An orange and white
shark swims out of an ink black sea and dies bloodily in a hail of laser-like
bullets. A cut reveals the image to be on the screen of a video arcade game
called Killer Shark being played by a
young man on the beach front. Just like the shark souvenirs on sale at the dock,
here is more evidence of Amity’s entrepreneurial spirit and its ability to turn
adversity into an opportunity. The camera tracks left to right following Brody (in
sandy coloured uniform) and Meadows (in unflattering claret coloured jeans) as
they cross a beach populated predominantly by Waspish families and couples. Behind
them we can glimpse a yellow stall decked with more of the shark jaw souvenirs. By the bandstand is a yellow oil drum, which may be either a coincidental piece of set-dressing or a deliberate visual foreshadowing of the Orca's barrels.
The sequence that
follows takes Chapter Ten of the novel as its template. Although there are key
points of reference common to both page and screen (Brody and Hooper on
walkie-talkies, an interview for a TV station, a young boy who survives a close
encounter with the shark), the movie aims for dramatic spectacle and scales the
action up accordingly. Where Benchley made the setting a sparsely populated
private beach on an ordinary Saturday, the filmmakers bring in hundreds of
extras, a flotilla of boats and a helicopter, and locate the action on America’s most
iconic of holidays.
Made at the height
of the disaster movie boom by the studio that created the genre’s touchstones, Jaws was inevitably cast in the mould of
another tale of group jeopardy, and so the film demanded a central set piece of
mass panic. Audiences had paid good money to see people perish in a capsized
ocean liner (The Poseidon Adventure),
burnt to a crisp in a glass skyscraper (The Towering Inferno), and crushed by falling buildings (Earthquake). There was no reason to doubt that they wouldn’t do the
same to see people being devoured by a man-eating shark. But, in fact, what
ultimately made Jaws such a hit was
not its pretensions to big-scale action, but its more intimate interaction
between the principal characters. The beating heart of the movie is the tale of
three men in a boat.
