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.
