Intellectual creativity, humans-in-the-loop, and AI: Part 2, Interpreting Jaws

This is the second post in my series, Intellectual creativity, humans-in-the-loop, and AI. The first post set the theme: On the boundaries of cognition in humans and machines. The idea is simple: These days LLM-based AIs are given specific tasks, which I’m thinking of as imposing a boundary on the underlying model within which a solution is to be found/generated. The most interesting situation, though, is one where there is no boundary set. Rather, the task is to discover a problem one can work on, which I’m thinking of as imposing a boundary in the space. Here’s my first case, creating a Girardian interpretation of Steve Spielberg’s Jaws.

I’m using that as an example because, a) I did my own interpretation a couple of years ago (February 28 2022), so I remember the process, and b) more recently I had ChatGPT interpret the film (December 5, 2022), though, to be honest, comparing two performances is a distant second to my recollection of my own procress. What’s important about ChatGPT’s performance is that I gave it both the “text” (broadly understood) to interpret, and the conceptual lens though which to make the interpretation, the ideas of René Girard. ChatGPT had a specific task to perform. By contrast, I had no intention of interpreting Jaws when I decided to watch it a couple of years ago. How and why did I decide to interpret Jaws? That’s the issue.

* * * * *

By way of background, I’m trained as a literary critic and I have a long-standing interest in films. I all but majored in literature as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins in the 1970s, where I heard Girard lecture on mimetic desire and sacrifice, his central ideas. I also attended two university-sponsored film series while I was there, one on foreign films and the other on American films. I got a Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo in the 1970s, where I also attended a number of film series.

Thus interpreting texts is my business. I’ve done a lot of it in the last half-century. It’s something my mind has been organized to do. And, while films and novels, not to mention plays and poems, are quite different kinds of texts, to a first approximation (which is sufficient to my purpose here), they are the same kind of activity. You need to identify two things, a suitable text and “a way in.”

What makes a text suitable? The fact that you have a way in. What do I mean by a way in? An “angle,” a point of entry, somewhere to apply some idea to the text in a fruitful way. I tend to draw my ideas from psychology, psychoanalytic and cognitive, and structuralism and semiotics. In this case, I chose the ideas of René Girard, though it might be more accurate to say that those ideas chose me (& Jaws). In any event, though I’ve been acquainted with Girard since the 1960s, this is the only time I’ve used his ideas in interpreting a text.

Watching Jaws

But, as I’ve said, I had no such thing in mind when I decided to watch Jaws back in 2021. I hadn’t seen it when it first came out (in 1975), but I knew it was an important film, the first so-called blockbuster. I decided it was time to watch.

I should note however, that as interpreting texts is my business, I’m always of the lookout for interesting texts. I have a series of media notes on New Savanna that dates back for May of 2010, almost the beginning of the blog, though the first post explicitly labeled as a media note didn’t go up until June of 2019. Any movie or TV program I watch could end up in a media note, and the occasional YouTube video as well. Media notes are, for the most part, quick dirty posts that I write up in an hour or so, sometimes less, occasionally a bit more. They’re not meant to be anything more. I never know when I watch something whether or not it will end up in a media note. And, as proved to be the case with Jaws, every once in a while I become really interested in something.

Keeping that in mind as deep background, I cued Jaws up on Netflix and watched it. Afterward I took a look at the Wikipedia entry. I do this for most of the movies I stream online, and for many of the TV series as well. I think of it as ‘calibration.’ I want to review the film and get a rough sense of what’s been said about the film. Jaws is such an important film that the entry was relatively large. There were a lot of comments by critics offering various interpretations of what the shark stood for, but the one I found most interesting was that by Fredrick Jamison, a well-known Marxist literary critic. He asserted it mean anything, everything, and nothing (in particular). I liked that.

But what I latched on to were the remarks about the sequels. There were three of them, all of them inferior to the original. I decided to take a look.

Now, I’m interested. I didn’t have anything in mind. But I like watching movies, so why not?

I like Jaws 2, but could see that it wasn’t quite as good as the original. I was unable to finish watching the other two sequels. Jaws 4 was especially wretched. In this process I’m sure I read the Wikipedia entries for those movies as well and re-read the entry for Jaws.

How did I arrive at those judgments? At this point I don’t recall, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t use any specific process. It was just intuitive judgements. How do we make those?

At this point I asked myself: So Jaws 2 is inferior to Jaws, why? I don’t know how long it took me to arrive at this conclusion, but here it is: the original film was tighter? What does that mean? Well, it falls into two parts. The first part is about 3/5ths of the film and takes place in Amity, with many people doing this that and the other. It’s pretty chaotic. The second part involves only four characters, three humans and the shark. It’s much more tightly focused. There’s no such division in Jaws 2, which involves many people through the entire film. The action is more diffuse.

