Wanted Dead Or Alive

 
The next scene begins with a close up of a notice on a bulletin board offering 'a $3000.00 bounty to the man or men who catch and kill the shark that killed Alex M. Kintner on Sunday 29th June on the Amity Town Beach.' In 1974 inflation in the US peaked at 7% and President Ford announced a Whip Inflation Now initiative to encourage Americans to exercise greater financial restraint by saving more and spending less. A 1974 dollar would be worth almost five times as much in 2011 so Mrs Kintner's offer should be multiplied accordingly if you want to get a true sense of the value she placed on her son's life. It's a rarely mentioned point of irony that it is Chief Brody - the man she blames for the tragedy - who is ultimately entitled to collect the blood money. It's fitting, therefore, that as the town's sheriff, with his pistol holstered at his hip, he is the closest character in the story to the Wild West image of the bounty hunter.

The message of the notice is unequivocal and the language is echoed in Quint's remark ('I'll find him for three, but I'll catch him, and kill him, for ten.'). The offer is directed at the males of the community, and both the singular and plural forms of the noun are used. Brody will later claim during a drunken speech to Hooper that Amity is a town in which 'one man can make a difference', but in the end it is the combined effort of the three shark hunters that allows them to prevail.

As the locals gather around the bulletin board - where the sign has been pinned up to partially  mask an official looking announcement containing the word proclamation - there is still some dispute as to the veracity of Mrs Kintner's claim. One of the voices describes Alex as 'the kid who was missing at the beach' and the voice of Mrs Taft seems to be taking the Amity party line when she says, 'We don't even know that there is a shark around here.' Her use of the plural pronoun, echoing the elderly bather on the beach, again illustrates how individuals speak as representatives of the whole community.

Just as Chrissie Watkins's death was marked by a document (the coroner's report) so too is Alex Kintner's: both texts identify the manner of death (shark attack), the time (in both cases, erroneous), and the place. The text of the reward sign is clearly printed in something resembling Comic Sans font and the margins look almost justified - it's unlikely that the distraught Mrs Kintner would have been able to write with such a steady hand, and the most logical explanation for such neat penmanship is that she got Polly to do the printing.

Get Out Of The Water

There is a cut from the dolly-zoom reaction shot of Brody to a shot of a group of children staring at the red stained water. A football - one of the defining symbols of US culture - has been dropped by one of the boys and it circles in the bloody maelstrom created by the attack. This small detail suggests what the panic on the Fourth of July scene will later make explicit: that it is the American way of life which is under threat from the monster. The terrified children are positioned much closer to the scene of the attack than in earlier shots, where Alex was further out, but sometimes continuity has to be sacrificed for dramatic purposes.

The camera cuts back to the beach where a couple are seen walking down to the water and pointing. Brody races past them in the foreground, but stops at the water's edge from where he shouts commands like a basketball coach at the court's sideline. The other adults, unaware of what has actually happened, run past him into the sea. Brody moves crabwise along the beach, shouting and gesticulating and then there is a cutaway shot to Mrs Kintner - partially obscured by the legs of running adults - as she raises herself up from her towel. There follows a series of cuts that alternate the point of view from the beach and the water as parents rescue their children, including a shot of Ellen Brody looking back nervously over her shoulder as she guides son Michael to the safety of the shore. Another cutaway shot shows Sean sitting by his ruined sandcastle, calling for his brother to get out of the water. There's a final shot of a young boy being literally dragged from the sea and then we are on the beach again as the last few bathers run up the sand past Brody. The music that accompanies this scene of panic builds up a frantic rhythm and then stutters to an end.

In the aftermath we see Mrs Kintner moving through the crowd calling her son's name. When she reaches the surf she makes a full 360 degree turn and then another half turn, a physical representation of her own sense of disorientation. Placing a hand on the crown of her head to prevent the wind from blowing off her yellow sunhat, she walks up the beach towards the camera, a look of desperation on her face.
 

There is then a cut to a shot of the torn remains of Alex's yellow raft washed up in the bloodied surf. It's not clear that Mrs Kintner sees this detail. The last shot of her shows her with her sight line directed out to the ocean and not at her feet. Furthermore, the framing of the final shot (with the waves on the left of the screen and the beach on the right) would not match her point of view. The image - rather like the dog's abandoned stick floating on the water - is a potent one, and provides a bloody punctuation mark to what is one of the film's most carefully constructed scenes.

