. In expressing concern for her sons, she once again defers to her husband ('Listen, if the kids going in the water is worrying you ...') and as the children in the background get up and go down to the ocean, she takes her husband's hand in hers, their shared fist momentarily obscuring her face. By the time it came to Jaws: The Revenge, Ellen had abandoned any sense of reticence and was in full Ripley-mode, taking out the Great White with an improvised harpoon.

In Benchley's novel, Brody's three sons (Billy, Martin and Sean) are never in the water with the shark. Spielberg, who would go on to put children at the centre of many of his subsequent movies, could not resist the urge to add adolescent peril to the mix. In Jaws, at least, it is incidental to the plot and does help to provide the main character's motivation for hunting down the shark. By the time he got to Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World, the director had more of less surrendered to his own sentimentality and the box-office imperative that increasingly requires blockbuster movies to feature protagonists close to the age of their target audience.

Hey Marty

Brody is interrupted in his shark spotting by Mrs Taft's husband. Mr Taft, a middle-aged businessman, interposes his tanned bulk between the chief and the ocean so that Brody has to look over the man's shoulder to keep his eye on the water activity. Taft's big head looms on the right of the frame and the tiny head of a girl swimmer - just a speck in the water - is in the far background on the left. The split focus gives a sense of depth and ensures that the viewer's attention, like Brody's, is held by the smaller of the two images within the frame.

The second false alarm occurs when the girl swimmer cries out as if taken by something below the surface. She rears up out of the water on the shoulders of her boyfriend, her scream more playful than fearful. Brody again raises himself out of his chair in reaction, settling back down when he realises his mistake. Taft, unaware of the threat, is more concerned with mundane matters. His little monologue of complaint about parking misdemeanours encapsulates the small town nature of Amity police work and also hints at the way those in authority are manipulated by those with influence ('You can take care of it. You've done it before.').

Taft's idiolect ('I've got some cats parking in front of the house') betrays his age as much as his greying hair, and his use of the overly-familiar form of Brody's first name may also be a hangover from the Fifties.

Bad Hat

 
Brody is distracted by two red herrings (one visual and one aural) before the real fish strikes without warning. The first is a black shape in the water just beyond the overweight woman. There is a cut to Brody's anxious reaction as he raises himself slightly from his seated position and then a shot that reveals the suspected fin to be nothing more than the black bathing cap of another of Amity's elderly residents. Another reaction shot shows Brody looking askance with a mixture of relief and self admonition. As a participant in the action, Brody has no visual or aural clues that will help him identify the presence of the shark. For him every suspicious movement in the water could be a threat. As viewers of the action, the audience, however, has been primed by the opening scene to associate the shark with an underwater POV shot and the throbbing music of the score. Although we do not feel the same misplaced anxiety as the main character, there remains a tension throughout the scene that dervies from the fact that we know something must happen, and we too, like Brody, are on the edge of our seats.

Wipe Out

Having established the geography of the beach with fluid tracking shots, Spielberg adopts a series of quick cuts that set up a number of bathers as potential shark food. The first  - a POV from Brody's perspective - is a medium shot of the overweight lady floating on her back. The young man with the lemon polo shirt runs across the frame from left to right, obscuring the view, and then we cut to a medium close up as he throws the stick for his dog. This, and the following shots that are all seen from varying low angles, are clearly not intended to be showing what Brody is seeing. In pursuit of the stick the dog races into the water, where a young couple is canoodling in the shallows. There is another cut to Mrs Kintner in profile as Alex runs past her with his raft, and this is followed by another low angle shot as the boy launches himself onto the ocean. With each shot the camera has become closer to the water so that as viewers we almost feel as if we are in it as well. The next shot is of the dog swimming with the stick in his mouth and being intercepted by a male bather. Then we cut back to the overweight lady, still kept afloat by her bulk and slowly turning in a clockwise direction. Another cut to Alex on his raft, propelling himself with kicks of his legs and a two-armed paddle stroke. The images are accompanied by the sound of splashing and water activity.

The next cut returns us to dry land with a medium shot looking along the beach from a reverse angle to the establishing one. A song on the radio provides ambient background music. The beach - a crescent of white sand - is almost deserted and the most conspicuous items on it are two more empty lifeguard stations. The boy and his dog are having a playful tug-of-war. There is a travelling shot of the dog prancing in surf, and then we cut to a medium shot of Brody. He has shifted his position to one side of his chair and leans his right elbow over the back of the metal frame. His hands are clasped - just as they will later be in the dinner table scene with his son - and his right leg is crossed in a manly fashion over his left. His posture suggests something between relaxation and attentiveness. It is almost as if he is literally on the edge of his seat, waiting for something to happen.

Abandoning the rapid cutting technique, Spielberg now moves from shot to shot with clever imitation wipes. A bather passes in front of the camera, briefly obscuring our view of the watchful police chief. As the bather moves out of the frame we are aware that the shot has moved in closer. Another passer-by wipes the screen and we move even closer. The combination of the 'wipe' and the cut create a single fluid image. Compare this scene to Mrs Brenner's discovery of the eyeless corpse in The Birds where Hitchcock creates a jarring effect by cutting closer on the same image. In Frenzy the same director used an imitation wipe to cheat in the creation of a long travelling shot: watch for the moment when the Covent Garden porter passes across the frame with a sack of potatoes, seamlessly joining together studio and location work. 