The game is afoot

OK, so what makes the original one tick? I spent a good deal of time thinking about the three-way interaction between the shark, and two factions of townspeople. One faction wanted to close the beaches until the shark about been found and killed (or had been known to leave). The other faction wanted to keep the beaches open so that the town could rake in tourist dollars, which were central to the local economy. In the end, though, the town decided that they had to close the beaches and hire someone to kill the shark.

That brings us to the second part of the film. The town hired Quint, a disagreeable old shark hunter who agreed to do the job for $10,000. Sheriff Brody and Matt Hooper, a marine biologist and shark expert, went with him. I settled on one question: Why did Quint have to die? Why didn’t sheriff or Hooper die?

I’ve not yet decided to write an article, but I sense that I’m on to something.

At this point I’m thinking about story-telling conventions. Jaws tells a certain kind of story. In this kind of story the monster, or whatever, must be killed, otherwise there’s no point. Well, the shark was killed, but why Quint as well? One possible answer: Well, we can’t make it too easy. Someone has to die more or less on general principle. Why not Quint? After all, he’s a rather unpleasant character.

How does Quint’s death affect the ending? That is to say, in this kind of story we generally have a celebratory ending when the heroes return home after the monster was vanquished. Jaws didn’t have such an ending.

I’m in!

And then it hit me: Quint’s the sacrificial victim! Not the shark. Bingo! Girard, mimetic desire, sacrifice.

Crudely put, as best as I can remember, that’s how it happened. All these things came together at once. I had my way in, my point of conceptual departure. This is when I decided to write about the movie.

I made notes, read more about the movie, read some Girard, and consulted with my friend David Porush, who had studied with Girard in graduate school (a half century ago). I still had a lot of work to do, but it was all fairly tightly focused. I remember, for example, spending a fair amount of time tracking down scripts so that I could get the exact wording for Quint’s speech about being on the USS Indianapolis in WWII when the ship was sunk and lost half the crew to sharks. I wasn’t able to find a version with the actual words on the screen, so I ended up having to transcribe it myself. Why did I do that? Because it was about sharks and Quint, that’s why. Details. Interpretations are built on lots of details. Another detail: Sheriff Brody telling the mayor:

This summer’s had it. Next summer’s had it. You’re the mayor of Shark City. You wanted to keep the beaches open. What happens when the town finds out about that?

“Shark City,” and important detail. And so forth.

And that, more or less, is how I ended up writing about Jaws. I watched the film in 2021. I may have watched Jaws 2 at that time as well. I forget what brought me back to the film a year later. Maybe nothing in particular. I was just curious. I watched it again and curiosity became interest and interest grew into a written article over the course of two or three weeks.

I made my first New Savanna post about Jaws on Feb. 9, 2022. It was a long one, almost 5K words. My 3 Quarks Daily article appeared on February 28.

What kind of a process is that?

I don’t know. But I’m pretty sure it depends on my education, interests, and decades of experience. What’s interesting is that it wasn’t until near the end of the process, after I’d watched Jaws three or perhaps four times, and Jaws 2 at least two times, and after I’d done quite a bit of thinking about the films, only then did I come up with a specific interpretive approach. The thinking that led to that was based on my knowledge of stories and conventions and my experience in reasoning about them.

It took all that to, in effect, place a boundary in my mind, a boundary within which I could conduct the detailed reasoning needed to produce a written interpretation. How do we produce an AI that’s capable to producing such a boundary? When I prompted ChatGPT to using Girard’s ideas to interpret Jaws, I gave it that boundary. I could then work within that bounded region to produce an interpretation, and even then I had to nudge it along here and there.

Roughly speaking, then, we have two very different intellectual processes. The first starts with me going about my everyday life, which includes watching streaming movies. I chose Jaws to fill in a gap in my knowledge of popular movies. Once I’d read the Wikipedia entry and decided, hey! I should watch the sequels, then I began an open-ended process with no specific endpoint. But I knew, from my years of experience, that one can learn things about texts by comparing them with other texts. That’s what I set out do to.

And so I began exploring a largish and loosely defined area of my “mindspace.” That exploration ended when I focused on Quint and Girard’s ideas about mimetic desire and sacrifice popped into my mind. I want to emphasize that point. Girard’s ideas came to me unbidden. I was not, for example, looking through my “inventory” of interpretive strategies, looking for a way in. If I’d done that, then I might not have looked at Girard at all, for I’ve never made such use of his ideas. Rather, they’re just some ideas that stuck in my mind from my undergraduate days.

