Deep Blue Sea

The shot of the estuary victim’s severed leg sinking to the sea bed is a detail that might have come directly from the original novel. Whereas Benchley tends to linger over the visceral details of the shark attacks, Spielberg shows us only brief glimpses – the severed arm on the beach, the torn yellow raft in the bloody surf, the dismembered head of Ben Gardner, and here the sneaker-shod leg leaving a trail of blood as it sinks to the sea bed.  The next shot of the upturned red hull of the rowboat and the mirroring crimson pool blooming beside it on the surface of the water has a grisly poetry to it. There is a cut to tourists gathering on the beach and then we are back on the water, with a bravura swerving camera movement as the shark swims directly at and then past a petrified Michael Brody. 

As originally planned and shot, the estuary scene would have been even gorier, but when Spielberg looked at the first assembly, he decided it was “too bloody” and recut it. The idea was to have the victim - clamped in the shark’s jaws - grab hold of Michael Brody and then release him as the fish submerges. This concept helps to explain why the swerving POV shot of the shark swimming towards Michael is above water: it was originally conceived to be the view of the prey, not the predator. After the boy’s close encounter with the shark, the camera holds on a close-up of his fightened face as muffled timpani beat on the soundtrack. A reverse shot of the people on the beach shows the shark’s fin slicing through the water and then we cut to the bridge, framed like one of Kubrick’s favoured one-point perspective shots. As Brody runs across the road and vaults first one rail and then the other, we hear someone shout – in a sly moment of foreshadowing – ‘Someone get a gun! Get a gun and shoot it! Does anybody have a gun?’ The next shot of Brody running across the beach is obscured by the thick wooden posts of the bridge. A panning shot shows Ellen running along the bridge’s walkway behind the rail. Both shots reinforce the movie’s visual motif of fences, which suggests how ineffectual these barriers are to incursion by outside forces. Brody rushes to the water’s edge and helps pull his son onto the beach. The light on the water has a bright silvery sheen to it, and the glare has the effect of giving an almost sepia tone to the image. The shot of the unconscious boy and his legs being dragged across the wet sand seem to encourage us to think the worst, and indeed when Ellen breaks through the circle of onlookers her first words are: “He’s dead.”  The line is a call back to the light-hearted words of encouragement the mother gave her son in the kitchen (“I think you’re going to live”) when she was cleaning his cut hand. Brody, no doubt trained in basic first aid, disagnoses shock and runs up the beach, snapping towels from the sand. There is a brief cut-away shot of Sean, the younger son, distressed by the actions of his father, and his cries merge with the sobbing of his mother on the soundtrack. With Ellen wrapping the towels around her son and keening over his inert form, Brody rises as the camera tilts up. He occupies the left hand side of the screen and stares out of the frame. Both the expression on his face and the rising horn motif of the score signal that he has reached a moment of decision. The next shot shows us his point of view: the open sea framed by the wooden piles of the bridge. The camera pushes forward until the whole screen is filled with only sky and the deep blue sea.

Happy Meal

The shark comes up fast behind the rowboat, advancing on its unsuspecting prey like a pantomime villain. It’s probably nothing more than an ironic coincidence that the boat’s red hull and the yellow rope hanging down its side are the same as McDonald’s corporate colours. The unnamed victim (played by stuntman Ted Grossman) is tipped into the water as the shark rams the boat. 

The next shot shows Michael and his friends being capsized in the same manner. Subsequent shots that indicate the positioning of the two craft make it clear that there is no good reason – other than narrative necessity – why the Sailfish should have overturned. Two brief shots of the man and then Michael Brody surfacing and shaking their heads serve to link them as potential victims. The young boy appears to be looking directly into the camera – just as the earlier shots of bathers seemed to be breaking the fourth wall – but, in fact, the editing of the next two shots would suggest that Michael is directly witnessing the attack. We, however, see this not from his point of view at water level, but from above. As the rower desperately tries to find a purchase on the upturned hull of his boat, we get our first real view of the shark: a pale ghostly image of its snout and open jaws beneath the surface. 

The image seems to fade just as the man is pulled under. The camera then cuts back to Michael Brody’s reaction, his dark eyes and open mouth conveying his terror. A contrasting perspective is provided in the next shot: we view the attack from the shore, where three young bikinied girls are sunbathing, the one closest to the camera inexplicably wearing a light pink sweater. They look towards the source of the screams with casual curiosity. The moment recalls the movie’s opening scene, when the frenzied attack on Chrissie is inter cut with shots of her would-be-date lying in the surf.

Basic Seamanship

Brody’s first reaction to the woman’s warning cries (‘The shark. It’s going into the pond. Shark. In the estuary.’) is a resigned ‘Now what?’ until his wife reminds him about Michael. The camera follows Brody as he moves through the crowd, keeping him in focus as the heads of those he passes remain just a blur. The technique of filming a moving object through a series of static ones – also used in the pursuit along the beach in the movie’s opening scene – here creates a dynamic effect, whilst at the same time suggesting the determination of the character. Brody has no awareness of those around him and his only thought is to save his son – everything else is, literally and figuratively, a blur. The layered sound mix of the woman’s cries, the PA system, the murmur of the crowd and a few accelerating bars of music build to a crescendo on the next cut, which shows little Sean playing on the edge of the pond as the shark’s fin glides silently past. 

The next shot shows Sean and his two buddies bickering on the Sailfish as one of them struggles with a knot. The blocking of the coming attack is established in the composition of the next shot. In the foreground are the three boys on the boat, its stern low in the water. A few yards behind them is a man in a red rowboat. He shouts some advice on basic seamanship to the three inexperienced youngsters, unaware that behind him in the middle distance is a black fin scything its way through the water. On the bridge are a number of static figures who have stopped to watch the drama play out. We then cut back to a shot of the stone causeway that runs along the side of the pond. It’s positioned with Kubrickian precision right in the centre of the frame. 

The figure of Chief Brody runs along it in the direction of the bridge, followed on the beach side by barefoot members of the crowd. Over this scene there plays a savagely propulsive reading of the shark motif. The music for this scene was not selected for the original soundtrack album, but does appear under the title ‘Into the Estuary’ on the Varese Sarabande recording, albeit in a significantly muted interpretation by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Interestingly, up to this point – almost half way through the film – there has only been about thirteen minutes of score. It is in the second hour, once the Orca has put to sea, that John Williams’s contribution really comes to the fore.

The Woman On The Beach

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!’  

F For Fake

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.

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.