Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Jaws
1975 · Steven Spielberg · Jaws on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Count how long you go without seeing the shark. (camera)
Spielberg gives you proxies instead of an animal: a displaced wake, a rope going taut, a camera lurching at the waterline. The mechanical shark kept failing in salt water, so he cut around it.
Payoff: The threat has no place you can point to, which is exactly why it can be anywhere. In the reading: out-of-field-absolute. The reading calls this an absolute out-of-field: pressure from outside the frame that belongs to no room you could cut to.
Listen for Williams's two-note bass rising under the water. (sound)
Williams builds the threat from an ostinato that climbs in pitch and volume. Spielberg then runs long stretches with no music at all and lets ocean ambience carry the dread.
Payoff: You end up supplying the shark yourself. The sound does the work the picture refuses to do. In the reading: mark. The reading calls the two notes a mark: a learned signal you decode, so you feel the shark without seeing it.
Watch the background of every crowded beach and town scene. (staging)
Bill Butler holds deep focus in Amity's public spaces so foreground faces and background action stay legible at once. Bathers, selectmen and the mayor keep moving behind whoever is talking.
Payoff: The town's pressure on Brody is built into the geometry of the image, not just into the dialogue.
Watch Scheider's hands and shoulders whenever Brody nears the water. (performance)
Scheider plays Brody as a mainland transplant who never adapted to the coast. The fear reads as a reasonable civilian's rather than a weakness, and Dreyfuss's Hooper keeps needling it.
Payoff: The film is measuring an ordinary man against conditions past his training, and you can watch the measuring happen.
Watch how Fields cuts between a swimmer and Brody's face. (cutting)
Verna Fields intercuts point of view with reaction and holds back the resolution. She won the Academy Award for this cutting. The rhythm stretches the waiting instead of hurrying the shock.
Payoff: Your dread comes from the joins, from whatever she declines to show you next.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: The shark sits off the edge of the frame. Watch the water, the barrels and the faces, not the animal.