This first process took place over a period that started in sometime in 2021 when I watched the film, probably three quarters of a way though (I don’t know the exact date) and lasted until late January of 2022. I certainly wasn’t thinking about the film during that whole time, but I may well have thought about it now and then until January, 2022, when I went at it. I took me, say, a week or two of work, every day or every other day, before Girard hit me. That’s when the second process took over. It was faster and more intense.

Once my mind had presented me with the connection between Girard and Quint, though, I knew that I had something worth working on. At that point I began a different kind of process, one focused on refining my interpretive hypothesis and gathering evidence for it. I went looking for Girardian materials on the web – my library is in storage, so the two books I own, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, and Violence and the Sacred, weren’t available. I read general articles, an interview or two, and some short interpretive pieces. That’s when I went looking for scripts of Jaws and articles about it. And that’s when I consulted with my old friend, David.

The contention in this series is that the current crop of AIs can undertake this second kind of process, but not the first. I don’t even know how we’d create a machine that can undergo the process. How do we endow a machine with the ability to make its way in the world, and then set it free to do that?

The Birth of "Jaws"

Brian Raftery, 50 Years Ago, ‘Jaws’ Hit Bookstores, Capturing the Angst of a Generation, NYTimes, July 12, 2024. The article opens:

In 1973, the first chapter of an unpublished novel was photocopied and passed around the Manhattan offices of Doubleday & Co. with a note. “Read this,” it dared, “without reading the rest of the book.”

Those who accepted the challenge were treated to a swift-moving tale of terror, one that begins with a young woman taking a postcoital dip in the waters off Long Island. As her lover dozes on the beach, she’s ravaged by a great white shark.

“The great conical head struck her like a locomotive, knocking her up out of the water,” the passage read. “The jaws snapped shut around her torso, crushing bones and flesh and organs into a jelly.”

Tom Congdon, an editor at Doubleday, had circulated the bloody, soapy excerpt to drum up excitement for his latest project: a thriller about a massive fish stalking a small island town, written by a young author named Peter Benchley.

Congdon’s gambit worked. No one who read the opening could put the novel down. All it needed was a grabby title. Benchley had spent months kicking around potential names (“Dark White”? “The Edge of Gloom”?). Finally, just hours before deadline, he found it.

“Jaws,” he wrote on the manuscript’s cover page.

When it was released in early 1974, Benchley’s novel kicked off a feeding frenzy in the publishing industry — and in Hollywood. “Jaws” spent months on the best-seller lists, turned Benchley from an unknown to a literary celebrity and, of course, became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s blockbusting 1975 film adaptation.

While most readers were drawn to the book’s shark-centric story line, “Jaws” rode multiple mid-1970s cultural waves: It was also a novel about a frayed marriage, a financially iffy town and a corrupt local government — released at a time of skyrocketing divorce rates, mass unemployment and a presidential scandal.

At a time of change and uncertainty, “Jaws” functioned as an allegory for whatever scared or angered the reader.

That is, it functioned as a vehicle for giving form to free-floating anxiety.

As you may know, I've written a bit about Spielberg's movie version of the story, some time with assistance from ChatGPT. As this paragraph from the article indicates, the movie cut some important elements from the story:

Amity itself is on the brink of ruin, having barely survived the early ’70s recession. Also in decline: Brody’s marriage to his class-conscious wife, Ellen, who has a sexually charged encounter with Hooper at a surf-and-turf spot. Then there’s the town’s mayor, Larry Vaughn, who’s so deeply indebted to the mob, he’ll do whatever it takes to keep the beaches open — even if it means people die.

There's much more at the link.

Game Theory, Jaws, and Girard, with an assist from Lévi-Strauss: A quick sketch

While thinking about the next installment in my series on great literary critics (which has become another inquiry into the nature of literary criticism), I found myself thinking about that essay in which I offered a Girardian interpretation of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. I smelled an opportunity: Why not add Lévi-Strauss and game theory into the mix?

Lévi-Strauss is obvious since I’d already discussed him in the series, but game theory? How’d I get there? I don’t really know, it just happened.

But I had taken a look at some of Girard’s remarks about Much Ado About Nothing in his Shakespeare book, A Theater of Envy, where he talks of Beatrice and Benedick as playing a game with one another (p. 81):

Outside observers shrug their shoulders and declare the entire game frivolous. It certainly is, but our condescension itself may well be part of a strategic positioning that is always going on, “just in case” the game might have to be played. The game, perhaps, has already begun. We always try to convince others that we ourselves never play this kind of game, but these disclaimers are necessarily ambiguous; they resemble too much the moves that we could have to make if we were already playing the game.

