Predator

The mayor gives an interview for the TV, directing his gaze to the off-screen reporter, whilst in the background Meadows vainly tries to prevent people from waving and mugging into the camera lens. Vaughn’s statement is succinct and to the point (‘I’m pleased and happy to repeat the news that we have caught and killed a large predator that supposedly injured some bathers.’) The twin use of adjectives (pleased and happy) and verbs (caught and killed) employs the politician’s favourite technique of repetition to make a point, giving the sentence a persuasive rhythm. And yet the directness of the language in the first half of the sentence is at odds with the equivocal phrasing of the final clause, pointing up the absurdity of the mayor’s position. There is an infintesimal pause before Vaughn pronounces the word predator, as if he is self-censoring himself by avoiding the use of the word shark. The scene was clearly filmed on one of the less sunny days and it’s a happy coincidence of poor continuity that the greyish sky seems to be offering up yet another contradiction as Vaughn insists that ‘it’s a beautiful day.’ Being a politician, the mayor ends the interview with a soundbite (‘Amity, as you know, means friendship.’), which includes a sly meta-reference to the fact that the man holding the microphone is the creator of the fictional community. There are two real life communities called Amity in the state of New York, either of which may have provided Peter Benchley with inspiration. In his novel, he makes no direct reference to the meaning of the name, but the irony was no doubt intended. 

Splash

As Michael Brody and his friends carry the boat along the edge of the pond towards the bridge, little Sean Brody, who has slipped under his mother’s radar, runs after them. There follows a series of shots of bathers (both tourists and locals) filmed from just above the water line, accompanied by a soundtrack of children’s shouts, laughter and vigorous splashing. We then cut to a silent underwater shot, showing the bathers from beneath. Their exposed white limbs scissor and kick as the camera comes in close. This is the first underwater shot of the film that does not represent the POV of the shark, which is something the viewer intuitively grasps due to the absence of any music on the soundtrack. 

A cut to one of the spotter boats shows Hendricks raising a pair of binoculars and reporting a possible sighting (‘Thought I saw a shadow.”) on his walkie-talkie. There is a brief shot of Brody on the beach, somewhat sidelined from the main activity, fiddling with the dials of his own radio, before we cut back to Hendricks from a different angle. The shot frames the deputy on the right of the screen, an expanse of water on the left with the the sun shining on it. He lowers the binoculars and delivers his line (‘False alarm. Must be this glare’) It’s a moment that is lifted directly from the novel, but, with its need for narrative efficiency, the film script reduces half a page of dialogue (page 179 of the Fawcett paperback edition) into two terse lines.

There is a cut to another shot of bathers. The water laps against the bottom half of the screen as the camera tracks from left to right, and whenever it submerges the sound cuts out completely. It’s a deliberately disorientating effect, rather like (though less sustained than) the one achieved by Kubrick in The Shining when Danny rides his tricycle across alternating surfaces of carpet and bare flooring.

The Real Thing

As Brody walks down to the surf there is a cut to a shot of his wife by the soda stand further up the beach. She spies her husband in the crowd and waves to catch his attention. The shot is carefully composed to place Ellen between two iconic American symbols: a Coca Cola sign on the left of the screen, and the stars and stripes fluttering in the background on the right. Taken out of context the image could easily be used as a piece of advertising copy. Indeed, the prominent placing of the red Coke button was no accident, but an example of product placement. In the earlier beach scene when Brody was watching for the shark, drinks coolers with the Coke logo on them had been carefully placed in the background to be clearly visible, alongside some artfully arranged cans of Tab and Fanta from the same company. Compared to the more blatant advertising practices of modern Hollywood, the placement in Jaws was subtly done, and it could even be argued that the colour – like that of the hapless estuary victim’s rowboat – contributes to the foreshadowing of the bloody stain that will spread on the surface of the pond. Other real-life products were also featured in the movie: on board the Orca Brody masks the smell of the chum bucket with Old Spice aftershave, and in his demonstration of machismo Quint crushes a Narragansett beer can. 

Safe Haven

Michael Brody and his friends are carrying a small sailboat down to the sea. The police chief halts them and takes Michael aside, the camera pivoting to follow father and son as they move back up the beach. They stand on the far right of the frame, the son in a pose of mild defiance with his hands on his hips, the father with a protective hand on the boy’s shoulder. Behind them is a body of water that is reassuringly fenced in by a solid bank of sand paved with flat rocks, and a bridge that runs to the far left of the frame. This Brody identifies as ‘the pond’, a real-life tidal pond that no doubt helped shape the impromptu shooting script. The first mention of this location comes much earlier in the movie when Quint references it in his town hall speech (‘It’s not like going down to the pond and chasing blue gills or tommy cods.’), but at that point in the narrative the audience has no reason to assume that the word is being used other than in its generic form. Quint associates the pond with a non-threatening form of fishing, and this perception is reinforced by Michael’s retort that ‘the pond is for old ladies.’ Brody wins the argument with a self-deprecating remark (‘I know it’s for the old ladies, but just do it for the old man, huh?’), and then walks back to the shore line, confident that he has placed his son out of danger.

Right-Hand Man

A low angle camera pans from right to left, following the helicopter as it flies low over the beach huts. As the camera pans it also tilts so that when it comes to a rest on Larry Vaughn, whose head and shoulders occupy the left of the image, only the top of one of the hut’s orange pennants is visible against the sky on the right of the screen. The mayor turns his gaze away from the chopper as it flies out of frame and looks towards the camera, mouthing the words son of a bitch. 

