Jaws appeared in American theaters in June 1975, preceded by a massive “media blitz,” yet reviewers initially dismissed the film. “Jaws is, at least, the old standby, a science fiction film,” said Vincent Canby of the New York Times, who saw nothing extraordinary about the film at all. “It opens according to the time-honored tradition with a happy-go-lucky innocent being suddenly ravaged by the mad monster, which in Jaws comes from the depths of inner space—the sea as well as man’s nightmares. Thereafter Jaws follows the formula with fidelity.... It’s a noisy, busy movie that has less on its mind than any child at the beach might have.”1 After the film grossed over ninety million dollars in its first two months, the Times published a second review calling the film “nothing more than a creaky old monster picture.”2 Stephen Farber continued to affirm that Jaws “was strikingly similar to another movie in release this summer, William Castle’s Bug, about giant, incendiary cockroaches that overrun Los Angeles after an earthquake.”3
But Canby, Farber, and the other reviewers missed the point. Jaws proved to be the second most popular film in history, grossing, as of January 1, 1980, over 133 million dollars. It is not a standard science fiction film, or a monster movie about giant exploding cockroaches. For unlike the aforementioned Bug, and other formula monster movies, Jaws is not a film set in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., or even the plains of the midwest; it is about America—perhaps an America that does not exist and never did, but one the audience recognizes nonetheless. The “real” America is at best a series of widely scattered and discrepant regions, each with its own unique characteristics, often dependent upon the natural topography of the landscape. As early as 1792 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur pointed to this as being an early and seminal characteristic of America in his Letters from an American Farmer:
British America is divided into many provinces, forming a large association, scattered along a coast 1500 miles extent and about 200 miles wide. This society I would fain examine, at least as it appears in the middle provinces; if it does not afford that variety of tinges which may be observed in Europe, we have colours peculiar to ourselves. For instance, it is natural to conceive that those who live near the sea, must be very different than those who live in the woods; the intermediate space will afford a separate and distinct class.4
Spielberg distills elements from a variety of American landscapes into one ideal, mythic landscape. In the process lies the power of the film to evoke a place that everyone in the audience recognizes as “America.”
In an essay on symbolic landscapes and idealizations of American communities, D. W. Meinig claims that “Every mature nation has its symbolic landscapes. They are part of the iconography of the nationhood, part of the shared set of ideas and memories and feelings that bind a people together.”5 Jaws is a perfect example: the landscape in the film is an environment that never really existed, except in the collective conscious of the vast majority of Americans. The setting is the archetypal American coastal town—absolutely the earliest American image, the settlements of the pilgrims on the coast of New England. It is the predecessor of the American rural ideal, and in that sense, the truest America. It is also a creation of nostalgia, a pure American community which is nothing less than mythic.
But this is only half of the story. Spielberg also makes powerful use of another aspect of the environment—the beachfront and ocean. Not only in American culture, but in almost all cosmologies, the ocean is the predecessor of all, even the pure small town. And while the ocean may too be pure, it is not necessarily gentle. As W. H. Auden points out in The Enchafed Flood:
The sea or the great waters, that is, are the symbol for the primordial undifferentiated flux, the substance which became created nature only by having form imposed or wedded to it.
The sea, in fact, is that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse. It is so little of a friendly symbol that the first thing which the author of the Book of Revelations notices in his vision of the new heaven and earth at the end of time is that “There was no more sea.”6
There are two crucial points to be recognized in the collective perception of the sea as an unfriendly environment. Firstly, the sea is a place of the unknown: the life that lies beneath its surface, however dreadful, is greater than the visible. Herman Melville expressed this dread of submerged malignancy well in Moby Dick: “As this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life.”7 And on a much more personal and frightening level, as Spielberg notes, “When you’re out swimming and you turn to tread water, half of your body is under the surface and you can’t keep tabs on what’s happening down there around your feet.”8
Secondly, the sea is a place beyond the rule of man, whose influence stops at the shoreline. There are no demarcated borders to fight over, only arbitrary claims; it is beyond the subjugation of humanity. “The sea does not belong to despots. Upon its surface men can still exercise unjust laws, fight, tear one another to pieces, and be carried away with terrestrial horrors,” argues Nemo in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea; “But at thirty feet below its level, their reign ceases, their influence is quenched, and their power disappears. Ah, sir; live in the bosom of the waters. There is only independence. There I recognize no master’s voice. There I am free.”9 Beyond human control, the sea takes on all the aspects of wilderness that the virgin forest or desert might possess. And it is as archetypal and immediately recognizable as any other wilderness. As long as corpses wash up on the beach, we will fear the sea as uncontrollable, formless wilderness. In 1865, upon viewing corpses washed ashore from a shipwreck, even Henry David Thoreau decried the ocean as “wilder than a Bengal jungle.” “Serpents, bears, hyenas, tigers, rapidly vanish as civilization advances, but the most populous and civilized city cannot scare a shark from its wharves.” The beach Thoreau found no more than “a morgue” where “the carcasses of men and beasts together lie stately upon its shelf, rotting and bleaching in the sun.”10
In addition to the general disease generated by its symbolic value as evil and wilderness, the issue is further complicated by the dual nature of the sea. The maternal significance of water and the sea has always been one of the clearest symbols in mythology,11 although, as Jung points out, the mother archetype is not an easy symbol to deal with. The qualities associated with it are not only “all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains,” but also “anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate.”12 In Jaws this dichotomy is clear; the sea is at once both the warm, soft days of summer and the evil and danger lurking just beneath the surface. There is a beautifully visual cue of this between the first scene of the shark attack on the “summer girl,” Chrissie, and the introduction of Chief Brody. At the end of the shark attack, the camera looks out on the evilly gleaming night sea, awash with death, and slowly, on the same horizon line, there is a lap dissolve to the same ocean and the same sky, but now cheerfully gleaming in the clean blue morning: Jung’s loving and terrible mother has come to rest in the sea.
For all the neat categorizations of mythology, the sea is still a region entirely beyond the control of man; we may label it and classify it, but that is all. And it is between this archetypal uncontrollable wilderness and the archetypal American landscape that Spielberg spins his tale. His challenge is to structure two distinctly different landscapes into the film. In the first ten minutes he introduces them both, details them, and forces them upon the audience. Jaws opens on a beach at night—a group of summer teenagers gather by a fire, a primitive source of heat and light, and unwittingly carouse in reach of Thoreau’s morgue. Not only is the sea a place of wilderness, so too is the beach. The ever shifting, infertile sands are an object of chaos beyond the control of man and thus also tend towards evil.13 Like the ocean, it is a place both barren and beyond the pale of law. One edge of the beach plunges irrevocably into the sea, or perhaps just as malevolently, rises from it. At once, then, Spielberg thrusts his characters in a liminal zone and exposes them to danger.
One young woman leaves the relative safety of the firelit circle; she runs along the beach until she reaches the water’s edge, disrobing as she goes, abandoning the vestiges of civilization and returning to a wild state herself. In the truest sense of the word, she has become bewildered by the landscape. She enters the water and becomes the shark’s first victim. Yet with the environmental preamble afforded, no viewer is shocked, for despite the cinematic violence, the film has not lied. No gigantic flaming cockroaches suddenly appear; she entered a place of known evil and the virulence there overcame her. “She should have known better,” is the implied moral. In the final shots of this first shark attack, Chrissie begins to cry out for help, first to anyone who might hear, and then to God. With no response forthcoming, she reaches for her one possible succor, a buoy floating behind her. Underlining man’s impotence in this environment, it points out that the best that can be managed against the primitive power of the sea is a device to warn of the danger present. The beach and the ocean have been little more than a dark blur on the screen; but already they have been identified as a place where evil is hidden but ever present. There are no happy families in sailboats and no bronzed surfers in this environment, only fools and corpses. Thus the archetype of the sea is powerfully introduced in the film’s opening.
The sea introduced, it is now left for elucidation as Spielberg unveils his consummate man-made environment, the fictional village of Amity, a summer town located somewhere off the coast of New York state. With few exceptions this environment no longer exists on the eastern coast of the United States, and in any case it is not the modern conception of the beachfront. But it is the idealistic prototypical conception. And the small town that Spielberg locates there is a place of safety in the midst of the wilderness. As John R. Stilgoe points out in his comprehensive work Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1850:
For colonial New Englanders the word town was rich in peculiar spatial significance. It denoted a self-governing, nearly self-sufficient agricultural community inhabiting a discrete, carefully bounded space shaped from wilderness chaos and through continuous corporate effort maintained in equilibrium against the wild beasts and plants—and super-natural evils like witches—that threatened to overwhelm it.14
The bright clean world of Amity Island—a world of white picket fences and gleaming white houses—is a purified version of the original Puritan settlements. The neatly maintained fences demarcate the community order, the sprucely painted houses the worth of each homeowner. The web of sanctity spreads out until it reaches the lighthouses which appear throughout the film marking the limits of order. Like the buoy in the opening scene, the lighthouses warn man away from the dangers of the sea. “The towers, however, marked more than dangerous shoals and narrow channels. They announced the end of the locally controlled complex of structures and manmade spaces that most people recognize by the word neighborhood.”15
Spielberg not only creates this American environment, but takes it one step further. He extends his American archetype by combining it with the archetype of the sea by placing the community on an island. Auden considers the island to be “an enclosed place of safety... a private place where the writ of the law does not run” and “the earthly paradise where there is no conflict between natural desire and duty.”16 The village of Amity is suspended in the primordial innocence of an island, and like Defoe’s island in Robinson Crusoe or Cooper’s in The Crater, or Vulcan’s Peak, it is threatened only by its antecedent—the chaos and wilderness of the sea.
After the introduction of the sea and the first shark attack, Spielberg reveals his American landscape through the film’s protagonist, Chief Brody. Brody’s relationship to his environment is crucial; he is a man who has just fled New York City, the land of muggers, rapists, and corruption. He has come to Amity for “a healthy place to raise the kids,” for the ideal of simplicity and innocence. In short, he has left New York for this mythic America, the earthly paradise where “one man can make a difference.” Brody, though, is a man who does not like the water; he sits in his car on the ferry to the mainland. Yet so strong is the draw of this archetype that he has braved the island. What Brody is unaware of is that he has simply exchanged one wilderness for another; he has bartered away the city for the sea. And the sea threatens to take away all he has gained. It is this shattering of the American archetypal landscape which forms the emotional framework of the film; the shark attacks are horrific and examples of cinematic expertise, but they mean more than what is there on the “surface.” On a larger scale, Meinig’s symbolic landscape is being threatened. Spielberg threatens to tear America apart with this shark and, as it will become clear, it is this attack on the American environment that helped bring forty million people into the theaters, not just the blood washing up on the beach.
