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:
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’.
