Only some of you will turn out sharks, just some. The rest are chum.
Finally, like a week or more after I finished reading it, here is my review of Jaws. I may be using the term 'review' lightly, but here at least are my thoughts on Jaws, my book club assignment for January. Spoilers under the cut for both the book and the movie.
Disclaimer: I am a HUGE fan of Jaws the movie. I own it on DVD, and yet I still watch it on TV whenever it's on. I can quote it from memory (and not just "you're gonna need a bigger boat"). I've read all the trivia about it. I love Jaws <3. The point here is that this review is necessarily going to be a comparison of book and movie, because it's impossible for me to be objective about a different version of this story that I know so well.
Therefore, let's start with the two biggest differences between this book and the movie (1. The time spent on various things, and 2. Hooper's character), and then we can move on and discuss other things I noticed about the book.
1. Time allocation. Jaws the movie is approximately 95% shark attacks, people reacting to the shark attacks, the shark's underwater POV, talking about the shark, hunting the shark, and discussing sharks in general, 5% small town politics and character interactions, and 0% Ellen and her mid-life crisis issues. Jaws the book is 75% small town politics and character interactions, 5% Ellen and her nonsense, and 20% shark attacks, shark hunting, etc. In fact, there were a good 100 pages in the middle of the book where the word 'shark' wasn't mentioned at all. This isn't necessarily bad, and I wasn't bored by it, it's just something that's very different. The focus being on the inner workings of a small town and how everyone in it is affected by this shark works in a book (especially with Benchley's use of an omniscient narrator that changes POV often) but wouldn't work quite as well in a movie. Plus, it's far more exciting for the film to concentrate on the shark and what to do about it, rather than delving into exactly what the mayor's motivations are, Ellen's history, how the town relies on summer tourism, and tiny insights into how this shark is affecting nameless characters we only see for one scene.
2. Matthew Hooper. Hooper is probably my favorite character in the movie, but he may as well be a completely different character than the one in the book. In the movie, Hooper is the marine biologist/shark expert, who fills the role of an outsider that Brody and the town want and need to help them with this shark problem, because they are woefully unprepared for it. He and Brody are BFF's from the moment they meet, and Brody is grateful for his presence and knowledge of sharks. The two of them then become the sane men trapped on the boat with crazy Quint. Hooper is 100% likable, affable, and nice, and it's awesome when he pops back up at the end and isn't dead. I'm not sure if he ever even meets Ellen in the movie, and they certainly don't have any kind of relationship.
In the book, Hooper is a young, rich, know-it-all scientist, and Brody irrationally hates him from the moment he lays eyes on him. This hatred turns out to be justified when Hooper is seduced by and then sleeps with Ellen (Brody's wife) because of the mid-life crisis she's having. She chooses Hooper because he's an outsider just like she used to be, and it's mainly his outsider status that causes Brody's dislike, rather than being a welcome quality. When the three men are on the boat, it's more like Quint vs. Brody vs. Hooper, and it's a very different dynamic than in the movie. Book!Hooper is almost 100% unlikable, between being extremely pretentious, sleeping with a married woman (who also happens to be the main character's wife) and being just a little too excited about the killer shark. Hooper loves sharks and wants to see this one, a desire which is foremost in his mind. Killing the shark and saving innocent lives is secondary, which pretty much leads to his death. Hooper dies because he's more concerned with taking a decent picture of the shark than with killing it, and even though I thought this would make me sad, it didn't. He needed to die both because his priorities were deeply out of whack, and so that the drama between him and EVERYONE ELSE could end and we could all focus on killing this motherfucking shark.
In a nutshell, Jaws the book is about how a small town that depends on summer visitors can manage to survive a completely random shark attack filled summer, as told through the eyes of Martin Brody, the local sheriff who's tasked with protecting this town from both the shark and financial ruin. Jaws the movie is about a shark that randomly attacks people in a small town, and how three guys team up to kill it. They're both good, but they're vastly different stories.
