"You're gonna need a bigger...wallet."

[dorinda]

Apropos of little, other than the idea that I should actually post here sometimes instead of just imagining writing posts but seldom doing it--

I've been re-reading the novel Jaws lately. Listening to it, really, as I saw an audiobook in the public library and checked it out onto my phone. I don't think I've read it since around the time the movie came out, when I was a child who read above my station in life (and also saw the movie, technically too young but definitely untraumatized).

And you know, seeing the movie back then, and many times since (I find it a masterpiece), has erased the memory of much of the actual contents of the book. Meaning, mostly, that I remembered the book as being, like the movie, mostly about shark attacks and battling/overcoming the beast. The movie is Man Vs Nature, with Man only barely succeeding.

The book? Pretty much Man Vs. Capitalism. Or maybe Man Vs. Money, if we want to separate the workings of mob-backed loan sharks from capitalism proper, but I don't separate them, so.

Like, the ongoing, ratcheting strain of 'I'm closing the beaches!'/'Martin, don't close the beaches!'/'I'm not gonna re-open the beaches!'/'Martin, re-open the beaches!' is about human life from Martin Brody's point of view, sure. Basically. But from literally everyone else's, it's about money and business, to an exhausting degree. The book goes into a lot of detail about the fragile economy of a summer resort town, and how it works on a tenuous boom-bust cycle, and how the presence of the shark basically knocks down the town's financial, real estate, and business structure prop by prop, until everyone is speculating very seriously that Amity itself will shortly die.

All v. interesting to someone, I have no doubt. But frankly, I'd rather hear a story about a shark.

Also, unfortunately, Martin Brody can be SUCH A PILL in the novel. I'd forgotten that. Irritable, hapless, uncommunicative, chip on his shoulder, constantly bickering with his wife. No wonder she sneaks off for a nooner with Rich Young Blond WASP Matt Hooper in the book, in a lengthy bid to recapture her lost upper-class identity. Thank goodness the movie removed that subplot and also changed Brody and Hooper's characterizations, plus cast them the way it did. Dodged a bullet there.

And man, listening to the audiobook narrator gamely proceeding through a very 1970s-gender-opinions sex scene, while I am on the train to work...awkward!

Definitely going to have to rewatch the movie to clear my palate.

Comments

[gwyn]

Oh god, that book. I haven't read it since I did back in…well, the year after the movie came out, but jeez-o-pete, that book was annoying. I hated how Mrs. Brody was portrayed as being so helpless against her attraction to his self-insert character (we might not have had the word, but I definitely recognized the concept) and everything about the main characters made me want to throw the book. I think that was my first real introduction to the book-movie dichotomy, and how despite what people always want to say, sometimes the movie is definitely better. In the way that a good vid can take a really crappy movie and make it genius art, they managed to make a work of art out of a lousy potboiler.

[dorinda]

...omg. OMG. I'm so glad you mentioned it, because I had never actually made the connection, and how didn't I realize book-Hooper is Benchley's self-insert?! This upper-crust old-money east-coaster, so young, so smart, so handsome, so effortlessly charming and rich, with an irresistible magnetic pull for the older fading housewife, with whom he exchanges sexual fantasies in a supposedly-rakish way over a restaurant table. Good grief, that explains SO MUCH.

In the way that a good vid can take a really crappy movie and make it genius art, they managed to make a work of art out of a lousy potboiler.

Damn right! Another thing I hadn't remembered is how even the dramatic voyage of Quint, Brody, and Hooper after the shark is kind of muddled and unspectacular. Like, I had remembered the movie's masterful editing and tightening of it, where once they sail out, they're out there alone, being hunted, kill or be killed, until the battle is over. Whereas in the book, they come back to shore each night for days in a row. Good job dribbling away the potential unity and throughline and peaking tension of the sequence, Benchley. (Not to mention--and this I did remember--that in the final moment, with Brody and the shark face to face, the shark just...up and dies. Hoookay.)

Which reminds me--I hadn't seen this specific opinion from Spielberg before, and it cracked me up. Wikipedia paraphrases him as saying he felt he had to change the characterizations, because he found all the characters unlikeable. And I'm like, right on, dude.

[carbonel]

I read the book long before I saw the movie. And it probably says something about the book that what I remember most vividly is the scene where after Brody's wife has had nooner sex and is contemplating, now that she has two examples to generalize from rather than just one, about the differences between the way men and women pee.

To be fair, it wasn't the sex and peeing that interested me; it the the point of view and internal dialogue. Back then, I wasn't an editor, but I guess I was born to be a structure geek.

[dorinda]

That's very interesting! I guess you never know which books will activate productive areas in our brains. Thinking about the POVs, there does seem to be a fair amount of grist for the mill--for instance, having Ellen's POV in her efforts to signal to Hooper what she wants, but we don't get Hooper's POV about any of that, so there's suspense. And then after that suspense is resolved, we get Brody's POV with his suspicions about what Hooper is up to (where has he been all day? with whom?), so there's fresh suspense. I can see why it was a popular read, even when it bugs me.