In addtion to screaming for help during her brutal attack, Chrissie also exclaims, “Oh God, it hurts. It hurts,” which are more than just straightforward exclamations of physical pain and torment. They are also allusions to sexual violation. Chrissie’s guttural cries are met with soft whispers from Cassidy, who is passed out on shore wearing nothing but his underwear by the end. “I’m coming, I’m coming,” he moans, leaving “his id to ventriloquize the ravishing passion of the shark.” (Andrews) In his drunken stupor, Cassidy has something between a wet dream and the vicarious pleasure of hearing Chrissie get fucked (punished) by something else. Chrissie’s cries for help also recall pubescent Regan MacNeil in the earlier horror flick The Exorcist. “It burns, it burns,” Regan tells her mother when the Devil has his way with her. “Burning” becomes synonymous with the pain of sexual penetration. Like The Entity, in which a malevolent male spirit repeatedly rapes Barbara Hershey, something neither the victim nor viewers can see rapes Chrissie. According to Chrissie portrayer Susan Backlinie, a fearless underwater stuntwoman, the scene was shot and re-shot thirty or forty times. And according to the documentary The Making of Jaws, Backlinie reveals that Spielberg himself was behind some of the key stunts she performs. Namely, the pulling of the severe cable harness Backlinie was strapped into in the water, and tugged at from opposite sides of the beach, as well as the sound of her drowning, which was looped in during post-production and achieved by positioning Backlinie, head upturned, in front of a microphone, while water from above was poured down her throat. In his essay, “Jaws, Ideology, and Film Theory,” British film scholar Stephen Heath argues that Chrissie’s murder is a symbolic act of female genocide. Like Shelley Duvall in The Shining, Backlinie goes through off-screen hell to enact Chrissie’s viscerally terrifying death. In my book Beauty Talk & Monsters I write about the time when, during the filming of Close Encounters in India, the Bombay press asked the movie’s producer, Julia Phillips, how Steven Spielberg “got the girl in the beginning of Jaws to go this way and that way so violently in the water?” She writes—but didn’t say—in her memoir You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, “fearless stuntwoman, ten men, ten harnesses, pushpullpushpull, lacerations and bruises for years to come, don’t ask.” We know from interviews about the making of The Exorcist, as well as Peter Biskand’s tell-all about the movie industry of the 1970s, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, that Ellen Burstyn suffered her own harness horror in the hands of director William Friedkin.

Interestingly, Jaws’ other major shark victim is the Kintner boy, Alex, the son of a single mother (most likely a widow) who in the storyboard drawings is young, fit, and bikini-clad, more a beach babe then the austere (sexless) older woman she becomes in the movie. It is Mrs. Kintner who publicly slaps, and therefore indicts, the already-emasculated Chief Brody. And it is her slap that induces Brody’s shark-hunt odyssey in an effort to reclaim his manhood. Brody’s fear of the water doesn’t need elaboration. His phobia is allegorical and part of the emotional economy of patriarchy: fear of the feminine, or the unknown primordial “deep.”