Half-Assed Autopsy On A Fish

The scene on the dock where Hooper cuts open the belly of the tiger shark is established with two quick shots: the beam of a torch and the reflection it casts on the blade of a long knife. The technique of visual shorthand is the same as the one used in an earlier dock scene where the two fishermen prepare their bait of holiday roast. The camera pulls back from the glittering blade to show Hooper's gloved hands inserting the knife into the corpse of the fish whilst Brody crouches on his haunches in the background, one hand held protectively to his face. In fact, Spielberg's original intention was to lead up to the scene with the two men approaching the dock from underneath whilst Hooper regaled the chief with a story of college telephone sex. Its exclusion from the final cut (it can be seen as a DVD extra) may have been due to running time constraints, but it was more likely the result of a decision to emasculate the character of Hooper and cast him in the role of the eager boy scout. Another element cut from the scene was the music. John Williams wrote a moody cue (in much the same vein as the music that accompanies Quint's Indianapolis speech) to underscore the action, but it was dropped by the director and only resurfaced when Joel McNeely recorded the full score with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra twenty five years later.

As Hooper saws into the shark's belly, he provides a commentary on his actions ('We start in the alimentary canal and open the digestive tract.'), which is free from the 'upper musculature' forensic gobbledygook he spouted in the Amity morgue. A milky liquid spills out onto the dock and as he reaches in to pull out the remains of undigested food he gasps for air. He tosses one whole and one half of a bonito onto the deck and they slither to a stop at Brody's feet. There is a cut to a low angled reverse shot as he throws a tin can onto the deck, and this reverts to the original master shot as he pulls out a Louisiana licence plate, which confirms his suspicions that the fish came up 'from southern waters'. Brody probably doesn't intend his question ('He didn't eat a car did he?') to be taken literally, although by the time the sequel came around the shark was taking on other modes of transportation.

Semioticians will no doubt be able to explain the significance in the number plate (007 0 981), and some might see the first three digits as a coded message for Spielberg's desire to direct a James Bond movie (a desire that prompted George Lucas to offer him Raiders of the Lost Ark), or the legend 'Sportman's Paradise' as an ironic commentary of the shark hunt. The audience is given time to register these details as Scheider picks up the number plate, twists it upright with an awkward arm movement and plays the beam of his torch over it.

Brody's need for confirmation that they have caught the wrong shark lacks any logic (Why not just present the results of their half-assed autopsy to the mayor in the morning?) as does Hooper's decision to go looking for the great white in the stretch where he has been feeding (What does he intend to do? Take a photo of it?). These blips on the story's radar, however, will be nothing compared to the gaping hole in the narrative that is soon to be revealed by the discovery of Ben Gardner's boat, and, indeed, it is this discovery that is dictating the characters' actions. The movie has been on land for long enough and it's time to go out on the water. Incidentally, another thing that doesn't quite make sense at the end of this scene is the architecture surrounding the two men. As they stride towards the boats they move through a half-complete barn-like structure that resembles nothing that we saw in the earlier daylight harbour scenes.