Jaws: Half-second skips

At the beginning of the month, I introduced a screening of Jaws at the Picturehouse cinema in Chester.* Jaws in 3D, no less, although I had to reassure the people I was with that it wasn’t Jaws 3D, a wholly different prospect. (I wouldn’t introduce Jaws 3D because I actually refuse to acknowledge that it exists.)

At this juncture it’s probably worth saying that Jaws is my favourite film, as much as you can have a ‘favourite film’ as a human with access to thousands of moving pictures and more than one emotional setting. As a film lecturer, it’s useful to have an answer to the question “what’s your favourite film?” (as asked by students in a normal voice) or “what’s your favourite film, then?” (as asked by friends-of-friends in pubs in a vaguely challenging tone, usually before the Tarantino chat), and Jaws is both my honest response and a fun barometer for if someone is a knobhead or not. So getting to introduce the film in the cinema, and not just subjecting my dog to some trivia about it before putting on the DVD, feels like unlocking a new cool life nerd level.

The month before, I had introduced a screening of Clueless at Storyhouse, also in Chester, and I talked about Austen adaptations and costumes and music. (I will write about this at some point, if only because when I tell people I’m writing a book about siblings in cinema, approximately 83% of them say, “are you writing about Clueless?”) Introducing Jaws, however, was a slightly different kettle of fish (just go with it). Where do you start with Jaws?

In the recent Jaws @ 50 documentary, Steven Spielberg is asked whether there’s anything he can say about Jaws that hasn’t already been said. It’s a great documentary, as it happens, and genuinely moving. There’s a palpable sense of everyone involved realising they were part of something special, without it veering into mawkish, best-days-of-our-lives territory (see every documentary about Grease ever). But the making of Jaws is the stuff of such legend - the broken sharks! blowing the budget! filming on water is hard! - and the ways it changed Hollywood cinema are so well-trodden that it’s difficult to find a new angle.

But I was also aware that for some people at the screening, this might be their first time seeing Jaws. Just because Jaws is 50 years old - the whole reason for the swathe of nostalgia screenings that have been happening this summer - it doesn’t mean it isn’t new for someone. So I talked a little bit about the blockbuster context, and a little bit about the messy production, but I spent most of the time talking about a split second moment early in the film when Roy Scheider, as Chief Brody, skips down the street.

It happens fifteen minutes in, or thereabouts. Brody is in the police station, bashing out “SHARK ATTACK” on the typewriter, recording the cause of Chrissie’s death. (This is another little moment that I love. Everyone remembers the barrels, but this is another way that we sense the shark without seeing it, and there’s something restrained and yet effective about those stark letters being hammered out.) He decides they need to close the beaches, but the police department has no existing signage. So Brody heads out of the police station, past the white picket fence and the manicured lawn with the blossom trees, and starts to walk down the street. As he does this, there’s a short hop in his walk.

It conveys a lot, that little skip. In the script Brody is described as moving with “purpose and haste”, and that’s absolutely part of it. He’s in a hurry. He understands - even if no one else seems to yet - that closing the beaches is necessary, and that there is a real danger out there. But there’s also a sense of energy, a cheerfulness about the movement that reminds us that Brody is happy to be on Amity. He’s lived in New York, he’s worked for the NYPD, and now he’s here in this idyllic island setting, where his kids can roam about outside. On top of this, there’s an element of optimism. Brody isn’t just enjoying his new life, he feels like this is somewhere he can have an impact. This is the one thing he hasn’t been able to do in New York, and now he has a chance to make a meaningful difference. He’s not your hero, he’s your guy.

It’s also a supremely un-macho manoeuvre. Jaws grapples with a lot of issues around masculinity and what ‘makes a man’ in the troubled landscape of 1970s America, and it does so in much broader strokes than Brody’s skip down the street, but it remains an unexpected thing for a police chief to do. This sense that Brody is lacking, somehow, is emphasised elsewhere: his fear of the water, his powerlessness in the face of the mayor, his struggle to be heard (sometimes literally). But it’s seeded here, in a split-second part of Scheider’s performance that nails Brody’s character right at the start.

Jaws is a big movie. The shark is big, for starters. (Hooper: “That’s a twenty-footer.” / Quint: “Twenty-five.”) The ocean is big. This is a film that made big money at the box office and ushered in a whole new era in Hollywood. The marketing, the merchandise, the capital-M movieness, the monstrousness of it all. And it is a film filled with big moments and memorable set pieces, not just all of Bruce’s appearances but Ben Gardner’s head and the Vertigo shot and the Indianapolis speech.** But it’s also a film made up of lots of little moments, which for me is what gives it it’s staying power. There’s a balance struck between big blockbuster set pieces and quiet, blink-and-you’ll-miss-them instances, tiny choices that give Jaws its soul.

In my (forthcoming) book, I write about Nope and specifically about some of the small but significant interactions between OJ and Emerald. Nope obviously owes a lot to Jaws, as Jordan Peele has talked about (including in Jaws @ 50!), and as a film it also manages to capture this same balance between big, monstrous set pieces and small, human moments that make it another film I keep going back to.

So here’s to skipping with bow-legged police chiefs, I guess.

*This is an incredible cinema, by the way. The seats are made of this cool teddy bear material, which is cosy but not so cosy that you fall asleep, and the seats aren’t theatre-tiny or fiendishly huge. My local, Vue Printworks, has massive horizontal recliners, which are nice but make me feel like I’m being consumed by a pleather crocodile.

**I saw Ian Shaw, Robert Shaw’s son, perform as his dad in The Shark is Broken earlier this year, and when he did the Indianapolis speech the theatre was pin-drop silent. I both couldn’t breathe and wanted to cry, which is maybe how the theatre should be every once in a while?