{"id":4489,"date":"2006-02-17T10:48:37","date_gmt":"2006-02-17T15:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=4489"},"modified":"2022-10-09T22:37:48","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T02:37:48","slug":"the-fish-sensed-a-change-in-the-seas-rhythm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=4489","title":{"rendered":"“the fish sensed a change in the sea’s rhythm”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I really like this article about Peter Benchley<\/a>, author of Jaws<\/i> 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.<\/p>\n

But I was particularly interested in this part of the article:<\/p>\n

Benchley might have had no time for humans\u0097his puritanical views on sex are the stuff of pure pulp\u0097but he loved sharks. He was a lifelong enthusiast of sea life; he got the idea for Jaws <\/i>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 <\/i>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\u0097”a dumb garbage bucket,” Quint calls it\u0097and a sum of its biological impulses.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The fish turned toward shore<\/i>. It may be a dull passage, but in the middle of an ocean of pulp, it’s an arresting one. The shark\u0097all leathery and dead-eyed\u0097is such a bewildering creature that it can’t be shoehorned into genre conventions, can’t be reduced to stereotype. Benchley and Jaws <\/i>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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[1669],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4489"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4489"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":178976,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4489\/revisions\/178976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}