Why JAWS has the greatest opening movie scene ever

The first scene of a film is a big deal. If you don’t get it just right you can easily lose your audience. They want to be amazed and yet not feel like they’re just being shown lots of fancy visuals. They want intrigue but they also require some explanation. They want to understand what kind of movie they’re going to see and yet at the same time be ready for something unexpected.

‘Shaun of the Dead’ from 2004 and directed by Edgar Wright. The Specials sing ‘Ghost Town’ as we fade in from a black screen and there’s the clang of a bell and a shout of ‘Last Orders’ from the bar. We’re in a pub.

Our hero Shaun (Simon Pegg) is trying to figure out what his long suffering girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) is telling him. Immediately we know who Shaun is, he’s the geeky, nerdy bloke-next-door who feels that life went and got all complicated when he wasn’t looking. In his head, he’s still living his student life of too many pints and late nights but now he’s being told by the girl he loves that there’s more to it than that. That he needs to grow up. We briefly meet the other main (notably Nick Frost’s Ed) and if we look and listen carefully we can discover quite a bit about the story to come. There’s a woman in the background who looks very zombie-like indeed, comments about Shaun’s mum and a hint that there’s a problem with that relationship too, there’s a lot of quick fire conversation and it ends as Shaun promises Liz “Things’ll change, promise.”

And of course they do. This foreshadowing happens in subsequent scenes too, setting the audience up time and again for what’s to come - even if they don’t quite know it.

Lethal Weapon from 1987 and directed by Richard Donner is actually pretty similar to JAWS in its themes and characters. Before the JAWS-like visuals kick in we have a long aerial shot across the smoggy LA skyline. Bobby Helms sings his hit, ‘Jingle Bell Rock’ and although we know we came to see an action movie, now there’s this jolly Christmas song playing. It puts us off-balance a bit. This is a year before Die Hard remember (often wrongly touted as the original 80s action Christmas blockbuster) so we have no prior experience of this. The shot comes to rest on a penthouse window and this is when suddenly the similarities start to become more apparent. We see a young blonde woman who’s not afraid to take risks. Amanda Hunsaker (Jackie Swanson) is alone though and she looks sad, she is taking cocaine and you know bad things are coming. She steps up onto the balcony rail. Just like Chrissie Watkins she decides to take the plunge. At this point of course, Chrissie is just going for a swim but is Amanda really aware of the danger in front of her? So now we see that she and Chrissie are very alike in their actions.

Below Amanda the concrete of the parking lot is waiting. Beneath Chrissie, its the teeth of the shark.

The fate of both women is unknown to them and yet we suspect that this is it. The end. We’ve only just met them and now they’re going to be killed off in the most terrible way.

Amanda falls silently past the windows of the apartment block until the truly shocking moment that her body slams into the roof of a car. The shot is filmed from inside the car, windows smash and the roof buckles violently as she hits it.

We see Chrissie from below as well, we know no what will happen.

The inevitability of death is looming up at her.

So let’s look at that first scene in JAWS - is it really the best ever? We start underwater - the grubby LA skyline in Lethal Weapon borrows again here, those skyscrapers really do start to resemble rocks on the seabed and of course the smog is a very close cousin of the silt in the water off Amity Island. Then there’s an abrupt cut to the land and the acoustic guitar over the top. We see the welcoming sight of a campfire, there’s the amiable chatter of people, you can almost smell the smoke and the hotdogs, and if you’ve ever been to a beach party in the dunes, this is as good as it gets.

When Chrissie runs along the dunes in silhouette the fence posts stop being markers at the edge of the beach and start to resemble something more dangerous - teeth. She’s running headlong towards her violent death - and she’s laughing as she does it.

The audience know the movie’s just taken a dark turn, they can feel that something’s going to go very wrong. But will this young director really kill the pretty girl who’s just going for a late night skinny dip? I mean would he do that to us? And if he does, what’s it going to be like?

Remember, before JAWS came out, no one had heard that score, no one knew anything about it, about how it looked or the violent punch it had waiting behind all that East Coast small town homeliness. This was a descent into hell with a backdrop clapboard houses and the 4th July celebrations, everything about it set you off balance.

Chrissie dives into the water and starts swimming out into the bay.

Tom collapses on the beach - he’s never gonna make it, you can tell.

She calls to him to join her in the water but it’s no good, the guy can’t even get his shoes off.

But Chrissie doesn’t care, she’s an independent soul. She’s a free spirit who can take men or leave them and if they can’t keep up with her - so be it, she’d do things her way and they can find someone who’ll wait around for them.

This is quite sad and the only bit of the scene I feel is a shame. Obviously, it’s an incredible set piece and it makes the movie but the feeling that Chrissie is sacrificed when all she did was want to live her life, to do things her way and not worry what others thought. This is seen as a failing by the story, that this is the reason she gets devoured by the shark. I suppose the attack could be seen as purely random - but only if this was reality, but its not. This was written by someone and so they decided this girl who leads a guy on, strips naked and then laughs at him needs to be killed.

Whatever, it’s still a great scene.

The attack starts with not much more than a nudge from the shark (not that you see it of course) but then the next second she’d pulled under and then thrown back and forth as presumably the shark beneath her tastes the blood mix with the water.

To make Susan Backlinie who played Chrissie, move so violently, she was fixed to two ropes which were pulled back and forth by crew members on the beach. All she had to do was throw herself about and scream. For the sake of her own safety, she insisted on having a quick release on her shorts so if she got into trouble she could detach and come to the surface.

“Because I’m out there screaming my head off…how would anyone know?”

It’s a taught, brutal scene that lets the audience know nothing is off limits in this movie in terms of what this shark will do - so get ready.

And talking of the shark - we haven’t even seen it. This was intentional by Spielberg as he said he didn’t want to have a big “monster moment” with the shark coming out of the water and biting down on Chrissie as it said in the script. It would’ve been spectacular but to play on the minds of the audience, to have them all imagining what this monster actually looks like, was far more effective.

It’s a case of ‘showing them nothing but telling them everything’. Bruce was being very uncooperative but the movie was all the more heart-stopping for his non-appearances. Seeing the shark in this first scene is something a less imaginative director would have done. It’s like when we’re afraid of the dark when we’re children (or maybe even as adults), we fear much more what we don’t see as opposed to what we do. Our mind is far more creative all by itself, it doesn’t need to see the monster, it can make it up all by itself, thank you very much.

Ross from The Daily Jaws with Chrissie herself, Susan Backlinie

As Chrissie finally slips beneath the waves, her throat filling with brine for the last time we hear that awful last gasp and gurgling and then she’s gone.

All is still, silent. Like she was never there.

All we hear is the tolling of the bell at the top of the buoy. Like a church bell at a funeral perhaps?

John Donne, the English poet wrote ‘No Man is an Island’ and the last lines of which fit perfectly here and also with much of the rest of the film.

“Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

Donne says that no matter what we do, we will all eventually die and at this time the bell will toll for all of us.

Chrissie was just one person in Amity (a small Island community let’s not forget) and when she wa taken by the shark, this was the start of the death of the town. The events of her death at the start of the movie touched everyone in Amity. The bell on the buoy was for protection and now it was chiming to tell everyone that one of their own was lost.

But did the islanders see it this way? Did they realise that now was the time to pull together and protect each other? No. They followed the Mayor’s advice and kept the beaches open until a child was killed.

Spielberg crafted a scene of the utmost violence and brutality out of a few sound effects, some lengths of rope, a few burly crew members and one actor who will be remembered as the most effective and convincing victim of any screen killing in the history of cinema.