With Jaws, the picture Steven Spielberg not only made, but intended to make, becomes transparent through the recovery of erasure. Editing becomes not just a formal strategy of composition, but also a symbolic removal, or remolding, of one’s footprints in the sand, or, in the case of The Shining, the snow. As reinstated cuts, special features are a way of pretending what was on film never really was. As a disastrously famous production, even on-set script writer/doctor and author of the just as iconic Jaws Log, Carl Gottlieb, has concurred, Jaws also ended up being a movie about the making of a movie.

Rape

The water looks beautiful. It’s real, and so is that moon and so are those stars. You want to go in. You never doubt Jaws’ treatment of landscape—“a love poem to water—” (writes Antonia Quirke) because it breathes. Chrissie, the lone swimmer, is the movie’s exemplary female victim. Her death, which has been described as rape, touches upon a number of sexual scenarios, most notably, the sub-category date rape. Her death is literally a “date” gone awry. Though I’ve written about Chrissie before, I see new things this time around. The way she sheds her clothes, piece by piece, along the jagged “teeth” of the dune fence, like she’ll never need them again before running into the water. The way Brody collects them like crumbs that lead him to the shark the next morning. The way Chrissie sits in isolation at the beach, removed from the rest of the group. The way Tom Cassidy mirrors the predatory gaze and sexual assault the shark inflicts upon Chrissie in the water. Not only does Chrissie sit alone at the bonfire, she swims alone too. Her attack has been read as Cassidy’s displaced rage over Chrissie “running out” on him, as Chief Brody puts it the next morning when she goes missing. In one of the earlier drafts of the script, Chrissie’s last name is Worthington, but when asked, Cassidy says, “Worthingsly,” which sounds a lot like “worthless.” I also notice that the movie goes out of its way to spare Cassidy’s life—the preppy upper-class boy Chrissie wants to have sex with—while greedily taking hers. The film makes Cassidy too drunk to swim or have sex, and saves him by letting him pass out on shore while Chrissie swims brazenly into the “dark” ocean like a nubile siren (or, to use the date rape term, “tease”). As a woman who clearly loves to swim alone, Chrissie is punished for basking in her own eroticism. Her pleasure in the water is not contingent upon whether Cassidy joins her. And while her death is standard punishment doled out to girls who have, or in her case want to have sex, had Chrissie and Cassidy been attacked in the water together, they would still have suffered the death penalty that comes with being sexual in the horror genre. In the storyboard drawings, Chrissie and Cassidy fuck under a big, low moon that hangs over what looks more like a cityscape then a seascape. After which, Chrissie, seemingly possessed by the lunar light, walks solo into the water for a sacrificial swim. In the storyboard drawings of the shark attack, Chrissie’s breasts are bared, in the film version, the water sheathes her from top to bottom as the lower half (the sex organs) of her body gets ripped (fucked) apart.

Then there are the words. When the “nice” boy Cassidy passes out on shore, leaving Chrissie to metaphorically walk home alone, she runs into the bad boy. Think of Jodie Foster in The Accused showing up at the wrong bar. The shark is a bad fish, the immoral sailor, like the one who tries to rape Marnie’s mother in Marnie. In a bizarrely revealing assessment of cinematic value and coincidence, a time capsule containing five items was buried in 1989 on Universal’s 25th Anniversary. It was to be opened on Universal’s fiftieth. It contained: “a swatch of King Kong’s fur, the hat worn by Ernest Borgnine in the 1964 film McHale’s Navy, a seismogram from Earthquake, a tooth from the shark in Jaws, and Sean Connery’s bow-tie from Marnie.”