Spielberg: Jaws Act III

Chief Brody is moving toward a point of reckoning. He moved from New York to Amity to prove that One Man Can Make a Difference, and needs desperately To Prove His Worth. In Act I he Did What He Was Told, in Act II he Took Charge (but still did so while Working Within The System). Faced with the utter corruption of the System, he has come to the point where he realizes that, to face the monster, he must head out "into the woods," as it were, Face His Fear and learn the truth about himself.

Common moviegoers (that is, civilians) tend to like the second half of Jaws more than the first half. They say that the movie only really "gets going" when the three guys head out onto the water to hunt the shark. There is a lesson in this: an audience responds to an active protagonist, and up to this point, poor Chief Brody has been reactive, spinning his wheels and losing ground against the forces arrayed against him. The final shot in Act II, where Brody has gotten the signature from the Mayor and moves through the hospital corridor on his way to destiny, says it all. Brody’s attitude, shoulders back, head down, jaw set, stride confident, has been seen in many, many movies but is most recognizable in westerns: Brody is the quiet American sheriff, slow to anger but unstoppable once roused to action. The action cuts from Brody walking from left to right through the frame, and then directly to Quint walking in the door of his house, also from left to right, almost as though Brody has become Quint in the cut. (Quint also emerges seemingly from the mouth of a shark-head mounted near his door — foreshadowing in reverse!)

1:06:00 — Brody and Hooper go to Quint’s house in the fisherman’s village. The scene opens with a line from Quint about "this zoning crap," which, if I’m not mistaken, is a meta-joke about the shooting of the movie, where the filmmakers were given "zoning crap" about the height of the set for Quint’s house, but in any case does a good job of re-introducing the character: Quint is a "natural man" or a "man’s man," a pioneer, a man uncomfortable with laws and regulation, in tune with the rhythms of nature, not the rules of men.

And so the dominant theme of Act III is stated right at the top: "What Makes A Man?"We know that the over-arching theme of the movie is "One Man Can Make A Difference," but if that’s true, then who would that One Man be? This act serves as a battle-ground of temperaments as Quint, the natural "man’s man," does battle with Hooper, the over-educated "college-boy", with Brody shoved to the back — even in his moment of action, Brody is made to feel useless.

(It’s interesting to me that Spielberg picked Dreyfuss to play Hooper, which seems like poor casting on the surface. Clearly he wanted the audience to like the character — he cut out the part where Hooper seduces Brody’s wife and he somehow makes an egghead, idle-rich playboy an underdog to Quint. Not to mention the fact that he lets him live [he not only gets eaten by the shark in the book, he gets shot in the neck by Brody], and he would go on to cast Dreyfuss as a veritable alter-ego in two more movies. Hooper comes close to being the protagonist in the second half of Jaws, and Spielberg seems to have felt that between the cop and the shark-hunter, his own point of view was closest to the bespectacled academic.)

1:09:30 — Quint’s house might as well be a cave, hung with bones and meat and ropes. He loads his simple equipment onto the Orca with the help of his little pal with the greasy orange hat, while Hooper has a team of no less than three men helping him load his oxygen tanks and spearguns and shark cage and so forth. Meanwhile, Brody shows up at the dock with his wife, who might as well be his mother dropping him off to school, listing for him all the supplies she’s packed for him. (When he tries to turn the tables on her and "be a man," warning her about a domestic triviality, she cuts him off with an accusatory "what am I gonna tell the kids?" as though Brody were running off with another woman instead of going off to kill a shark.

(And here I must pause to wonder, well, why is Brody going on the Orca? He’s terrified of the water, he’s never been on a fishing boat, he knows nothing about catching sharks, he’ll only be in the way — what the hell is he thinking? The answer, of course, is that the movie isn’t about Brody and a shark, it’s about Brody and himself — Brody goes out to kill a shark and bring himself to life.)

1:10:15 — Hooper and Quint talk about the shark cage, which brings up a key difference between Quint and Hooper. Spielberg knows that the best drama comes from characters who are diametrically opposed — it’s not enough that Quint and Hooper be from different classes, they have to be coming from different emotional standpoints. Quint, obviously, hates sharks. He has an almost pathological hatred of sharks. Hooper, on the other hand, we remember from his little aria in Act II, loves sharks, which is why that speech is there to begin with. If Jaws were set in space with an alien instead of a shark, Hooper would be the bright, good-hearted scientist who wants to capture the alien alive and study it to see what he can learn from it, and thus endanger the lives of everyone on board.

(Quint sings "Ladies of Spain" to Hooper as an ironic form of good-bye, which will resonate later.)

1:12:00 — We head out onto the ocean. There’s a shot of the Orca heading out to sea, shot from Quint’s house, through a mounted shark-jaw — the boat is literally sailing into the jaws of death.

