Reel & Read: Jaws!

Our book today is Peter Benchley's mega-bestselling 1974 novel Jaws, which was subsequently made into an obscure art-house film some of you may have seen. That film caused three horrible things to happen (well, four if you count prompting millions of people to go sit in dark movie theaters instead of taking a walk in Central Park): it made every single person in the Western world permanently terrified of swimming - or even wading past knee-deep - in the ocean, any ocean; it declared an open season on the killing of sharks which hasn't lessened in fervor in the last forty years, even though most species of large shark are now all but extinct; and it took a wrecking-ball to the writing career of its author, who was capable of good work and might have been capable of great work (his father and grandfather certainly were) but who instead will be known forever only as "the author of Jaws." Those are three heavy indictments to lay at the feet of a movie, but despite its gazillion readers, the book is largely innocent.

I'm turning my attention to the book today even though I wrote about it only (!) two or so years ago here. The reason? Why, because my "Reel & Read" partner in crime, Mr. Anderson, has decided to take time out from his wall-to-wall schedule reviewing new-release movies in order to take in Steven Spielberg's super-hit again, and I really don't need much excuse to revisit this novel.

Last time, as some you may recall, I brought up the parts of Benchley's novel that were not only effective but essentially impossible to capture on film. In retrospect this seems to me a snotty and short-sighted assertion: of course virtually anything that can be conveyed in prose can be conveyed on film, if the film-maker has some talent and puts his mind to it. Re-reading Jaws for this post, I could easily picture all of it being filmed - but the book is in so many ways so different from the Spielberg movie that I found myself imagining the unimaginable: a "Jaws" remake directed by somebody else. That somebody else might decide to stick closer to the actual plot of the novel, in which there's a lot more subtlety and land-based goings-on than makes it to the screen.

I read the novel before I saw the movie (I remember its original, dorky cover), and re-reading it has reminded me of all those goings-on. In the novel, ichthyologist Matt Hooper is still the idealistic nature-lover who can blurt out things like "Sharks have everything a scientist dreams of. They're beautiful - God, now beautiful they are! They're as graceful as any bird. They're as mysterious as any animal on earth" (apparently, Benchley's Hooper isn't much of a reader, or he'd know not ever to say such things in a book ... it's just bound to, er, bite you) - but he's also a stuck-up little prick quite a lot of the time, one who happily goes along when a distraught Ellen Brody awkwardly approaches him about having an affair. She and Hooper meet at a restaurant safely up the coast from Amity, the Long Island beach town where Ellen's husband is chief of police, and the scene that follows, in which they fantasize aloud about what they'd like to do to each other, certainly wouldn't be impossible to film - but it would sure as hell be impossible for Spielberg to film. I doubt he could even understand the words on the page.

Benchley is expertly parsimonious with words, when he's narrating such hard-edged, adult scenes. There's one excrutiating sequence where Ellen throws a small dinner party and Chief Brody, broiling with resentments he can only half-name, proceeds to get very nearly drunk enough to torpedo the whole evening. Benchley keeps the narrative focus tightly on Brody, and yet there's no sympathy in the action at all ... the reader hears all of Brody's internal complaints and justifications and yet is never moved to empathy, is horrified the whole time by how he's behaving. It's expertly done: it's a shame so many readers probably missed it while thumbing forward looking for the next shark-attack scene.

Naturally, this being a work of prose not film, there's a good deal more straightforward exposition than any action-movie could support - including a scientific digression (by Hooper, of course) that might ring some bells for modern readers:

Look, the Latin name for this fish is Carcharodon carcharias, okay? The closest ancestor we can find for it is something called Carcharodon megalodon, a fish that existed maybe thirty or forty thousand years ago. We have fossil teeth from megalodon. They're six inches long. That would put the fish at between eighty and a hundred feet. And the teeth are exactly like the teeth you see in great whites today. What I'm getting at is, suppose the two fish are really one species. What's to say megalodon is really extinct? Why should it be? Not lack of food. If there's enough down there to support whales, there's enough to support sharks that big. Just because we've never seen a hundred-foot white doesn't mean they couldn't exist. All their food would be way down in the deep. A dead one wouldn't float to shore, because they don't have flotation bladders. Can you imagine what a hundred-foot white would look like? Can you imagine what it could do, what kind of power it would have?"

