Signs

Larry Vaughn’s description of the graffitied billboard (‘a deliberate mutilation of a public service message’) is – on the surface – a typical example of the mayor’s propensity to speak in the jargon of the bureaucrat. It’s an idiolect that uses vocabulary for the purposes of obfuscation, turning ‘a shark attack’ into ‘a boating accident’, hiding the truth behind big words and burying meaning in serpentine sentence constructions. It comes to the fore later in the mayor’s brief interview with the TV reporter on the Fourth of July, and is also evident in that other public service message, the No Swimming sign that we see being erected on the windswept beach in the wake of the town hall meeting. With its connotations of cutting and tearing, the word ‘mutilation’ stands out, however, as a rather unfortunate choice of word, the kind of verbal misstep that politicians are wont to make. It could be read as a Freudian slip, prompted by the scene depicted on the billboard, which itself is a parody of the movie’s opening scene of cutting and tearing. It could also be read as an indication that Larry Vaughn’s carefully constructed pronouncements are beginning to crack under pressure. Indeed, in his very next sentence, he abandons any pretence of linguistic control and expresses himself in more direct and emotional language (‘I want those little paint-happy bastards caught and hung up by their Buster Browns.’) The reference to a brand of kids’ shoes suggests the mayor is assuming the vandalism is the work of children. The euphemism – which seems to have been coined here – may seem a relatively innocent expression, but it belies the fact that Larry Vaughn is advocating emasculation as a punishment for the vandals. Hooper, like Vaughn, also abandons the idiolect of his public persona during the course of the scene, and ends up treating the mayor like a child, framing his argument as a third grade show and tell (‘All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks …. Now, why don’t you take a long close look at this sign.’). As the two men spar with words, the sign behind them – as big as a movie screen – transmits its unreconstituted public message that Amity has a shark problem.

Bring Me The Head Of Benjamin Gardner

Despite Quint’s assertion that a ‘fish like that’ll swallow you whole’, Ben Gardner does not completely disappear down the shark’s gullet. His head - like Chrissie’s arm, which washes up in the surf - provides graphic undigested evidence of the attack.  The remains that the shark leaves behind become food for creatures lower down the food chain: the girl’s ravaged limb is picked upon by scuttling crabs and screaming sea birds; the fisherman’s left eye is nibbled out of its socket by tiny fish, not dissimilar perhaps to the ones that flit across the screen in the opening shot. Ben Gardner’s head undergoes a ‘sea-change’ more gruesome than the one described by Ariel in his song in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. What better, then, than this grisly transformation – far more persuasive than the missing shark’s tooth - to convince the mayor to close the beaches? And yet, no mention is made of it – it is rather the fisherman’s boat that Brody proffers as Exhibit A (‘It was all chewed up. I helped tow it in. You should have seen it-’).

The reason, of course, that no mention is made of Ben Gardner’s head (which the viewer can assume has been deposited in a plastic bowl in the morgue alongside the remains of the first victim) is simply that it had not been written into the script by the time the scene on the bluff was filmed.  It played no part in the boat discovery scene as it was originally written (and partly filmed), which Carl Gottlieb makes clear on page 84 of The Jaws Log: 

‘We were filming a scene in which Brody and Hooper, accompanied by Meadows, are at sea in a small boat, looking for evidence of a great white shark. The script calls for them to find the wrecked hull of a local fisherman’s boat. They tie up alongside it, closer examination shows terrible damage, Hooper puts on a wet suit and dives to inspect its hull, and prises the tooth of a villainous shark out of the hull.’ 

This description is closer to the scene in Chapter Five of the novel where Brody and Hendricks pull alongside the deserted craft, and the deputy pulls a two inch ‘triangle of glistening white denticle’ out of the transom.  In the book we never learn if Ben Gardner’s body, or any part of him, is recovered, although Brody does reflect that if any remains wash ashore they will become ‘a gory nuisance’.