Now that that's all out of the way, let's talk about some other notes I took on Jaws. Trigger warning in the below for discussion of racism and rape, though there are no actual rapes in this book.
-Someone needed to tell Peter Benchley that 1. Young people do not talk the way he writes them, even in the 70's. No, really, they don't use slang like that. 2. Women do not think or behave the way he writes them, and I'm thankful that we only got one or two scenes from Ellen's POV when usually I'm complaining about the lack of female characters in books, and 3. He was a little bit racist. This is probably a product of the time period, and a little bit a deliberate attempt to explain the attitude of this small town, but when your neutral narrator describes a character as 'a dark-skinned Portuguese', you have a problem, to say nothing of the way he talks about black people.
-Then there's the rape stuff. On page 18 we get this: "Police work offered security, regular hours, and the chance for some fun - not just thumping unruly kids or collaring drunks, but solving burglaries, trying to catch the occasional rapist (the summer before, a black gardener had raped seven rich white women, not one of whom would appear in court...)" I mean really? There's so much wrong with that sentence. SO MUCH. Collaring rapists is fun? And could you have a more stereotypical depiction of rape? Rape isn't all poor black strangers and the rich white ladies they work for. It's also a disturbingly racist portrait of rape culture, in case you ever need an example of that.
So, because of that, early on in Jaws I was disturbed by Benchley's casual attitude toward rape. And then we got to the part of the book where Ellen, in the course of propositioning Hooper for sex, starts discussing sexual fantasies with him. This is how that goes:
Ellen laughed. "Oh, mine aren't very interesting. I imagine they're just your old run-of-the-mill fantasies."
"There's no such thing," said Hooper. "Tell me".
"Oh, you know," she said. "Just the standard things. Rape, I guess, is one."
I literally put the book down and gaped at it for a while before facepalming. Now, I realize that rape fantasy is a thing, and that it's probably fairly common (given that 'bodice-rippers' is a genre) but this is not the way you present that either as an author or a character. You need to give something like that a little more lead-in, and you definitely don't call rape 'run-of-the-mill' or 'standard'.
It gets better though, and by better I mean worse, when Ellen goes into the details of her rape fantasy, and Hooper asks Ellen if the man raping her is black. Why does that matter? I don't know, but I facepalmed again at that point. I guess Benchley was obsessed with white women being raped by working-class black strangers.
In any case, these are issues with Jaws that I wanted everyone to be aware of. They didn't ruin the book, but I wasn't about to do a review without mentioning the problematic aspects of this story.
End trigger warning!
-For all his issues, Benchley is good at writing tension, suspense, and Brody. The action scenes are excellent, the shark attacks were described in a visual way, but not so intensely that I felt sick, and Brody is a fantastic main character. He's very likable, always sarcastically quipping at people, but he's also a genuinely good guy who's just trying to figure out the right thing to do in a tricky situation. He's an excellent choice for protagonist too, because there came a point in the book when I realized that Brody was the only character I didn't want to punch. Well, there was also this policeman named Hendricks who was pretty awesome, but he didn't have a very big part. I'm pretty sure that Hendricks' affable, helpful, second-in-command personality got foisted onto Hooper in the movie, which is all right.
-Something I like about both the book and the movie is that the shark is never explained. The characters guess at what might be causing the shark to come, and then to stay, but no definitive answer is ever given. This is the best course of literary action, because it makes the book simultaneously a supernatural thriller and a marvel at how bizarre nature can be and how little we really know about it. Is it a punishment from God? Is the shark a supernatural being? Is it just a shark that went a little crazy? Or is it something else? No one ever knows for sure; the shark simply shows up one day, and then refuses to leave. It's very similar to a lot of works of Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock, where this bizarre thing happens, and though the readers and the characters both wonder why here, why now, why us, there are no answers to be found.
-A thing in the book I wish had made it into the movie: There's a great description in the book about how as the shark moves through the water at night in the very first scene, tiny phosphorescent creatures react to its presence and light up. How cool would that have been to see? A visual warning to go with the awesome music.
