Everything You Wanted To Know About Sharks But Were Afraid To Ask

The next scene opens with a close up of a book illustration explaining how a shark's lateral sensory system (aka its vibration detector) works. The camera pans across the page showing how the erratic impulses of a fish in distress can be picked up like a radio signal. In the novel Peter Benchley packed a lot of his shark facts into the opening chapter in sentences that could have been lifted from a National Geographic article ('Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings, and these nerves detected vibrations and signaled the brain.'). A 1968 issue of the magazine was, in fact, one of several sources for the pictures Brody looks at in a subsequent scene, although the editing suggests that he is looking at a single book.

As the page of the book is turned, there is a cut to a shot of Brody deep in study at the desk in his living room. This location will be seen again during the montage sequence that prefigures the Fourth of July when Hooper and Brody work the phones in an attempt to recruit shark spotters. The use of the home rather than the police station as a setting emphasises the fact that Brody's motive in hunting down the shark is not simply a matter of civic duty ('I'm responsible for public safety around here'), but is also part of the male's primal urge to protect his mate and offspring. Indeed, Brody is also responsible for safety in the home - hence his warning to his kids in the early scene to stay off the swings, and his later admonition to Ellen against using the fireplace in the den.

The sofa - on which Spielberg's dog Elmer sits with a longing look, possibly at his real master off camera - is functional rather than attractive although it does match the orange of the curtains. The chair Brody is sitting in seems a size too small for the desk, forcing him to crouch over the books he has open before him. So absorbed is he by the material that he doesn't at first notice his wife come up behind him, and when he does react by turning suddenly, she jumps out of her skin and says, 'You scared me.'

Brody is beginning to obsess about the shark (an attitude that was to become the lynch pin of his character in the sequel), and he picks up another book from the stack he has obviously checked out of the local library. As he does so, his comment to his wife ('People don't even know how old sharks are. I mean, they live two, three thousand years') suggests that he hasn't been absorbing much of the information he's been reading. Although it's true that the life span of some species of sharks is not known (the Great White probably lives to be about thirty), the number of years is likely to be only in double digits.

Ellen Brody takes the book out of her husband's hands and replaces it with a comforting glass of scotch. She settles on the floor between his knees and leans back into his crotch (reversing the positions they took on the beach). Tilting back her head she delivers a light-hearted come-on line ('Wanna get drunk and fool around?') that could well be part of the couple's marital code. Brody's ironic reply of 'Oh, yeah' is not so much a rejection of the offer as a mark of affection.

No Swimming

The scene in the council chambers is bookended by two signs: the first, an offer of a reward; the second - in the movie's briefest single scene - a prohibition against swimming. A man, who bears a passing resemblance to author Peter Benchley, holds one of the signs in close up so that the audience can read it and Deputy Hendricks can hammer it into the sand with a mallet. Further down the beach in the background similar signs are being erected in what is clearly a concerted community action.

The wording of the notice (NO SWIMMING HAZARDOUS AREA BEACH CLOSED by order Amity P.D) tellingly avoids any reference to the shark, and one can't help but think that Larry Vaughn had final say on the text - just as when interviewed later, he will use language to downplay the threat with a reference to injured bathers. The light is fading from the sky as the beach signs are put up, and there's something about the gathering darkness and the wind that ruffles the clothes of the police officers and the volunteers that is slightly unsettling. It also serves to provide a temporal transition to the next scene, where the sun is setting on the horizon as Brody confronts in picture form what he will soon be facing in real life.

Chalk and Talk

With the announcement of the twenty four hour beach closure there are some cutaways of the Amity residents growing restless and a reaction shot of Brody surveying the scene with an expression of mild disbelief. From out of the raucous expressions of discontent, one distinct line of dialogue ('Twenty four hours is like three weeks') is a reminder that in the capitalist economy time is money. Even with his gavel Larry Vaughn is no longer able to control the meeting and the bickering is finally halted by another sound from the back of the room. There is a cut to a hand - partially obscured on both sides of the frame by the out-of-focus arms of two Amity residents - drawing its fingernails down the blackboard over a child-like chalk drawing of a shark devouring a man. Both the sound (like a high-pitched scream) and the image act as a presentiment of Quint's own death.

