Analysis of studio blockbusters is one of the most fruitful ways to perform the ideological analysis of Hollywood films. The phenomenal popularity of blockbusters demonstrates how they speak to the issues important to the people of a particular historical moment, not in didactic ways common to unsuccessful films (for example, Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1986)), but instead in subtle, re-assuring ways. Jaws is such a blockbuster, released in the summer of 1975, in the midst of three of the most significant political events of the American 1970s: the Watergate crisis, the American retreat from Vietnam, and the debates over the Women’s Movement.

Methodology

I will interrogate the polysemous nature of Jaws’s ideological position. Polysemy refers to a text which is multiply voiced, having the potential to activate multiple, and often contradictory, meanings. Jaws is polysemous in that its approach to each of its cultural intertexts is varied in political tone. It figures the liberal response to Watergate but proto-neo-conservative reactions to the Women’s Movement and the meanings of the Vietnam War.

Explanation of This Lecture's Subtitle

As Spielberg and the producers of Jaws were sorting through drafts of adaptations of Peter Benchley’s novel, they encountered a fellow who constantly referred to the shark as "the whale." After correcting the screenwriter three times, the producers fired him. Of course, the screenwriter, trained in the history of American storytelling, was latching onto Herman Melville’s Moby Dick as the precedent for Benchley’s story. Literary scholars have spent monograph after monograph interrogating the allegorical meaning of the whale in Melville’s novel. A similar argument has raged about the meaning of the whale in John Huston’s 1956 film adaptation of Moby Dick: Does the whale represent communism, the hydrogen bomb, Joseph McCarthy? My project here is to argue that the shark in Jaws is equally polysemous as an allegorical figure. For example, within the feminist reading frame, the shark could be a phallic, violent male presence which devours women, or it could just as well be a vengeful, castrating mother, intent on severing Quint at the groin with her vagina indentata-like teeth, for his murders of her fish kin.

1. Jaws as a Watergate film

The film articulates traditional Hollywood "liberal" values, by presenting governmental representatives, purportedly serving in the public interest, who are easily bought off by the business community, who only serve in the interest of profit.

CLIP #1: Jaws: the mayor of Amity Island refuses to close the beaches

A cover-up at the behest of the government; shades of Chappaquidick

Yet, the film backs away from a radical critique of this corrupt government-business relationship, revealing that not all public officials are corrupt. Our middle-class hero, also the Chief of Police, serves in the public interest and is above moral reproach. Thus, even in the wake of Nixon’s corrupt government, once the bad eggs are removed from power, the rest of the country can return to business as usual (to wit, Jerry Ford).

We are made to identify with Chief Brody throughout the film, so that when the mother of the dead boy slaps him, we know that he has been wronged by her.

CLIP #2: Jaws: the mother slaps Chief Brody

Brody really wanted to close the beaches, he is a good man, it was the corrupt others who would not let him.

In this way, Jaws backs away from the radical critique of the systemic nature of corrupt power, as articulated in such left-liberal films as Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975).

CLIP #3: Three Days of the Condor: end

Not even the great liberal hope, The New York Times, can rescue America from the corrupt CIA.

2. Jaws as an Anti-feminist film

Most histories of the slasher film position Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978) as the first film of this contemporary sub-genre of the horror film. However, the groundwork for this misogynist cycle of films was being laid at least 4 years prior in Jaws.

Why are slasher films misogynist? They are seen by some feminist critics as such because they enact the punishment of sexually-active teenage girls. That is, the girl who acts in the interest of her own sexual pleasure (i.e., acts on the discourse presented by women’s liberation with respect to female sexuality) is killed by the monster.

CLIP #4: Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978): Michael kills his sister after she has sex

Jaws, then, is a proto-slasher film. The catalyst of the plot--the murder of the skinny-dipping woman--predicts the misogynist narrative strategy of the slasher film.

CLIP #5: Jaws: the sexually-active woman is killed by the shark

For its first third, up until the 1st turning point, Jaws’ narrative continues in slasher film fashion, as the monster kills off one character after another. Yet, at the first turning point, Jaws abandons the one narrative principle of the slasher film that feminist critic Carol Clover has used to rescue the slasher film for feminist ends: in slasher films, the final girl kills the monster. That is, a woman possesses the final agency in a slasher film, a power usually denied women in patriarchal cinema. Jaws, on the other hand, banishes women from the narrative as the men go off to do manly battle with the shark.

