Jaws and Jurassic Park: Perfecting The Art Of Showing By Not Showing
In many Steven Spielberg films, there is something the director does not want you to see, at least not initially. It could be a killer shark, extra terrestrials or the contents of an ancient ark- he intentionally hides them from the camera. At the same time, Steven Spielberg lets the audience feel their presence in a way that feels more intense than if we were to have seen them outright.
The film in which he perfected this technique, was of course, Jaws. It has been argued how the malfunctioning mechanical shark was a blessing in disguise; it forced Steven Spielberg to be creative in how he used his monster. But even when he had a bigger budget and access to CGI, he still applied the lessons he learned from his shark thriller. I will demonstrate that eighteen years after the ‘fish film’, Spielberg used gimmicks from his Jaws bag of tricks to make the audience feel the presence of his new monster, the velociraptor, without actually showing it on screen.
The movement of a victim during an attack
The famous opening scene of Jaws shows a swimmer being thrashed around violently and dragged under the water. The audience can guess what is doing this to the swimmer but the camera never shows us. The opening of Jurassic Park similarly shows an unfortunate worker yanked suddenly backward toward a cage and then being hoisted high into the air.
Again, we sense the strength and speed of whatever is in the cage, but we never see what exactly it is. In both sequences, the camera shows us the perspective of the attacker, using an underwater shot looking up in Jaws, and shots from inside the cage looking out in Jurassic Park. This camerawork chillingly suggests that whatever it is we can’t see, sees us very clearly. (That could be why the only part of the velociraptor that Spielberg DOES show us in the opening, are its eyes.)
The aftermath of an attack
As Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) and Brody (Roy Scheider) find the remains of Ben Gardner’s boat, Brody focuses his searchlight on the wreckage and asks “What happened?” That is the question Steven Spielberg wants to penetrate into the imagination of his audience. We see floating debris, broken glass, even a part of the boat that looks like something took a bite out of, but we never get to see the attack itself. In Jurassic Park, we see a full size cow hoisted up by a crane and lowered into the raptor paddock.
Shortly after, we hear the sounds of “feeding time”, we see the dumbstruck reactions of the observers and then finally we see the contraption lifted back up again, this time with the straps and bars completely mangled and to no one’s surprise, without a trace of the cow. Brody’s question “what happened?” echoes, but no answer is given; Spielberg makes us answer it ourselves.
The subtle movement of an everyday object
Spielberg does not need a violent attack to give us the chills though. He can do it with the slightest and quietest of movements. On board the Orca, before there is any sign of the shark, the camera frames Quint gazing out to sea with his fishing line in the foreground. The reel ever so slightly turns a few inches. The intense look on Quint’s face and a dramatic chord in the musical score tells the audience what is making the line move.
In Jurassic Park, after being told that the raptors are contained “unless they can figure out a way to open doors.” The camera immediately cuts to a door handle, ever so slightly turning. These are goosebump moments in the films- again, no monster necessary!
By using these Jaws techniques, of showing the monster without showing it, Spielberg forces our imaginations to actively participate in the movie, making the experience so much more intense, chilling and ultimately fun.
I have not seen the new Jurassic World movie nor do I plan to. I know that it is over-saturated with CGI and according to the reviews, leaves little to the imagination. I am going back to the original Spielberg movie if I am in the mood to see dinosaurs this summer…or rather, to NOT see them.
Words by Josh Strosberg
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