Hooked again: Why Jaws still reels us in

JUST when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…

I never thought it was safe – oh no – not after watching that toothy juggernaut maul the Kintner kid on his inflatable mattress thing. Not after three barrels couldn’t put manners on it and especially not after it swallowed Robert Shaw whole. No, the water was never safe after that.

‘Jaws’ was re-released at the end of August to mark its 50th anniversary and despite having seen it from the comfort of the sofa umpteen times and despite still harbouring this Jaw-related, deep-rooted phobia of toothy juggernauts, I decided to hit the pictures to see if the big screen would cauterise my dread – or maybe even work as a form of catharsis.

Less imaginative film buffs have always pointed to the blatant artificiality of the shark, as the main downside of Jaws’ efficacy – “it doesn’t look real at all.” But that’s missing the point. It is testament to the job Spielberg did on Jaws – the world’s first ever summer blockbuster – that a dodgy, animatronic set of fins (and teeth) could still inspire such fear. It was everything else that made Jaws into the Exorcist of the seas – Peter Benchley and Carl Gottlieb’s script (Benchley wrote the book), John Williams’s dud-dud, dud-dud score, the powerhouse performances from the actors (especially Scheider and Shaw) and especially Spielberg’s tactic of drip-feeding the audience half snapshots of the shark long before we suffered the big reveal. The paucity of authentic shark was more than made up for by the inherent menace of the creature’s presence and the gaps in the views beneath the waves that our imaginations were only too willing to fill.

Umpteen times on the telly, I soon realised, hadn’t done the film justice. Everything on the big screen was better, from the glint in Robert Shaw’s eye as he recounted the USS Indianapolis disaster to Chief Brody’s black wellie slipping as he manoeuvred across the side of the Orca – everything was more… in your face. The bigger screen played its part of course but with exponentially louder dud-dud, dud-duds it was more an experience impossible to resist. Everything was more vibrant, the unsuspecting summer people of Amity and the sinking, severed limbs both.

Without resorting to hyperbole, I even wondered if some scenes had been added to this 50th anniversary edition as a special treat for fans. But no, they were simply more cinematic for the setting they were born to adorn.

Even after those countless viewings, this was more involving that any director had a right to ask.

Quint standing on the Orca’s pulpit clutching his rifle as the sun went down; Chief Brody bearing the brunt of Alex Kintner’s ma’s wrath; Ben Gardner’s damned head floating into the hole; Mayor Vaughn’s stupid sports jacket with the little blue anchors; the tooth juggernaut racing to eat a sinking Brody and being told to smile…

It turns out the cinema was the bigger boat we’d been lacking all along.