Like most kids born in the early to mid-80s, I grew up knowing the name Steven Spielberg. My cousins and I wore out my grandmother’s VHS copy of E.T. (1982) growing up (and not simply because it was the only VHS she owned). And, of course, watching Jurassic Park (1993) at the movie theater when I was 9 was one of the defining and most humbling moments of my movie-going life. I had never seen raw filmmaking like that before.
Still, while I was aware of movies like Hook (1991), Schindler’s List (1993) and Saving Private Ryan (1998), by the time I exited high school and was well on my way to becoming a horror acolyte for life, I suddenly realized I had missed out on a whole subset of Spielberg’s career. For one, I didn’t even know a movie called Duel (1971) existed. And, perhaps most shocking of all, I had never seen Jaws (1975).
Sure, I had seen clips. Scenes on TV. Glimpses featured in “Best Moments of Film” programs on cable networks. But, I had never sat down and watched it. In some ways, it was so famous, so talked about, that a part of me felt I had already seen the thing just based on my familiarity alone. So it was one day when I was browsing the DVD section at Circuit City that I stumbled across a copy and decided to finally give it a go.
Spielberg’s raw talent was immediately on display, crafting comfort and terror at the beach, the two conflicting emotional backdrops working in harmony to forge the unforgettable opening. As the film progressed, I watched as the characters were developed, given personalities and histories, idiosyncrasies and familial bonds. These were people I cared about, people I wanted to see survive.
The cinematography told the story as much as the exposition, using in-camera techniques to make us feel alienated or claustrophobic at times. The blocking carried us through the story, changing the very makeup and flow of the shot mid-scene as the narrative and character moments dictated. I could barely keep up with my analyzation, however, as the film was simply that engrossing.
As the picture evolved from the bureaucracy of small town politics to a far more carnal man versus nature epic, my love for the film truly sunk in. I had never seen anything balance spectacle and story so well, character and action so eloquently. Jaws was the epitome of the Hollywood blockbuster, a benchmark of quality. The script, I would later discover, delivers a similar experience, balancing taut action with graceful language and poetic description, packed with imagination that shows up on screen.
Still, it was the way Spielberg interpreted Peter Benchley’s script (with the help of Carl Gottlieb who did a re-write) that allowed the finished film to have the impact that it did. No sequence represents this more clearly than Quint’s ultimate demise. With clear direction and imaginative language, the screenplay inspires not only action but emotion and intrigue – a visceral interaction with the sequence that is not commonly found unless accompanied by an image. With that in mind, Spielberg crafted a visual human moment that embodied mankind’s humbling relationship with mother nature and lent weight to the character’s narrative legacy.
THE SCENE
Quint eyes the water expectantly and the shark breaks the surface. In seconds, the stern is underwater. Quint and Brody retreat to the cabin, but as items become dislodged, Quint is sent sliding toward the shark’s open mouth. Quint roars in pain as the shark bites down against his torso, spewing blood into the water. Moments later, both Quint and the shark disappear below the surface.
THE SCRIPT
THE SCREEN
The iconic music that penetrates the action of the film is noticeably absent as Quint calmly surveys the sea before him, a stern, knowing expression planted on his face. The image cuts to the shark moving fluidly through the water, its wide mouth agape. The action culminates in a medium-wide shot of the two men, Quint and Brody, standing against the cabin as the shark breaks the glassy surface of the water and lands on their boat, mere feet away.
The script, similarly, begins in a straight-forward manner, however powerfully worded, conjuring images of epic scale and proportion:
“The shark breaks water right beside the Orca, rising with a great whooshing noise. It rises vertically, blocking out the sun. The pectoral fins seem to reach forward. The shark in all of its monstrous glory, falls onto the stern of the boat with a shattering crash, narrowly missing Quint and Brody.”
While the shark may not exactly rise “vertically” or “block out the sun”, the realization of the events in the film share a certain sense of horrific power and absoluteness, making the characters’ plights feel suddenly feeble and hopeless.
The entire exchange takes less than fifteen seconds. There’s a sense of mean-spirited immediacy to the proceedings onscreen: an undeniable helplessness that overcomes not only the characters who have been fighting so hard to defeat the creature, but to the audience who has grown to care for them. This newfound sense of fragility afflicting the characters which moments before seemed so hardened and capable continues to evolve as the sequence progresses.
A medium-shot, over Quint’s shoulder, tracks the shark’s terrible visage through the doorway to the cabin that Quint is so desperately clinging to. His feet struggle and kick, slick against the wet deck, showing real terror and powerlessness.
In the screenplay the heading to this sequence reads in bold text:
NIGHTMARE ANGLE – DECK OF THE ORCA
The words “Nightmare Angle”, by definition, speak to a sense of indescribable terror, meant to stimulate an alarming visual sensibility that while indefinable on the page, is important for the eventual filmmaker to embody. The shark, in turn, is written as a gnashing, murderous machine:
“[List of items on the boat] all are food for the insatiable maw blindly churning away.”
The creature appears this way on film as well, effortlessly chewing through the boat and the sea of items falling from the cabin into its open jowls. The dead eyed, silent stare of the beast is made all the more haunting when one considers the thoughtless nature of its destructive tendencies.
Where the script and film depart is in Quint’s actions leading up to his demise. The screenplay reads:
“Quint is clinging next to a rack of lances: he is enraged at this ultimate violation of his territory. He snatches up a lance and hurls himself at the shark with a wordless bellow.”
Quint’s stoic, hard-edged nature is still very much alive in the script. His life, on the page, is not as important as his honor and the honor of his vessel. In some ways, this certainly seems in keeping with who Quint is. After all, from the moment he’s introduced to the moment when his demise becomes imminent, Quint acts without regard to his own survival.
