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Of Fins and Rafts

"Did you see that?" - Witness on the beach

Ever since I was a small boy I've been entranced and baffled by this one shot in JAWS in which Alex Kintner is eaten by the shark and I'm not the only one. Film critic Nigel Andrews once described the shot quite accurately as "a windmilling flurry of dark movement." All I could ever figure out was that you were seeing one of the shark's fins or maybe two of its fins and who knows what else?? I've watched this shot in slow motion on DVD and then Blu-ray. I've studied stills on-line. It's been like the goddamn Zapruder film for me. A few years back some awesome stills of a deleted scene surfaced in which you see Bruce the mechanical shark, in all his glory, rising from the waters and chomping down on the Kintner boy.

This gave me a clue that there was even more going on with this shot than we originally realized. Was it a snippet of these leaked photos? The documentary The Shark Is Still Working actually went as far to show the outtakes of this more explicit shark attack in color and in motion and confirmed that yes: This shot comes from that outtake.

And yet no one on the internet could figure out what exactly we were seeing in the shot! Upon closer inspection it looked like two fins and maybe part of the shark's snout, but none of the positioning made any sense. And why was the shark so black? Was it a trick of shadow and sun? I watched the outtakes in slow motion again and again and kept comparing them with a GIF of the shot I had on repeat and vowed to finally figure it out and guess what? I did and I feel like an idiot for not seeing the shot for what I now see it to be: The big black thing popping up in the water is the BOTTOM of Kintner's raft. Just look at the photo below: The top is famously yellow but the bottom is BLACK (I never thought about this even though I've seen the film over a hundred times).

With this now in mind, I rewatched the outtake that showed the shot from another angle and it all fell into place! We're catching a glimpse of the aftermath of the shark rising to the surface and attacking Kintner as the shark chomps down and spins around in the water. These are the dark objects we see in order: dorsal fin of the shark, black side of the raft popping up from the water, and the tail fin of the shark. As the tail fin disappears beneath the water the raft is front and center and the last object on screen before the cut away. Somehow it makes the shot a little less frightening knowing that the big black object in the center of this whirlwind is just the raft, but it's still an awesome shot nonethless. And it only took me four decades and various pieces of archival material to figure it out...!!!

!!!UPDATE!!!

I got into a debate with somebody on Facebook over my dorsal and tail fin + raft theory. They insisted that the tail fin was a pectoral fin because if the shark was flipping over on its side, the pectoral fin would protrude from the water. And it would: If it was a real shark. The footage of the outtake from The Shark Is Still Working makes it clear the two fins visible in the shot are the dorsal and tail. The pectoral fin never appears. This is because it was removed for the shot...

There were two mounted Bruce the mechanical sharks. One was a very basic model with only half the side made up to look like the shark for shots where you only saw the dorsal and tail fin breaking the surface (like when you see the shark swimming in the pond). The other mounted Bruce was more detailed and complex. Its body could thrash about and it could bite down on things. This was the Bruce used for this shot. The pectoral fins were removable for storing purproses, but my theory is they realized that when the shark bit down, flipped on its side and resubmerged, the pectoral fin was going to stick out from the water because the mounted Bruce couldn't make a 180-degree flip. This would make the shark look dead or fake on screen. Their solution to this problem was to simply remove the pectoral fins. This explains the various photos of Bruce sans pectorals in Katama Bay (where the second unit filmed this pickup shot) and why you don't see a pectoral fin in the outtake as Bruce flips over and submerges into the water. It also explains why in the shot you only see two fins and a raft and not three fins and a raft.

Yet another thing that makes this shot so fascinating. Spielberg and Verna Fields had no idea when they went for this less revealing shot of the shark first attacking Kintner that decades later fans would have the means to slow down the shot and study it frame by frame. They just thought people would see a bunch of dark ominious stuff happening in the water and that's still pretty much what most people see. But what we're really seeing is something we shouldn't be seeing: A shark without a pectoral fin just so a shot can be made. The artifice of the beast is revealed and forever there on screen. In my opinion, it doesn't take away from the magic of JAWS. It only adds to it by showing the level of ingenuity that went behind the making of this classic film.