FILM
Jaws Revisited
/ Masha Tupitsyn
09.15.08
The Gun That Won’t Fire
The line “the gun won’t fire,” uttered by Roy Scheider after each failed take, concerns a series of close-up outtakes. In them, Scheider is shown being more Scheider than Brody in his frustration as on- and off-camera merge in a fascinating way. It’s the scene where Brody, the cop on the boat, tries to shoot the shark with his pistol. Since Scheider never gets to enact the “scene” in these takes due to a faulty prop gun, he acts out his frustration as actor instead. With each take, Scheider becomes more and more angry while still trying to remain in the scene (the diegetic world). By the fourth or fifth outtake, however, Brody’s hesitance is gone, leaving only the costume of Brody. Scheider is cursing, overwhelmed by yet another technical malfunction on set on the long shoot, and a voice from the crew can be heard calming him down. Scheider’s anger is see-through and reactive; on the surface the way Brody’s never is. “The rage and anxiety of the actors fighting the shark in the last act is honestly arrived at,” writes Carl Gottlieb in Jaws Log. “It’s not only a visualization of the character’s emotions in the script, it’s a very real expression of the discontent with the process of filming.”
Quint
In the recent TV version of Jaws, Quint enters the story differently. He appears earlier, at a point I’d never seen before on TV or in the theater. In the 30th anniversary DVD edition, that I watched the day after I saw the film on TV last month, the scene is catalogued as deleted. On full-screen TV, however, the scene suddenly becomes part of the narrative. In it Quint walks over to the Amity music shop to purchase piano wire for fishing, and while waiting, cruelly taunts a young boy playing the clarinet. This was also the case with a deleted line between Cassidy and Brody, in which Cassidy tells Brody that he’s rented a house on the Vineyard with four other guys for a thousand dollars a piece. This line was included on full-screen TV, but is catalogued as a deleted scene in the 30th Anniversary DVD version. In the deleted Quint footage, the effect is caricature. A performance of male symbolism and discord, played for controlled effect, becomes over-the-top when consistently on onscreen. Like the shark, Quint is more powerful as an archetypal menace. An allegorical figure, Quint cannot be woven into the narrative by being immersed in the daily fabric of Amity. As Antonia Quirke has pointed out, Quint is the only non-diegetic character in the film. “He doesn’t come from fiction, he comes from fact. The Indianapolis. And it would be a fracturing of the rules of fiction to rehabilitate Quint because his story doesn’t belong to the film but history.” Like the shark, Quint chews the scenery, but can’t afford to chew into it too much (that’s the shark’s job after all), and, like the movie’s famous two-note ostinato, DUM DUM, DUM DUM, if overused and played exclusively, the music, along with Quint, risks becoming a straight gag. Instead, the film’s composer, John Williams, does remarkable things with the score. The music is, as Lorraine Gary puts it in the documentary The Shark Is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws, “the movie’s extraterrestrial script.” Music, along with the shark, is both present and absent in the film.
The line “the gun won’t fire,” uttered by Roy Scheider after each failed take, concerns a series of close-up outtakes. In them, Scheider is shown being more Scheider than Brody in his frustration as on- and off-camera merge in a fascinating way. It’s the scene where Brody, the cop on the boat, tries to shoot the shark with his pistol. Since Scheider never gets to enact the “scene” in these takes due to a faulty prop gun, he acts out his frustration as actor instead. With each take, Scheider becomes more and more angry while still trying to remain in the scene (the diegetic world). By the fourth or fifth outtake, however, Brody’s hesitance is gone, leaving only the costume of Brody. Scheider is cursing, overwhelmed by yet another technical malfunction on set on the long shoot, and a voice from the crew can be heard calming him down. Scheider’s anger is see-through and reactive; on the surface the way Brody’s never is. “The rage and anxiety of the actors fighting the shark in the last act is honestly arrived at,” writes Carl Gottlieb in Jaws Log. “It’s not only a visualization of the character’s emotions in the script, it’s a very real expression of the discontent with the process of filming.”
Quint
In the recent TV version of Jaws, Quint enters the story differently. He appears earlier, at a point I’d never seen before on TV or in the theater. In the 30th anniversary DVD edition, that I watched the day after I saw the film on TV last month, the scene is catalogued as deleted. On full-screen TV, however, the scene suddenly becomes part of the narrative. In it Quint walks over to the Amity music shop to purchase piano wire for fishing, and while waiting, cruelly taunts a young boy playing the clarinet. This was also the case with a deleted line between Cassidy and Brody, in which Cassidy tells Brody that he’s rented a house on the Vineyard with four other guys for a thousand dollars a piece. This line was included on full-screen TV, but is catalogued as a deleted scene in the 30th Anniversary DVD version. In the deleted Quint footage, the effect is caricature. A performance of male symbolism and discord, played for controlled effect, becomes over-the-top when consistently on onscreen. Like the shark, Quint is more powerful as an archetypal menace. An allegorical figure, Quint cannot be woven into the narrative by being immersed in the daily fabric of Amity. As Antonia Quirke has pointed out, Quint is the only non-diegetic character in the film. “He doesn’t come from fiction, he comes from fact. The Indianapolis. And it would be a fracturing of the rules of fiction to rehabilitate Quint because his story doesn’t belong to the film but history.” Like the shark, Quint chews the scenery, but can’t afford to chew into it too much (that’s the shark’s job after all), and, like the movie’s famous two-note ostinato, DUM DUM, DUM DUM, if overused and played exclusively, the music, along with Quint, risks becoming a straight gag. Instead, the film’s composer, John Williams, does remarkable things with the score. The music is, as Lorraine Gary puts it in the documentary The Shark Is Still Working: The Impact and Legacy of Jaws, “the movie’s extraterrestrial script.” Music, along with the shark, is both present and absent in the film.
