FILM
Jaws Revisited
/ Masha Tupitsyn
09.15.08
As a movie, Jaws is intensely diegetic. It doesn’t want its audience to stray from the world of the fiction for even a second. And, unlike the entirely banal Jaws 2, Jaws is a narrative of archetypal economy. This is where Spielberg’s penchant for fantasy and escapism (total immersion in the film world) borders on an imperial takeover of the cinematic imagination. While George Lucas and Steven Spielberg undermine authority in their films, notes Biskand, they do it in order to delve deeper into fantasy. In their films, the disaffected era of the Vietnam generation was repossessed into the cinematic fold, and social reality was retreated from altogether. In the deleted scene, Matt Hooper’s character is extended beyond its utilitarian and diegetic purposes. If left in, the film would start to take on the quality of a paranoid 1970s conspiracy thriller (note the mayoral corruption in Jaws hinting at Watergate) in the vein of All The Presidents Men, The Parallax View, The Conversation, or Serpico. But, as Antonia Quirke rightly points out in her BFI Classic on Jaws, the film doesn’t go in that direction because Spielberg is trying to “brin[g] everything down out of the neurotic 1970s into a Boys’ Own adventure story.” While the films of The New Hollywood are products of the rebellion movements of the 1960s, and therefore attempted to reformulate genre by blurring the line between diegetic and non-diegetic (and in the process, calling attention to the construction of film, as well as opening the movie narrative to the socio-historic realities of the non-diegetic world), Spielberg, along with George Lucas, restored the hermeticism of the cinematic frame in the same way that thematically his movies attempt to reconstitute the nuclear family. (Tellingly, in The Making of Jaws Spielberg states that one of the main reasons he chose Martha's Vineyard as the film’s location was because he could easily obscure terra firma from view in the third act, making both the men on the Orca and the viewers in the theater feel stranded at sea.)
Outtakes
The domestic outtakes and deleted scenes of Roy Scheider and Lorraine Gary outwardly display a stifled marriage as well as Chief Brody’s professional and personal dissatisfaction, an unhappiness that the final version of Jaws only skirts around. “To dispense with dialogue in order to establish character,” writes Antonia Quirke, “to find both narrative and poem in silence, marks the young Spielberg.” One could also argue the same with the movie’s handling of, and in this case, omission of weighty domestic scenes. Had the film included more of them, the movie’s script would have certainly had to accommodate the extramarital affair that Ellen and Hooper have in Peter Benchley’s novel. Left out, however, their frustrations must be suppressed and evoked as silences and omissions. In light of Spielberg’s obsession with the theme of familial dissolution, this is a notable absence. Spielberg, who started out as a TV director, once stated that “television replaced the father” in America. There are problems, yes, says Spielberg, but in Jaws, there are bigger fish to fry (in Jaws 2 this is literally the case when the shark is electrocuted using a power cable). The outtakes reveal what Brody could have been as a character had Spielberg chosen to keep certain scenes. Plagued by transparent doubt, fear, and inadequacy, Martin Brody would turn into a man far less benign and emotionally peripheral. If we knew too much about him, or the things the deleted scenes tell us, we wouldn’t believe him capable of transcending his fears to overcome the shark. We know Brody is afraid, but we don’t really know to what extent or why. After all, this film is, in large part, about evasion, the greatest evasion being death. We want to sense Brody’s fears but we don’t want them spelled out because they are also our fears. On Hooper’s boat, an extraterrestrial “floating laboratory,” (foreshadowing Dreyfuss’s role in Close Encounters) Brody, drunk due to his fear of the water, mumbles, with bottle in hand, about the ineffectuality of being a New York City cop in the early 1970s, a popular story line widely explored in many 1970s films. Brody left New York City so that he could “make a difference.” A big fish in a little pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. Scale is relevant to ego. He left a place that he feared literally (NYC) only to be engulfed by a landscape (Amity Island/water) that characterizes those fears symbolically. Brody doesn’t go in the water because of a bad childhood experience (“there’s a clinical term for it,” says Ellen) that he doesn’t let his wife reveal to Hooper (us). In a film about the opacity of symbols rearing their ugly heads, men, like the shark, cannot risk full disclosure.
Outtakes
The domestic outtakes and deleted scenes of Roy Scheider and Lorraine Gary outwardly display a stifled marriage as well as Chief Brody’s professional and personal dissatisfaction, an unhappiness that the final version of Jaws only skirts around. “To dispense with dialogue in order to establish character,” writes Antonia Quirke, “to find both narrative and poem in silence, marks the young Spielberg.” One could also argue the same with the movie’s handling of, and in this case, omission of weighty domestic scenes. Had the film included more of them, the movie’s script would have certainly had to accommodate the extramarital affair that Ellen and Hooper have in Peter Benchley’s novel. Left out, however, their frustrations must be suppressed and evoked as silences and omissions. In light of Spielberg’s obsession with the theme of familial dissolution, this is a notable absence. Spielberg, who started out as a TV director, once stated that “television replaced the father” in America. There are problems, yes, says Spielberg, but in Jaws, there are bigger fish to fry (in Jaws 2 this is literally the case when the shark is electrocuted using a power cable). The outtakes reveal what Brody could have been as a character had Spielberg chosen to keep certain scenes. Plagued by transparent doubt, fear, and inadequacy, Martin Brody would turn into a man far less benign and emotionally peripheral. If we knew too much about him, or the things the deleted scenes tell us, we wouldn’t believe him capable of transcending his fears to overcome the shark. We know Brody is afraid, but we don’t really know to what extent or why. After all, this film is, in large part, about evasion, the greatest evasion being death. We want to sense Brody’s fears but we don’t want them spelled out because they are also our fears. On Hooper’s boat, an extraterrestrial “floating laboratory,” (foreshadowing Dreyfuss’s role in Close Encounters) Brody, drunk due to his fear of the water, mumbles, with bottle in hand, about the ineffectuality of being a New York City cop in the early 1970s, a popular story line widely explored in many 1970s films. Brody left New York City so that he could “make a difference.” A big fish in a little pond rather than a small fish in a big pond. Scale is relevant to ego. He left a place that he feared literally (NYC) only to be engulfed by a landscape (Amity Island/water) that characterizes those fears symbolically. Brody doesn’t go in the water because of a bad childhood experience (“there’s a clinical term for it,” says Ellen) that he doesn’t let his wife reveal to Hooper (us). In a film about the opacity of symbols rearing their ugly heads, men, like the shark, cannot risk full disclosure.
