Fredric Jameson is perhaps the premier American Marxist literary and cultural critic of the last half century. Let’s take a look at what he said about Jaws in 1979, four years after the film appeared.
Fredric Jameson, Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture, Social Text, No. 1, Winter, 1979, pp, 130-148, https://www.jstor.org/stable/466409.
The first half of the article consists of apparatus building: How are we to properly discuss popular culture in capitalist society? Then he considers two movies, Jaws, and The Godfather.
For the most part I want to set theory aside. But I’ll quote one brief passage (p. 140):
The only authentic cultural production today has seemed to be that which can draw on the collective experience of marginal pockets of the social life of the world system: black literature and blues, British working-class rock, women’s literature, gay literature, the roman québécois, the literature of the Third World; and this production is possible to the degree to which these forms of collective life or collective solidarity have not yet fully penetrated by the market and by the commodity system.
Jameson isn’t going to be looking to Jaws for “authentic cultural production.”
He begins with a quick précis of various interpretations which have been offered for the shark (p. 142):
Thus critics from Gore Vidal and Pravda all the way to Stephen Heath have tended to emphasize the problem of the shark itself and what it “represents”: such speculation ranges from the psychoanalytic to historic anxieties about the Other that menaces American society-whether it be the Communist conspiracy or the Third World-and even to internal fears about the unreality of daily life in American today, and in particular the haunting and unmentionable persistence of the organic–of birth, copulation, and death-which the cellophane society of consumer capitalism desperately recontains in hospitals and old age homes, and sanitizes by means of a whole strategy of linguistic euphemisms which enlarge the older, purely sexual ones: on this view, the Nantucket beaches “represent” consumer society itself, with its glossy and commodified images of gratification, and its scandalous and fragile, ever suppressed, sense of its own possible mortality.
Which of these is valid? Interpretive multiplicity emerged as a major problem for literary criticism in the mid-1960s, was investigated for a decade or two, and was then dropped, without resolution. Jameson takes a clever approach to this particular case of interpretive multiplicity:
Now none of these readings can be said to be wrong or aberrant, but their very multiplicity suggests that the vocation of the symbol–the killer shark–lies less in any single message or meaning than in its very capacity to absorb and organize all of these quite distinct anxieties together. As a symbolic vehicle, then, the shark must be understood in terms of its essentially polysemous function rather than any particular content attributable to it by this or that spectator. Yet it is precisely this polysemousness which is profoundly ideological, 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.
Whatever he is doing, he is not taking the shark to be just that, a shark.
Interpretive emphasis on the shark, indeed, tends to drive all these quite varied readings in the direction of myth criticism, where the shark is naturally enough taken to be the most recent embodiment of Leviathan, so that the struggle with it effortlessly folds back into one of the fundamental paradigms or archetypes of Professor Frye's storehouse of myth. To rewrite the film in these terms is thus to emphasize what I will shortly call its Utopian dimension, that is, its ritual celebration of the renewal of the social order and its salvation, not merely from divine wrath, but also from unworthy leadership.
But to put it this way is to begin to shift our attention from the shark itself to the emergence of the hero-or heroes–whose mythic task it is to rid the civilized world of the archetypal monster. This is, however, precisely the issue-the nature and the specification of the “mythic” hero–about which the discrepancies between the film and the novel have something instructive to tell us.
The account I’ve recently offered, Crisis in Shark City: A Girardian reading of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, would seem to be Utopian, though I emphasize, not the hero, but the sacrificial victim.
In his interpretation Jameson compares the movie to the book on which it based (by Peter Benchley) and notes a number of interesting differences. In the book both Sheriff Brody and his wife are natives of Amity, though the wife is upper class, rather than being new arrivals. Hooper is more important in the novel and has an affair with the Chief’s wife, one that emphasizes class tensions, tensions that are minimized in the movie. Finally, Quint is not so important in the novel as he is in the film.
Jameson’s interpretation turns on his reading of those three men. Concerning Quint he observes (pp. 143-144):
Quint’s determinations in the film seem to be of two kinds: first, unlike the bureaucracies of law enforcement and science-&-technology (Brody and Hooper), but also in distinction to the corrupt island Mayor with his tourist investments and big business interests, Quint is defined as 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. Meanwhile–¬but this feature is also a new addition to the very schematic treatment of the figure of Quint in the novel–he also strongly associates himself with a now distant American past by way of his otherwise gratuitous reminiscences about World War II and the campaign in the Pacific. We are thus authorized to read the death of Quint in the film as the two-fold symbolic destruction of an older America–the America of small business and individual private enterprise of a now outmoded kind, but also the America of the New Deal and the crusade against Nazism, the older America of the depression and the war and of the heyday of classical liberalism.