Yet despite Brody’s best efforts, the blood does wash up on the beach again, this time as the young Alex Kitner is attacked in the midst of a crowd of bathers. After this attack, the town finally recognizes that a problem does exist and the local populace gathers in the town council chambers to discuss the issue. It is here, in the midst of their inefficient discussion, that the audience is first introduced to the character of Quint. Like the woodcutter of the fifteenth-century European village of Grimm’s Tales, Quint has been in the wilderness too long. He is no longer one who dwells on the land or belongs there. He is an outsider, and the public fears him as such, much the way the settled public of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales felt the life of a hunter to be “of vast disadvantage for temporal purposes, and it totally removes one from within the influences of more sacred things.”17 Indeed, to the townspeople of Amity, Quint seems to have gone a bit wild himself: a hairy, scruffy denizen of the sea, he now lies outside the hegemony of the Amity landscape. He demands respect and even fear from the mayor, a man who can bluster and shout his way through controlling the indigenous population, but finds that Quint, much like the shark, must be treated on a different level. Quint’s alignment with this gathering, and indeed the land itself, is at best tenuous, but he still stands as the townspeople’s most direct link with the primal power of the sea. The outcome of the meeting, however, is nebulous, as Quint’s offer to hunt down the shark is “taken under advisement.” For now, at least, the townspeople decide to deal with the problem themselves. But Brody, despite his compliance with the decision, decides to find his own help, aligned with the environment of the sea, and so he calls in an expert from the “Oceanographic Institute.”
The next morning, the ineptitude of the landspeople on the sea is revealed as they overload their boats and try to hunt the shark with explosives. In the midst of this tumult Brody’s expert from the institute arrives. The expert, Hooper, comes equipped with a long history of shark study and an extraordinary array of technical wizardry. It is unclear whether his boat would be more at home at sea or on a pad at Cape Canaveral. The information he provides will create an important catalyst to prod Brody on to action—yet it seems evident from the moment of his arrival that he has come from the wrong environment to do battle with the sea and the evil presented there in the form of the great white shark. His knowledge of the sea is from the secondhand flash of a diode. Hooper does not spring from the days of the British navy tar, nor of the tattooed merchant marine; he negotiates the sea through electronic artifice, not by battling it on its own primitive terms. While Hooper may play an important role in the eventual eradication of the shark, it is clear that he will not take a major role in its actual demise. At this point, Jaws divides into two films; the first half is the attack on the beaches of the archetypal coastal town, and the second half, the captain and crew in pursuit of their prize, the great white shark. Just as neatly it divides into the final conflict of the two archetypal landscapes.
The film also makes it clear that there is only one man present who can fight the shark on its own terms, in its own environment. Brody and Hooper realize this and visit Quint’s house/dock to procure Quint’s services in eradicating the shark. The room is bedecked with trophies of Quint’s triumphs against the sea; his one view of the harbor is literally through the jaws of a giant shark—Quint negotiates the environment of the sea from within it. He appears to be the only logical choice to battle the shark, for he fights the primitive force of the sea with a primitive force of his own. But the origin of his strength is the sea itself. As far back as 1738, Lord Bolingbroke, in his essay “The Idea of a Patriot King,” described the source of power of the archetypal sailor: “Like other amphibious animals, we must come onshore; but the water is more properly our element, and in it we find the greatest security, so we exert our greatest power.”18 But Quint has allowed this force to overpower the part of him that belongs to the land and the community of men.
After their first battle at sea with the shark, Quint, Brody, and Hooper spend the night afloat awaiting the shark’s return. After an evening’s drinking, Quint tells the tale of his rescue from the USS Indianapolis, torpedoed and sunk with eleven hundred men on board, only three hundred and sixteen of whom survived the subsequent shark attack. Quint survived, although death, it seemed, passed within a fin’s width. Somewhere in the five days he floated waiting and hoping for salvation, Quint resigned himself to his own death; his life no longer belonged to him but to the sea. He has sworn never to wear another life jacket, and indeed, as the Orca begins to flounder, he does not, but only hands them to Hooper and Brody. There are three black circles painted on the forecastle of the Orca: two of them have life rings hung and centered, while the third, representing Quint, contains a set of shark jaws. Quint has quit the land and aligned himself with the sea. After the shark attacks the boat and it begins to founder, Brody rushes to the radio to signal to land for help, but Quint suddenly appears and beats the radio into pieces with a baseball bat. If they are going to sink and die, so be it, but they will not depend upon society for help in the briny wilderness. Quint’s alignment with his environment is complete; and in the eyes of Brody, Quint has gone mad—or more appropriately, in his case, wild.
Aligned now totally with the sea, and his bond with the land severed, Quint can never return to Amity, the island of friendship. Instead, he joins the sea as the shark takes him as its next victim. For Hooper and Brody, the ship is now the last vestige of union to the land. And yet the shark threatens to destroy this too. Just prior to Quint’s death, Hooper descends into the sea, his plan to fight the shark in its own environment. But Hooper’s “anti-shark cage” proves to be less than effective, and as his technology fails him he is forced to take refuge in the very environment in which he hoped to triumph. He, as Quint had once been, was the survivor of a near shark attack, swimming to shore as a youth, as a shark devoured his boat. He has spent the rest of his life since that incident studying sharks. His alternative to staying at Amity and battling the shark was spending eighteen months at sea aboard the Aurora, a “floating asylum” for shark scientists. He, too, has only a tenuous alignment with the land. Only Brody is now left to do battle with the shark. Unlike Quint and Hooper, his stake in returning to the land is high. He has declared Amity his home, and has ventured into the wilderness to defend it. While the sailor or denizen of the sea may accept death on the waters as his inevitable fate, the land dweller has never taken it quite as well. As Gonzalo cries out in Shakespeare’s The Tempest as the ship founders in the storm: “Now I would give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground—long heath, brown furze, anything. The wills above me be done, but I would fain die a dry death.”19
As the ship sinks and the shark cruises in search of its next meal and victory, all that is left Brody is the primitive instinct of survival—no complicated strategies, no premeditated plan of action, only the desire to endure. And reduced to this primitive level, Brody, in his final attempt to survive, his last gesture of defiance against the sea, triumphs. He triumphs not in denying his bond with the land, nor in attempting to retreat to safety, but in fighting to defend himself and his environment against this interloper. And thus Brody and his environment are saved.
The success of Jaws was phenomenal, but its success lay in more than just its cinematic virtue. The film is a consummate collision between wilderness and community as it pits the two immediately recognizable archetypes against each other. In this nation of immigrants, the archetype of the sea as a place of wilderness has been part of American subconscious beliefs since the first Pilgrims crossed the water seeking sanctuary. Whether in metaphor or actuality, all (European) Americans have braved the wilderness to reach these shores. Amity, unlike the sea and wilderness, exists only on the screen; but it also exists deep within the subconscious beliefs of Americans. For all its cinematic scares, Jaws did not ask its viewers to do anything difficult or frightening; it demanded the acceptance of no new ideas. The film simply reinforced the audience’s already preconceived notions about these two archetypes, and in this sense, it was both a comforting and comfortable film. What is said to the audience was, in effect, “You’re right. You were right all the time.” The film reinforces our already preconceived fears of wilderness and the unknown and bolsters our belief in the purity and sanctity of America. The supposedly helpless and hydrophobic Chief Brody overcomes the wilderness; he triumphs over chaos. Thus, the ending of this film is immensely satisfying. The audience is given exactly what it wants.
Jaws in many ways is a propaganda film for America. It draws on deep, submerged beliefs, manipulates them, and feeds them back to us. Spielberg threatens America with his shark; the wilderness and the unknown hidden there threaten the sanctuary and community that is America. But typical of most horror films, Jaws can only toy with beliefs and anxieties we already have. We may not recognize them, but like the shark, they prowl unceasingly beneath the seemingly calm surface of consciousness. We want to believe that America will triumph over all unknown obstacles, through ferocious battle perhaps, but triumph nonetheless. By aligning his protagonist with a symbolic, idealized landscape of America, Spielberg insures that on some level his audience will understand and be reassured of Brody’s eventual triumph—America, of course, cannot fail. Jaws provided its audience with a satisfactory solution to the conflicts presented: the shark dies, Brody prevails, and two submerged beliefs are brought to the surface for a hundred-and-twenty minutes, reaffirmed, and then allowed to sink quietly from where they came. The audience leaves the theatre calm and inwardly pleased—they were right, after all.
Vincent Canby, “If You Are What You Eat,” New York Times, 21 June 1975, p. 19, col. 2.
Stephen Farber, “Only Difference Is the Hype,” New York Times, 24 August 1975, p. 11, col. 1.
Farber, “Only Difference Is the Hype.”
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New York: Dutton, 1975), p. 40.
D. W. Meinig, ed., The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 164.
W. H. Auden, The Enchafed Flood (New York: Random House, 1950), p. 7.
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (New York: The Modern Library, 1926), p. 181.
Andrew C. Bobrow, “An Interview with Steven Spielberg,” Filmmakers Newsletter, Summer 1974, p. 34.
Jules Verne, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (London: Thomas W. Cromwell, 1976), p. 234.
Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1966), pp. 161 and 165-67.
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, vol. 5 of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1962), pp. 399 ff.; and Karl Abraham, Dreams and Myths (New York: The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing, 1913), p. 23, as cited by C. G. Jung in Symbols of Transformation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 16.
C. G. Jung, Four Archetypes (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), p. 16.
John R. Stilgoe, “A New England Coastal Wilderness,” Geographical Review (April 1981), p. 33.
John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 57.
Stilgoe, Common Landscape, p. 109.
Auden, Enchafed Flood, p. 21.
From The Pioneers by James Fenimore Cooper, published 1823, as cited by Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 63.
Lord Bolingbroke, from “The Idea of a Patriot King” (1738) in Flowers of the Sea, Captain Eric Bush, ed., (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962), p. 1.
