Jaws Turns 50: From Book To Sharknado

Peter Benchley's 'Jaws' Turns 50: A Tidal Wave No One Saw Coming

Published in February 1974, the thriller is considered among the most successful book-to-screen adaptations. But Steven Spielberg's 1975 classic made telling revisions to the novel's characters.

'THE great fish moved silently through the night water...'

So begins Peter Benchley's debut novel Jaws , published in February 1974. The very next year, Benchley would co-write the script for the movie adaptation of the same name — a film that made its director Steven Spielberg a household name; spawned three other films (of widely varying artistic quality) that, along with the original, earned over $400 million (over $2 billion in today's value); introduced the phenomenon of the "summer blockbuster"; and inspired (for better, but more frequently worse) Hollywood's long list of sharksploitation films.

The equation between Jaws, the novel, and Jaws , the film, is symbiotic. Few book-to-film adaptations have weighed favourably on the side of the film. At least not like Jaws.

When Benchley’s novel Jaws, which turns 50 this month, was published, it was a smash. Despite critics’ reservations, it was on the New York Times bestseller list for 44 weeks. Yet when we think of Jaws half-a-century later, images from Spielberg’s film are what come to mind – along with John Williams’ iconic theme music.

Spielberg’s Jaws keeps the simple and stunning narrative architecture of Benchley’s novel intact: A shark terrorises a small beach community that depends on wealthy tourists for sustenance. Brody, the chief of police, keeps the beaches open due to political pressure from Mayor Vaughan; when more attacks occur, marine biologist Matt Hooper comes to help. Together, they contract shark hunter Quint to help kill the great white.

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How Benchley's Bestseller Led To Spielberg's Blockbuster

By Ari Mattes

THE tone of grand adventure that defines Spielberg’s film, however, marks a major departure from the Jaws novel. In Benchley’s work, more energy is directed towards exploring the minor social and political lives of its small-town denizens than in staging an epic showdown between man and beast. More crucially, it differs radically from the film in its characterisation. In Spielberg’s world, the main characters are likeable, heroic, whereas in the novel they’re petty, broken and bitter, wading through the messes their personal lives have become.

These differences are not simply evidence of a young director’s desire to make the material his own. They map the changing consciousness of American popular culture in the 1970s, from a resolute focus on the violence simmering within American society and US policy (the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War) to an attempt to forget about these things through spectacular, anodyne entertainment.

As we know, Spielberg’s film reshaped Hollywood, virtually single-handedly inventing the “blockbuster” and marking a significant shift away from the existentially charged, sometimes nihilistic, ever self-critical films of the previous decade or so. Still, the two dominant themes situating Benchley’s novel in a rich American literary tradition also underpin the film: its biting look at small-town politics and economics, and its reverent study of a wilderness awesome and sublime.

At the novel’s core is a swift, economically told tale of human versus beast: a classic American adventure in the vein of Jack London’s White Fang or Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Benchley punctuates this drama with a keen interrogation of the social dynamics of small American communities in the context of the economic pressures of capitalism.

A career journalist, Benchley is effective in describing actions, events and scenery: shark hunting, the ocean, Quint’s boat. The shark material is brilliant: the few times it cuts to the shark’s point of view (recalling Spielberg’s redeployment of the creature’s point of view from Creature from the Black Lagoon), the writing becomes electric, effortless. Benchley is at his best when describing the movements of the shark in the water.

For example, when Hooper is cage diving, towards the end of the novel: "The head was only a few feet from the cage when the fish turned and began to pass before Hooper’s eyes – casually, as if in proud display of its incalculable mass and power. The snout passed first, then the jaw, slack and smiling, armed with row upon row of serrate triangles. And then the black, fathomless eye, seemingly riveted upon him. The gills rippled – bloodless wounds in the steely skin."

But the material about people is less confident – Benchley's writing is uneven and trite in places, with moments between characters sometimes strained in order to generate the necessary action. This includes two subplots Spielberg and team wisely cut from the film:

The first involves a murky connection between Mayor Vaughn and the Mob that is partly responsible for his desire to keep the beaches open, despite Brody’s warnings. It seems both underdeveloped – we don’t find out much about it – and strangely present, with the majority of the novel’s scenes involving the mayor gesturing towards it. The second, which probably would have been fatal to the film, involves an affair between Brody’s wife Ellen and Matt Hooper.

One of the great joys of the film is the developing friendship between Hooper and Brody, culminating in their delightful final exchange. After the shark is dead and they are kicking their way back to shore, Brody laughs: “I used to hate the water.” Hooper replies, “I can’t imagine why”. Both men are happy to have survived, and to have each other.

In the novel, it’s more or less hate at first sight, with Brody immediately resenting Hooper because he grew up as a “summer person” in the area. Brody is ashamed he’s not one of the wealthy summer people, and tries to hide this through a kind of pathetic machismo, which emerges most visibly in his competitiveness with Hooper. This obsession with summer people defines much of the dialogue between Brody and Ellen in the book, with Brody’s resentment of the summer people’s nonchalant and emasculating wealth matched by Ellen’s resentment of the fact she used to be a summer person before she married this oaf of a police chief.

The characters in the novel are thus thoroughly unappealing – even loathsome in places. Spielberg famously stated the shark was his favourite character in the novel. Of course, populating a novel with unlikable characters and depressing relationships is not a problem in and of itself. Popeye from William Faulkner’s Sanctuary is hardly likeable, neither is pompous Nick Carraway from The Great Gatsby – and you’d be hard pressed to find a Dickens novel that doesn’t feature some degree of family strife.

But in Jaws , a “man versus beast” tale, a melodramatic thriller, it creates a flat feeling: we don’t wholly mind the prospect of these characters being eaten by a shark. At the same time, Benchley – despite occasional flaws in the writing – does capture something of the dismal inconsistencies and banalities of being human. The complex self-loathing of the characters contrasts with the brutal and unthinking power – the genius for action and killing – of the shark.

The film redacts the frailties and faults of the characters, turning an adult (albeit imperfect) novel into family-friendly fodder. Spielberg took Benchley's low-key thriller doubling as a study of a small American community and turned it into the kind of blockbuster that would get people back into – and keep them in – cinemas. It comes as no surprise that the film also excises much of the novel’s pointed class critique.

Popular opinion would hold the novel up as an inferior work. At a technical level, this opinion would probably be right. However, while Benchley's book is pretentious, it’s also much more ambitious than the film. The novel is ugly in places; where it works though, it works at the level of great literature.

Incidentally, horrified by the bad rap his novel gave sharks, Benchley went on to become an ecological activist focused on shark protection. In 2015, a shark was named after him: Etmopterus benchleyi.

Benchley’s Jaws may not immediately grab one as easily as Spielberg’s, and it’s certainly not as technically accomplished. Its position in American literature is minor compared to the film’s in cinema. But despite – or, perhaps, because of – its flaws, the novel is worth reading at a time when the blockbuster has virtually decimated the middle of American cinema, churning out masses of pleasurably forgettable, interchangeable films that float like a thick slick of chum on the water’s surface.

Ari Mattes teaches Communications & Media at the University of Notre Dame Australia. This essay originally appeared in The Conversation and has been republished here under the Creative Commons Licence.

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