I really like this article about Peter Benchley, author of Jaws who just died. A funny analysis of the book itself – and the screenplay by Benchley which came to Steven Spielberg in its first draft – with NO JOKES in it. Spielberg said he read the humorless first draft and found himself rooting for the shark. A couple re-writes later (“We’ll need a bigger boat” et al) and movie history was made.
But I was particularly interested in this part of the article:
Benchley might have had no time for humanshis puritanical views on sex are the stuff of pure pulpbut he loved sharks. He was a lifelong enthusiast of sea life; he got the idea for Jaws after writing a series of oceangoing magazine articles. Whether because of his amateur scientific interest, or just the dizzying amount of detail he inserted into the book, the appearance of the shark in Jaws allows Benchley to unplug his pulp impulses while remaining firmly in the realm of plausible horror. Benchley gives the shark no supernatural powers, nor a fierce native intelligence. Even at its most gruesome, the shark remains a simple fish”a dumb garbage bucket,” Quint calls itand a sum of its biological impulses.
A hundred yards offshore, the fish sensed a change in the sea’s rhythm. It did not see the woman, nor yet did it smell her. Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings, and these nerves detected vibrations and signaled the brain. The fish turned toward shore.
The fish turned toward shore. It may be a dull passage, but in the middle of an ocean of pulp, it’s an arresting one. The sharkall leathery and dead-eyedis such a bewildering creature that it can’t be shoehorned into genre conventions, can’t be reduced to stereotype. Benchley and Jaws established sharks as an all-too-ordinary menace. Benchley, a committed conservationist, later expressed his dismay for having created a worldwide shark-frenzy. It was his greatest literary achievement.
That, to me, is one of the most chilling aspects of that book. The non-anthropomorphization of the great white. It’s not a “killing machine”, or a “misunderstood” monster of the deep (cue Timothy Treadwell) – It does not have emotions the way we understand them. The shark experiences a need. Hunger. And so it goes out to feed itself. That’s what is so frightening – the emotionless of it all. Anyway – good article. Go check it out.
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And I love that you and the article point out some very basic elements to story-telling/subject matter that I think a lot of authors miss when trying to write the “next scariest/thrilling thing.” Often times, it isnt how bizarre something is, but how mundane, and how inhuman. Its the inhuman that scares us the most.
I’m surprised he was so humourless. Another of his books, which I think is titled “Q” is about a speech writer for the President and is hilarious – I mean really funny, funny ‘ha-ha – this is really funny’ funny, not funny ‘gee, that’s peculiar’ funny.
Never heard of it – sounds good, though!!
Maybe he felt too reverently towards sharks (which he apparently did) to crack too many jokes.
This was the first “adult” novel that I read (about six months before the movie was released.
There is a phrase in that article: “titular great white” which hints of something that has always bothered me for some nerdy reason. The name of the shark is NOT “Jaws”! The shark has no name! (Deep Breaths, Deep, Calming Breaths) It’s strange that the author would use that phrase when in the rest of the article he refers to “the shark in Jaws.
The smartest change from the book to the movie was to eliminate the “affair” between Brody’s wife and Hooper (technically, in the book they only “talked” about having an affair from a hypothetical standpoint, it’s not clear whether they actually acted out their fantasy). It added little to the story, but I guess pulp fiction has got to have some sexual content in it.
Oh, BTW, I REALLY could have gone through the rest of my life without clicking on the link about vagina dentata myth and been much happier too. [I type this with my legs tightly clamped together]
JFH – hahahahaha
My thoughts (Purely from memory because I read the book many, many years ago): I agree with JFH that the affair was best left out of the movie although Brody mistakenly shooting Hooper as he does in the book might have made things interesting in the film. The most disappointing thing in the film to me was the ending where Brodie blows up the shark. In the book, I liked that the shark finally ran out of gas chasing the now swimming Brodie and the barrels slowly pulled the dead shark back out to sea. I thought that was vivid and was a great passage.
Now, of course, we owe it to ourselves to go to Angry Alien and see the 30-second bunny version. Flawless – from the quick asides, to the telescope shot, to the shark wearing bunny ears… Kills me every time (haw, haw).
Okay, Rob, I’m thinking from memory too, but:
Hooper was already dead and just hadn’t been swallowed yet when Brody shot him.
I remember the shark going down into the deep with Quint, foot caught in a bite, trailing behind him (kinda stolen from Moby Dick) rather than drifting out to sea… but I could be wrong.
Yes, Hooper was already dead but Brody was still horrified when he shot when he shot him in the neck.
I don’t remember where Quint was at the end. And I could be wrong, too. It was a long time ago but that’s my memory of it.
The shark had a name:
Bruce, after Speilberg’s lawyer.
Steven had humor.
Drat, I hate typos…pretend my haiku has Spielberg’s name spelled correctly.