 

Just to make sure we associate the nail-on-chalkboard sound with something unpleasant, Spielberg provides four separate reaction shots of people in the room: Mrs Taft rises from her seat and turns, one hand touching her ear like a secret service agent; an elderly woman in a blue jacket and pearls, looking like an extra from an Agatha Christie mystery, physically recoils in her chair; a tableaux of Amity residents, artfully arranged like a jury, collectively grit their teeth and narrow their eyes; and two of the councilmen (the bald-headed bespectacled one who had accosted Brody on his way to the hardware store, and the pudgy one who had made the crack about the reward money) try to make out the source of the noise through the intervening crowd of people, most of whom are now on their feet.

Two of the residents closest to the blackboard conveniently step aside in unison to allow us to see Quint seated at the far end of the room with all eyes now upon him. He takes a bite of a cracker, and, as he begins to speak, the camera begins a slow tracking shot towards him. As it passes Mr Taft, he momentarily turns to look back at the seated members of the council, but almost immediately turns his attention back to the fisherman, craning slightly in his seat to get a better view. The balance of power has clearly shifted from one end of the room to the other. Seated at the back of the room Quint is both literally and figuratively distanced from the island's recognised authority. One of the conditions he later sets the chief for going after the shark is to 'get the mayor off my back so I don't have any more of this zoning crap.' This line of dialogue was written into the script partly as an in-joke (the filmmakers had difficulty getting permission to build a temporary structure to stand in as Quint's boathouse), but it also suggests the fisherman's non-conformist attitude to civic obedience.

The camera movement towards Quint, which ends in a close-up as he addresses himself directly to Brody, has a certain predatory quality to it, not unlike the underwater POV shots of the shark. It's complemented by a reverse tracking shot that moves towards the council bench as the mayor rises from his seat in a gesture that suggests he has recognised the fisherman's right to the floor of the meeting. There is a brief cut back to the close up of Quint, who uses the language of commerce ('Gonna stay alive and ante up?') to reinforce his point.

In fact, his entire speech is punctuated with such terms: he introduces himself not by name but by profession ('You all know me. Know how I earn a living.'), talks about putting Amity's businesses back 'on a paying basis', raises the spectre of being 'on welfare the whole winter', and even sees his own life in monetary terms ('I value my neck a lot more than three thousand bucks, chief'). He makes a distinction between pleasure fishing and sharking ('It's not like going down the pond and chasing blue gills or tommy cods.'), which he will later use as a rod with which to beat Hooper's back ('I'm not talking about pleasure boating or daily sailing. I'm talking about working for a living.'). Incidentally, the pond reference is not, as we will later learn, meant as a generic term, but is a reference to the estuary where the hapless boatman will lose his leg and his life. As Quint describes the Great White's eating habits ('A little shaking, a little tenderizing, down you go.'), he munches on a cracker with no doubt intended irony, unable to appreciate, of course, the greater irony of the scene, which is that he is actually describing his own fate.

Brody and Quint are subliminally linked by matching tracking shots: as the fisherman declares his intention to do the job alone ('I don't want no volunteers. I don't want no mates.') the camera pushes in on him again and then cuts to a similar camera movement on the chief. In fact, when Quint's offer is eventually taken up and he becomes a de facto employee of the Amity authorities, it is Brody who ends up calling the shots ('It's my party. It's my charter.') and the fisherman is forced to accept Hooper as his mate and Brody as a volunteer.

To make clear that his motivation is strictly financial, Quint makes a sole claim on the bounty money ('Ten thousand dollars for me by myself.'), and figuratively cuts up the shark into an unholy trinity ('For that you get the head, the tail, the whole damn thing.'). The mayor, exchanging a look of puzzled agreement with another council member, promises to take the fisherman's offer 'under advisement', a phrase that suggests the language of bureaucracy has not totally deserted him. Quint, in a profile shot that shows off his mutton chop sideburns to their best advantage, takes his leave with a mildly mocking acknowledgement of the people in the room ('Mr Mayor. Chief. Ladies and gentlemen.'). He's followed down the empty corridor by his silent mate and dog as a young man and woman peer round the jamb to watch their departure. There is a final cut to a low angle shot of a brooding Brody on the right of the frame with the view of a house and a suspiciously bare-looking tree out of the window on the left.