William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I:i, 71-74.
In the first phase of this project, we attempted to redress the seeming incommensurability between ideological and archetypal approaches to rhetorical criticism.1 Drawing on the ideological work of Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson and on the archetypal approach of depth psychologist C. G. Jung, we developed a critical perspective intended to account for the operation of both historical and universal symbols within rhetorical texts. In fashioning our point of view, we reworked the concepts of the cultural psyche, narrative texts, and the role of the critic in ways that both rely on and transcend the individual perspectives of Jameson and Jung.
In this second phase, we apply our framework to a text that has been interpreted separately by two critics, one who invokes an ideological and the other an archetypal orientation. The text we consider is the 1975 cinematic blockbuster Jaws. This film has been examined by Jameson himself, as well as by archetypal feminist critic Jane Caputi. Since, as we will show, both critics have produced insightful readings, it seems safe to conclude that the film admits of both ideological and archetypal interpretations. In addition, Jaws remains one of the all-time box office moneymakers, and, along with Psycho, still retains the capacity to chill those who may conjure up its images as they haltingly enter the water. Because it has left such an indelible mark on the American psyche, it seems an ideal test case for our critical approach.
Within the larger context of rethinking the relationship between modernism and mass culture, Jameson interprets Jaws as an extended example of cultural manipulation.2 Whereas this piece was published two years before the appearance of his major work, The Political Unconscious, which we highlighted in our previous essay, the procedures he invokes to analyze Jaws are similar to those outlined in his later writings.3 As such, Jameson sees the shark in Jaws as a mass media decoy which draws attention away from the ideological content of the film—a tacit alliance between multinational corporations (personified by Matthew Hooper) and the forces of law and order (depicted by Martin Brody)—which is cemented not so much through the killing of the shark as through the sacrifice of Quint, the vessel of an older, outdated political regime. By contrast, Caputi sees the film as the most recent enactment of an age-old patriarchal myth in which the Terrible Mother archetype, symbolized by the shark, is ritualistically killed by the three men, thereby reaffirming the patriarchal social order at the expense of the feminine. In her view, Jaws displaces men’s fear and hatred of women onto the shark, which is then killed so that the patriarchal world order can continues.4
While provocative in many respects, the singular orientations of Jameson and Caputi prevent them, in quite different ways, from seeing important meanings in this film. For Jameson, the political message of Jaws is centered in the class relationships among the three men, whereas for Caputi, the archetypal import of the film is located in the feminine engenderment of the shark.5 But neither can address the relationship between class and gender because that relationship presupposes a critical posture that conjoins ideology and archetype. In the initial essay, we argued that a “cultural myth” often mediates between the historical particularities of ideology and the ahistorical generality of archetypes, and comprises “a narrative whole which the critic reconstructs from singular texts often separated in time and genre but tied together by a single unifying theme.”6 In our view, the relationship between class and gender in Jaws is best explained by situating it within the context of the American myth of the frontier hunter—specifically, the white man’s adaptation of the holistic hunting rituals of the American Indian.7 When seen as a modern reenactment of the hunter myth, the film reveals how the social hierarchy fractures not only feminine, but also masculine, identities in ways that weaken both. We also argued earlier that the critic can best assess the moral value of a text by placing it within a “master myth,” the end point of which is “cultural individuation”—an ethical ideal in which economic domination ceases, the culture becomes more aware of its unconscious, and a sense of community is achieved.8 By interpreting Jaws within both the cultural myth of the hunter and the master myth of cultural individuation, we offer a moral evaluation that implies certain directions our culture can take to improve its psycho-political health.
In what follows, after reconstructing the myth of the frontier hunter from well-known texts that are obvious precursors to Jaws, we offer our interpretation and moral assessment of the film. Because our intent is to show how reading the film from an integrated framework reveals meanings not available to either Jameson or Caputi, our analysis unfolds inductively insofar as we first show how Jameson and Caputi see particular symbols and motifs within the film, then offer a critique of their conclusions, and finally articulate our alternative interpretation.
In proceeding this way, two clarifications seem necessary. First, we are not attempting merely to synthesize the existing analyses Jameson and Caputi provide of Jaws. Rather, our integrated perspective assumes that the collision of archetypal and ideological energies produces a synergy which cannot be reduced to the sum of its archetypal and ideological parts. Thus, we generate this reading from our own framework as well as in response to oversights and/or misinterpretations Jameson’s and Caputi’s respective views impose upon them. For example, in contrast to Jameson, who sees Jaws as a strategy of containment in which ideological repressions are raised and then displaced, and to Caputi, who sees the film as a strategy of displacement in which patriarchy is reaffirmed, we find complex rhetorical strategies of repression, revelation, displacement, and condensation in which the feminine gender is scapegoated for the ills of the capitalistic system, and the masculine gender is fragmented by that system. Second, we do not presume that any critical perspective can exhaust the meaning of a text; as such, our reading must also be ultimately partial—we offer it as a counterpoint to the schism that has typically kept ideological and archetypal critics at odds with one another.
As we have claimed, singular texts often partake in the narrative history of a cultural myth and thus derive their meanings partially from antecedent texts. The archetypal and political symbolism of Jaws is embedded within the cultural myth that has captured the heart of America’s consciousness since its beginning—that of the frontier—of the initiation into a New World and a new life. More specifically, Jaws is a contemporary version of the white man’s adaptation of the Indian hunter myth, and it draws on the symbolism of this myth in its literary tradition. Thus our initial task is to illustrate how the hunter myth articulates the relationship between ideology and archetype in conquering the frontier.
The hunter (or hunter/warrior) played a central role in American Indian mythology. The hunter leaves the confines of the tribal circle to hunt his animal or human prey; his conquest is for the benefit of the tribe and for his own glory—if he is a boy, it will make him a man.9 The wilderness is a metaphor for the unconscious and the beast for the mysterious soul within man. Richard Slotkin claims that the myth of the hunter follows the pattern of the archetypal quest for the source of divine power:
The quest is a searching both of the two worlds (the temporal and the underworld) and of the hero’s soul. These two quests lead him to the arms of the earth goddess, who is also his “lost half,” his anima, the hidden part of his male consciousness where feeling subordinates intellect: passive, feminine, essential. It is in the union with this other self, this goddess-soul mate, that the hero achieves both personal salvation and the boon of power that will save his people. (156; see also 490)
The animal prey often leads the hunter to a body of water, such as a lake, a river, or the sea, which is both real and symbolic--the “inward ocean” of the mind. Thus, the hunting ritual is an initiation into a symbolic marriage with the feminine spirits of his unconscious—a sexual union between the male and female principles (490–502).
In many Indian cultures, the myth of the hunter was paired with that of the shaman, who gained insight into the world through the adventures of the mind and spirit rather than of the physical hunt. The shaman’s rituals sanctified the activities of the hunter, fostering belief in a common life-spirit immanent in all things. When the shamanistic principle balanced that of the hunter, the hunter experienced a transfer of identity between himself and the prey, and he came to appreciate and worship the power of nature and its spirit through his killing and eating of the beasts who carry that spirit in the world. The hunt thus reaffirmed his brotherhood with nature and conformed to the balance of the natural relationships which sustain life. But in situations where a tribe felt itself in danger of being absorbed or obliterated by another culture, the precarious balance between hunter and shaman dissolved; the shaman became symbolic of weakness and the hunter of strength (49–50, 152, 559).
The white hunter learned the Indian’s way of relating to the prey, discerning its secrets, sympathizing with the spirit that connected him to it. But given that the frontiersman’s purpose was to extend the borders of his culture by claiming Indian land, and that this required hegemony over the Indians, his adaptation of the Indian’s myth also differed from it significantly. The Indian was likened to the beast; whether “good savage” or degenerate, the entire race became associated, not only with an inferior class, but also with the dark unconscious (204–205). Furthermore, although nature’s wilds were still visualized as feminine,10 the salience of another frontier motif—that of the captivity of white women by the Indians—demanded that the wilderness be made safe for white women and civilization. The “sacred marriage” of the hunter with his prey was unrealizable because the defense of the captive demanded that the spirit of the wilderness (which included the Indian) be rejected.11 The white hunter resolved this dilemma by splitting the image of the feminine into “good woman” versus “bad woman,” associating the former with the conventional idea of woman in civilized Anglo-American society and the latter with the untamed wilderness, its beasts, and its “Red” inhabitants.12 Thus, the Indians and women of the unsavory sort were linked together, both as lower classes that justified exploitation and, along with nature itself, as symbols of the repressed unconscious.
The elimination of the folk “fire-hunt legend” of Daniel Boone from most of the popular written Boone stories illustrates the domestication of woman as the spirit of wildness and freedom into the dutiful and conventional wife. As the legend was told, Boone was out stalking the forest with a blazing torch one night. After a long wait, he saw the double gleam of the eyes of a deer which was attracted to the light. Preparing to shoot between the eyes, some intuition checked him; pushing aside the brush, he discovered a woman—Rebecca Bryan—who then turned and fled home. Boone courted and later married her. For the Boone of this story, Slotkin explains, the spirit of nature is feminine, and he relates to it as hunter to prey, or sexual aggressor to coy, amenable victim. But in later retellings of the Boone saga, Rebecca’s civilized qualities are emphasized; she conforms to the conventional idea of woman in white society—“a morally strong but physically weak creature in need of a hero’s protection, a victim suffering dutifully under physical discomfort and the pangs of womanly sentiment, so completely identified with her role as wife and mother that she has no identity independent of her social role.”13 The good, but devitalized woman, then, became associated with culture, morality, and civilized, improved nature, such as the garden. The wild spirit of nature was still feminine, but, unimproved and untamed, it was more evil than good and had to be conquered, not married.
Although the masculine image was not politically weakened, as was the feminine, it too suffered a psychologically debilitating split. The shamanistic principle (often called the Magician or Wise Old Man archetype) is the hunter/warrior’s opposite,14 but both must be present within a culture if it is to maintain its balance—if it is to avoid identifying totally with the bloody excesses of the hunter or the contemplative passivity of the shaman. In opting for the hunter’s focus on exteriority—i.e., venturing forth from the tribe to prove a man’s worth by doing—the American frontier myth evolved a hero who eventually eschewed any reverence for inferiority—i.e., reflecting on the meaning of doing and the nature of being.15 As we shall see, this division in the masculine image has led inevitably to war against the feminine principle, embodied in nature and women, and to further fragmentation of the male psyche.