In the grammar of film a cut can be used within scenes or to move from scene to scene. Traditionally, a fade or dissolve is used to indicate the passing of time and as such is rarely used within a single scene (although, off the top of my head, I can think of examples in Citizen Kane and Taxi Driver). A wipe is most frequently used to indicate both a change of time and location, or - in this beach scene- as a sleight of hand, like some of the camera tricks of Georges Melies. Like the Iris-in and Iris-out of the silents, the wipe has become rare in modern cinema unless it is being used in a post-modernist ironic way, or - as in the Star Wars movies - as a kind of retro throwback.

Spielberg uses cuts when he allows us to be the observer of the action and 'wipes' when he wants us to watch it through Brody's eyes. The contrast of the staccato rhythm of the former and the perceived fluidity of the latter helps to create a kinetic tension that builds to the 'Vertigo moment' when the screen seems to expand and contract at the same time.

It's Only An Island If You Look At It From The Water

On his way to collect his raft from the beach hut, Alex Kintner passes Ellen Brody, who is sunbathing on the beach and conversing with a dark-haired woman (Mrs Taft according to the IMDB credits, but anonymous in the movie itself). Snatches of inconsequential dialogue can be heard, but it is Ellen's question ('When do I get to become an islander?') and Mrs Taft's response ('Never! You're not born here, you're not an islander.') that register.

In Benchley's novel the town of Amity is located on the western end of Long Island, a twenty-minute drive from Sag Harbor. Long Island somewhat belies its geographical status by lying flush against the mainland and being connected to it by both bridges and tunnels. When you look at it from the water or even from space, its large mass of almost one and a half thousand square miles looks more like a peninsula. In the movie Amity becomes an island unto itself, more akin to Martha's Vineyard, which was where the film was shot and which looks like an island from wherever you view it. In fact, although nominally set in a recognisable east coast location, Amity is about as real as the village of Brigadoon or that other famous Scottish village from Local Hero.

In the novel Brody is a local, but finds himself increasingly isolated from his community - a story element that was emphasised by the publisher's hype (... one man against a giant killer shark and a town that won't face the truth!). In the film, Brody is an off-islander, figuratively and - at the movie's climax - literally out of his depth, but he finds unlikely companionship in his quest to kill the shark. At the very end of the movie he is reunited with Hooper and the two men share a brief moment of poignancy as they acknowledge Quint's sacrifice with a realisation that no man is an island.

Watching The Detective

 
Alex walks towards the beach huts to get his raft, stepping between reclining sunbathers. The camera moves with him and halts as the profile of Brody comes into view in the foreground, dominating the right side of the frame. The concentrated stillness of the chief's gaze sets him apart from the rest of the people of the beach, and his right hand is held to his mouth in a typical gesture of deep thought. His posture can also be read as an emblem of his complicity in the cover-up of the first attack: forbidden to speak, he is, at least, determined to be on the lookout for any further threat.

The scene is as much about Brody being watched as it is about him watching. Shots alternate between what he sees and his reactions to it in a textbook example of the Kuleshov effect. As an audience we share with him the knowledge that none of the other participants in the scene have, and so his heightened expressions of dread become ours. In a sense, we are watching our own reactions up on the screen.

Throughout much of the movie, Brody is placed in the position of observer. At key moments he directs his gaze out towards the ocean, and - particularly in the presence of Hooper - he is relegated to the role of onlooker, first as the fish expert delivers medical analysis in the morgue scene, then fillets the tiger shark in a 'half-assed autopsy', and later explores Ben Gardner's half-submerged boat.

Brody sits in his chair throughout almost the entire scene: what, after all, could be more emblematic of an observer than a seated posture? Even when there is an appearance of a threat, Brody does nothing more drastic than half-rise to a crouching position, and when his view is blocked he simply shifts his beach chair a few inches in irritation. Even at the moment of the attack, he remains rooted to the spot - it is the camera and indeed the image that react with movement.

That Little Kintner Boy

As the overweight lady walks into the sea she passes a young man in cut off jeans and a pale lemon polo shirt, who is playing with his black labrador in the surf. He throws a stick into the ocean and the dog races after it. A skinny boy in red bathing trunks (the same fire engine red as the boat of the estuary victim) emerges from the sea. The camera reverses its right-to-left movement and follows him up the beach until he plops down in front of a woman, whose face is hidden by a floppy yellow sun hat. Their brief exchange hints at the prickly relationship of a nervous child and an over-protective mother. Interestingly, the boy's name is telegraphed to the audience, just as the first victim called out her own name minutes before her death.

Given a final ten minutes on the water (and, in fact, a final few minutes of life), Alex Kintner gets up and walks further up the beach. The camera follows him, pulling back to reveal more of the background where we can see first one and then two tall lifeguard chairs, both unoccupied and facing the ocean. Painted the same white as the picket fences, they are totems of a false sense of security.

In the book, Alex is six years old, but in the movie he's ten or eleven, more or less the same age as Brody's elder son. He was played by twelve year old local Jeffrey Voorhees, who coincidentally shares the same surname as another iconic movie monster. Mrs Kintner also seems to have been aged for the movie version - at times, she looks old enough to be the young boy's grandmother. Played by another local (Lee Fierro), the actress was, in fact, forty five when she was cast in the role. Benchley never fully describes her in the book, but the illustrated Reader's Digest version of the novel portrays her as a leggy blonde with Jackie O. sunglasses and a DePalma transvestite psycho fright wig.