In a deleted scene, shark expert Hopper and Chief Brody crawl under a landing pier together, flashlights in hand, to get to the Tiger shark Hooper plans to autopsy. The movie cuts from Hooper and Brody talking sharks at Brody’s house, to gutting one for evidence. In the released take, the shark remains primary; it’s the thing that bonds the two men, and the action continues along a straight line. In the deleted scene, however, the line takes a detour around the insides of Hopper. The effect is jarring. Hooper is caught not thinking about the shark, but rather bragging about the details of his erotic encounters, in particular obscene phone calls from ex-lovers, to an always-preoccupied Brody. In the unused scene, Hooper is callow, not just in age, but in soul. Driven by basic instincts, like the shark, he comes across as a man mentally off-duty and therefore strays from the A-Z story. This is the Hooper that has an affair with Ellen Brody, and since the producers David Brown and Robert Zanuck, as well as Spielberg, who, as the director, identifies with the character of Hooper, banned the affair from the movie version of Jaws, this small scene—the residual connective tissue of the affair—has to go to. “One of the key decisions we made early on,” informs Zanuck, “was to take the sex scenes out of the story of Jaws.” As Peter Biskand put it in his essay on the blockbuster, “The Last Crusade,” “Mark Hamill was not about to disrupt Star Wars by lisping (like Marlon Brando in Missouri Breaks), wearing a dress, and upstaging the robots.” If left in, Hopper would no longer be just an emblem of science and modernity, there to move the action along with the information/knowledge he possesses—one of the three tools employed against the marauding shark—but a man with extra-diegetic features and connotations. And since Jaws is a film in which the three models of masculinity hinge upon and reflect off each other like glass, the triptych they form must be palliated on screen in a delicate equilibrium of characterization. This triptych is introduced early on in the opening credits as a theme when the names Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfus appear in the shape of a triangle (mirroring, as Nigel Andrews has pointed out, “the classic triangular figuration of the ego, superego, and id. The pointy-faced shark is also in the shape of the pyramidal ego structure”), like the now iconic shark maw rising out of the “deep” towards the surface of the water. If this version of Hooper had remained, the scales would tip too far to one side, and therefore something about Brody would have to shift. What’s more, Hooper’s sex life, like the dark passageway he’s shown walking through with Brody, moves his character beyond the given frame and into something inscrutable. Rather than shed light, it casts a shadow where shadows are not wanted.