Title: Jaws
For some reason, lately I’ve been in the mood of reading a book and then watching a film adaptation of it. With Jaws being on the AFI list of best films and I hadn’t seen it in a long while, I decided to give it the same treatment.
I’m not sure how much people remember what a huge deal Jaws was when it came out. It was the first really big blockbuster of the 1970s. It seemed to play forever. The graphic horror of it was shocking. There were reports of people running out of the theater, throwing up and passing out.
I remember seeing it in a drive-in with my brother. Before it started, I was worried that I might throw up in his car. I did get scared but managed to preserve my dignity.
Watching it now, it all seems so tame. The explosion of blood when the kid on the raft gets attacked is still shocking, not only because of the blood but also due to violating the unwritten rule that while it’s OK for children to be threatened, the expectation is that no harm comes to them.
Similarly, the novel Jaws also caused a sensation upon release. It was on the NY best seller list for something over forty weeks. When released as a paperback, millions of copies were immediately sold. Ultimately, some twenty million copies of Jaws were sold world wide.
So, how do they compare?
The plot is more less the same. Brody (Roy Scheider) is the sheriff of Amity. A woman gets attacked by a shark and he wants to close the beach. Vaughn (Murray Hamilton), the mayor of Amity, intercedes because shutting down the beach will economically doom Amity. Brody acquiesces and other people are killed by the shark. Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), an ichthyologist, arrives so that he can research the shark. Brody, Hooper, and the irascible skipper Quint (Robert Shaw) go out to hunt and kill the shark.
What’s the major difference between the novel and the movie? Well, in the novel, pretty much all of the characters are assholes.
In the film, Brody is a transplant. He’s a New York City cop who burned out and now just wants to live a more tranquil life here in this beach town. He loves his wife Ellen (Lorraine Gray). The townspeople treat him suspiciously because he’s not considered one of them.
In the novel, Brody is a life long resident of Amity. He’s the one that treats non-residents with suspicion. Convinced that they’re all snobs, he’s actively rude to other people. He’s rude to his wife. Aware that he’s married above his station, he’s suspicious of Ellen. He’s especially suspicious of Hooper, who’s much more educated than he is, much richer than he is, and has known Ellen since they were both children.
In the film, Ellen is kind of a nonentity. She’s a pretty generic loving wife and mother. She apparently had a bigger part but much of it ended up on the cutting room floor (the filming of Jaws was problematic to say the least).
In the novel, it turns out that Brody was right to be suspicious of her. Ellen was born of wealth but fell in love with Brody. They got married and had three children. On the surface, all seems to be well. However, she is a cauldron of discontent. She sees all of her childhood friends continuing on with their luxurious lives while she feels trapped in the small town married to an unambitious man that makes a small salary.
When Hooper comes into town, her discontent reaches full flower. She essentially throws herself at Hooper and for the one and only time in her married life, spends an afternoon in a motel room with another man.
I have to say here that Benchley should never write a sex scene. First of all, men writing women has become a meme. Benchley is such a good example of this. Ellen’s thoughts and actions simply don’t make sense. The rape fantasy scene is particularly egregious. His description of the sex act, which includes Ellen watching Hooper’s eyes bulge out so far that she’s afraid that they’re going to pop out, is, quite simply, insane. It’s the weirdest sex scene that I’ve read since Stephen King had a 11 year old girl pull a train in It.
Hooper, in the film is kind of an odd duck. Charming in a goofy manner, he’s really only interested in the shark. His interest in Ellen appears only friendly. In the novel, Ellen basically only has to drop a hint and he is immediately all over her. His overt pretentiousness is grating. His affair, combined with Brody’s suspicions, makes for uncomfortable boat rides when the three men do set off in search of the shark. Oh yeah, spoiler alert for a 45 year old novel, Hooper, unlike in the film, comes to a bad end.
There’s not a lot of difference between the film and novel Quint. Quint’s pretty gruff in both. Just to raise his asshole factor a bit, in the novel Quint does do things like cutting up a still living shark so that it will feed upon itself and is preserving a dolphin fetus to use as future bait.
Quint’s most famous scene in the film is him relating the anecdote of surviving the sinking of the USS Indianapolis. It was several days before the surviving crew could be rescued. As they waited, floating in the ocean, many sharks came to feast on the survivors. Since this scene was partially written by Shaw, it’s not surprising that it does not appear in the novel.
As in the film, Quint also comes to a bad end. However, in the novel, it’s much more of an overt Ahab ending. By the end of the novel, Quint has become obsessed with the shark, talking to it as he would to his mortal enemy. As he harpoons it, his leg gets caught in the rope and he drowns as the shark plunges into the depths. Very Ahab indeed.
Finally, there’s the mayor Vaughn. In the film, he’s just worried about tourism. In the novel, he’s somehow involved in a mafia scheme that’s dependent upon summer tourist traffic. When the tourists disappear as a result of the shark attacks, he becomes a despondent alcoholic and moves away in disgrace.
The film simplifies all of this nonsense. In hindsight, all of this additional plot seems unnecessary and maybe even detrimental. In fact, as Spielberg put it, when you read the novel, the characters are all so unappealing that you find yourself rooting for the shark. Even though an argument can be made that, by removing all of this complexity, Spielberg put a Hollywood spin on a much richer story, I think that, in this case, the complexity obfuscated the simple person against animal (monster) narrative that is really the heart of this story.
In case you’re wondering about the title of the blog post, apparently Benchley struggled mightily with finding a title for the novel. One of the bonus parts of the edition that I read included a list of discarded titles (of which they were many and varied). Peter Benchley’s father, Nathaniel, was also an author. He jokingly suggested “Wha’s That Noshin’ on my Laig?” as his entry.
I think that title would have made both the film and the novel much better.
dorkenstein 