Fortunately, thanks to later masterpieces, readers in 2011 need not wonder about such things (although they might wonder how such a careful researcher as Benchley could get his archeological time-tables so scrunched up) - nor, indeed, does the book itself ponder on them for any length of time. Instead, it unfurls its various plot-lines with careful skill, including one plot-line that owes everything to what a certain wind-bag once described as the anxiety of influence. In the book, it turns out that Larry Vaughan, Amity's mayor, has a clear-cut motive for insisting that Chief Brody open the town's beaches even though two people have died, and his motive is cinematic: he's in debt up to his eyeballs to ... the Mafia!

That would be more or less the same Mafia that starred in the book-world's previous mega-bestseller, Mario Puzo's The Godfather from 1969. That novel had done the ultimate magic trick in the publishing world: it had become its own currency, an immediate part of every single Western individual's functioning cerebellum. Long before the Harry Potter books or The Da Vinci Code or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it had become a cultural phenomenon - and that phenomenon was quadrupled by the 1972 movie. Peter Benchley would have been something more than human if he hadn't hoped, at least in some part of his heart, that someday he could write a book that would do the same thing.

He did exactly that. He squeezed the not-so-innocent town of Amity between a feckless mayor who needs to keep the beaches open if he's ever going to repay his mobster 'partners' and a remorseless predator prowling beyond the surf. And it's not just Larry Vaughan: most of the characters here (with the notable exception of Quint, who's every bit as ridiculous a figure in the novel as in the movie, but who's at least graced in the movie by an indelible performance by Robert Shaw) are caught between the lone shark and the loan shark, and none more than Ellen Brody, who belatedly comes to regret her fling with Matt Hooper:

As she pondered what Vaughan had said, she began to recognize the richness of her life: a relationship with Brody was more rewarding than any Larry Vaughan would ever experience; an amalgam of minor trials and tiny triumphs that, together, added up to something akin to joy. And as her recognition grew, so did her regret that it had taken her so long to see the waste of time and emotion in trying to cling to her past. Suddenly she felt fear - fear that she was growing up too late, that something might happen to Brody before she could savor her awareness.

Nothing happens to Brody, of course - unlike in the movie, he's the sole survivor of the Orca, who returns alone to tell the tale. Benchley's book outsold Puzo's by two or three to one, and then a few years later the movie made from that book out-grossed the movie made from Puzo's by more than twice as much (although, again, you'll have to check with Mr. Anderson to see how it holds up after all these years). And most importantly, Puzo's novel reads like it was written in fifteen minutes by a megalomaniac 15-year-old, whereas Peter Benchley - may he rest in the deep - wrote a really good book, an almost perfect intelligent summer-read, provided you're not on a raft at sea.

Jaws!

Our book today is Peter Benchley's 1974 mega-bestseller Jaws, which was flying out of bookstores even before it was turned into a damn fine movie and given one of the single most world-famous cover illustrations any book has ever carried.

The story is roughly the same: a great white shark homes in on the peaceful little summer vacation town of Amity and begins a pattern of tightly focused feeding on humans. The plot is just that simple: what happens if a shark decides to do that? And the gimmick driving the plot is equally simple: this great white shark is huge (and, in the book and even more in the movie, seems oddly bright, despite Benchley's repeated scientific assurances throughout the novel that it's a dumb creature of pure instinct).

The town elders of Amity don't want to hurt their summer rentals by announcing the presence of a killer shark off their beaches, and at first they manage to convince Police Chief Brody not only to cover up the cause of the mysterious deaths cropping up offshore but also to keep the beaches open for swimmers. It's only once the attacks continue that Brody is forced to act on his conscience, and Benchley does a very good job of portraying the way the tension begins to eat at Brody's relationship with his wife Ellen:

"You'll wake the children."

"I don't give a damn. I'm not going to let you stand there and work out your own hang-ups by telling me I'm a shit."

Ellen smiled bitterly. "You see? There you go again."

"Where do I go again? What are you talking about?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Just like that. You don't want to talk about it. Look ... okay, I was wrong about the goddam meat. I shouldn't have blown my stack. I'm sorry. Now ..."

"I said I don't want to talk about it!"

Brody was ready for a fight, but he backed off, sober enough to realize that his only weapons were cruelty and innuendo, and that Ellen was close to tears. And tears, whether shed in orgasm or in anger, disconcerted him. So he said only, "Well, I'm sorry about that." He walked out of the kitchen and climbed the stairs.

In the bedroom, as he was undressing, the thought occurred to him that the cause of all the unpleasantness, the source of the whole mess, was a fish: a mindless beast that he had never seen. The ludicrousness of the thought made him smile.

He crawled into bed and, almost simultaneous with the touch of his head to the pillow, fell into a dreamless sleep.