Unencumbered by the shamanistic principle, the Euro-American’s abhorrence of the natural spirit as dark and evil—feminine, bestial, Indian—turned the marriage hunt into an act of murder, repudiation, or exorcism. The white hunter myth, then, eventually supported the ideological project of the destruction of the balanced world in an attempt to remake it in the narrower image of the male hunter/warrior. The hero of the hunter myth represents the demand that the wilderness frontiers submit to his knowledge and control. The nature/animal/woman/dark Other complex is his teacher, but “his intention is always to use the acquired skill against the teachers, to kill or assert his dominance over them. The consummation of his hunting quest in the killing of the quarry confirms him in his new and higher character and gives him full possession of the powers of the wilderness.”16
The hunter always lived on the edges of civilization and maintained an ambivalent relationship to it, typically preferring solitude to society. He reflected the proposition implicit in much American literature that the valid rite of initiation for the individual in the New World was away from society, not into it,17 and he helped to set the heroic pattern still dominant in popular culture today, in which the man cannot be both a hero and a community leader, and so typically must leave the society he saves.18 Even though his own preferences ran to savagery over civilization, however, the hunter and the myth surrounding him implicitly served the expansion of the capitalist system by clearing the wilderness for settlement.19 An uneasy alliance existed, then, between the hunter/hero and the rulers of the growing society.
Many scholars see Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick as both the most eloquent example and ultimate critique of the frontier myth, particularly the hunter motif.20 Certainly, Jaws is transparently derivative of this national treasure, and although Jameson discounts the relevance of Moby-Dick to a properly ideological reading of the film,21 we see the similarity of the shark to the Leviathan not as a red herring inhibiting an ideological interpretation, but rather as a symbol facilitating recognition of the change occurring between the two epics from a tragic commentary on the white hunter myth to a victorious celebration of it. In Moby-Dick the archetypes of the hunter are extended to extremes. The lake that figures prominently in so many tales becomes the ocean. The prey is Leviathan. Ishmael’s initiation is the whaling voyage, which is both an outward and an inward journey. These archetypal expansions restore the original dream of the New World—of mystic islands in the sea—like the white whale in the ocean—that hold the possibility of godlike power, as well as death and damnation.22 The whale as archetypal Other is also the original blank continent, which lured the hunter/frontiersman with promises of riches and yet remained recalcitrant against his desire for complete domination.
Ahab sees the whale as a sentient being—a part of himself. To Starbuck’s cry, “To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous,” he replies:
Hark ye yet again,—the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me.23
As the spirit of nature or even godliness, he relates only to the dark side of his prey, the side that unmans him with its wound and refuses to be comprehended or conquered. He worships not the whale but the wound it gave him, and so he seeks vengeance rather than healing.24 As Leo Marx puts it, “Ignorance of the absolute, for Ahab, is a humiliation; he equates not knowing with being senselessly dismembered or imprisoned.”25 As the still-unsubdued New World, Moby Dick is partly masculine—the avatar of the nature goddess—but more centrally feminine, the anima, the opposite-sex aspect of Ahab’s mind. The choice confronting Ahab near the end is couched as a marriage metaphor; he repeatedly refuses Starbuck’s advice to return to his true (civilized) wife, seeking rather to be wedded to the whale by the binding cord of the harpoon line.26 Ahab and his prey are doubles, isolated rogues who have forsaken the society of their own kind.27 In his Promethean “Faustian compulsion to impose his will upon the cosmos,”28 Ahab wants not to assimilate the whale (New World/unconscious/nature/feminine) to his understanding, but to destroy it.
Furthermore, Ahab is not only a would-be hunter hero, but as the captain of a crew that includes a representative of almost every race, class, and personality in the American experiment, he is a social leader.29 The Pequod is a microcosm of American culture, and Ahab of its ruling classes. Ahab’s delusions of grandeur seem to be a consequence of both his relentless desire to subdue the Other and of the attempt to merge leader and hero in the same man. The prey destroys the hunter/leader, of course, and “Ahab’s Promethean-Satanic dreams and all the individuated existences so carefully accumulated in the foregoing chapters drop in a moment into the shapeless maw of the undifferentiating sea” (548). Thus, Moby-Dick ends in tragedy, the tragedy of the hunter who, in his attempt to murder the natural Other in order to control it, is decimated by the enemy whose death would make him a hero. The novel reveals the paradox at the center of the archetypal and ideological frontier project—that the individualistic hero cannot lead his society. And the story is prophetic of what the fledgling democracy will do to itself: in its attempt to “write” a capitalistic script onto the continent that was once pristine, it inscribes a drama of its own effacement.
In reconstructing the American version of the Indian hunter myth, we have argued that, with the loss of the shamanistic principle as an antidote to the excesses of the hunter/warrior, the hero replaced the mythic sacred marriage with destructive domination of the archetypal Other—a psychic merger of nature, the unsettled continent, the negative feminine, the nonwhite races, and the lower classes. An effective alliance existed between the antisocial hero and the society, such that the ideological project of conquering the frontier could be achieved. In Moby-Dick, the most obvious prototype for Jaws, the tragic consequences of this American myth are set forth in ultimate terms. In what follows, we analyze Jaws as a contemporary episode of the hunter myth which attempts to undo the bleak vision of Moby-Dick by forging a new hero capable of vanquishing the enemy. We set our reading as a counterpoint to those of Jameson and Caputi in order to illustrate the fruitfulness of an integrated archetypal/materialist perspective; we consider the meaning of the prey, the hunters, and the hunt itself within the overall narrative of the film and the cultural and archetypal myths of which it is a part.
Although the shark is undeniably horrifying just for what it is, we agree with Jameson and Caputi that popular artifacts display as much “content” as high culture, and that this particular fish is a symbol as well as a reality. More accurately, it is multiply symbolic; as Jameson notes, the diverse interpretations of the shark’s meaning reveal “its essentially polysemous function rather than any particular content attributable to it by this or that spectator.”30
Jameson goes on to say, however, that this very openness makes the shark a profoundly ideological symbol “insofar as it allows essentially social and historical anxieties to be folded back into apparently ‘natural’ ones, to be both expressed and recontained in what looks like a conflict with other forms of biological existence” (141). If the shark is privileged, he concludes, all subsequent analyses become variants of mythic criticism wherein the civilized world is reborn as the heroes slay the modern version of the Leviathan. To view the film in this fashion is to highlight its utopian dimension while neglecting its negative ideological character. In other words, Jameson sees the shark as ideological in its capacity to subsume all attributed meanings into its character as the mythic Leviathan, and thus to draw attention away from the real action, which occurs among the male characters, not in their killing of the beast. Placing the shark within its “archetypal” and cultural character as Leviathan, then, hides the ideological rhetoric of the film. In contrast to Jameson, we would argue that the movie’s namesake cannot be so easily dismissed—that its character has both social and archetypal dimensions, and that contextualizing it within the frontier hunter myth reveals rather than conceals its ideological import in the film.
Surely, one thing the shark represents for the people of Amity is a threat to its economy. Making its dramatic entrance, appropriately, right before the Fourth of July, the shark endangers the town’s biggest moneymaking weekend. It also creates dissension among the civic leaders, inducing them to bicker with each other over what to do about it. For the better part of the film, the economic threat is the only force motivating the city officials to cover up the shark’s presence, and then to attempt to destroy it. In fact, the shark is quite like the worst ills of the economic system whose birthday is being celebrated while it is disregarding the well-being of its citizens. As Hooper implores the mayor, who seems set against closing the beaches no matter how many people the shark attacks: “Mr. Vaughan, what we are dealing with here is a perfect engine, ahhhh, an eating machine. It’s really a miracle of evolution. All this machine does is swim and eat and make little sharks—and that’s all.” This beast is impersonal, seemingly lifeless, yet always moving—hollow, relentless, a dull death force motivated only by the irrepressible greed to maintain and reproduce itself. Herbert Gans captures well this part of its character when he remarks, “The shark is an instinct-driven ‘eating machine’ which can represent impersonal and relentless economic forces.”31 As the repository of the repressed inequalities of capitalism, the shark depicts a long-delayed and much hoped for Marxist expectation, for it is the internal contradictions of class economies that are predicted to destroy such systems from within. While it does not come from within the class structure of Amity, in both its mechanized relentlessness and its economic destructiveness, we may interpret the Great White as a symbol of repressed capitalist anxieties about the efficiency of the system in devouring its own.
If the Great White in Jaws is, in part, a carrier of the repressed hatred intensified by years of economic exploitation under capitalism, we can explain an important difference between this shark and its mythic predecessor, the white whale in Moby-Dick. As the symbol of the unconquered continent, the whale was a reclusive rogue who did not initiate the carnage it wreaked upon Ahab and his crew. Like the New World and its inhabitants, it attacked in response to being attacked. By contrast, as a symbol of the conquered continent, the shark erupts from its normal habitat to seek out the perpetrators of social injustice. Although also a rogue, the Great White, in an ironic transmutation of old Ahab, relentlessly revenges the “wound” perpetrated on the land.
But the shark is also more than an economic machine. To uncover another layer of its meaning, we entertain the possibility that the economic and the archetypal might be inextricably intertwined. A clue to this relationship can be found by extending one of Jameson’s strategies—exploring the disjunctions between Peter Benchley’s novel, Jaws, and the film, for which he also cowrote the screenplay. Jameson notes an important theme of class struggle in the book, in which Brody’s wife, Ellen, who misses her former upper-class status as one of Amity’s “summer people” from New York, seduces Hooper because he comes from and reminds her of the life she left behind when she married the local and working-class “islander,” Brody. This politically relevant struggle is absent from the film, Jameson points out, and in fact is transformed into an alliance between Hooper and Brody in their triumph over Leviathan.32
There is another transformation from the book to the film, however, that, when seen in the context of the hunter myth, expands our understanding of the shark. The entire middle third of the book highlights how Ellen Brody’s illicit desires foment the conflict between her lower-class husband and the aristocratic Hooper. Unbridled female sexuality, that is, brings the contradictions of the capitalist system to the surface and causes tension between the two men, who need to bond together in the killing of the shark. Although she is not the entirely free feminine nature-spirit of the traditional hunter myth (after all, she is living within and constrained by late capitalism), underneath her persona, the Ellen Brody of the book is closer to the untamed feminine spirit than she is to the dutiful and civilized wife of the myth. In the film, Ellen Brody has mysteriously lost the erotic edge that upsets the male bonding between the men of two classes. Like Rebecca Boone, her sexuality is tamed and contained within her marriage, and she is reified into a stereotypically dutiful wife and mother, upholder of civilized society.