-A thing the movie included from the book and I'm glad: Shots from the shark's point of view, that seem to emphasize that the shark sees humans as prey. Benchley definitely describes the attacks like this, making the shark seem like just an animal (at least in the beginning) and I think they movie keeps it that way.
-A thing the movie definitely improved: The ending. In the book, the shark just up and dies, probably from exhaustion and the wounds Quint gives it. It's swimming up to Brody, presumably to eat him, Brody has no hope, and has accepted his death... and then the damn thing just keels over and sinks. Brody starts to swim to shore. The end. It's pretty anti-climactic, actually, and makes me feel like Benchley got tired of writing and just wrapped everything up very quickly. (And nothing was really resolved with Ellen either, although she did eventually regret the affair and realize that she loved Brody. Brody never knows for sure if Hooper slept with her, and we never really get to see them make up. If you remove Ellen and/or her affair from this book, the plot remains largely unchanged, so I'm not really sure why it had to be there in the first place.)
The movie, on the other hand, (besides eliminating the pointless affair of pointlessness) has Brody literally blow the fucking shark out of the water, in an epic man vs. beast battle that serves as the culmination of Brody's long struggle with the bastard. It is awesome, and it is so satisfying. And then Hooper pops up out of the water, less dead than suspected, and they swim back to shore together, bantering all the way. I'm smiling just thinking about it.
-I also prefer the movie's version of Quint, with his personal vendetta against sharks and his 'anyway, we delivered the bomb' backstory, none of which is in the book.
This is a beautiful scene, really excellent. Also, he strongly reminds me of Uncle Joey.
Bottom line: I hesitate to say that either the book or the movie is better, because they're very different, but I personally prefer the movie. Possibly because it's what I saw first.
Here's one of my favorite scenes from Jaws, for your enjoyment:
Answer to last Tuesday's song: My Hometown, by Bowling for Soup. No one guessed this, probably because it's relatively obscure, but I had to quote it because it mentions The Grammys, lol.
Disclaimer: I am a HUGE fan of Jaws the movie. I own it on DVD, and yet I still watch it on TV whenever it's on. I can quote it from memory (and not just "you're gonna need a bigger boat"). I've read all the trivia about it. I love Jaws <3. The point here is that this review is necessarily going to be a comparison of book and movie, because it's impossible for me to be objective about a different version of this story that I know so well.
Therefore, let's start with the two biggest differences between this book and the movie (1. The time spent on various things, and 2. Hooper's character), and then we can move on and discuss other things I noticed about the book.
1. Time allocation. Jaws the movie is approximately 95% shark attacks, people reacting to the shark attacks, the shark's underwater POV, talking about the shark, hunting the shark, and discussing sharks in general, 5% small town politics and character interactions, and 0% Ellen and her mid-life crisis issues. Jaws the book is 75% small town politics and character interactions, 5% Ellen and her nonsense, and 20% shark attacks, shark hunting, etc. In fact, there were a good 100 pages in the middle of the book where the word 'shark' wasn't mentioned at all. This isn't necessarily bad, and I wasn't bored by it, it's just something that's very different. The focus being on the inner workings of a small town and how everyone in it is affected by this shark works in a book (especially with Benchley's use of an omniscient narrator that changes POV often) but wouldn't work quite as well in a movie. Plus, it's far more exciting for the film to concentrate on the shark and what to do about it, rather than delving into exactly what the mayor's motivations are, Ellen's history, how the town relies on summer tourism, and tiny insights into how this shark is affecting nameless characters we only see for one scene.