In the novel, the town hires the crusty old shark-catcher Quint to deal with the problem, and Brody brings in Matt Hooper, whose brother used to date Ellen years ago in her life before she married Brody (a life she looks upon wistfully even while she chastises herself for doing so). Quint is as pure and simple a predator as the fish he's chasing, and Hooper has predatory designs of his own - on Ellen Brody. One of the notes Benchley strikes over and over throughout the book is that the "great fish" marauding out in the ocean is just a cleaner, more honest physical manifestation of the kind of cold-blooded hunting that goes on everywhere. Jaws is thickly populated by sharks - and only one of them lives in the ocean.

Benchley, a life-long ocean-goer and frequent visitor to Nantucket, fills his book unobtrusively but plentifully with shark-lore, and some of the most effective moments in Jaws are descriptions of the shark itself, its motions, its sensory world. This is a much, much stronger novel than it's usually given credit for being - not only Benchley's masterpiece but a fine addition to the 'men and the sea' sub-genre whose Everest is Moby Dick.

I've recommended Jaws to countless people, and doubtless I've personally given a copy to many of you reading this. If so (and even if not), you'll have heard me make one of my favorite points about the book: there are many scenes in it that are not only superior to anything found in the blockbuster movie but superior to anything that could be filmed. There are dreads, agonies, and swift little moments that defy cinematography - but good, lean prose can capture them if it's smart enough to know where they are.

Take the book's opening scene. It's the same as in the movie - a young man and woman go down to the beach in the hour before dawn, and she goes for an impromptu swim. Her strokes in the water attract the attention of the shark a hundred yards offshore, and it closes in on her movements. The movie harrowingly depicts her death-agonies, because that's what it can show us. In the novel, there's no such struggle - she feels a sharp tug on her leg, reaches down with groping fingers in the dark water and feels that her foot is missing, that bone is protruding (pain hasn't hit her yet). She screams, but in the next instant the shark catapults up from directly beneath her and instantly destroys her with a couple of enormous bites.

But the genius of the scene is in the delicate moment right before this:

The fish closed on the woman and hurtled past, a dozen feet to the side and six feet below the surface. The woman felt only a wave of pressure that seemed to lift her up in the water and ease her down again. She stopped swimming and held her breath. Feeling nothing further, she resumed her lurching stroke.

The fish smelled her now, and the vibrations - erratic and sharp - signaled distress. The fish began to circle close to the surface. Its dorsal fin broke water, and its tail, thrashing back and forth, cut the glassy surface with a hiss. A series of tremors shook its body.

For the first time, the woman felt fear, though she did not know why. Adrenaline shot through her trunk and her limbs, generating a tingling heat and urging her to swim faster. She guessed that she was fifty yards from shore. She could see the line of white foam where the waves broke on the beach. She saw the lights in the house, and for a comforting moment, she thought she saw someone pass by one of the windows.

Putting us so heartbreakingly inside her head in the moments before she dies (or letting us hear Brody's mirthless, contradictory little chuckle in his bedroom alone) - is something Benchley the novelist can do - and does often in Jaws - that no movie director can duplicate or would want to. Its a good reason to find a 20 cent thrift store copy of Jaws and give yourself a good afternoon's read. Given the recent world-wide rise in shark attacks, you'd be crazy to go swimming in the ocean anyway ... so why not enjoy yourself on land?

Stevesees! R.I.P. Roy Scheider

We revive Stevesees today despite the lamentable absence of our beloved Hippolyta to cheer us on (she vanished from the site at roughly the same time as the Reichmarshall did - do we detect Romance in the air? Perhaps a whirlwind trip to Argentina to visit some, um, old friends of the Reichmarshall? Alas, we'll probably never know...), and we do so not only to honor the memory of recently deceased actor Roy Scheider but also to sing the praises of sequels.

But first, Scheider, a perennially underrated performer who managed to impart an extra bit of grace, an extra ounce of believability, and most of all an almost imperceptible twinkle into even his most mediocre parts. He was the quintessential knockaround part-player, of a type the stage and screen will always have and always need - the character actor who turns in the work and eschews the histrionics.

Unfortunately, histrionics almost always gets the attention and wins the awards. This was the case in 1979, when he was nominated for Best Actor for his part in All That Jazz and lost to Dustin Hoffman vamping in primary colors in Kramer vs. Kramer - the one is a scintillating, bravura star-turn, the other a deeply boring assay at suburban ennui, of a type that's always popular with the Academy. And look at his most famous performance, as Police Chief Brody in Jaws: he's impossibly bracketed between the ham of Robert Shaw and the wry of Richard Dreyfuss.