Vertigo

The shot of a struggling Alex Kintner being pulled under by the shark is obscured by billowing clouds of his own blood, just as the mutilated corpse of the shark will later obliterate the screen with a cloudy red. The camera cuts to a shot of Brody's reaction. He is positioned in the dead centre of the screen with his wife immediately behind him. On either side of the frame are grassy sand dunes, and in the background, separating the land from a strip of blue sky, are the blurry slats of the same kind of fencing that dominated the movie's opening scene. The shadow of a beach hut darkens the bottom left corner of the frame.

In the novel Brody learns of the second attack by telephone, experiencing first a 'twinge of unease [in his] stomach' before feeling 'flushed, almost feverish.' The film reproduces this sickening sensation through a camera movement in which the character and the background seem to be operating in different dimensions. The image pushes in towards Brody so that his head and shoulders occupy marginally more of the frame. At the same time the strip of sand behind him seems to stretch like rubber. In contrast to the movement towards the seated figure of the chief, there appears at the same time to be a movement away from his position that allows elements previously unseen (such as the side of one of the beach huts) to become visible within the frame.

It doesn't require any great technical knowledge of film making to know that if you move a camera closer to an object, it will occupy more of the image space, and that if you move it away from the object it will show more of the surroundings. What this shot - known as a dolly zoom - does is combine the two concepts into a single image, creating a distorting push-me-pull-you effect. The shot was first used in commercial cinema by Alfred Hitchcock for scenes in Vertigo to convey the paralysing effects of Scottie Ferguson's fear of heights. Hitchcock explained the origin and the development of the idea to Francois Truffaut in the Sixties:

'I always remember one night at the Chelsea Arts Ball at the Albert Hall in London when I got terribly drunk and I had the sensation that everything was going far away from me. I tried to get that into Rebecca, but they couldn't do it. The viewpoint must be fixed, you see, while the perspective is changed as it stretches lengthwise. I thought about the problem for fifteen years. By the time we got to Vertigo, we solved it by using the dolly and the zoom simultaneously [...] so that's the way we did it, and it only cost us nineteen thousand dollars.'

Interestingly, although Vertigo was released in 1958 there were no immediate imitations of the effect by other filmmakers. In fact, Jaws was the movie that helped establish it as a device for conveying shock, and it has been much used since then - to the extent that today it has become enough of a cliche to be the object of irony. Spielberg used the shot in later films (including E.T and Schindler's List) and it was also employed by John Landis for the moment when Michael Jackson is transformed into a zombie in his Thriller video.

Brody's moment of vertigo is accompanied by a distorting string effect in the music score, just as Hitchcock had used Bernard Herrmann's frenzied harp glissandi to underline the drama of his shot. The distorted perspective not only induces a feeling of unease in the viewer, but also serves to highlight Brody's own sense of helplessness. He is literally rooted to the spot, momentarily unable to move.

There Will Be Blood

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.
 

Commenting on why he eventually vetoed a longer and more explicit version of the attack on the estuary victim, Spielberg expressed a sense of reserve ('It was too bloody so I cut it out.') although the outtake footage, which can be seen as a DVD extra, seems quite tame when compared to the Scanners-like explosion of blood and guts that ends little Alex's life.

Pippet

There is a brief cutaway shot of Michael and Sean Brody running down the beach before the camera is back on their parents. Ellen, playfully addressing her husband as Chief Brody, moves behind his chair and proceeds to give him a neck massage as an MOR song plays on the radio. Their positions will be reversed in the later scene when Ellen tries to take Brody's mind off the shark books he has been reading by leaning back against him. Just as Brody succumbs to his wife's coaxing, there follows an abrupt series of cuts of the children playing in the water. Each cut is timed with a splash to develop a staccato rhythm. This is then contrasted with a low angle shot of the beach that frames the boy in the lemon polo shirt on the left and young Sean Brody on the right.

Sean is making sandcastles and singing ('Do you know the muffin man?') to himself. The boy in the lemon shirt is standing in the surf, turning to the left and to the right and calling his dog's name. The camera then cuts to a medium shot of the upper body of the boy in profile against an empty expanse of green/grey sea. As he calls 'Pippet! Come on, Pippet!' he turns to face the ocean and presents his back to the camera, the yellow of his shirt providing a subliminal signal for danger. To leave us in no doubt as to Pippet's fate, there is a cut to the stick bobbing on the water, and then a cut to below the surface, which the throbbing music on the soundtrack makes immediately clear is a POV shot of the shark.