Note that Jameson seems blind to the insight Quint’s WWII story gives into his character. While he has previously acknowledged that Quint is an Ahab-like figure, Quint’s character and motivation are of no interest to him.
Moreover, he treats Quint, not so much as an individual, but as a representative of a class of people, local small business America in the 1930s and 1940s, “the heyday of classical liberalism.” Do people somehow register that when watching the film? Jameson is writing as a critic who is, when writing, at a distance from the film itself. He is able to think about it in a way that is impossible when you are immersed in the film as it unfolds. Everything you see and hear in the moment implies things you don’t see and hear. Yes, Quint is old enough to have been alive during the final years of Roosevelt’s “New Deal” Presidency, but does that impress itself on you in any way while watching the film, or as you chat with friends about it a day or two later? Interpretive criticism, not just Marxist criticism, but any kind, is like that.
Jameson continues with Hooper and Brody (p. 144):
Now the content of the partnership between Hooper and Brody projected by the film may be specified socially and politically, as the allegory of an alliance between the forces of law-and-order and the new technocracy of the multinational corporations: an alliance which must be cemented, not merely by its fantasized triumph over the ill-defined menace of the shark itself, but above all by the indispensable precondition of the effacement of the more traditional image of an older America which must be eliminated from historical consciousness and social memory before the new power system takes its place.
Note the word “allegory.” Characters are not treated as individuals, but as figures for populations and institutions. Jameson continues (p. 144):
This operation may continue to be read in terms of mythic archetypes if one likes, but then in that case it is a Utopian and ritual vision which is also a whole–and very alarming–political and social program. It touches on present-day social contradictions and anxieties only to use them for its new task of ideological resolution, symbolically urging us to bury the older populisms and to respond to an image of political partnership which projects a whole new strategy of legitimation; and it effectively displaces the class antagonisms between rich and poor which persist in consumer society (and in the novel from which the film was adapted) by substituting for them a new and spurious kind of fraternity in which the viewer rejoices without understanding that he or she is excluded from it.
What happened to the actual conflict that actually emerged in the town? Do we shut down the beaches to protect people’s lives or do we protect the town’s economic life? But then Jameson seems to have characterized that life in terms of “the corrupt island Mayor with his tourist investments and big business interests.” Yes, the Mayor certainly has his interests, but I don’t see big business anywhere, unless you think of motels and gift shops as big business, which they surely are not. And just who does Jameson think the audience is that they are excluded from the ”fraternity” of “law-and-order and the new technocracy of the multinational corporations”? Does he think the audience consists entirely of Quint’s friends, acquaintances and relatives?
Jameson concludes (p. 144):
Jaws is therefore an excellent example, not merely of ideological manipulation, but also of the way in which genuine social and historical content must be first tapped and given some initial expression if it is subsequently to be the object of successful manipulation and containment. [...] At this point in the argument, then, the hypothesis is that the works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well; they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be manipulated.
Color me skeptical, but not completely dismissive. As I have indicated above, I am bothered that he does not pay more attention to what he calls the Utopian aspect of the film, in part because it really isn’t what he seems to think it is. Jameson had remarked (p. 142):
To rewrite the film in these terms is thus to emphasize what I will shortly call its Utopian dimension, that is, its ritual celebration of the renewal of the social order and its salvation, not merely from divine wrath, but also from unworthy leadership.
As I remarked in my original post, that is not how the film ends. There is no ritual celebration of renewal. The idea that there should be such a celebration, however, seems to exert a strong pull on the imagination.
Consider the opening to Michael Walker’s essay, “Steven Spielberg and the Rhetoric of an Ending”:
The opening of Christopher Booker’s monumental book, The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories, refers to the ending of Jaws: “There is a tremendous climactic fight, with much severing of limbs and threshing about under water, until at last the shark is slain. The community comes together in universal jubilation. The great threat has been lifted. Life in Amity can begin again” (2004, 1). Unfortunately, that is not what the film shows.
Indeed, it is not. But the pull of the standard template is so strong that it is easy to imagine it when it is not in fact there. The film ends with two men wading ashore as the end credits roll. Of course, as Jameson points out, one of those men can be said to represent law-and-order while the other represents science-&-technology. I’m just not sure that will carry the weight Jameson asks it to.
I need to think about it some more.
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[1] Michael Walker, “Steven Spielberg and the Rhetoric of an Ending,” in Nigel Morris, Ed. A Companion to Steven Spielberg, First Edition: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2017, pp. 137-158.
More posts about Jaws.
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