In the film, Quint clings to the doorway, hanging tight as several items fall from the cabin into the creature’s gaping mouth. His expression is pained and fearful, suddenly struck with mortality, recalling glimpses of his expression the night he told the story of the Indianapolis. This is a Quint who is not infallible, rather he is human and facing the death that he ultimately knew was his to claim. His feet kick lamely against the wet wood, frantically attempting to halt himself from sliding into the path of those crushing teeth, but the worry in his eyes tells that even he knows the fruitless nature of his exploits.
The cinematography is straight on, configured of close-up shots of Quint and Brody, providing the audience with a window into their emotions as they experience them: a view into the raw, visceral terror in the face of a painful, unruly finish. An air canister rolls over Quint’s hand, causing him to scream in pain and release himself from the cabin. Brody grabs his arm but they’re both too wet and slick to keep their grip. While the screenplay called for blind, melodramatic heroism, the film provided Quint with a human, humbling demise.
“Quint’s footing falters and slips, he stumbles at the Mouth of Hell, the big teeth seize him and snap.”
The camera follows Quint as he slides into the massive monster’s mouth: “The Mouth of Hell.” The screenplay brings a sense of poeticism that again strikes a sense of abhorrent horror while providing the filmmaker with tone as opposed to direction. The shark is on full display, terrifying and driven- fulfilling the promise that the film had been making since the opening, dread filled moments where two teenagers met the shadowy creature in dark ocean waters. But the audience’s eyes are less attached to the shark and more to the frantic, flailing efforts of Quint. The camera holds close as he kicks out his legs, fighting to prop himself against the sides of the tremendous creature’s head.
As Quint slides into the creature’s mouth he releases a guttural scream, haunting and real, infused with as much fear as it has pain. The screenplay describes this as well, continuing the idea that the shark is a grotesque machination of blind consumption, reading: “his body is clamped between the grinding, sawing teeth…” When the shark finally does bite into Quint’s torso, the camera holds on a close-up on Quint. Blood gushes from his clenched teeth, making the death far more personal and disturbing in a way that showing the gore of his meaty torso could never have achieved. The screenplay reads “Blood gushes onto the deck,” but the film shows blood in the water, which seems to dissipate quickly, focusing on the nature of life and death in the wild. Specifically, how fleeting and impersonal the act of eating for the animal truly is.
The screenplay completes the exchange somewhat unceremoniously:
“The remnants of his body tumble from the shark’s mouth.”
In the film, Quint strikes back in spite of the sounding of his death knell, stabbing the shark repeatedly as it shakes him back and forth, more blood pouring from his mouth. The audience watches from over Brody’s shoulder in a medium-wide shot as Quint goes limp. The shark pulls him below the surface and, as the ocean was less than two minutes before, all is calm.
No “remnants” of Quint tumble from the shark’s mouth. He is simply swallowed whole by the shark, by the ocean, by the natural world he’s always been so quick to want to tame, to hunt and to survive in but, deep down, so certain he would be consumed by.
In essence, in his final moments, the film allowed Quint to reveal himself for who he was, rather than continue to occupy the space of the character he was written to be.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
In an interview conducted by Eric Vespe (aka Quint) and published on June 6, 2011 on aintitcool.com (Found here), Steven Spielberg spoke about his decision to film Jaws on location:
“I was naïve about the ocean, basically. I was pretty naïve about mother nature and the hubris of a filmmaker who thinks he can conquer the elements was foolhardy, but I was too young to know I was being foolhardy when I demanded that we shoot the film in the Atlantic Ocean and not in a North Hollywood tank.
But had I to do it all over again I would have gone back to the sea because it was the only way for the audience to feel that these three men were cast adrift with a great white shark hunting them.”
Steven Spielberg was a name I grew up revering and after finally watching Jaws, I had a whole new understanding as to why that fact was true. His versatility as a filmmaker knows no bounds, certainly, but neither does his imagination and determination as an artist. Jaws is a picture about mother nature as much as it is about a shark, and every element that went into making it serves to further its dramatic thrust into that altogether familiar and yet oddly unknown territory.
“Spielberg made a thrilling, adventurous, and ultimately crowd-pleasing tale of man vs. nature.”
Scriptophobic’s own Kelly Warner put it best in an article he wrote titled ‘Jaws and the Rare Case Where the Film is Better’ (Found here):
Quint’s death represents this sentiment better than almost any other moment in the film. The page speaks of a stoic, heroic man’s demise in the face of the machine-like creature which represents the lawlessness of the ocean. The film expands that idea, tying in a more human element and allowing vulnerability to eek out of even the most indomitable personality in the film. The block of text may be a short one, as is the scene, but its impact is everlasting and a defining moment of the film’s entire 130 minute runtime.
In an interview with The Washington Times, conducted by Keith Valcourt and published on July 28, 2016 titled “’Jaws’ screenwriter Gottlieb says classic film still has its bite” (Found here), Carl Gottlieb reflects on the film’s antagonist:
“They touch a nerve in everybody. They are an apex predator. Same fascination we have with lions and tigers. They’re big and scary and they keep us humble.”
Great cinema can leave us humbled. So can great terrors. I think of Quint, humbled rather than empowered in the final moments before his demise and how relatable that death is then able to become. It is often our greatest fears, which may well be rooted in our past experiences, that haunt us until the end. And often such sacrifices which drive some to survive, overcome and supersede where others have fallen.
Take a look at Sheriff Brody, for example. If you keep watching after the aforementioned scene, well, you’ll see what I’m talking about.
JAWS (1975) Written by Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb
Directed by Steven Spielberg
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