Jaws: misogyny and violence

Dan Rubey’s reading of Jaws is the most interesting one that I’ve read:

Dan Rubey, The Jaws in the mirror, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, no. 10-11, 1976, 2004 pp. 20-23, https://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC10-11folder/JawsRubey.html

His thesis:

In JAWS the shark reflects a disguised hatred of women and the preoccupation of our society with sadistic sexuality, a view of business as predatory and irresponsible in human terms, and a fear of retribution for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The film resolves these issues and fears by externalizing them from the protagonists and solving them in a macho fantasy, fear-and-bravery ending which denies any possibility of concerted social action, excludes women as weak and ineffectual, and erases the past and its guilts.

Though he doesn’t use the word, Rubey is in effect arguing that, in the second part of the film (set in Amity), the shark, but also Quint, are used as scapegoats for phenomena on display in the first part (in the hunt).

His argument about the movie’s presentation of business is relatively straight-forward. Yes, business interests in Amity are presented negatively, but the focus is in individuals, not “rather than the system itself, blaming them for being weak rather than examining the pressures placed on them by the system or making alternate forms of behavior possible.”

The argument about misogyny is more interesting. The movie opens with the death of Crissie Watkins, “a young, long haired woman swimming naked at night, a ‘skinny dipping adolescent, in Time’s contemptuous and hostile phrase.”

The shark’s-eye camera view watches from below as the woman swims acrobatically above. Then it rises up under her toward her crotch as she scissorkicks vertically in the water. The camera quickly switches to the surface of the water. Here the close up of the woman’s agonized face as the unseen shark tears her body under the water is a frightening imitation of orgasm, the cliché of the equivalence of pleasure and pain used almost from the first portrayal of female orgasm in film.

This juxtaposition of images, the erotic swimming sequence and the shark attack, appeals to a sadism and hatred of women which must be assumed to be a part of the consciousness of the film’s audience. However, the sadism is disguised [...] so that it can be enjoyed by people who would not admit to having sadistic impulses or tastes.

While Watkins is the only female victim, her death sets up the entire film.

Rubey goes on to point out that

Quint is also a woman hater. His dislike for women is treated as a natural counterpart of the manliness which makes him an effective shark killer. [...] The song Quint sings several times, “Farewell and adieu, you fair Spanish ladies,” portrays women as whores to be left behind as men sail off to the serious business of war and death. The men compare scars at night on the boat in a warmly treated scene of male camaraderie. Quint shows one he got arm wrestling in a bar celebrating his “third wife’s demise.” Hooper shows his own woman-related mark, an invisible scar on his chest placed there by “Mary Ellen Moffitt: she broke my heart.” The scene is amusing, and Hooper’s line is very funny in context. But the humor and distancing technique make Quint carry the weight of the film’s aggression against women in the same way that he carries the macho fantasy, externalizing then from Brody and Hooper (and thus from the audience), and finally denying them totally when he is killed by the shark.

That is a very telling set of observations.

And then we have the “fear of retribution for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.” Rubey starts with an interesting historical aside, noting that “interest of people in the United States in sharks, documented by countless magazine articles, books, and films, dates from WWII and the encounters with sharks of downed airmen and sailors in tropical waters.” He then goes on to ask, but why the Indianapolis and the bomb?

But it would be naive to claim that no meaning is inherent in the juxtaposition in the film, that Spielberg or Benchley or Gottlieb (or whoever added it to the screenplay) simply picked the Indianapolis sinking to motivate Quint because it was the worst shark disaster he knew, and that reference to the bombing was included only because it was part of the story. Even if a meaning for the connection was not consciously worked out in the writer’s mind, it is the nature of film as a narrative medium to suggest that causal relationships exist between narratively related acts, and such relationships create the film’s meaning.

The last is interesting and requires a bit more discussion than I am prepared to give it at the moment. Here’s what Rubey is suggesting:

On the most simplistically causal level then, the men of the Indianapolis were killed by the sharks in retribution for the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and the deaths of 70,000 Japanese civilians. But if this is punishment, who is the punisher? The only possible answer is something like Nature, natural forces anthropomorphized, punishing the savagery of man with the savagery of the sharks.

I’ll raise the same issue I raised with Jameson, just how is that “meaning” registered by the audience? That’s certainly not something I consciously thought about (until I read Rubey’s article). To be sure I am just one person, but I would be surprised if many people consciously thought the sharks were attacking the sailors from the Indianapolis as punishment for dropping Little Boy on Hiroshima. Did we think about it unconsciously? How would any of us know?

(Moreover, there is a problem with chronology as the Indianapolis was sunk on July 30, 1945 and the bomb was dropped on August 6. Were the sharks prophetic?)

No, the idea that the sharks were (symbolically) punishing the sailors seems to me a stretch. Rubey is on stronger ground when he notes:

JAWS does treat the great white shark as something larger and more mysterious than a hungry fish. It develops from a mindless eating-machine into a malevolent force—intelligent, vengeful, unnaturally powerful, perhaps thousands of years old.

Moreover:

On another level of interpretation, the shark represents our own voracity and savagery in war. Chennault’s Flying Tigers painted teeth on the front of their planes, and some of the helicopters in HEARTS AND MINDS displayed similar markings. The shark is an image of the viciousness of our own society in war. There’s a savagery we want to identify with when it seems justified in moral terms as protection of ourselves or others. But we also want to deny and externalize it when there is no such justification because we have unconscious fears of retribution in kind. In this context, the shark represents fears of retribution for the bombing of Hiroshima (and perhaps for our role in Vietnam as well) growing out of feelings of guilt and doubts about the justifiability of our actions. Here it is not a question of being punished for our actions by some superhuman agency. Rather, it is that we have somehow made ourselves vulnerable to the savagery of nature by our own participation in that savagery.

Yes, he sticks “fears of retribution” into the middle, but I like how he comes out of it in that last sentence.

The shark kills Quint, removing his violence, his misogyny as well, and Brody kills the shark, removing its violence. Brody and Hooper are now free to swim ashore on a deserted beach.

Rubey doesn’t stop here, and I recommend the rest of his analysis to you, but this is sufficient for my purposes. 

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More posts about Jaws.