The ability of feminine sexuality to disrupt the male, capitalistic system is not absent from the film, however, but displaced onto the shark, which then forms a gruesomely voracious contrast to the nurturing docility of Ellen Brody. Caputi reveals much of its archetypal force as a symbol of the fearsome feminine. She traces the early expression of intense male aggression against women to ancient myths that revealed a matriarchal social order which had succumbed to the advance of patriarchy.33 This transition was a violent one. “[M]ale dominance over women,” she writes, “forms a continuum of warfare historically evinced in legends of Amazon tribes, in worldwide traditions of male heroes slaying dragons, serpents, and monsters, and in the ritual rapings of the older Greek goddesses by the newly arrived gods.”34 The recurring theme in all these tales is of a frightening and terrible mother goddess locked in love/war with a young male protagonist who ultimately kills and dismembers her, thereby creating the new patriarchal order.
In mythology, Caputi points out, the Magna Mater archetype combines antithetical characteristics of protection, nurturing, caring, and fecundity with suffocation, devouring, denial, and death. The shark in Jaws “represents the primordial female and her most dreaded aspects.... The Terrible Mother of death and hell... re-emerges most dramatically from the oceanic depths as the dismembering, devouring, and undeniably awe-inspiring shark in Jaws” (307-308, 311). It does not negate her claim that the shark is referred to as “he” in both the novel and the film, for gender disguise, Caputi tells us, is a common practice among patriarchal myths, extending to the serpent in the Garden of Eden story as well as to the various dragons slain by the young knights of earlier times.
If the shark is the Terrible Mother aspect of the feminine archetype, then her mouth and the sea in which she dwells assume intensified mythic import. “Both mythically and iconographically, the mouth of the Great Mother is often identified with the vagina dentata” (312). It is the hero’s task, therefore, to smash the vaginal teeth so as to “prepare” the female orifice for male entry. “Patriarchal civilization can commence,” Caputi notes, “only after this act has been accomplished” (314). The sea is a mythic symbol of the unconscious, “the realm of thought and creativity which remains a wilderness, beyond the colonizing grasp of patriarchal socialization” (323). It must be explored as a prelude to psychic growth, and although such contact is never without peril, it is not necessarily fatal. But like the Mother, the sea receives a macabre twist in Jaws, for its more traditional image as the scene of fertility gives way to a site of dismemberment. Thus the water, place of spiritual communion between man and beast in the hunter myth, becomes a scene, as in Moby-Dick, of terror that invites murder, not marriage.
What, then, can we conclude from an interpretation of this prey that relies upon both history and archetype? In terms of the model of the psyche developed in the first part of this project, repressed energies from two different levels of the unconscious are raised and revealed. The appearance of the shark, that is, indicates that the collective unconscious has been activated as the archetype of the Terrible Mother erupts into the cultural psyche as the uncontrollable, “bad” feminine. Simultaneously, the shark embodies the latent repressed, undesirable aspects of the class-structured economy—that is, contents from the personal/cultural unconscious are unrepressed. In our view, it is the condensation of these two antithetical characteristics, and their displacement onto the shark, that imbues this monster with its horrific power, as the impersonal dehumanization of the class economy and the unleashed fury of the repressed Terrible Mother become consubstantial. These fused opposites are represented throughout the film in scenes in which cold and hot, inhuman and passionate, random and purposive are visually contiguous. For example, the images immediately following the opening credits are warm and sensual, the blurred yellows and oranges eventually revealing a beach picnic where attractive young people are roasting hot dogs. As the blonde soon-to-be-victim and a young man run toward the water where the shark swims yet unseen, the mood changes to cool, steely blue. Similarly, the sluggish, silver body of the fish often precedes views of its blood-smeared, jagged mouth. It strikes its victims with seemingly random, mechanical force at the same moment the ocean erupts in a torrid tempest of gore. This Leviathan is a fitting prey for the hunters, for it challenges both their manhood and their political system.
Seeing the shark as a diversion, Jameson turns toward the three men to reclaim the film’s ideological project. Hooper is “a technocratic whiz-kid... a good-natured creature of grants and foundations and scientific know-how.”35 Brody is a displaced New York policeman who moved to Amity to escape the hassle of the urban scene; he “introduces overtones and connotations of law and order, rather than yankee shrewdness [as in the book], and functions as a tv-police-show hero” (143). Quint is “the locus of old-fashioned private enterprise, of the individual entrepreneurship not merely of small business, but also of local business—hence the insistence on his salty Down-East typicality” (143). Quint also tells how he helped to deliver the Hiroshima bomb and subsequently survived a horrifying shark attack after the heavy cruiser, USS Indianapolis, was torpedoed. This latter connection Jameson links to the outmoded New Deal liberalism of the post-depression era (144). Jameson’s ideological focus enables him to differentiate the three men in terms of their roles in the capitalistic system, and such a distinction is an important prelude to our own analysis. But because he dismisses the shark and the nonideological slant he thinks it implies, he does not see the men in relationship to the feminine, or to their own masculinity.
Caputi’s archetypal focus alerts her to the men’s relationship to the shark. Heroic male action is needed, she says, to slay the fanged mother and calm her turbulent waters. She casts the men as participants in an ancient ritual in which they are prepared by immersion in water, sent out to battle the Terrible Mother, and initiated into manhood through the killing of the monster.36 But if we are to understand these men as hunters in relation to the prey, we must interpret their masculinity within the economic system in which they participate. As many feminists have pointed out, the attributes it takes to succeed in the social hierarchy are those also associated with masculinity.37 However, feminists, including Caputi, are likely to overlook how the system also undermines that which it requires of men. That is, at the same time that the system demands masculinity, it makes it difficult for them to achieve it. The result is that the class structure not only fractures the feminine, but also the masculine image, privileging one form and marginalizing all others. To uncover the hunters’ relationships to the system, we must differentiate their maleness. In what follows, we discuss each male character separately in relation to his social class, his own form of masculinity, and the feminine.
Quint. There is little question that Quint embodies the crusty know-how of small, local businesspeople in America. But from his singular soliloquy on the shark attack during a World War II campaign, it does not follow, as Jameson would have it, that he reflects the New Deal politics of classical liberalism. Certainly Quint is not entirely independent of the free enterprise system, but he sees himself as an outsider, as is underscored by his grating means of getting the attention of Amity’s movers and shakers by scratching his fingernails on the blackboard at their town meeting. Quint (“Quaint”) is disdainful of Hooper’s technology, preferring the outdated seaman’s tools and boat he has always used. He displays an icy contempt for the myriad of amateur fishermen who set out after the killer shark, muttering, “Wait’ll we get them silly bastards down on that rock pile, there’ll be some fun, they’ll wish their fathers never met their mothers when they start takin’ their bottoms out an’ slammin’ into them rocks, boy.” And he has no respect for the benefits of wealth. After showing Hooper that only the shark could have bitten through his wire fish line so effortlessly, Hooper objects, “Quint, that doesn’t prove a damn thing.” Quint fires back, “Well, it proves one thing, Mr. Hooper. It proves that you wealthy college boys don’t have the education enough to admit when you’re wrong.”
Quint’s masculinity is not in question. When he and Hooper compare scars aboard his boat, the Orca, it is evident that his came from a thresher shark, barroom brawls, and arm-wrestling contests. However, Quint’s masculinity seems to derive from his rejection of the system. Like other men in contemporary America who find themselves at the bottom of the social hierarchy, Quint avoids the inevitable emasculation of that position by divorcing himself from its source. When Brody tries to use the boat’s phone to call for help, Quint singled-mindedly smashes it with a baseball bat. “Real men,” apparently, need no protection from other men. He hates the shark, in part, because it represents the contradictions of the economic system that threatens him with impotence. Like the prey he wants to kill, and with whom he identifies probably more than he is aware, Quint is a rogue hunter, alienated from the system and from the companionship of his own kind.
Quint also has no love for women, and unlike Ahab, he makes no distinction between “good” and “bad.” He prefaces one of his scar stories by contextualizing the event in celebration of the “dee-meese of my third wife.” His toast to Brody and Hooper at his own house after he has been hired to kill the shark is, “Here’s to swimmin’ with bow-legged women.” After Ellen Brody tells her husband that Quint frightens her, he bequeaths her this parting limerick as his boat leaves the peer: “Here lies the body of Mary Lee/died at the age of one hundred and three./For Fifteen years she kept her virginity/not a bad record for this vicinity.” Most importantly, Quint passionately hates sharks, which we have claimed are associated here with the Terrible Mother. His antipathy seems to stem, like Ahab’s, from the “wound” he suffered during the war. One of his scars turns out to be a tattoo of the Indianapolis, to which he apparently submitted in memory of his companions who were eaten by sharks while they waited to be picked up. He had it removed, he tells Hooper and Brody, but the scar and the event it commemorated are still with him, as is his desire for vengeance which has been kept alive for thirty years.
Also like Ahab’s, Quint’s relish in killing sea monsters exceeds any economic advantage obtained in the hunt. He is determined to destroy the Great White, even after it is clear the advantage lies with the fish. His house overflows with shark skulls and bones. Lacking anything like the shamanistic principle of the Indians, or even the “code” of the hunter that kept classic frontier characters such as Deerslayer in James Fenimore Cooper’s novel or Michael in the contemporary The Deer Hunter from shedding blood needlessly, Quint is given to excess in bloodletting.38 The film would have been even clearer in this regard had it followed the book more closely. Obviously inspired by a similar scene in Moby-Dick,39 Benchley has Quint slit the belly of a small shark he has caught, just to show his disgusted mates how the dying creature will consume its own entrails as “food.”40 Benchley also paints Quint as the Sierra Club’s worst nightmare, polluting the sea at will (despite the fact it earns him his meager living), throwing beer cans and discarded fishing equipment into it with a total lack of concern. As Susan Griffin and others have pointed out, the tendency of men to exploit nature is related to anger at the feminine.41
Hooper. Hooper characterizes a reversal that has occurred in modern capitalism in the way the “haves” and the “have-nots” relate to nature. In the early American hunter myth, the disenfranchised—woman, slave, Indian, poor—were imagined as closer to the spirit of the wilderness than were the white male settlers. The would-be hero took from this Other the secrets of nature in order to triumph over it. In contemporary culture, those at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale are too reified by the technologies of capitalism to be close to nature. They are more likely to be “close to the machines,” which regulate the rhythms of their work and play. Often depending upon the exploitation of nature for their livelihood, they scoff at the well-off “liberal” concerned with saving the spotted owl, the whale, the salmon, or the redwoods. They are more like Quint than Hooper, who, as Benchley gets it right again, is angered when Quint pollutes the ocean with his trash.
