Who Are Those Guys?

As he heads out to sea, leading a motley posse of fishermen, Ben Gardner delivers a mocking commentary in an almost impenetrable accent that has shades of W.C. Fields about it. Dressed in a working man's cap and a camouflage jacket, he's clearly a rootin'-tootin' hunting and fishing kind of guy, a fatter more loquacious version of Quint. Judging by Brody's later assumption on seeing the tiger shark strung up on the dock ('Ben Gardner get this?'), he too can also lay claim to a local reputation as a master of his trade. At this stage of the movie, we don't actually know his name, and later when his head pops out of the hole of his sunken boat it's so disfigured that we don't identify it - indeed, bereft of its bulky body, the head has an almost shrunken quality to it. Gardner has a mate on board; he looks suspiciously like the man in the yellow oilskin jacket and mustard trousers glimpsed out of the window of the harbour master's hut, but now he's dressed in dark clothes. This mate we can only assume was swallowed whole by the shark as his remains never resurface.

A wide shot of the boats in the bay reveals them to be only about a dozen in number (far fewer than Hendricks's earlier complaints would suggest) but when Spielberg cuts to closer shots of the craft weaving dangerously close to each other as the fishermen toss blood and fire crackers into the water, there's a real sense of confusion. Weighed down by too many occupants, some of the boats are riding so low in the water that they look as if they could capsize at any minute. Nevertheless, there's never any sense of threat in the scene, and the sight of a Labrador sunning itself on the bow of one of the boats adds to the easy-going tone. The snatches of dialogue (no doubt recorded later and looped in) bring out the competitive nature of the hunt, reflecting Brody's earlier comment before the town hall meeting that the whole thing is going to turn into a contest. We're also given a quick note on chumming in an exchange ('Chumming? What in the hell's that?' 'They're tricking the sharks out.') that is later echoed by Quint's description of his own modus operandi ('See, what I do, chief, is I trick him to the surface, then I jab at him.') To underline the mercenary nature of the hunt, the penultimate line of dialogue we hear refers to the bounty ('Ten thousand dollars divided four ways is what?') and there's something about the tone of it that always reminds me of the overlapping dialogue in the penultimate scene of Citizen Kane.

 

The final shot shows a bucket of blood being emptied over the stern of one of the boats and its outboard motor churning it into a crimson wake. It's on this image that the film cuts to the cold clinical interior of the Amity morgue, and when that scene ends it will cut back to the dock with another bloodied image of a dead shark's jaws.