Given the size of its bite radius, it's quite likely that the fish could have swallowed the labrador in one gulp and ingested it before it realised it was covered in fur. Then again, one of the principal components of a Great White's diet is seal, and seals have fur. Being a dog lover, Spielberg (whose own hound Elmer played the role of the Brody's spaniel) would never have thought of showing a canine death, but he was also canny enough to know that less is often more, and that the simple shot of a stick floating in the waves was enough to goose the audience up a little.

Aquaphobia

There is a low angle shot of the group of children splashing into the sea with Alex Kintner further out, revolving on his raft. The next shot shows Brody from a slightly different angle, one which accentuates the diminishing perspective of the orange and white striped beach huts that stretch the width of the screen behind him and end at a green-roofed pagoda. Mrs Taft sits with her arm around her husband on the left of the screen and the two of them look smilingly on at the children at play out of shot. An elderly man in blue bathing trunks and black bathing cap (earlier mistaken for a shark fin) comes and sits in front of Brody and begins drying his drooping chest with a yellow towel. There is a cut to a reverse angle behind Brody that positions the back of the chief's head on the right of the frame with the elderly bather just right of centre and the splashing children in the water dominating the left.

The old man's single line of dialogue ('We know all about you, chief. You don't go in the water at all, do you?') is the first specific reference to Brody's aquaphobia, which his wife will later try to psychoanalyse ('I guess it's a childhood thing.'). The use of the first person plural pronoun suggests that the old man is speaking on behalf of the whole island (indeed, Amity's population up to this point does seem to be well represented by elderly white males), and also tells us that in such a small community no secrets can be kept for long. Brody's reaction to the old man's playful needling seems unnecessarily harsh: he uncrosses his leg, shifts his chair to the left and dismisses him with the line, 'That's some bad hat, Harry.' He will similarly dismiss his wife's later attempts to explain away his phobia ('There's a clinical name for it, isn't there?') with a curt put-down ('Drowning.), which suggests he remains sensitive about his weak spot.

It's a matter of record that some of the dialogue in Jaws was improvised in rehearsals and then worked into the script proper by Carl Gottleib, Brody's 'bigger boat' line being the most oft-quoted example. I can't help feeling that the 'bad hat, harry' remark was another piece of improv. The line has taken on a life of its own outside the film as the name of Jaws-fan Bryan Singer's production company, whose production credit logo - which appears at the end of every episode of House, M.D - reproduces the scene in a Beavis and Butthead style animation.

Parenthood

As Taft returns to his own wife and child, Ellen Brody offers her husband some words of comfort. The framing of the shot, with Brody on the right of the screen in profile and Ellen facing him at a right angle, is one of several such devices in the film that places the wife in a supporting role. In most of her scenes, Ellen is there to provide her husband with either an offer of physical relief ('Wanna get drunk and fool around?'), food (at the dinner table) or medical aid ('The Blistex is in the kit.'), and to defer to his authority ('Michael! Did you hear your father? Out of the water! Now!').

With her strapless swimsuit cropped by the lower part of the frame, Ellen's naked shoulders recall those of the shark's first victim. Her floppy straw hat and Jackie O sunglasses give her the appearance of a glamorous mom. Her headgear may, in fact, be a detail designed to contrast her with the rather frumpy Mrs Kintner. In expressing concern for her sons, she once again defers to her husband ('Listen, if the kids going in the water is worrying you ...') and as the children in the background get up and go down to the ocean, she takes her husband's hand in hers, their shared fist momentarily obscuring her face. By the time it came to Jaws: The Revenge, Ellen had abandoned any sense of reticence and was in full Ripley-mode, taking out the Great White with an improvised harpoon.

In Benchley's novel, Brody's three sons (Billy, Martin and Sean) are never in the water with the shark. Spielberg, who would go on to put children at the centre of many of his subsequent movies, could not resist the urge to add adolescent peril to the mix. In Jaws, at least, it is incidental to the plot and does help to provide the main character's motivation for hunting down the shark. By the time he got to Jurassic Park and its sequel The Lost World, the director had more of less surrendered to his own sentimentality and the box-office imperative that increasingly requires blockbuster movies to feature protagonists close to the age of their target audience.