It is, rather, the rich and/or famous who more often go “back to nature,” for it is they who can afford to buy their way out of a mechanized existence through expensive leisure activities, second homes in the country, and “vision quests” into the wilderness.42 As if attempting somehow to reclaim the hunter’s sacred marriage with nature, this new upper-class prototype is more likely to hunt animals with a camera than a gun, to study them than to kill them. When Ellen Brody opens a conversation with Hooper by encouraging him, “My husband tells me you... you’re in sharks,” Hooper responds:
Excuse me? Well, yes, I’ve never heard it put quite that way before, but yes, I am. I love sharks. Yeah—I love them, I love them. When I was twelve, my father got me this boat and I went fishing off Cape Cod, and I hooked a scuff, and as I was reeling it in I hooked a four-and-a-half foot baby thresher shark who proceeded to eat my boat—and my oar, hooks, and my new seat cushions, before turning an inboard into an outboard. Scared me to death—and I swam back to shore, and when I was on the beach I turned around and I actually saw my boat being taken apart and, ever since then—yes—I have been studying sharks.
Hooper has awe for the power of nature, not hatred. Contrary to Jameson’s claim that Hooper is funded by scientific grants, he tells Brody he is independently wealthy, and that he pays for his boat and hi-tech equipment himself. We see Hooper, then, not as a representative of multinational corporations, but as an analogue to Jacques Cousteau, John Denver, Robert Redford, Sting, and Ben Home (late of Twin Peaks). At the top of the hierarchy, he can afford to study rather than to hunt sharks, and perhaps, by being “environmentally aware,” to expunge any guilt he might have over the exploitation that inevitably accompanies the moneymaking of those who have handed him his privileges.
Like Quint, but for different reasons, Hooper’s masculinity is secure. He squelches Quint’s efforts to prove him an unworthy seaman by successfully tying a sheepshank knot. In the aforementioned scene of manly one-upmanship, Hooper matches scars with Quint arm for arm and leg for leg. His came from a moray eel that bit through his wet suit and a hull shark that scraped his leg when he was “taking samples.” (But note that, while demanding courage, these activities are ones of leisure, not necessity.) Cementing their shared bravado (and recalling Quint’s narrative ancestor, Ahab), they drink to their legs amid much hilarity. Hooper’s love of sharks, which we have claimed symbolizes both the feminine and the system, means that he has no problem with either. At the top of his class, he has no need to victimize women or nature to prove his virility, and remains vulnerable to their impact. His “biggest scar,” he says, topping Quint as he pulls apart his shirt, was inflicted by “Mary Ellen Moffett—she broke my heart.” Hooper’s form of masculinity, unlike Quint’s, is a reward for his material success within the system.
Brody. If Brody is a “tv-police-show-hero” representing law and order, as Jameson sees him, he certainly is not a very effective one. Until his anger at almost losing his son to the shark overcomes his meekness, every legal move he attempts is undercut by the mayor and the petty bureaucrats of Amity. Thus, after getting the local medical examiner to change his original report on the first victim’s cause of death, from “shark attack” to “boating accident,” Mayor Vaughan convinces a passive Brody to withdraw his order to close the beaches. Similarly, after the Kintner boy is killed, Brody weakly tells hostile city merchants he is now going to close the beaches. “Only for twenty-four hours,” shouts Vaughan. “I didn’t agree to that,” Brody objects—too quietly to do any good. Brody has left New York for the island because in Amity “one man can make a difference. In twenty-five years there’s never been a shooting or murder in this town.” But if his impotence in the face of the economic crisis the shark brings to town is any indication, Amity’s low crime rate owes little to Brody.
We see Brody as a middle-class public servant, an Everyman who is reified and emasculated by the very system whose laws he upholds. Brody’s predicament is that he does not fit into the masculine niche represented by either Quint, who has dropped out of the system, or Hooper, who resides effortlessly at the top. Everywhere he turns, Brody is confronted with his own lack of manliness. Not only is he painfully aware of his failure to stand up to his civic superiors, but he is humiliated by the irate Mrs. Kintner, whose boy fell victim to the shark. He is the recipient of Quint’s alternating condescension and paternal protection: “Come on, Chief, this ain’ no Boy Scout picnic—see you brought your rubbers,” Quint scoffs as Brody climbs aboard his boat. “Eh, Chiefie, next time you jus’ ask me what line ta pull, right?,” Quint says in response to Hooper’s rebuke of Brody for dumping the air tanks on the deck. And perhaps most tellingly, as Quint and Hooper compare scars, Brody is seen pathetically peering at his own stomach, finding nothing salient to display.
Of the three men, Brody is the only one whose masculinity is threatened; it makes sense, then, that, unlike Quint, who hates bad woman/nature, and Hooper, who loves it, Brody is afraid of it. He is married to a safe and “civilized” good wife, but he has no relationship to the spirit of the wild. He never goes into the water, never fishes or boats, and never leaves his car as it is being ferried between Amity and the mainland. His young sons are more at home on the water than he. Hooper has to get Brody drunk before he can con him into joining in a midnight run to find the shark. And after getting his first “up close and personal” look at the killer shark, Brody mumbles catatonically to Quint, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
A mythic hunt often involves the teaching of an initiate, who must learn the ways of the hunter in order to become an adult male within the social order. In one sense, we agree with Caputi, who reads the shark hunt in Jaws as an initiation-into-manhood ritual. But whereas she sees this as the ordeal of two puerile boy-men, taught by father Quint, we regard Brody as the adult who needs initiation because he has been emasculated by the system. Although Quint is the captain, in quite different ways, both he and Hooper are Brody’s guides. It is fitting that the two men seasoned by the sea, but uninvolved in local politics, assume leadership, for as Michael Osborn points out, “an identification with the sea would imply a rejection of landed laws and covenants, and an affiliation with a natural power strong enough to overcome human, artificial conventions.”43 The laws of Brody, the man of the land, are in need of the repair that only nature can provide. We get a clue that he will learn from Quint when he kisses his tearful “good wife” goodbye as he boards the boat to search for the “bad.” From Quint, he will learn to turn his fear into hate, to transform his civilized life through contact with the wild.
Psychic Inversion. For the first two-thirds of the film, Brody, Quint, and Hooper respond more to the economic than the archetypal projections in the fish, seeing it as a dumb, lifeless force. Hooper’s reference to the shark as a “perfect engine” is one such instance. Another occurs when Quint reminisces about the shark attack he survived in World War II:
Sometimes the shark, he looks right into you, right into your eyes. Y‘know a thing about a shark, he’s got lifeless eyes, black eyes like little dolls’ eyes. When he comes at you, he doesn’t seem to be livin’—until he bites ya—then those black eyes roll over white—an’ then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’ and the ocean turns red.44
Clearly, this is the shark as a dehumanizing social force, dismembering and devouring everything in its way as a means of maintaining itself.
But there is a crucial scene in which all this changes. The men are suffering the doldrums of the first day out hunting the shark with no luck. Hooper plays solitaire, Brody practices tying seaman’s knots, and Quint casually nibbles a cracker while fishing the chum-strewn water. The camera shifts nervously back and forth from a close-up of the reel on Quint’s rod to Brody’s struggles to “tie the knot.” As the camera dwells on the reel, it clicks slowly as the line is pulled out. Quint freezes. Another click is closely followed by several more. Quint carefully secures his position, strapping himself into his chair, and locking the rod to the strap. At the same instant the fish hits the line, sending it careening off the reel, Brody pushes the “male” end through the “female” loop, and, by so doing, visually anticipates the struggle between masculine and feminine which subsequently permeates the action. Several moments later, when the line goes slack, Quint secures the new meaning of the shark: “I dunno, Chief,” he worries to Brody, “if he’s very smart or very dumb. Jesus Ch ... he’s gone under! He’s gone under the boat, I think he’s gone under the boat! Yeah—it’s too easy. He’s a smart big fish. He’s gone under the boat!” From this moment on, the men sense, like Ahab, that they are dealing with a sentient being, a “reasoning thing” whose actions are guided by malevolent purpose.
The men test and retest the shark’s new status as intelligent prey. After it dives beneath their boat with three barrels attached to it, Hooper dumbfoundedly asks Quint, “You ever had one do this before?” “No,” comes the measured response. Near the end, when the shark is undeniably following the boat toward shore, a disbelieving Brody asks Hooper, “You ever had a Great White do this?” “No,” replies Hooper. And although the men still usually refer to it as “he,” both the cinematic point of view and the men seem to relate to it unconsciously as female, thereby validating the meaning of Brody’s earlier knot-tying episode. When Hooper catches his first glimpse of the twenty-five footer, he shouts with a smile, “Come ’ere come ’ere, darlin’ ... beautiful!” Precisely when the shark is first sighted, Quint answers a phone call from Ellen Brody, assuring and dispensing with her quickly, as if to indicate the “real” female has just sidled up to his boat. As Quint reveals the scar on his arm to be from the tattoo he will later disclose as commemorating the shark attack, Hooper quips between hysterical giggles, “Don’t tell me ... Mother!” And as Quint, in a last desperate effort, seems to be outrunning the shark to the safety of shallow water, he sings it the following ditty: “Farewell an’ adieu t’ ye fair Spanish ladies/Farewell an’ adieu you ladies of Spain/For we just received orders to sail back t’ Boston/An’/lo, n’er more shall we see ye again.” This tune becomes a frequent theme in the background music of the hunt.