Ready When You Are, Mr DeMille

Of the numerous crowd scenes in the movie that use local actors and residents, the scene in the council chambers is the one that requires the most amount of acting of its non-professional participants. Spielberg establishes the positioning of the key players in a series of low-angle shots that shows them taking their seats, and, tellingly, has Brody hovering in a no man's land between the two groups of council members and concerned citizens. Mrs Taft, who provides the voice of the latter, sits front and centre and has the lion's share of the dialogue. She has a brief exchange with the man next to her, which identifies her as the owner of a motel, and responds haughtily to the council member's joke about the reward money being in cash or cheque ('I don't think that's funny at all.'). When Brody prevaricates about the beach closures, it is Mrs Taft who fixes him with a stare and asks the question ('Are you going to close the beaches?') that he can no longer avoid. The bright yellow of her polo neck jumper sets her out from the rest of the crowd, whose clothing is predominately blue.

It's difficult to say whether the uncomfortable expressions on the faces of some of the extras is a result of being in front of the camera or an indication of untapped acting talent, but they play well with the overall tone of the scene, which is informed by a communal sense of embarrassment and indecision. There are subtleties in Scheider's performance that also reflect this mood. When he enters the room, he looks about uncertainly, unsure where to place himself, and ends up neither sitting nor standing, but leaning on the wooden desk, and has to be called to the front by the mayor. When he speaks he stumbles on his words and is interrupted by Meadows before he can finish his first sentence. The newspaper editor's question ('What about the beaches, chief?') is subtly layered in a lower register to contrast with the tone of nervous proclamation that Brody adopts, a simple technique that Spielberg would employ in a similar way for the air traffic control scene in Close Encounters of The Third Kind.  Scheider's reading of his next line ('We are going to put on the summer - the extra summer deputies as soon as possible') is a perfect encapsulation of his character's compromised position. It's almost as if Brody has been coached on what to say but has fluffed it on delivery. Unlike Larry Vaughn, the chief does not have the politican's skill of dissembling and when he's asked a direct question by Mrs Taft, he replies with a simple and slightly regretful affirmative. Spielberg isolates him against the expanse of window frame and there's perhaps no other moment in the entire movie when he looks quite so forlorn. Interestingly, he adopts the third person pronoun up until the moment he learns of the twenty four hour moratorium, but his principled outburst ('I didn't agree to that') is drowned out by the rising murmur of the group.

Interiors

Nigel Andrews, whose pocket book analysis of Jaws is usually right on the money, refers to the scene in which the beach closures are announced as The Schoolroom Scene, and builds part of his interpretation around the mistaken assumption that Amity's city fathers have requisitioned the space for an impromptu meeting. Andrews's error seems to be based solely on the fact that in the establishing shot of the room the most dominant feature is a blackboard. However, as details from the previous scene in the corridor (the notices on the bulletin board, the official signs above the doors, and the mayor's own reference to the 'council chambers') make clear, this is supposed to be the interior of the town hall. In Peter Benchley's novel, it's a much more opulent space and indeed the printed description may be more like the real thing. The movie's choice of location may in part have been dictated by what was available, but the manner in which the interior was dressed serves to highlight the nature of Amity's small town politics.

As the mayor holds open the door for the others to enter, we get a brief wide shot of the interior. The off-white walls of the room are almost bare except for four framed certificates, two of which are slightly crookedly hung. The doors and the skirting board are painted in a pale green - reminiscent of the colour of the shutters and the fire hydrant seen in the earlier street scene as Brody walks to the hardware store - and the two stacked in/out trays on the desks are a perfect match with the woodwork. Amity is a town that is clearly obsessed with appearances.

In the foreground of the frame there is a curved wooden desk (something less than a semi-circle) on which are placed some pen holders, two small flags and a gavel. This piece of furniture, which will only seat five, has something of the look of a judge's bench about it, and suggests that the power of decision making in Amity rests in the hands of a few select men. At the other end of the room is the blackboard, wiped clean since the last meeting, and behind it on the wall the room's only concession to decoration: an old-fashioned wooden clock, the hands of which appear to be at twenty past four. The middle of the room is occupied by two rows of grey metal folding chairs, and to the right of them there is a traditional-looking schoolteacher's desk and chair. A gunmetal filing cabinet occupies the far corner of the room, and wedged up against the wall on the right is a machine, which looks like some kind of bulky photocopier.

