FILM
Jaws Revisited
/ Masha Tupitsyn
09.15.08
In another deleted scene, Quint is introduced even earlier—anthropomorphically via his purple clogs, while stepping out of his truck on the way to the music shop. The unusually shaped wooden shoes resemble the body of a shark, and become parodic as they force the viewer to focus too much on Quint’s obvious expository eccentricities. In the DVD version, along with nearly all the versions I’ve seen on TV, which has comprised the bulk of my viewings, Quint is introduced at the schoolhouse meeting via a suicidal chalkboard drawing that he famously drags his nails across, making him a deus ex machina, rather than a member of the Amity community. The chalkboard drawing shows a behemoth shark swallowing a man whole. The drawing also foreshadows Quint’s death, letting us know not just that he will die, but how it will happen. He even munches on what resembles a Holy Communion wafer, or, as it’s known in the Roman Catholic Church, a host, while he tells Amity’s residents what he will require in order to slay the shark. In the Roman Catholic Church, the word host is derived from the Latin, hostia, which means "victim" or "sacrificial animal." Out of the three men, he will be the one to perish.
Lorraine Gary (Sea of Men)
Lorraine Gary, who reprised the role and made a woman central to the Jaws story in Jaws 4: The Revenge (her marine biologist son is even the father of a little girl in the movie), is allowed to do so only as a mother protecting her cub and confronting her female rival in the form of a shark, who is also an angry mother chasing her enemy across oceans in the fourth installment. As another woman, the shark in Jaws: The Revenge is on par with a slew of other cinematic feminist backlash. Think of the maternally territorial Ripley when she calls the feminized Alien a “bitch” in Aliens and Annabella Sciorra and Rebecca de Mornay fighting over nature vs. nurture in 1992’s The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. Gary is only permitted to take center stage in the film’s fourth sequel as mother and widow. Not only were many of Gary’s outtakes and story lines cut in Jaws (in particular her character’s affair with Hooper), which she openly laments in The Making of Jaws documentary, but in the movie she is often obscured. Ellen Brody’s affair is cut not only to salvage the integrity of Hooper’s manhood and the homosocial camaraderie between him and Brody—Brody would fail to rise to the heroism that is required/destined of him without the help of both men—but because in a film that purges itself of the feminine, as Stephen Heath argued, Ellen is stripped of material, and thus, screen time. She is either shot from the back, a feminine specter and witness in a male parable, or in profile, a window to it. Gary’s deleted “otter monologue,” her biggest talking-scene, was cut entirely from the movie. Interestingly, the marginalization that Gary suffers as “wife” in the film bleeds into her marginalization as actress in a male-dominated story, and the expression of boredom and mild irritation on Brody’s face when Gary does the otter monologue, is virtually indistinguishable from Roy Scheider’s.
Lorraine Gary (Sea of Men)
Lorraine Gary, who reprised the role and made a woman central to the Jaws story in Jaws 4: The Revenge (her marine biologist son is even the father of a little girl in the movie), is allowed to do so only as a mother protecting her cub and confronting her female rival in the form of a shark, who is also an angry mother chasing her enemy across oceans in the fourth installment. As another woman, the shark in Jaws: The Revenge is on par with a slew of other cinematic feminist backlash. Think of the maternally territorial Ripley when she calls the feminized Alien a “bitch” in Aliens and Annabella Sciorra and Rebecca de Mornay fighting over nature vs. nurture in 1992’s The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. Gary is only permitted to take center stage in the film’s fourth sequel as mother and widow. Not only were many of Gary’s outtakes and story lines cut in Jaws (in particular her character’s affair with Hooper), which she openly laments in The Making of Jaws documentary, but in the movie she is often obscured. Ellen Brody’s affair is cut not only to salvage the integrity of Hooper’s manhood and the homosocial camaraderie between him and Brody—Brody would fail to rise to the heroism that is required/destined of him without the help of both men—but because in a film that purges itself of the feminine, as Stephen Heath argued, Ellen is stripped of material, and thus, screen time. She is either shot from the back, a feminine specter and witness in a male parable, or in profile, a window to it. Gary’s deleted “otter monologue,” her biggest talking-scene, was cut entirely from the movie. Interestingly, the marginalization that Gary suffers as “wife” in the film bleeds into her marginalization as actress in a male-dominated story, and the expression of boredom and mild irritation on Brody’s face when Gary does the otter monologue, is virtually indistinguishable from Roy Scheider’s.