We have argued that the shark is a vessel for the condensation and displacement of two forms of repression—the Terrible Mother and the undesirable aspects of the class-structured economy. But in the latter part of the film, these displaced contents get inverted, such that the economic one that was privileged by the main characters in the beginning recedes in favor of the archetypal and ultimately gendered projection.45 Thus, the symbol emerging from the lower level of the collective unconscious eventually subsumes within its archetypal domain the symbol of the economic contradictions. The economic displacement only recedes in importance and does not disappear, however; consequently, the more fundamental feminine/nature/Other projection then becomes a carrier for the economic. To put this another way, the Terrible Mother becomes the scapegoat for the crimes of the capitalistic system. Finally, the repressions that had been lifted from both layers of the unconscious are re-repressed. If the bad woman/shark is responsible, not only for depriving Brody of his masculinity, but also for wreaking havoc in the town’s economy, then she must be destroyed so that the patriarchal, class-structured system may be reaffirmed.
The Kill. Both Jameson and Caputi bypass the actual killing of the shark and focus upon the significance of who dies and who survives. But the manner in which the shark is killed also influences the meaning of Brody’s initiation, for it determines what he must learn in order to become a man in contemporary society.46
After the monster has irreparably damaged the boat and the men are in desperate straits, Hooper descends in his shark cage, hoping to jab a cyanide capsule into the shark’s mouth. The fish quickly makes mincemeat of the cage. Not knowing that Hooper has miraculously escaped and is hiding among the weeds at the bottom of the sea, Brody and Quint fear the worst as they hoist the mangled remains of the cage aboard the sinking Orca. In a prophetic revision of Hooper’s childhood bout with the thresher shark, the Great White begins its final assault by eating the boat—stern first. The unfortunate Quint becomes one more chunk of chum, leaving Brody to battle his prey alone. As the monster proceeds to reduce Quint’s boat to a sinking raft, Brody throws one of Hooper’s compressed air tanks into its mouth. Just as it seems he is about to go the way of Quint, Brody uses Quint’s rifle to shoot the air tank, and the Leviathan—not the vessel, as in Melville’s tale—explodes and falls back into the sea.
Quint has passed his antiquated, but still effective, M-1 to Brody, and with it his animosity for the archetypal Other. To be a “real man,” the film seems to say, Brody has to transform his fear of the Terrible Mother/unconscious into hatred. Standing atop the rapidly sinking mast, Brody shouts, “Smile, you sonofa ... !” as his bullet finally hits the air tank, and he breaks into uncharacteristic maniacal laughter. But he also needed Hooper’s hi-tech tools, which increasingly are the agencies of manliness that keep woman/nature repressed, and that a man must know how to wield to keep the system running.47 The prey is killed, then, by one who has been initiated into the ways of both the old and the new.
Death and Survival. Both Jameson and Caputi see Quint’s death as a sacrifice that enables the new partnership of Hooper and Brody. For Jameson, it signifies the end of individual entrepreneurship and New Deal liberalism that allows an alliance between multinational corporations and law and order. For Caputi, Quint is a father sacrifice to the Terrible Mother prior to the sons’ emergence as adults who will defend the patriarchy through the killing of the Mother/shark. We agree that, within the logic of the film, Quint needs to be sacrificed and that, at least once aboard the boat, he is a father figure who is replaced by the son. But if Quint were just outmoded, he would not need to be so brutally sacrificed; an impotent force is more likely to be ignored than killed. More than a relic of the past, we see Quint as dangerous to the system because his masculinity—itself a valued commodity—is derived through a rejection of the social order. He hunts the shark, not to save society, but to avenge his wound. His definition of self comes from outside the class structure and the rules of male bonding that dictate the protection of the good woman and the rejection of the bad.
The fact that Hooper, lover of sharks, survives in the film can in one sense be seen as a sign that a man can relate positively to the archetypal Other and still be a man. But Hooper’s love of the shark, a symbol of both woman/nature and the economic order, means that he loves both, and we have claimed that the reaffirmation of capitalism depends upon dominating woman/nature. How, then, as Jameson asks, can his survival be explained, especially given his death in the book, as well as the fact that only one survived in Moby-Dick? Aside from the fact that Richard Dreyfus’s characterization of him in the film is more likeable than the somber aristocrat portrayed in Benchley’s novel, making it difficult for a Hollywood film to kill him off, we see Hooper’s survival as ironic: his hi-tech assemblage of tools is necessary to the perpetuation of the system. Such technology has undoubtedly helped Hooper’s family to ascend to the top of the socioeconomic ladder, and yet it is this orientation that also separates Hooper’s ilk from nature and reifies people like Brody. Hooper is not himself a hero—he was hiding at the bottom of the ocean when Brody killed the shark—but his “partnership” with Brody implies that technology will be both the means to dominate nature and to get back to it.
Brody is the newly initiated hero of the film. He returns to lead Amity, having conquered his fear of the archetypal Other and of the emasculating economic order, killing both without rejecting the system he saves from the dual threat. Unlike Ishmael, who survived merely to tell his tragic story, things are looking up for Hooper and Brody as they swim back to shore on a raft they fashioned from the remains of Quint’s boat and buoyancy barrels:
| Brody: | “What day is this?” |
| Hooper: | “It’s Wednesday . . . uh, it’s Tuesday, I think.” |
| Brody: | “I think the tide’s with us.” |
| Hooper: | “Keep kickin’.” |
| Brody: | “I used to hate the water.” |
| Hooper: | “I can’t understand why.” |
Both Jameson’s materialistic perspective and Caputi’s archetypal approach result in a moral denunciation of Jaws, albeit for different reasons. For Jameson, the film is an example of what he will call in The Political Unconscious the “strategy of containment,” in which a narrative reveals political contradictions—in this case, the conflict of small business versus the multinational, technological corporation/law and order alliance—only to re-repress them into the political unconscious by resolving them symbolically within the story. Caputi decries the film’s misogynistic stance, whereby it kills the archetypal Mother in order to validate the patriarchy. In the first part of this project, we argued that a critic operating within a synthetic perspective should be able to do more than merely illustrate how texts perpetuate the maladies of society by offering the illusions of a cure. Rather, criticism has the responsibility to assist the culture in understanding itself, by pointing out how its discourses not only fuel injustices, but sometimes offer a revealing assessment of the culture or an outlook for the future. Although our ultimate judgment of Jaws is as negative as those of Jameson and Caputi, our rethinking of the film in light of our integrated perspective heads us to different reasons for this verdict, and thus to a more complex explanation of what Jaws tells us about ourselves as a culture.
We concur with Caputi that the film reaffirms patriarchy through the slaying of the feminine, but we also argue that a combined materialist/archetypal framework leads to a more specific understanding of the function of this kill. As we have explained, the hunting of the archetypal blend of woman/nature/unconscious/dark Other has long played a dominant role in the cultural myth of the frontiersman. What is more, this hunt has never been far removed from the ideological project of the frontier, which was to extend the boundaries of EuroAmerican civilization by conquering the wilderness and exterminating its inhabitants. In a psychological sense, the task of the hero is to defeat the Devouring Mother (threatening nature and its beasts) in order to differentiate his young ego from the unconscious which would otherwise assimilate him back into the maternal abyss. In the context of the frontier myth, the hunter hero is not content merely to separate his ego from the Mother, but he commits the classic sin of hubris; he attempts to ensure his own immortality against the disintegrating forces of nature and continues to despoil and rape the wilderness.48
In Jaws, however, the “kill” has taken on additional meaning. The film certainly repeats this familiar psychological pattern, but in scapegoating the feminine/nature archetype for the crimes of the system, these hunters add insult to injury. This rhetorical strategy is similar to that operating in The Manchurian Candidate (1963), in which the literal mother of the tragic hero is shown as the root cause of Communist infiltration and technological dehumanization within the American government.49 And, as the recent Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas debacle that concluded Judge Thomas’s confirmation hearings sadly reaffirms, the strategy of “blaming the victim” is alive and well today—not only in the movies, but in the nonfictional context of American public address. For many, this dramatic event underscored the social schism between the masculine and feminine that is deeply inscribed within the cultural psyche, and that needs to be unrepressed and transcended if cultural individuation is to be advanced.
We also agree that Jaws’s promotion of an alliance between Hooper and Brody at the expense of Quint (for Jameson) and the feminine (for Caputi) is morally questionable. However, we think that, in celebrating this victorious partnership as decisive, the film unwittingly pinpoints a major contradiction in American mythology. Following the pattern set in the old frontier myth, it is typical for the popular cultural hero of almost any hunt or battle, whether set in the frontier or not, to leave the society by himself in the last scene.50 The image of Brody and Hooper swimming back to shore together at the end of Jaws is a rather notable exception to this pattern, and it indicates that Brody, perhaps with the moral support of his pal Hooper, is returning to lead his town.
But what becomes of Brody after his moment in the sun? In his initiation, he learned two paths to manhood, that of Hooper, and that of Quint. Can he blend these into a viable persona as the Everyman Chief of Police, pillar of his small society? That is, can he translate his hard-earned heroism into leadership? We think not. Hooper’s form of masculinity—the “good hunter” who communes with nature rather than kills it—is now valorized by our society, but it is enabled by his position at the top of the social hierarchy. Although, on the one hand, this mode reclaims the shamanistic concern for being, it does so, on the other, by possessing material wealth. Since it is very unlikely that Brody will acquire such a privileged position, he cannot maintain his virility by becoming like Hooper. Quint’s way is closest to that of the traditional white hunter, and since this is the myth the movie celebrates, it would seem to advocate this option for Brody. But the primary ideological project of American culture today is to preserve the class structure, not to extend the frontier. Because the Quints of the world find their place at the bottom of this hierarchy rather than at the edges of it, they do not have the freedom of the traditional hunter, and they define themselves as oppositional to the system in order to protect their masculinity. They enact the hunt for their own preservation, not for that of the social order. Thus, their method of maintaining manliness, partly because of its strong appeal, is threatening to the establishment; Quint is a “bad hunter” who must ultimately be eliminated. Brody, then, cannot really lead his town by becoming like Quint. And, as a police chief, he does not enjoy the option of riding out of town like the traditional western hero.
