JAWS: Book VS. Film

The Book: JAWS
Author: Peter Benchley
Year released: 1974

I do not, and have never, understood why this book was a bestseller. It is not a good book. It's trashy, and not in an enjoyable Jacqueline Susanne sort of way either. It's just sordid, superficial trashiness.

Peter Benchley took a great, rock solid focal point - a 25 foot long, six thousand pound great white shark, i.e. an eating machine - and surrounded it with an utterly unlikable cast of characters, doing rotten things to everyone around them.

Basic plot: A HUGE great white shark swims into the waters just off of the fashionable New England coastline and starts eating people: skinny dippers, fisherman, little kids on inflatable rafts, etc. A lone Everyman (in this case, the town police chief, transplanted from the Big City) tries to close the beaches and is met with opposition from the town council, who depend on vacationers to keep their economy afloat.

Good, simple story. Right? A community coming together to fight a common foe. Strength in numbers, Us against It.

Yeah, that's what it should have been. Instead, Benchley populates the fictional coastal community of Amity with people so despicable and shallow and self serving that you really don't give a sodden sackful of dog diarrhea if they live or die. In fact, by the time the shark is identified, you're fucking rooting for the goddamned fish to pulverize every single scumbag resident into bone powder between its ginormous serrated teeth. Hell, I was ready to push them all headfirst into the black, gaping, razor lined maw of stinky death myself. Eat it up, sharkie. There's plenty more where that came from. And save room for Benchley, because he is the entire fucking dessert cart.

Please dispose of unlikable characters here.

Sheriff Martin Brody is just kind of There. His wife Ellen is slutting around with Matt Hooper from the Oceanographic Institute, meeting him in cheap hotels for really oily 1970s sex. She may also have fucked the greaseball mayor who is in bed with The Mafia as well. Benchley doesn't seem to think much of gay people either, as he employs the word "faggots" and trots out a lesbian named Daisy Wicker, who is never introduced, described or allowed to speak, but simply serves as a foil for Matt's liason with Brody's wife. Women only exist to wear bikinis, be ogled at and screw. Even the kids are turdy little bastardos. There is no one to root for and nothing that feels threatened. They all deserve to be eaten by a goddamned shark. The ending is limper and lamer than overcooked pasta and the whole thing is just so clunky and seedy that it makes me wonder if there was an excess of soulless scumbags alive and reading in 1974.

The Film: JAWS
Director: Steven Spielberg
Year released: 1975

Long before Spielberg turned into a movie machine, swallowing originality whole and shitting out sleek, polished family safe fare, he was a filmmaker, and not a bad one either. Before E.T. The Extraterrestrial gave us all diabetes, Stevie was cranking out flicks like Duel and The Sugarland Express. Oh, and Jaws, which marked the birth of the Summer Blockbuster. A dubious honor indeed considering the current, soulless state of American cinema, a meat grinder that endlessly cranks out sanitized and shiny chunks of empty action and unrealistic sex and tries to make us believe it's fucking art.

But anyway.

Stevie took a bestselling book and turned it into an even bigger movie. Jaws was the movie of 1975. It was a deep sea version of The Exorcist. People were afraid of being attacked by sharks in their living rooms, for fucks sake.

But Spielberg also did the impossible - he made the characters likable. Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) was now a slightly goofy but sincerely dedicated Chief of Police, as well as a faithful husband and loving dad to his two boys. His wife was a slut no longer, but a no-nonsense yet sweet woman, totally devoted to and in love with her husband. She also had a great big butt, much appreciated by us modern fat-bottomed girls. Matt Hooper, while still a bit of an elitist dick, has no interest in fucking another man's wife and lives to the end of the film. There's no mafia shadow looming over this beach, just a nostalgic, Kodachrome summer in the 70s. You actually want to see everyone live to the end, even the greaseball mayor with his terrible suits that make him look like a used car salesman/creepy ice cream peddler.

You care about these people. They're flawed but forgivable, united against a common enemy and totally normal. Well, except for Quint. Quint was a weirdo. But if you don't feel any sympathy for him following his retelling of the harrowing USS Indianapolis incident, you're not human.

This is a very rare case of the movie being vastly superior to the book, but hey - it happens occasionally. About as often as shark attacks do.