The interior is overlaid with a a gossamer patchwork of shadow created by the venetian blinds pulled to half mast over the windows. The effect is reminiscent of but not quite as dramatic as the spider web that surrounds Cary Grant as he climbs the stairs with a possibly poisoned glass of milk in Hitchcock's Suspicion.

Looks Like I Picked The Wrong Week To Quit Smoking

As Larry Vaughn leads the way down the corridor to the council chambers he places a cigarette in his mouth. In the later scene when he argues with Brody and Hooper in front of the defaced billboard, he toys nervously with another cigarette, holding it cagily in his cupped right hand, sucking on the filter tip, but never lighting up. These are the only two oblique references to the fact that he is trying to quit smoking, and it's the kind of business that an actor might come up with in rehearsal. When the mayor appears in the hospital in the aftermath of the Fourth of July panic in a rumpled jacket with his tie askew, he has clearly lost his battle against the nicotine habit and is seen openly taking a drag.

Brody too is a smoker: he puffs nervously on a cigarette while waiting for the car ferry; he's admonished sharply by Hooper for attempting to light up in the morgue; and, famously, he has a freshly-lit Marlboro between his lips when the shark rears up behind him at the Orca's stern. In the movie's sequel Ellen Brody complains when her husband smokes at the breakfast table, suggesting he eat a doughnut with his coffee instead.

In the Seventies smoking in movies was pretty common (although not as common as, say, in the Forties when it was casually assumed that everybody did it), and it was still a long way from being demonised. Nevertheless, it was - and always will be - a nightmare for movie continuity, as evidenced by the fact that Brody's cigarette disappears and reappears from shot to shot in the 'you're going to need a bigger boat' scene.

Corridors Of Power

A close up of the upper portion of the reward sign is obscured by figures passing in front of it (in the same way that Brody's view of the ocean in the previous scene was partially obscured) before a cut displays the complete text with the profile of two Amity residents (one male and one female) on either side of the frame. The female resident is Mrs Taft, wearing a yellow polo neck sweater under a beige jacket with typically wide Seventies lapels and sporting a rather unflattering pair of George Burns style glasses. She dismisses the comments of the other resident - an oily-skinned slightly overweight man, who will later be seated at the head table in the council chambers - with a head-in-the-sand remark: 'Look, I can't argue with you. I can't talk to you.' As she appeals to the mayor ('Larry, do something here.') the camera pulls back to reveal the crowd of people squeezed into the corridor. In the foreground is Brody on the right of the screen, who is in conversation with Meadows. Behind them on the left is Vaughn, vainly trying to pacify the increasingly restless natives.

Like the crowd scenes on the dock - both before and after the killing of the tiger shark - there is a sense of disorder. In those later scenes, this is conveyed by both the editing and the movement of people within the scene. Here, however, the shot is a simple Kubrickian reverse track along a corridor and so it is through the Hawkesian overlapping of dialogue that we get a sense of both urgency and barely controlled hysteria. The isolated lines of dialogue that are given to Vaughn, Meadows and Brody focus on the element of containment. Brody fears - rightly, as it turns out - that the whole thing is 'going to turn into a contest' and Meadows, though willing to bury the story in the local media ('The ad is going to run in the back along with the grocery ads.'), is powerless to prevent wider coverage ('Now people all over New England are going to know about it.'). Brody, too, is aware, of his duty to the immediate community ('I'm responsible for public safety around here.') but he is curtly rebuffed by a clearly pissed-off mayor, who tells him to 'go out there tomorrow and see that no one gets hurt.' Vaughn's comment is given added emphasis by Mrs Taft, who - imitating her husband's familiarity with the chief - cries out, 'Marty, do something here!'

As Brody walks down the corridor - unable to resist the pressure of the crowd behind him just as he has been powerless to resist the pressure of the mayor - he bumps his head against a sign hanging above a door, and it's surely no coincidence that it indicates the office of the Town Accountant.