Brody, we might speculate, will enjoy the benefits of heroism for a spell and may even be able to translate them briefly into genuine leadership. After the memory of the hunt for the Great White is gone, however, the economic structure Brody works within will still be there, and we predict that the Mayor Vaughans and other forces of greed will retain the capacity to reify and emasculate their leaders. Jaws, then, hints at a dilemma at the core of the American psyche: our heroes cannot be civic leaders. At least one avenue other than Hooper’s remains for those who would reaffirm their masculinity in service of the system—that of the warrior who returns from a victorious external war. But such heroes rarely make the transition to enduring political helmsmanship. Brody’s “choices,” then, seem to be two: live with his ineffectuality, or find another projection target for what is wrong with his life. “What becomes of the new self, once the initiatory hunt is over?” asks Slotkin. “If the good life is defined in terms of the hunter myth, there is only another hunt succeeding the first one.”51 In the destruction of the Pequod, Moby-Dick underscored the folly of the hunt as a murderous purge of the Other that Ahab fails to wrest under his control. Though Jaws celebrates the finality of this more successful hunt, we would suggest that there must be another.
At the outset of this essay, we claimed that our integrated critical framework would allow us to offer an interpretation of Jaws that is not available to critics operating from either a singularly ideological or archetypal approach. We can now summarize the central conclusions that emanate from this perspective. First, our notion of a cultural myth as a middle horizon that reinterprets archetype in historical terms enables us to see Jaws as a recent installment of the American hunter myth, in which gender-as-archetype and ideology-as-class-structure work together to promote the American project of conquering the frontier. Second, the model of the cultural psyche points toward seeing the shark neither as irrelevant to an ideological analysis nor as exclusively the symbol of the Terrible Mother archetype, but rather as a condensation of meanings, some indexing the repressed contradictions in class society and others linked more centrally to archetypal and cultural images of gender. Third, we view the three men not as tacitly previewing a new form of class power alliance nor solely as participants in an initiation ritual whose completion demands the murder of the feminine, but rather in terms of how the men’s forms of masculinity differentially link them to both their class and the feminine. Fourth, while we agree with Jameson and Caputi that Jaws is a morally suspect film, we reach that conclusion not solely on the basis of the class politics it seems to endorse nor because it demeans women, but because it scapegoats the feminine for the ills of class society. Finally, in addressing how the film reconstitutes the masculine gender, we question the tacit rhetorical advocacy that a powerless Everyman can be remasculinized through a fusion of heroic hatred with innocent wealth and efficiency.
We undertook this two-part project in the spirit of conversation. That is, in the first essay, we wanted to initiate a dialogue in which two kinds of rhetorical critics who have had little to say to each other might find common ground in a mutual concern for how cultural texts affect the health of the body politic. To that end, we combined ideological and archetypal concerns into a single, integrated framework which we hoped would alert the critic to the interaction between both domains of meaning in a given text. In the present analysis, we attempted to demonstrate the practical utility of our approach by examining the film Jaws. Obviously, our overall attempt to fuse two approaches with such different terministic screens and such diverse histories of scholarship is limited by its reliance upon one major spokesperson for each, and upon the analysis of a single cultural text. The vitality of this project depends upon a continuation of the conversation in both its theoretical and analytical forms.
Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, “Integrating Ideology and Archetype in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 77 (1991), 385-406.
Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979), 130-48.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981), 53–54.
Jane E. Caputi, “Jaws as Patriarchal Myth,” Journal of Popular Film 6 (1978), 305-26. Caputi does not introduce her analysis as explicitly Jungian. However, her approach is primarily archetypal; in addition to Jung and his associate Carl Kerenyi, she relies on Jungian analyst Erich Neumann and Jungian-oriented mythologist Joseph Campbell for her interpretations of the shark; her employment of Mircea Eliade and Robert Graves is also consistent with archetypal theory. Thus, whereas an interpretation of Jaws by Jung himself was obviously not available, Caputi’s treatment is consistent with a Jungian approach.
The relationship of gender to archetype is an open question among Jungian scholars. Although most find Jung’s differentiations of anima and animus (the contrasexual elements within the male and female psyches, recognizing the cultural biases operating in Jung’s own writing. See, for example, Demaris S. Wehr, Jung and Feminism: Liberating Archetypes (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987). Others recognize the existence of archetypes, but question whether gender differences are strictly archetypal in nature. Thus, Polly Young-Eisendrath and Florence Wiedemann understand gender to be founded on a basic archetype of difference, or the “Not-I,” or “the instinctive tendency to discriminate between self and not-self”; social categories of gender differences occur in typical themes across cultures, but they state that “these are not clearly enough established to allow the conclusion that there are specific archetypal differences between women and men,” in Female Authority: Empowering Women through Psychotherapy (New York: The Guilford Press, 1987), p. 40. See also Estella Lauter, Women as Mythmakers: Poetry and Visual Art by Twentieth-Century Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
Rushing and Frentz, “Integrating Ideology,” p. 399.
We employ the term “Indian” rather than the more accurate “Native American” in our discussion of the cultural myth because this is the term of currency within the myth itself.
Rushing and Frentz, “Integrating Ideology,” pp. 393-94, 400.
Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1960 (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1973), p. 49. Slotkin relies on Joseph Campbell’s descriptions of the hunter/warrior myth in The Masks of God, especially Vol. 1: Primitive Mythology and Vol. 4: Creative Mythology (New York: Viking, 1959-68).
See Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp. 345-50.
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, p. 554.
For a discussion of this motif in ancient myth, see Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess: A Way of Initiation for Women (Toronto: Inner City Books, 1981); in the frontier, see Janice Hocker Rushing, “Evolution of ‘The New Frontier’ in Alien and Aliens: Patriarchal Co-optation of the Feminine Archetype,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989), 1-24.
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, pp. 299-301.
See Tad Guzie and Noreen Monroe Guzie, “Masculine and Feminine Archetypes: A Complement to the Psychological Types,” Journal of Psychological Type 7 (1984), 3–11; Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1990).
Janice Hocker Rushing, “Frontierism and the Materialization of the Psyche: The Rhetoric of Innerspace,” The Southern Communication Journal 56 (1991), 243-56.
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, pp. 551, 558-59.
R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 115.
Janice Hocker Rushing, “The Rhetoric of the American Western Myth,” Communication Monographs 50 (1983), 14–32.
See Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800-1890 (Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1985) for a treatment of how the frontier myth, in both its political and literary forms, supported capitalist expansion.
Marx, The Machine in the Garden, pp. 277-319; Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, pp. 538-65.
Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” pp. 142-43.
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, pp. 539-40.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale, ed. Alfred Kazin (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin/Riverside, 1967), p. 139.
Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 293.
Marx, The Machine in the Garden, p. 293.
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, p. 546.
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, p. 545.
Marx, The Machine in the Garden. p. 293; see also Ishmael’s reference to Ahab’s Promethean character, Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 168.
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, p. 548.
Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” p. 141.
Herbert J. Gans, ‘“Jaws’: Urban Hero Saves Small Town,” Social Policy 6 (1976), 51.
Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” p. 143. Although Jameson claims the class struggle in the novel does not appear in the film, that is not entirely true. The tension is more diffuse, but it is clearly present between the wealthy vacationers to Amity (significantly, a Rolls-Royce drives onto the island for the ill-fated July fourth festivities) and the local merchants whose livelihood depends on the vacationers’ wealth.
Although most scholars agree that ancient cultures worshipped a female goddess, the existence of an actual Matriarchy, in which women exercised political and economic control over men, is still a contested issue. See, for example, Marja Gimbutas, The Goddess and Gods of Old Europe, 7000–3500 B.C. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), and The Language of the Goddess: Images and Symbols in Old Europe (New York: Van der Marck, 1987); Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Rian Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1988).
Caputi, “Jaws as Patriarchal Myth,” p. 306.
Jameson, “Reification and Utopia,” p. 143.
Caputi, “Jaws as Patriarchal Myth,” p. 315.
Anne Wilson Schaef, Women’s Reality: An Emerging Female System in a White Male Society (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).
For a discussion of this code in Cooper, see Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, pp. 500-501; for a treatment of The Deer Hunter as a frontier story, see John Hellmann, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); for a treatment of Michael’s obsession with “one shot” in The Deer Hunter, see Janice Hocker Rushing and Thomas S. Frentz, “‘The Deer Hunter’: Rhetoric of the Warrior,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980), 392–406.
Melville, Moby-Dick, p. 241.
Peter Benchley, Jaws (New York: Bantam Books, 1974), p. 234.
Susan Griffin, Women and Nature: The Roaring inside Her (New York: Harper and Row, 1978); see also, Kolodny, The Lay of the Land.
The general theme of the current so-called “Men’s Movement” seems largely inspired by the attempt to reclaim many of the aspects of Native American mythology, especially a spiritual relationship to nature and a focus on inner meaning. See Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (New York: Addition-Wesley, 1990). Thus far, however, participants in the movement seem to be primarily middle upper class men, especially those who work in the professional and corporate worlds; see Jerry Adler, Karen Springen, Daniel Glick, and Jeanne Gordon, “Drums, Sweat, and Tears,” Newsweek, 24 June 1991, pp. 46-51.
Michael Osborn, “The Evolution of the Archetypal Sea in Rhetoric and Poetic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1977), 357.
This scene precedes the one discussed just above in which Quint recounts his experience with the World War II shark attack. As such, one might question the inversion function we attribute to it since Quint seemingly experiences the economic entailments of sharks after this particular scene. However, it is Quint’s memory of sharks in general from almost twenty years earlier that guides his earlier monologue, and not his current experience with the Great White. Consequently, the sequencing of these two scenes does not affect our argument that this “reel episode” significantly realigns how the men perceive the shark.
This function was not discussed in the first essay because it does not seem to be one that is broadly generalizable to other texts.
Joseph Campbell notes, in Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), that the classic mythic hero must not only accomplish a series of heroic tasks, but also return to the society to share his “boon” with others.
Many feminists argue that technology is tied to the patriarchal oppression of women. See Lana Rakow, “Gendered Technology, Gendered Practice,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5 (1988), 57–70.
Janice Hocker Rushing, “Mythic Evolution of ‘The New Frontier’ in Mass Mediated Rhetoric,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 3 (1986), 265–96; “Evolution of ‘The New Frontier’ in Alien and Aliens.”
Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing, “The Technological Shadow in The Manchurian Candidate,” in Communication and the Culture of Technology, ed. Martin J. Medhurst, Alberto Gonzalez, and Tarla Rai Peterson (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1990), pp. 239-56.
Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence, The American Monomyth (Garden City, N. Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1977).
Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, p. 556.