THE SCREEN:
Jr, Colin L Westerbeck
GUMS THE SCREEN A shark is the ideal villain for an adventure story. He's readymade for the part. He couldn't be better if you got Jack Palance to play him. The reason is that a shark already has...
...colin l. westerbeck, jr...
...He can handily represent one thing and one thing alone in the way adventure-story villains must because a shark is one thing alone, pure aggression, and everybody knows it...
...It seems that the woman has just found out her son was killed by the shark because Brody let the town's tourist-minded aldermen bamboozle him into leaving the beaches open...
...And in the thoughtless onslaught of all this gear, what unwittingly proves effective is something never intended to be a weapon-something designed only for the sustenance of man, not the extermination of sharks...
...Why, it's Peter Benchley, of course...
...Will the real shark-killer please stand up...
...Yet this little touch doesn't even begin to sound the depths of the real ignominy Brody must suffer...
...Where a shark is unmistakable and purposeful, man is ambiguous and self-contradictory...
...Benchley and Speilberg's only problem was that a shark is almost too good a villain...
...What way could they find to oppose such unadulterated power...
...As a rich cosmopolite who develops a fascination for sharks, Hooper comes closest to being Benchley in autobiographical fact...
...The shark is far more frightening when he is still swimming unseen down in our subconscious...
...What ultimately kills the great sea monster is a mere breath of air...
...When he is killed in the end it is in part because he has literally become a fish out of water, and for the same reason our psychological need as an audience to see him killed has pretty much abated by then...
...If Quint seems the most likely candidate to do the job, Brody seems the least likely...
...The three contestants are 1) Brody (Roy Schneider), police chief of the resort town being terrorized by the shark...
...With a shark for a villain, Peter Benchley could hardly have missed making Jaws a best seller, nor is director Steven Speilberg likely to miss with his film adaptation...
...The reason is that a shark already has what the antagonists in any melodrama must acquire: singularity...
...It is this, rather than cunning, experience, or knowledge, that finally kills the shark...
...The whole point of a novel like Jaws is to indulge in a little fantasy, so Benchley has paid himself the dividend of a three-for-one split of his personality...
...An ex-New York cop who wanted to live some place "where one man could make a difference", Brody is afflicted with just the kind of degrading compromise and humiliation he left New York to escape...
...If we get to know Peter Benchley better than we ever really wanted to, that is not so disappointing as the fact that, at least in the movie, we also get to know the shark rather better than we cared to...
...This puts the movie, as an entertainment, roughly on a par with a quiz show-What's My Line...
...Early in the film he remains an implied presence only...
...2)Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), an itinerant oceanographer-ichthyologist...
...Put up against the Muhammad Ali of sharkdom, the whole human race looks like a Joe Bugner...
...Although the final showdown with the shark provides the story's most incredible episode, it is also, in a sense, its moment of greatest realism...
...We see not him, but just teasingly pleasing evidence of him: a point-of-view shot as he comes up on a swimmer from below, the sound of jaws slamming shut, a battered boat hull with a hand-sized tooth imbedded in it, a tattered air mattress washed up on the beach, a blipping light on the side of a barrel which we know to be attached to a harpoon line, etc...
...He is already a monomaniac by reputation...
...That is to say, Benchley probably came closest to truth here when he imagined that the one thing man has which is equal to a shark's is just instinct for survival, the taste for a desperate combat...
...There is no need to develop-or rather, reduce-a shark's character...
...In the first scene Hooper is an uninvited guest who endears himself by enjoying Brody's own meal when Brody is too upset to eat it...
...Rubber dummy, you're the one...
...Accordingly, both the novel and the film try to cover the board by putting three very different men up against the shark, leaving us to amuse ourselves guessing which one really has what it takes to kill the beast...
...As to who kills the shark.....Well, it doesn't really matter which of three men does it...
...Somewhere between the talk about eating dinner in the one scene and the talk of being eaten for dinner in the other, we come to realize that the three men in this movie are in fact all the same man...
...After that slap in the face, the shark seems a somewhat peripheral part of Brody's problems...
...perhaps, or To Tell the Truth...
...The trouble is that where a shark is simple by nature, man is various...
...All the paraphernalia that Quint and Hooper assemble for the hunt end up being shoved helter-skelter through the gaping jaws in a last-minute frenzy to avoid being swallowed whole...
...and 3) Quint (Robert Shaw), a local fisherman with a thing about sharks...
...Who is it that kills the shark, you may still be asking...
...While Quint's moment of truth may be the one at which he stares down the throat of a rogue shark, Brody's is that at which a middle-aged woman slaps his face...
...But in effect Brody and Quint are just projections of the same personality, aberrations spun out of the essential Benchley/ Hooper himself...
...The fact is that the movie begins to blur the distinctions between them almost as soon as they are introduced...
...But the further along the film goes, the more the shark, as it were, surfaces...
...The linchpin in the threesome is Hooper, and in a pair of dinner table scenes-one at Brody's house and one on Quint's boat-Hooper provides the link between the other two, so seemingly different characters...
...In the second scene Hooper establishes an equally successful rapport with Quint by hoisting various bared limbs onto the table in order to compare scars from shark attacks...
...The fact that Spielberg was capable of doing acceptably realistic mock-ups of the shark for the closing scenes was not really a sufficient reason to do them...
...For instance, when they leave for the hunt from Quint's shanty, which is festooned with shark jaws that are the trophies of his earlier expeditions, Brody has to take along drama-mine...
Vol. 102 • June 1975 • No. 7
