Anatomy of a Scene: Chrissie goes swimming in ‘Jaws’
There are numerous chilling scenes in Steven Spielberg‘s Jaws that are as visceral as the monster’s razor-sharp teeth. It’s late when Chrissie and her boyfriend decide to leave the beach party. It’s dusk, and she wants to go for a swim in the ocean. She dives in alone; at least, she thinks she’s alone. There’s something in the water, something big and fast. Suddenly, she feels it pull at her from beneath.
Whatever it is doesn’t matter because it got her leg, dragging her against the current. While her boyfriend slumbers on the sand, she’s being eaten alive. She clings to a buoy, but it won’t save her from the monster beneath the water. At last, it drags her under. So ends one of the most iconic sequences in cinema history: the opening scene of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
The scene is the perfect set-up for the perfect monster movie. But why does it work so well? What about Spielberg’s direction makes this piece of exposition so haunting? As has been pointed out before, it’s important that we can’t see what’s attacking Chrissie. Spielberg originally intended us to see the shark (nicknamed Bruce). However, the crew had so many problems with the shark automaton that the director was forced to use his camera and a dolly to simulate the shark’s point-of-view.
As is so often the case, necessity bred invention. Spielberg’s camera trick creates a huge amount of visual tension, which is heightened as the distance between the shark and its prey get’s smaller and smaller. Spielberg had previously noted that he wanted the shark to be seen only at precise moments: “I thought that what could really be scary was not seeing the shark and just seeing the water; because we all are familiar with the water—very few of us have been in the water with a shark, but we’ve all gone swimming,” he explains in The Making of Jaws.
“And the idea of this girl going swimming and the audience going swimming with her would’ve been too extraordinary if, like a leviathan, the shark had come out of the water with its jaws agape and had come down on her…it would’ve been a spectacular opening for the film. But there would’ve been nothing primal about it—it would just have been a ‘monster moment’ that we’ve all seen.”
That idea of putting something dangerous in a “familiar” setting brings us to another reason this opening scene works so well. Horror works best when it is relatable. Here, Spielberg introduces his audience to a setting we like to think of fondly: the sun-soaked beach. How could anything bad happen here, where people are having so much fun?
Of course, horror is also the art of highlighting vulnerability, and water makes us incredibly vulnerable. Spielberg uses this scene to exploit our primal fear of open water. Chrissie is a solo swimmer. She is also swimming in minimal light when visibility is very low. She, like us, can’t imagine anything going wrong – until it does, of course. In this way, the shark also reminds us of our helplessness in the face of nature. The shark is the very personification of the ocean and is hungry for human blood.
Spielberg’s use of motion emphasises the violence of this opening scene. In this and all of the other shark attack scenes, Spielberg shows the strength of the shark, not by the size of its jaws (although that does happen later), but by the movements of its victims. While describing how Spielberg achieved the jerking motion, Susan Backlinie, who played Chrissie, said: “The first jerk-down Steven [Spielberg] did. He had a cable that came to the front of my stomach and went to an anchor that was laying at the bottom of the ocean…and then he just sat, and when he wanted that pulled, he just would pull”.
The horror really sets in when Chrissie begins thrashing from side to side and calling for help. To achieve this effect, Spielberg had the actress attached to two cables fitted to a pair of marks on the beach, where 5-6 men pulled the lines back and forth. It says a lot about the force with which she was being jostled around that she was fitted with a special string that she could pull to release herself from the cables. It also explains why that scene is so unnerving. Whatever is pulling Chrissie, it has the strength of 5-6 men. Cripes.
