The death of Alex Kintner is swifter but bloodier than that of Chrissie Watkins. The shark rises from the depths, ignoring the legs of the child bathers and homing in directly on the raft and the kicking limbs that propel it. (It's said that the reason surfers are often attacked by sharks is that the outline their boards and outstretched limbs form closely resembles the image of a seal in distress.) On the soundtrack the throbbing cello music - punctuated with shrill flute figures - pulses faster as the camera closes in, and just as it seems it is about to collide with the boy's knees there is a cut back to the surface. In the foreground is a group of splashing children and beyond them in the middle distance we glimpse the shark taking the boy. The image lasts only three seconds. What we see is what Nigel Andrews in his analysis of the scene calls 'a windmilling flurry of dark movement.' There's not enough time - certainly on a first viewing - to make sense of the visual information, and this is underlined by the fact that the one witness on the beach, who rises from his spot next to Mrs Kintner, cries out, 'Did you see that?'
Careful re-watching with the aid of the freeze frame does, however, refute Andrews's claim that 'you can see Jaws again and again and still not work out the components of that abstract ballet.' In fact, the conical shape to the right is clearly that of the shark's huge snout and is a ghost of the image of pictures taken on set that show the filmmakers' original intention of showing more of the mechanical shark before technical problems determined otherwise. Perhaps to make up for the absense of the monster, Spielberg felt the need to provide a gushing fountain of blood and to add to the horror by cutting to an underwater close up of the boy drowning in his own gore.
