Michael Brody and
his friends are carrying a small sailboat down to the sea. The police chief
halts them and takes Michael aside, the camera pivoting to follow father and
son as they move back up the beach. They stand on the far right of the frame,
the son in a pose of mild defiance with his hands on his hips, the father with
a protective hand on the boy’s shoulder. Behind them is a body of water that is
reassuringly fenced in by a solid bank of sand paved with flat rocks, and a
bridge that runs to the far left of the frame. This Brody identifies as ‘the
pond’, a real-life tidal pond that no doubt helped shape the impromptu shooting
script. The first mention of this location comes much earlier in the movie when
Quint references it in his town hall speech (‘It’s not like going down to the
pond and chasing blue gills or tommy cods.’), but at that point in the
narrative the audience has no reason to assume that the word is being used
other than in its generic form. Quint associates the pond with a
non-threatening form of fishing, and this perception is reinforced by Michael’s
retort that ‘the pond is for old ladies.’ Brody wins the argument with a
self-deprecating remark (‘I know it’s for the old ladies, but just do it for
the old man, huh?’), and then walks back to the shore line, confident that he
has placed his son out of danger.
A low angle camera
pans from right to left, following the helicopter as it flies low over the
beach huts. As the camera pans it also tilts so that when it comes to a rest on
Larry Vaughn, whose head and shoulders occupy the left of the image, only the
top of one of the hut’s orange pennants is visible against the sky on the right
of the screen. The mayor turns his gaze away from the chopper as it flies out
of frame and looks towards the camera, mouthing the words son of a bitch.
As he turns his back and walks away, the camera
tilts down and begins tracking from left to right. It follows the mayor as he picks
his way carefully between the holidaymakers, who have staked their claims on
the crowded beach. Some children race across the sand, one in the foreground
registering as just a blur of movement and providing a subconscious visual echo
of the wipe effect used in the scene when Alex Kintner is attacked. The camera cuts
to another low angle shot as Vaughn hunkers down beside an elderly sunbathing
couple.
Although the
audience is unlikely to recognise him, the man “trying to absorb some of this sun” is the selectman who sat on the mayor’s right at the town hall meeting.
Like the other uncredited locally-cast characters in the movie, he delivers his
lines with a quirky individuality. Turning the word ‘please’ into an order, Larry
Vaughn commands his right-hand man to go into the water. The selectman
exchanges a look with his wife and then wordlessly the couple get to their
feet. As they stand up we see that they have in their care two young girls and
a boy. We watch from behind as the grandparents and grandchildren link hands
and walk down to the surf. The selectman on the left of the group is holding an
inflatable yellow raft (another call back to the death of Alex Kintner) and his
wife is wearing a black bathing costume. Everything seems to be signalling to
us that these are to be shark’s next victims. As the family enters the water,
there is cut to a shot that emphasises the contrast between the populated land
and the empty sea, and it’s an identical composition to one used in the
earlier beach scene.
A cut to the
helicopter sweeping over the water as it passes the spotter boats provides a
brief reminder of the threat that is lurking beneath the waves. The camera pans
to the right to reveal one of the shark spotters with his rifle in the
stern of his boat, a stars and stripes fluttering behind him. Then we cut back
to the selectman and his wife, warily guiding the raft with their three
grandchildren on it towards the camera, which is positioned just above the
water line. We cut back to the beach where two young children, finally given
permission to enter the water, race past Larry Vaughn.
Both his position within
the composition of the shot and his mood have changed: he began the scene
frowning on the left of the frame, and now he is standing on the extreme right,
smiling at the success of his gambit. A sequence of four brief shots follows: a
young couple walking past the lifeguard’s post towards the sea, people wading
into the water with an empty lifeguard post prominent in the background, two
men racing each other into the surf, and then a bird’s eye view of the beach
from inside the helicopter cockpit. This final image – which lasts for about
five seconds – gives a sense of scale to the impending disaster that (even on a
first viewing) we know must come.
