What Bites Beneath: Reflections on the Opening Scene of Jaws at 50
Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of the Peter Benchley novel, Jaws is celebrating 50 years. The movie changed the way people looked at movies (and how they looked at the ocean), even how people talked about movies, with this film often credited as being the first “blockbuster,” due to the fact that filmgoers back in 1975, waited in long lines that would wrap around city blocks, in order to get their chance to see the thriller. Once inside, audiences were about to experience something they’d never seen (or heard) before. Within the first seconds and mere minutes into the film, Spielberg and composer John Williams created a significant cultural shift.
At first, the camera takes on the P.O.V. of something swimming underwater in the open ocean, making its way through the tufts of plants and other vegetation. There is a sense that this “something” is scanning and searching. Williams’ ominous orchestral score creates the sonic version of something wicked this way comes. Quickly, the scene cuts from ocean to land, water to fire, in the form of a bonfire on the beach, attended by a group of young people, smoking, drinking, and listening to music. A young man strikes up a conversation with a young woman named Chrissie (played by Susan Backlinie, who delivers an incredible, and unforgettable, performance). She impulsively wants to go skinny-dipping, and she, in silhouette, dives into the Atlantic, while the young man, too drunk to undress, passes out along the shore. She swims along the surface, and at one point, she spins onto her back, and much like a synchronized swimmer, raises one of her legs and points it up perpendicularly to the surface; her leg takes on a shape similar to a shark fin, as she gracefully descends below the surface (a smart nod to foreshadowing).
This is where the film begins to embrace some of the classic elements of the horror genre, which usually entails a young woman, now in a vulnerable state of undress, becoming the victim of the villain. (The iconic “shower scene” in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho is one of the best examples of this formula.) There are two reasons the opening scene of Jaws became an instant (horror) classic:
Fear of the Unknown
The viewer is never shown what is underneath the surface, wreaking havoc, only Chrissie’s terrified, bloodcurdling reaction to it. She is pulled underwater for a brief second, then things quickly escalate as she’s pushed, then thrashed around like a rag doll. The underwater cause (and Spielberg) moves Chrissie directly to the forefront of the frame, as she almost pleads to the audience itself for help, only to suddenly disappear below the surface.
Life After Death
When Chrissie first dives into the ocean, there is a large buoy positioned off in the distance. The scene eventually changes from calm to unexpected chaos once Chrissie’s attack happens. Then, seemingly just as quickly as it started, Spielberg concludes the scene with a return to peace and tranquility, by once again showing the large buoy out in the open ocean, its bell ringing intermittently in the distance, like nothing horrific even happened.
And this is just the beginning, as Jaws continues on with so many other now-iconic scenes, and, of course, one of the most famous lines in film history: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” After 50 years, Jaws’ chilling opening scene still works for what is shown, yet more so, for what isn’t.
“Secretive; Whispery; Indecent”: Intentional Disconnect in 1961’s The Innocents
More gothic folklore than gruesome gore, Jack Clayton’s beautifully haunting (and hauntingly beautiful) 1961 film, The Innocents is high-art psychological horror. Co-written by William Archibald and Truman Capote, the film is based on the 1898 Henry James story, The Turn of the Screw.
Deborah Kerr stars as Miss Giddens, a governess hired to care for two children, Flora (Pamela Franklin) and Miles (Martin Stephens), at an English manor. An unsettling tone is set right from the beginning: Behind the initial screen blackness, pre-opening credits, the sound of a young girl (Flora) singing “O Willow Waly” creates a disturbing blurred line between wholesome lullaby and its mournful lament for a lost lover. The disconnect continues through the opening credits, now with birds chirping in the darkness; those familiar tweets most often heard at daybreak, instead of in the dead of night. And finally, a profile of a distressed Miss Giddens, clutching her hands together, tilting her head back with her eyes closed, her forehead glistening with perspiration; the sight of sweat common in the blazing sunlight, not in the glowing moonlight.
Day or Fright
Throughout the crisp, black-and-white film there are a number of bone-chilling scenes. The manor and its grounds become settings for strange goings-on, ones not solely reserved for the nighttime, when fatigue, shadows and imagination can get the best of someone, but in broad daylight as well, often with others nearby. But what is real, and who is credible? In the film’s first line, a sense of doubt is immediately placed upon the viewer toward Miss Giddens, when the children’s uncle asks her during the interview for the governess position: “Do you have an imagination?” An almost embarrassed Giddens replies with a yes. As the film progresses: To believe or not to believe her, that becomes the subsequent question in the viewer’s mind.
Depth of Fear
The crisp black and white mentioned earlier is the work of the cinematographer, Freddie Francis, who used a deep-focus technique, which allows the foreground, middle ground and background to be equally sharp. One of the best examples is when Flora becomes oddly excited about nature’s brutality. She declares: “Oh look, it’s a lovely spider, and it’s eating a butterfly!” (Spiders aren’t usually described as lovely, creating another example of intentional disconnect.) The large depth of field simultaneously creates distance and claustrophobia for the viewer (a visual disconnect), while also establishing Flora as the spider to Miss Giddens as the butterfly.
Brother and Sinister
In addition to this macabre outlook on nature, mature subtexts run throughout, particularly ones dealing with the misguided affection between Miles and Miss Giddens. After learning more about two of the manor’s previous residents, Giddens begins to suspect the prim, proper, poetic Miles, and the once-sweet now emotionally hysterical, Flora are not who they appear to be, that something evil has entered the innocent (foreshadowed when Giddens admires a stone cherub in the garden, only for a cockroach to crawl out of its mouth).
Giddens conveys to Mrs. Grose, the housekeeper enveloped by extreme denial, that both children “are playing, or being made to play, some monstrous game. I can’t pretend to understand what its purpose is; I only know that it is happening: something secretive, and whispery, and indecent.” (Undoubtedly, Capote-penned prose.)
The relationship between Miles and Flora becomes suspect as well. Flora seems to have a psychic connection to Miles, knowing when Miles will return home from his school, permanently dismissed for bad behavior, even before Miss Giddens or Mrs. Grose. Giddens becomes watchful of the two siblings as they hold hands, walking closely together toward the town church. A concerned Giddens says to Mrs. Grose: “Look at them. What do you think they’re saying?… They’re talking about them; talking horrors.”
And the horrors continue through the film’s dizzying conclusion (or disturbing connection to its beginning, as described earlier), one that is both spine-tingling and heavyhearted, where the secretive becomes communicative, the whispery reaches its crescendo, the indecent once again innocent.