CLIP #6: Jaws: 1st turning point

The film, in fact, answers its opening catalyst sequence here, finalizing the abandonment of women as viable characters. In the opening, a woman runs into the water. At the 1st turning point, Mrs. Brodie answers her journey by running away from the water. At this point, the only woman character left is potentially the shark, who is a vengeful, castrating presence. Thus, the film completes its misogynist trajectory, fully representing an array of stereotypes: the sexually-active whore, the passive waiting woman, and the vengeful femme fatale.

Why does Jaws abandon its women characters?  I think it’s because the generic tradition that Jaws settles into for its second 2/3rds is the war combat film, a genre noted for its lack of women who aren’t prostitutes.

What kind of war film is Jaws?  Jaws is a film which attempts to recover from the American loss in Vietnam by finding a way to win the war, allegorically. It does so by returning to the last "good" war, that is, a war that America won: World War II.

Jaws features the character types that organize the World War II combat film

• The grizzled sergeant who knows everything about war and hates young recruits because they might get him killed (Quint: Robert Shaw).
• The lieutenant who doesn’t know squat about war but knows lots about technology, usually communications technology which is quickly decimated by the enemy (Hooper: Richard Dreyfus).
• The middle-class recruit, with whom we are meant to identify (Charlie Sheen in Platoon, for example) (Brody: Roy Scheider).

How, then, is Jaws a film about the Vietnam War?  The nature of the American military experience in Vietnam is allegorized by Jaws: the safe location for our troops is on the beach, the dangerous location is the jungle. In Jaws, the water is represented as a jungle.

CLIP #7: Jaws: credit sequence with water as jungle

Jaws is certainly not the only or even the first Hollywood film to import the traditions of the World War II film to refigure Vietnam as a just and winnable war.

CLIP #8: The Green Berets (John Wayne, 1968): end

Here, John Wayne’s star intertext as hero of World War II films and Westerns is used to justify the American involvement in Vietnam.

How does Jaws represent an American victory in this allegorical Vietnam?  The film proposes to have used the atomic bomb in Vietnam as a way of winning at any cost.

CLIP #9: Jaws: Quint tells the USS Indianapolis story

Quint offers the genesis for Brody’s idea for killing the shark. In World War II, Japan was defeated when Quint’s boat delivered the atomic bomb. In this latest war in Asia, the American strategy for victory should have been followed again, the film seems to imply. {In both the Korean and Vietnam wars, select military leaders frighteningly argued for the use of tactical nuclear weapons}. Thus, Brody immolates the shark, that largely unseen demonic presence (the Vietcong, as represented in the American public imagination), by immolating him with his own version of Quint’s bomb.

CLIP #10: Jaws: Brody blows up the shark

This victory represents a recuperation of what Timothy Corrigan, in A Cinema Without Walls, calls "a crisis in masculinity" precipitated by the American loss in Vietnam. Corrigan argues that the national loss in Vietnam is understood in 1970s cinema via a crisis in traditional masculinity on the local, domestic level. That is, American men in 1970s films became "weak" in the traditional sense. This crisis is raised in the Indianapolis scene in Jaws. While Quint and Hooper share their scars of manhood, all Chief Brody can do is look at his appendix scar. With the banishment of women, the film becomes about Chief Brody--the audience’s surrogate--enduring, surviving, and winning his ritual of manhood, the destruction of the castrating female shark. Thus, Brody proves his own manhood, and allegorically the American manhood, as he defeats the shark, and figuratively fights and wins the war in Vietnam as it should have been fought and won.

1980s Reaganite films would return to this message of fighting and winning the Vietnam War as it should have been done originally.

CLIP #11: Rambo: First Blood Part II (George Cosmatos, 1985): "do we get to win?"

But none do so as sublimely as the first Hollywood blockbuster, Jaws. The success of a film like Jaws goes a long way to help explain the rise of Reaganite neo-conservatism.

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This page was last updated on May 30, 2001

Questions or Comments?  Please phone me at (406) 994-6403 or send e-mail to:  metz@montana.edu

Walter Metz, Department of Media and Theatre Arts, Montana State University--Bozeman