As the two
pranksters are hauled aboard one of the spotter boats, Hooper checks in with
Brody on the walkie talkie. Right after his line (‘Did everybody get out of the
water all right?’) there is a cut to a young woman on the beach. The sea is on
the left of the frame, the land on the right, in a reverse composition of
earlier shots. The sand is strewn with pebbles and clumps of seaweed (like the
one that the first victim’s severed arm was discovered in). The beach is
clearly less attractive to tourists, only a few of whom can be seen in the
background. In the centre of the frame there is an artist’s easel, at which the
woman has been painting. It makes perfect sense that she should be the one to
see the shark, as her eye has been trained on the sea in an attempt to capture
it on canvas.As she moves closer towards us, a look of disbelieving horror
forming on her face, we get a reverse shot of the mouth of the pond. We can see
the crowd of bathers on the other side of the causeway, and the green-roofed
bandstand provides a further point of reference to give us our bearings. The
woman steps into the frame, obscuring a couple of kids wrapped in yellow towels
sitting on the rocks. The colour subliminally alerts us to the approaching
danger, just as the first growling notes of the score tell us that what we are
looking at over the woman’s shoulder is our first recognisable glimpse of the
shark: a large dorsal fin and the smaller tip of a tail moving through the water.
Over the beach PA system we hear a man informing the bathers that the earlier
sighting was a practical joke. There is a cut to a lower angle of the woman in
profile as she gives a name to the threat in a stuttering scream of the single
word, ‘Sh- shark!’
The panicked bathers
are aided at the water’s edge by first responders, dressed all in white like
the faithful at a mass baptism. As the camera follows a young boy with a raft
running up the beach, it latches onto the mayor who has a look of desperation
on his face. He is on the far left of the frame, the same position he occupied within
the image at the beginning of the scene. Another shot shows Brody almost
obscured by the crowd and then pans to the left to pick out a distraught Ellen
calling her son’s name. The next shot is of water, with a strip of land in the
background. The fin comes into frame from the right, and upends to reveal itself as
a fake, propelled from below by two young boys in wet suits. They remove their
snorkels and turn to face the camera as a crackling radio message alerts them
to the presence of the spotter boats. A low shot of one of the boats from the
boys’ POV has us looking directly into the barrels of half a dozen rifles.
As
the men lower their guns, the younger boy raises an accusatory arm above the
water and points at his friend, spluttering, ‘He made me do it. He talked me into
it.’ It’s a moment clearly designed to get a laugh and release tension. More
than a simple practical joke, the fake fin can also be interpreted as a hoax on
a meta-level. Despite the filmmakers’ best attempts to downplay the role of the
mechanical shark in the pre-release publicity, the audiences back in 1975 went
into the movie knowing all about it. As Carl Gottlieb documents in The Jaws Log, the shark was regularly
papped during the shooting, often in unflattering positions. So, maybe, in giving us our first glimpse of a
fin that turns out to be fake Spielberg is having a joke at our expense,
calling out the doubters in the audience, who are always quick to point out a
movie’s flaws.
