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.
