Everything You Wanted To Know About Sharks But Were Afraid To Ask

The next scene opens with a close up of a book illustration explaining how a shark's lateral sensory system (aka its vibration detector) works. The camera pans across the page showing how the erratic impulses of a fish in distress can be picked up like a radio signal. In the novel Peter Benchley packed a lot of his shark facts into the opening chapter in sentences that could have been lifted from a National Geographic article ('Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings, and these nerves detected vibrations and signaled the brain.'). A 1968 issue of the magazine was, in fact, one of several sources for the pictures Brody looks at in a subsequent scene, although the editing suggests that he is looking at a single book.

As the page of the book is turned, there is a cut to a shot of Brody deep in study at the desk in his living room. This location will be seen again during the montage sequence that prefigures the Fourth of July when Hooper and Brody work the phones in an attempt to recruit shark spotters. The use of the home rather than the police station as a setting emphasises the fact that Brody's motive in hunting down the shark is not simply a matter of civic duty ('I'm responsible for public safety around here'), but is also part of the male's primal urge to protect his mate and offspring. Indeed, Brody is also responsible for safety in the home - hence his warning to his kids in the early scene to stay off the swings, and his later admonition to Ellen against using the fireplace in the den.

The sofa - on which Spielberg's dog Elmer sits with a longing look, possibly at his real master off camera - is functional rather than attractive although it does match the orange of the curtains. The chair Brody is sitting in seems a size too small for the desk, forcing him to crouch over the books he has open before him. So absorbed is he by the material that he doesn't at first notice his wife come up behind him, and when he does react by turning suddenly, she jumps out of her skin and says, 'You scared me.'

Brody is beginning to obsess about the shark (an attitude that was to become the lynch pin of his character in the sequel), and he picks up another book from the stack he has obviously checked out of the local library. As he does so, his comment to his wife ('People don't even know how old sharks are. I mean, they live two, three thousand years') suggests that he hasn't been absorbing much of the information he's been reading. Although it's true that the life span of some species of sharks is not known (the Great White probably lives to be about thirty), the number of years is likely to be only in double digits.

Ellen Brody takes the book out of her husband's hands and replaces it with a comforting glass of scotch. She settles on the floor between his knees and leans back into his crotch (reversing the positions they took on the beach). Tilting back her head she delivers a light-hearted come-on line ('Wanna get drunk and fool around?') that could well be part of the couple's marital code. Brody's ironic reply of 'Oh, yeah' is not so much a rejection of the offer as a mark of affection.