2. Matthew Hooper. Hooper is probably my favorite character in the movie, but he may as well be a completely different character than the one in the book. In the movie, Hooper is the marine biologist/shark expert, who fills the role of an outsider that Brody and the town want and need to help them with this shark problem, because they are woefully unprepared for it. He and Brody are BFF's from the moment they meet, and Brody is grateful for his presence and knowledge of sharks. The two of them then become the sane men trapped on the boat with crazy Quint. Hooper is 100% likable, affable, and nice, and it's awesome when he pops back up at the end and isn't dead. I'm not sure if he ever even meets Ellen in the movie, and they certainly don't have any kind of relationship.
In the book, Hooper is a young, rich, know-it-all scientist, and Brody irrationally hates him from the moment he lays eyes on him. This hatred turns out to be justified when Hooper is seduced by and then sleeps with Ellen (Brody's wife) because of the mid-life crisis she's having. She chooses Hooper because he's an outsider just like she used to be, and it's mainly his outsider status that causes Brody's dislike, rather than being a welcome quality. When the three men are on the boat, it's more like Quint vs. Brody vs. Hooper, and it's a very different dynamic than in the movie. Book!Hooper is almost 100% unlikable, between being extremely pretentious, sleeping with a married woman (who also happens to be the main character's wife) and being just a little too excited about the killer shark. Hooper loves sharks and wants to see this one, a desire which is foremost in his mind. Killing the shark and saving innocent lives is secondary, which pretty much leads to his death. Hooper dies because he's more concerned with taking a decent picture of the shark than with killing it, and even though I thought this would make me sad, it didn't. He needed to die both because his priorities were deeply out of whack, and so that the drama between him and EVERYONE ELSE could end and we could all focus on killing this motherfucking shark.
In a nutshell, Jaws the book is about how a small town that depends on summer visitors can manage to survive a completely random shark attack filled summer, as told through the eyes of Martin Brody, the local sheriff who's tasked with protecting this town from both the shark and financial ruin. Jaws the movie is about a shark that randomly attacks people in a small town, and how three guys team up to kill it. They're both good, but they're vastly different stories.
Now that that's all out of the way, let's talk about some other notes I took on Jaws. Trigger warning in the below for discussion of racism and rape, though there are no actual rapes in this book.
-Someone needed to tell Peter Benchley that 1. Young people do not talk the way he writes them, even in the 70's. No, really, they don't use slang like that. 2. Women do not think or behave the way he writes them, and I'm thankful that we only got one or two scenes from Ellen's POV when usually I'm complaining about the lack of female characters in books, and 3. He was a little bit racist. This is probably a product of the time period, and a little bit a deliberate attempt to explain the attitude of this small town, but when your neutral narrator describes a character as 'a dark-skinned Portuguese', you have a problem, to say nothing of the way he talks about black people.
-Then there's the rape stuff. On page 18 we get this: "Police work offered security, regular hours, and the chance for some fun - not just thumping unruly kids or collaring drunks, but solving burglaries, trying to catch the occasional rapist (the summer before, a black gardener had raped seven rich white women, not one of whom would appear in court...)" I mean really? There's so much wrong with that sentence. SO MUCH. Collaring rapists is fun? And could you have a more stereotypical depiction of rape? Rape isn't all poor black strangers and the rich white ladies they work for. It's also a disturbingly racist portrait of rape culture, in case you ever need an example of that.
So, because of that, early on in Jaws I was disturbed by Benchley's casual attitude toward rape. And then we got to the part of the book where Ellen, in the course of propositioning Hooper for sex, starts discussing sexual fantasies with him. This is how that goes:
Ellen laughed. "Oh, mine aren't very interesting. I imagine they're just your old run-of-the-mill fantasies."
"There's no such thing," said Hooper. "Tell me".
"Oh, you know," she said. "Just the standard things. Rape, I guess, is one."
I literally put the book down and gaped at it for a while before facepalming. Now, I realize that rape fantasy is a thing, and that it's probably fairly common (given that 'bodice-rippers' is a genre) but this is not the way you present that either as an author or a character. You need to give something like that a little more lead-in, and you definitely don't call rape 'run-of-the-mill' or 'standard'.