Which brings us to sequels, because it's in a sequel that Roy Scheider's craft shows to perfect advantage. Of course we're referring to Jaws 2, the sequel to the record-breaking Jaws - and as in most cases, the sequel is better than the original.

Purists will howl, of course. Jaws 2 better than Jaws? Unthinkable! What about the stagecraft, the narrative, the filmic cohesion? To which we here at Stevesees say: there ain't no Muse of filmic cohesion. Jaws 2 wins out over Jaws because it resolves the mystery that's central to both movies and ignored by the first: the shark. In Jaws, a twenty-five foot great white shark starts eating humans off the shores of Amity island. After some initial reluctance, the town council agrees to pay professional shark-killer Quint (the Shaw character) to take a boat out after the shark. Police Chief Brody and marine biologist Matt Hooper (the Dreyfuss role) go with him, and they quickly find themselves demoted from hunters to hunted by a shark who's always one step ahead of them, mysteriously canny and malevolent. Emphasis on mysteriously. The film tries hard to convey a sense of realism - scores of 'natives' are trucked in from Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket, and Scheider gives Brody a very appealing everyman fallibility - but the elephant in the room is the shark itself, a superhuman monster who's swum in from a different genre altogether.

In Jaws 2 (Jeannot Szwarc directed it with a fine eye for visual contrasts, always violently juxtaposing violence onto tranquility), this mystery is cleared up: the shark in this movie is motivated by plain and simple revenge. It is supernatural, and almost no attempt is made to tell us otherwise. When a group of local kids find a killer whale carcass washed up on the beach with a giant bite taken out of it, Brody calls in a local expert and hesitantly asks her about motive, specifically whether if a shark were 'destroyed' off Amity, another shark might come along and ... to which the expert (the actress sounding exactly like the factual old biddy in Hitchcock's The Birds) tartly replies, "Sharks don't take things personally, Mr. Brody." Which, as all fans of horror movies will tell you, is the movie's way of lock-solid guaranteeing you that sharks do take things personally - or at least that this one does.

And just look at all the things it does in its brief reign of terror! It chases a water-skier and gulps her down; it plays peek-a-boo with a scuba diver; it successfully eats a Coast Guard helicopter; and, in the film's best, most emotionally satisfying sequence, it terrorizes the shit out of what has to be the most obnoxious group of teenagers this in film. The first movie's shark would have been pooped after twenty minutes at this pace.

And Jaws 2 has the requisite horror movie puritanism. The beginning of the young snot killing spree when the shark zeroes in on one sailboat that's straggled behind the others. And why has it straggled behind? Because young Billy and Tina want to do it without being ogled. In fact, he's in the very act of spreading a blanket on deck so she won't get bruises when the shark head-butts the boat and sends him ass-first into the ocean.

The movie is full of memorable scenes, and Scheider shines in all of his. Probably two are best, and they're connected. In the first, Chief Brody, his instincts tingling at the possibility he might be dealing with another shark, is positioned high atop a shark tower, ignoring the happy scenes down on the beach in favor of scrutinizing the water. There he spots a vaguely shark-shaped shadow, trains his binoculars on it, trains them again - Scheider's body-language is a perfect little depiction of a man whose fears are convincing him of something as we watch. In one quick decision, he knows he's looking at the shark he's begun to suspect is out there; he descends from the tower, pulls his gun (Szwarc drily shows us that nobody on the beach is at point afraid of anything but the gun-waving Brody), yelling for everybody to get out of the water. When he comes to the edge of the surf, he raises his weapon and fires - just past a boy still running to get out of the surf. And when the shadow turns out not to be a shark at all ("It's just bluefish!" yells a fisherman, thus christening a semi-popular band by that name that played Nantucket hot spots for a couple of years, until sharks got them all)(just kidding about that last part: it was boring old heroin). The crowds ignore Brody's pathetic calls for them to go back in the water; they drift away, leaving him alone on the beach with his little boy, both of them very quietly picking up his shell casings.

The scene that follows is very different and equally good: Scheider's Brody has been fired off-camera - and drunk a skinfull off-camera too. He comes home and tells his wife he's been fired - something that hasn't happened to him since he was a kid - and Scheider gives the confession a pained, bewildered tone another actor would have curdled.

So here at Stevesees salute Roy Scheider for a first-rate job entertaining us over the years, and we salute sequels - many of which, like Scheider himself, are a whole lot better than people think they are.

And we'll let Stevereads have the final word for now: Richard Sackler's novelization of the movie (he co-wrote the screenplay) is actually a first-rate adventure novel full of great lines and sharply-drawn characters. Many of you have received this book compliments of Stevereads; we suggest you dig it up and give it a try. You won't be disappointed.