Panic On The Fourth Of July

It is the shark spotter with the white sun visor who first raises the alarm. (“Jesus Christ! Fin! Shark! Three five zero!”) Behind him on the boat are three other men, two with binoculars looking to the port and to the starboard and one resting the butt of his rifle on his hip. The camera pans swiftly right to left as one of the men races to the bow of the boat and point his glasses in the direction indicated. In the background we can see Hooper’s boat and there is a cut to a brief shot of him giving orders on the walkie talkie (“Red one! Red one! Martin! Get the people out of the water!). 

The shot places Hooper behind the raised windscreen of the boat, with part of the steel frame bisecting the screen almost diagonally. It’s another example of the film’s visual motif of fences and barriers, and could also be seen as a foreshadowing of Hooper’s confrontation with the shark when he will be enclosed in the shark cage. There is a cut to a shot of Brody in front of the bandstand as he turns and looks towards the sea as the radio crackles in his hand.We then get a view of the ocean from the vantage point of one of the raised lifeguard stations, and there is a cut to a close up of the lifeguard rising up into the frame, his hands cupped around his mouth to amplify the sound of the whistle he is blowing on. Behind him we can see a number of sunbathers sprawled on the sand and dozing in the sun. The next brief shot shows a group of fully clothed tourists seated all in a row like movie goers. As one, they raise their own binoculars to get a better view of the carnage to come.

Brody races to the foot of the lifeguard station in an attempt to contain the situation, trying the stop the shrill whistling – the very sound that signalled the beginning of the shark problem when Hendricks found the remains of the first victim on the beach. Brody’s pleas are in vain and he becomes just another helpless observer. After we get a shot from ground level of the lifeguard issuing commands through a megaphone, there is a medium shot of Brody looking in despair to the right of the frame. He then takes a step towards the camera, as if about to make a decision, but then just stops and stares. 

The next shot – which we can assume is from Brody’s point of view – is of people swimming directly towards the camera, whilst in the background the boats are gathering to form a barrier. There follows a series of shots of bathers scrambling for the safety of shore.With the exception of the elderly selectman’s wife, who we see in close up, those in jeopardy remain anonymous. The camera picks out a few individuals – a child on a yellow raft crying as swimmers plough past him; a man who (in a typical disaster movie trope) pushes two children off a raft to commandeer it and save himself; a woman clutching a child protectively to her chest and screaming; an old man trampled in the surf – but the audience has no real investment in their survival. The panic on the fourth of July is a scene of mass rout. 

The concept of group jeopardy was integral to the disaster film and it determined the episodic narrative nature of the genre. Typically, multiple characters would be established in the first act (before the disaster struck) and their developing storylines would alternate in between action set pieces. Along the way some would persevere and some would perish, each character’s chances of survival being inextricably linked to the actor’s status on the call sheet. The casting of well known faces (be they movie stars, character actors, old time Hollywood legends, or TV stalwarts) meant that it was easy for the audience to recognise the characters amidst the mayhem. Had Jaws adopted the disaster movie template then Amity’s beaches might have been populated with the likes of George Kennedy, Shelley Winters, Roddy McDowall and Ava Gardner. Benchley’s novel contained enough soap-opera plot themes (infidelity, blackmail, alcoholism) that could easily have been worked up into multiple storylines, but, in fact, it was this Peyton Place element of the source material that Spielberg rejected from the beginning.

Red Herring

The composition of a brief shot from on board one of the boats has a Cubist-like abstraction: whether by accident or design, it is as if the image has been deconstructed into a series of triangles. On the right of the frame is the blurred profile of a shark spotter, his white sun visor forming a distinctive three-sided shape. The bow of the boat is cropped by the lower right hand side of the frame so that it appears as a shadowy triangle, its hypotenuse running parallel to the slightly curving rail of the craft. A triangular wedge of water is framed between the boat rail and the profile of the shark spotter. As the boat drifts to the right we can see a cluster of beach cabins, their pointed roofs flattened into triangles by the distance. Amidst this arrangement of three-sided forms we briefly glimpse another, a black triangle moving through the water.

Other than the absence of music (which has signalled the approach of the shark up to this point), there is nothing to discourage the viewer from interpreting what they see on the surface as an emblem of the predator below. The fin glides past two young women, who are playfully splashing each other and oblivious to its presence. The camera is raised slightly above the water line to provide a clear view of the fin, which moves smoothly through the water. There is a cut to a woman staring directly into the camera lens, her eyes widening in terror. She screams, turns and makes a panicked scramble towards shore. The same shot with the same reaction is repeated with a male bather. Both shots break the fourth wall by having characters look directly into the camera, essentially directing their gaze at the viewer. 

In his Bloomsbury pocket movie guide to the film Nigel Andrews criticised these ‘straight-to-camera grimaces’ as flaws that in his view make the Fourth of July scene a failure. In her BFI analysis Antonia Quirke reveals that the children on the raft in the background of both shots are the same. However, rather than seeing these examples of mismatched continuity as blemishes, she argues that the assembly of shots was a deliberate choice by the director, and that it sets up the subsequent scene of mass panic as a parody of the disaster movie trope. Essentially, Andrews is arguing that the scene fails to convince because – like the shark fin – the reactions are fake (‘from a 1950s sci-fi cheapie’) and therefore incapable of involving the viewer in the drama. Quirke, on the other hand, gives the director the benefit of the doubt, and takes the view that Spielberg is hoaxing the crowd, just like the two kids with the cardboard fin. The whole scene is not about a great white, but a red herring.