It gets better though, and by better I mean worse, when Ellen goes into the details of her rape fantasy, and Hooper asks Ellen if the man raping her is black. Why does that matter? I don't know, but I facepalmed again at that point. I guess Benchley was obsessed with white women being raped by working-class black strangers.
In any case, these are issues with Jaws that I wanted everyone to be aware of. They didn't ruin the book, but I wasn't about to do a review without mentioning the problematic aspects of this story.
End trigger warning!
-For all his issues, Benchley is good at writing tension, suspense, and Brody. The action scenes are excellent, the shark attacks were described in a visual way, but not so intensely that I felt sick, and Brody is a fantastic main character. He's very likable, always sarcastically quipping at people, but he's also a genuinely good guy who's just trying to figure out the right thing to do in a tricky situation. He's an excellent choice for protagonist too, because there came a point in the book when I realized that Brody was the only character I didn't want to punch. Well, there was also this policeman named Hendricks who was pretty awesome, but he didn't have a very big part. I'm pretty sure that Hendricks' affable, helpful, second-in-command personality got foisted onto Hooper in the movie, which is all right.
-Something I like about both the book and the movie is that the shark is never explained. The characters guess at what might be causing the shark to come, and then to stay, but no definitive answer is ever given. This is the best course of literary action, because it makes the book simultaneously a supernatural thriller and a marvel at how bizarre nature can be and how little we really know about it. Is it a punishment from God? Is the shark a supernatural being? Is it just a shark that went a little crazy? Or is it something else? No one ever knows for sure; the shark simply shows up one day, and then refuses to leave. It's very similar to a lot of works of Stephen King and Alfred Hitchcock, where this bizarre thing happens, and though the readers and the characters both wonder why here, why now, why us, there are no answers to be found.
-A thing in the book I wish had made it into the movie: There's a great description in the book about how as the shark moves through the water at night in the very first scene, tiny phosphorescent creatures react to its presence and light up. How cool would that have been to see? A visual warning to go with the awesome music.
-A thing the movie included from the book and I'm glad: Shots from the shark's point of view, that seem to emphasize that the shark sees humans as prey. Benchley definitely describes the attacks like this, making the shark seem like just an animal (at least in the beginning) and I think they movie keeps it that way.
-A thing the movie definitely improved: The ending. In the book, the shark just up and dies, probably from exhaustion and the wounds Quint gives it. It's swimming up to Brody, presumably to eat him, Brody has no hope, and has accepted his death... and then the damn thing just keels over and sinks. Brody starts to swim to shore. The end. It's pretty anti-climactic, actually, and makes me feel like Benchley got tired of writing and just wrapped everything up very quickly. (And nothing was really resolved with Ellen either, although she did eventually regret the affair and realize that she loved Brody. Brody never knows for sure if Hooper slept with her, and we never really get to see them make up. If you remove Ellen and/or her affair from this book, the plot remains largely unchanged, so I'm not really sure why it had to be there in the first place.)
The movie, on the other hand, (besides eliminating the pointless affair of pointlessness) has Brody literally blow the fucking shark out of the water, in an epic man vs. beast battle that serves as the culmination of Brody's long struggle with the bastard. It is awesome, and it is so satisfying. And then Hooper pops up out of the water, less dead than suspected, and they swim back to shore together, bantering all the way. I'm smiling just thinking about it.
-I also prefer the movie's version of Quint, with his personal vendetta against sharks and his 'anyway, we delivered the bomb' backstory, none of which is in the book.
This is a beautiful scene, really excellent. Also, he strongly reminds me of Uncle Joey.
Click to viewBottom line: I hesitate to say that either the book or the movie is better, because they're very different, but I personally prefer the movie. Possibly because it's what I saw first.
Here's one of my favorite scenes from Jaws, for your enjoyment:
Answer to last Tuesday's song: My Hometown, by Bowling for Soup. No one guessed this, probably because it's relatively obscure, but I had to quote it because it mentions The Grammys, lol.