The Time It Takes To Take The Takes

The scene between Brody, Hooper and Vaughn that plays out against the backdrop of the ocean and the defaced billboard runs – with the exception of a cutaway reaction shot at the end – in one fluid take lasting about three minutes. The technique goes back to Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and the technical experiments of Alfred Hitchcock in Rope and Under Capricorn, and was also admired and perfected by Stanley Kubrick, whose long tracking shots were one of his signature strokes. In both form (a single unbroken take) and content (a display of denial) the confrontation acts as a companion piece to the earlier ferry scene when Brody is persuaded into accepting the cover story of a boating accident to explain the first shark victim’s death. However, there are key differences that indicate the balance of power has shifted. In the ferry scene, Brody is alone against the local newspaper editor, the coroner and the mayor, all of whom act (and speak) as one. 

On the bluff overlooking the bay, it is now Vaughn who is isolated, hemmed in on both sides by Brody and Hooper, whose overlapping rapid-fire dialogue he finds it frustratingly hard to rebut. Two of the minions who backed him up earlier (Meadows and Hendricks) are too busy in the background supervising the repair of the grafittied billboard to lend support now. Gone too is the mayor’s avuncular tone and persuasive use of language. Caught on the back foot, he is reduced to desperate repetition (‘You don’t have the tooth?’) and evasiveness (‘Sick vandalism … a deliberate mutilation of a public service message.’). The contrast of location is also significant. In the earlier scene, Brody was literally penned up against by the rails of the ferry, just as he was boxed in by the official party line. Now, he moves freely along the top of the bluff, gesticulating expansively towards the community of Amity below.

If for Brody the conversation must have a sense of déjà vu, Hooper is unfamiliar with the Babbitism of small town politics and he begins with a degree of deference, a tone which strains and eventually snaps under the mayor’s persistent denial of what (on the billboard) is literally staring him in the face. Indeed, the scene plays with literal and metaphorical geography: Vaughn turns his back on Brody and Hooper and walks away, just as he metaphorically walks away from the problem. When he gets into his car at the end of the scene a road sign with the words ONE WAY stamped upon it points in the direction he is about to drive off in, indicating that the mayor, like another famous politician, is incapable of reversing a decision and making a U-turn.

Big Head

The shot of Hooper silhouetted against the light as he swims underwater towards Ben Gardner’s boat recalls the shark POV of Chrissie in the movie’s opening scene and the increasingly threatening music encourages the audience to anticipate another attack. In fact, the brief music cue that underscores the scene (called ‘Night Search’ on the original soundtrack recording) is a classic example of how film music is often required to change both in mood and tempo from moment to moment, expressing contrasting emotions within a few bars. High notes on the piano and shuddering chords convey the eerie atmosphere of the ocean at night and, as Hooper approaches the ravaged hull, a soft ostinato plays on the cello, reminding us that there is a shark somewhere in the water. 

Hooper discovers a hole below the waterline that recalls the image of the fishing boat in the book that frightened Ellen (that boat also had two fishermen in it). The ruptured planking also serves as a visual echo of the broken fence motif that runs through the early scenes of the picture. Nature, red in tooth if not in claw, is breaking through the barriers that man has constructed to mark out his territory. Hooper casts a nervous glance behind him, playing the beam of his torch over the murky water, before closing in on the hull to prise a white triangular tooth from the wood. We’re shown a close up of the tooth in his hand before there is a cut to a shot looking over Hooper’s shoulder directly into the dark hole in the side of the boat. Suddenly out of the darkness there lunges a white object, which, in the split second before it resolves itself into the shape of Ben Gardner’s severed head, could be the jaws of the shark. The visual shock is ramped up by an aural one as the shrill sound of high flutes and then shrieking violins (much like the ones Bernard Herrmann used for the Psycho shower scene) scrape down the soundtrack like Quint’s fingernails on a chalkboard. 

 

The big head of Ben Gardner is given enough screen time in close-up for us to register the gory details (the pale skin and the rictus scream, the one wide staring eye and the other wormy socket, the hair rippling like kelp) before there is a cut to Hooper’s reaction, his own startled face behind the mask mirroring the shark victim’s own disbelieving stare. Hooper’s screams – unlike those of the audience – are inaudible underwater, but expressed by the exhalation of his final gasps of air. He kicks towards the surface, abandoning the precious evidence of the tooth together with his knife and his torch. When he breaks the surface, the water all around him is a sulphurous yellow. He is caught in Brody’s spotlight as he swims to the boat, and when he grasps the ladder he can do nothing but look up into the camera, gasping both for air and for words. It’s likely that this coda was lengthened by several beats to allow the audience to settle down after the big shock of the dead fisherman’s head rolling into their laps. The next scene contains a lot of talky exposition, which could easily have been lost under the audience chatter that often comes in the wake of a big communal scare.

The story behind the movie’s biggest shock moment is part of Jaws legend. As originally filmed, Hooper discovered the remains of Ben Gardner by shining his light into the interior of the hull, and this was how the scene played out in early preview screenings. In fact, the reaction shot of Hooper (which was not reshot) is partially framed by the shattered wood as if the camera were inside the hull, which makes more visual sense in terms of the original concept. Spielberg was convinced, however, that he could get a louder scream out of the audience by making something jump out at them like in a Fifties 3-D horror movie. 

Unable to persuade the studio to back his idea, the director stumped up three thousand dollars of his own money to pay the art department to build a mock-up section of the boat hull and then with the assistance of a stunt double diver, editor Verna Fields’s swimming pool and some home grown special effects (Carnation milk and shredded tinfoil to give the water a murky look), he shot nine different versions of the shock reveal. He had these spliced into the scene and played each one to the post production crew, who by now had run the film so many times that they were inured to its scares. The version they reacted to was the one in which there is an infintessimal pause before the fisherman pops out like a head in a phantasmagoria, and Spielberg, always trusting his instincts, had it cut into the movie. He was so pleased with the effect it had on audiences - which he measured by how high their popcorn flew into the air - that he would make special trips to showings of the picture and sneak in at the back just to watch the reaction to that moment. 

Spielberg was clearly monitoring the picture closely during its previews for he noted that by ramping up the shock quotient in this scene, he had sacrificed some of the scare value in the movie’s other ‘big head’ moment - when the shark rears up out of the chum slick at the Orca’s stern. This scene now got less of a reaction than it had before, and the director rationalised this as the result of a greater sense of caution on the audience’s behalf. This may have been the case, but surely the Ben Gardner scene, with its atmospheric underscore and horror movie trappings, was always going to get a bigger scream by virtue of the fact that it had wound the audience up into a heightened sense of expectation before jumping out at them at saying ‘Boo!’ The shark’s sudden appearance comes – literally – out of the blue, and, as Hitchcock always observed, suspense is a much more powerful promoter of emotion than surprise.