As he turns his back and walks away, the camera tilts down and begins tracking from left to right. It follows the mayor as he picks his way carefully between the holidaymakers, who have staked their claims on the crowded beach. Some children race across the sand, one in the foreground registering as just a blur of movement and providing a subconscious visual echo of the wipe effect used in the scene when Alex Kintner is attacked. The camera cuts to another low angle shot as Vaughn hunkers down beside an elderly sunbathing couple. 

Although the audience is unlikely to recognise him, the man “trying to absorb some of this sun” is the selectman who sat on the mayor’s right at the town hall meeting. Like the other uncredited locally-cast characters in the movie, he delivers his lines with a quirky individuality. Turning the word ‘please’ into an order, Larry Vaughn commands his right-hand man to go into the water. The selectman exchanges a look with his wife and then wordlessly the couple get to their feet. As they stand up we see that they have in their care two young girls and a boy. We watch from behind as the grandparents and grandchildren link hands and walk down to the surf. The selectman on the left of the group is holding an inflatable yellow raft (another call back to the death of Alex Kintner) and his wife is wearing a black bathing costume. Everything seems to be signalling to us that these are to be shark’s next victims. As the family enters the water, there is cut to a shot that emphasises the contrast between the populated land and the empty sea, and it’s an identical composition to one used in the earlier beach scene. 

A cut to the helicopter sweeping over the water as it passes the spotter boats provides a brief reminder of the threat that is lurking beneath the waves. The camera pans to the right to reveal one of the shark spotters with his rifle in the stern of his boat, a stars and stripes fluttering behind him. Then we cut back to the selectman and his wife, warily guiding the raft with their three grandchildren on it towards the camera, which is positioned just above the water line. We cut back to the beach where two young children, finally given permission to enter the water, race past Larry Vaughn. 

Both his position within the composition of the shot and his mood have changed: he began the scene frowning on the left of the frame, and now he is standing on the extreme right, smiling at the success of his gambit. A sequence of four brief shots follows: a young couple walking past the lifeguard’s post towards the sea, people wading into the water with an empty lifeguard post prominent in the background, two men racing each other into the surf, and then a bird’s eye view of the beach from inside the helicopter cockpit. This final image – which lasts for about five seconds – gives a sense of scale to the impending disaster that (even on a first viewing) we know must come.

Author! Author!

Hooper tells Brody over the walkie-talkie that there have been no sightings of the shark before a cut to a shot looking down on the crowded beach. In the background a group of sunbathing tourists watch as a man dressed in a blue blazer, white slacks and a wide-collared open-neck shirt walks towards the camera and looks directly into the lens. The microphone in his hand and the manner of his speech identify him as a television news reporter, and he is played by Peter Benchley. Putting the author of the original book in the movie was not simply a case of vanity casting. His experience as a reporter for a syndicated TV news service meant that he could deliver his lines with the right amount of faux earnestness. Even his appearance – which Carl Gottleib described as a “blend of bookish Harvard intellectual and tennis-playing, scuba-diving athlete” – is right for the part: with his square jaw and thick-framed glasses, he could almost be mistaken for Clark Kent. 

He describes Amity in idyllic terms (“clean air, clear water, beautiful white sand beaches”), a verbal equivalent of the picture-postcard image presented by the town’s billboard. As he hits his mark at the top of the dune, he adopts a tone of gravitas in describing the threat to the island as “a cloud in the shape of a killer shark”. It’s an apt description for a community that equates summer with prosperity and one that would not be out of place alongside the prosaic metaphors that the author employed in the source novel.

I Got Rhythm

In the first brief shot we get offshore, the camera pans left to right from the bow of one of the shark spotter boats to reveal Hooper at the wheel. He’s dressed for the part in the denim jeans and grey sweatshirt that he will wear for the second half of the movie, and sports an expensive-looking diver’s watch on his wrist and a large gold signet ring on the wedding finger of his left hand. 

The pleasure boat called Fascinatin’ Rhythm, unlike the the Orca, looks ill-equipped for the task of ‘sharkin’. The aluminium rails on its prow – a visual call-back to the fence motif established in the movie’s opening scene – seem more for token decoration than practicality. In Jaws lore, the boat has gained notoriety as being the one from which writer/actor Carl Gottleib fell into the ocean during the filming of an abandoned scene. Indeed, the way Gottleib describes the day’s shooting in The Jaws Log, the plucky little vessel had clearly been destined for a much bigger role in the movie:

‘Besides us three principals [Dreyfuss, Scheider and Gottleib], there’s a technical advisor to run the boat, Steven the director, a cameraman, a camera operator, a sound recordist, a script supervisor, and a grip…..We shoot the dialogue for a while, the cameraman moving around to various setups, balancing the forty-pound Panaflex camera on his shoulder, trying not to fall into the ocean every time the boat hits a wave.’

Yet, like Gottleib’s own character of Meadows, the boat’s part was cut back until it had only a few brief minutes of screen time. Bearing no ill will against the vessel or the elements, Gottleib was generous enough to include a three-page spread of photos of the craft and his ungainly departure from it in the expanded edition of his classic making-of text.