1:13:30 — Spielberg-watchers recognize that Brody cuts the smell of rotting fish with Old Spice, which is the after-shave favored by Elliot’s missing father in E.T. (Holy shit — there are two boys in E.T. as well, maybe Brody, after killing the shark, ran off with a woman to Mexico. That bastard!)

The "man’s-man vs. nancy-boy" conflict is humorously underscored with the "beer-can vs. paper-cup" beat. This is Spielbergian humor at its finest — slight, easy-going and pure. When he leans too heavily on this kind of physical comedy his movies can become glib and silly (like, say, The Last Crusade) but in the midst of a thriller like Jaws a beat like this is a welcome respite (and makes us like Hooper more).

Brody, a boating neophyte, knocks over Hooper’s air tanks, leading Hooper to chastise him. Plotwise, this is the low point of the script: the moment Hooper yells "if you screw around with these tanks and they’re gonna blow up!" we know how the movie is going to end. But apparently the technology of compressed air tanks was still esoteric and radical in 1975, rather like the genetic engineering of Jurassic Park, and the filmmakers felt an audience needed to have the dangers spelled out for them. Exposition-wise the scene is a dud, but dramatically it works, as it puts Brody at the bottom of the boat’s pecking order, reduced to a child, helpless and clumsy among the "real men" on board.

1:14:00 — The first encounter, the shark unseen. Quint is sure it’s the shark, Hooper is doubtful. I’m still not sure who’s correct, and in a way it doesn’t matter — the scene isn’t there to show an encounter with the monster, it’s there to "put Hooper in his place," to firmly establish Quint as the alpha-sea-dog on this vessel.

1:20 — Brody comes face to face with the monster. Man, the screams in the theater when that happened, you wouldn’t believe. Spielberg’s timing is impeccable, and considering that the shark is a gigantic mechanical puppet on a complicated underwater rigging makes the scene a small miracle. The transition from Brody looking at the camera and griping about the chum, to him standing up stock-straight as he comprehends the monster, to him backing into the cabin to say "You’re gonna need a bigger boat" still works beautifully 30-odd years later.

(In fact, one thing that surprised me watching Jaws this week is that this movie from 1975 has not aged one second. There is not a haircut, costume or automobile, not a shooting technique or editing trick that takes you out of the narrative. Try and think of another movie from the 70s you can say that about.)

This begins the Act III climax, where we see the three men set aside their differences to pursue a common goal, killing the shark. Quint has his harpoon gun, Hooper has his gadgets, and Brody — well, Brody is the nervous nelly in the scene, frightened to venture close to the water and begging Quint to "kill it! Kill it already!"

(Note to young screenwriters — when making a horror movie, it’s important to have at least one character who acts frightened. That sounds obvious, but I once actually worked on a horror movie where the filmmakers, for whatever reason, found it expeditious for the characters in the movie to not be frightened of the thing that’s going to kill them. The movie, to say the least, did not succeed.)

(Favorite shot: Brody and Hooper climb down the side of the boat and one of them (I think Brody) slips on the narrow planking. My heart stops every time I see it.)

So we might say that this act suggests that One Man cannot make a difference, that it takes a number of men, of different temperaments, to accomplish a life-or-death task. In any case, the crew of the Orca bonds over their adventure, strikes a blow for civilization and retires to celebrate.

1:26:00 — Which brings us to the Act III denouement and the heart of the movie, the "scar scene." Quint and Hooper, both drunk (apparently no men in Jaws would ever become friends without getting drunk first) playfully try to top each other by displaying their scars, as Brody, off by himself, considers displaying an appendectomy scar before thinking better of it. Just as Act I ended with Brody at a turning point, wondering just what he should do as a police chief to protect his town, here Act III ends with him wondering if he’s "man enough" to even be on this boat.

Quint tells the story of the Indianapolis, which completes the "aria trilogy" of the main characters and also ties together Quint, the Mayor and the shark in a continuum. The Indianapolis was delivering the atom bomb, the weapon that would win World War II and establish the US as the dominant super power of the last half of the 20th century. It’s top-secret mission meant no distress call was sent, and so the crew of the Indianapolis were eaten by sharks. A ship delivers a bomb to win a war for capitalism, and as a result its crew is eaten by sharks, and 30 years later a Mayor on an east-coast island feeds his citizenry to the sharks in order to maintain his town’s balance sheet. It’s the same system, the leaders feeding the people into the jaws of the capitalist "perfect eating machine."

Quint puts a cap on his story by singing "Ladies of Spain" again, ready to leave this earth — but Hooper interrupts him by singing "Show Me The Way To Go Home." Quint is ready to leave, but Hooper wants to go home, and Quint, having finally bonded with Hooper (and Brody), smiles and sings along with them.

The act ends at 1:34:24, as the shark comes after them and (as Kent M. Beeson put it the other day) "The Hunters Become The Hunted."