Girard does not invoke game theory, and games of course are common enough. We talk about them all the time. Back in 1964 Eric Bern had a bestseller with Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships, though it's not a game theory book, not in the sense I have in mind in this essay. But Girard was also concerned about who knows what, with what things are public knowledge, and what things are secret, with how public knowledge confirms individual beliefs, those are all matters of importance in game theory. Moreover and after all, game theory is an abstraction over games in the common-sense use of the term and in a way very similar to the way Turing’s account of computation is an abstraction over an activity otherwise performed by people using pencils and paper.

But just how and why I came to think of game theory is not all that important; what’s important is that I thought of it. Once there I thought of the work of Michael Chwe, a brilliant political scientist who published a very interesting book I’d read some years ago, Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination, and Common Knowledge (2001) and has more recently published Jane Austen, Game Theorist (2013), which I’ve not read. But I have skimmed through his article, Rational Choice and the Humanities Excerpts and Folktales (2009); Chwe uses the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick as one of this examples. Moreover, if you search on “game theory and literature,” you get hits. The conjunction of game theory and literature is thus not so strange, not so unexplored, as one might think. If literature, why not film?

Since I’ve already done a Girardian analysis of Spielberg’s Jaws, why not revisit the film with game theory in mind? That’s what the rest of this post is about. I don’t actually conduct a game theoretical account. Game theory is a technical discipline, but this is not technical. It is, however, informed by game theory, but it is not technical. It is a long though, so take your time.

Caveat: If you’re looking for Girard and Lévi-Strauss, they’re here. But the essay is mostly about games. You can find more Girard in my original essay on Jaws, linked above.

The larger game, Nature and Culture

We can think of the larger game, the one that frames the whole story, as being between Nature and Culture, to use terms favored by Claude Lévi-Strauss. The shark is Nature’s primary agent in this larger game and the town of Amity is Culture’s primary agent. That, I know, is a bit of a strange way of putting things. Setting aside the fact that Amity is a town of some thousands of people (with many more to arrive during the summer tourist season), why not think of it as a game between Amity and The Shark?

I fear I could, and probably should, go on about that at some length. But this is not the place. If we were talk about a Real-Life situation, that’s what I would do. But we’re not, we’re talking about a fiction. I assume that people watching movies do so with the same neurobehavioral equipment they use to negotiate their way in Real-Life, but fictions have affordances that Real-Life lacks. For one thing, fictions are always complete, in some sense, and one’s life continues beyond and outside of one’s vicarious experiences (to borrow a term from William Flesch, Comeuppance) of the fiction. Real-Life is not like that. When you’re dead, that’s the end.

Beyond that, one (generally, often) has a knowledge of the events in the fictional world denied to characters within that world. Take the beginning of Jaws. A young woman goes skinny dipping in the ocean at night. Her body is found next day, washed up on the beach. No one in Amity knows what happened to her. Sheriff Brody sets out to find out. The audience, however, does know what happened. She was killed by a shark. It’s not that we saw the shark; we didn’t. But, we see her struggle and we know it had to be a shark. How do we know that? Because THAT’s what the film is about. It's called Jaws and the posters featured an image of a shark with its mouth open, displaying all those sharp teeth.

THAT changes the valence of everything we see and our experience of it. It gives those events an emblematic resonance that similar events are not likely to have in reality, unless, of course, we so interpret them. I’m using the terms Nature and Culture to capture that resonance. The shark is Nature’s agent and Amity is Culture’s agent. 

* * * * *

“Wait a minute, hold on there. You can’t do that. In what sense is Nature playing a game against Culture?”

“Good question. In the first place we would certainly treat the shark as a game player, with preferences and so forth.”

“But that’s not what you’re talking about, no?”

“Right. Stay with me here. The people of Amity, that is, Team Culture, doesn’t know what’s going on. It makes perfect sense to think of Amity as playing against an unknown opponent, trying to guess its moves, influence its behavior, and make moves of its own. That's what people do.”

“OK. I can see that. And that’s how an audience would see it.”

“Right. Then we might try modeling Team Nature, that is, the shark, with a view to provoking Team Culture into sending out some people to hunt the shark in its own territory.”

“Hmmm. I have to think about that. You’re saying that unknown and unseen force wants to lure people on...”

“Yes. That gives a teleological cast to the affair.”

“And of course there IS teleology involved. The film-maker, Steven Spielberger is up to something, yes?”

“Yes.”

Together: “Curiouser and curiouser.”

The Amity game, Team Safety vs. Team Livelihood

But the town of Amity does not act as a unitary entity. It acts through the actions of individuals. And those individuals are not in agreement about how to respond to the dead body. We can thing of the town as divided into two teams, each headed by an official. Team Safety is headed by Sheriff Brody, an official hired by the city. He wants to close the beach until whateveritis has been dealt with. Team Livelihood is headed by the mayor, an elected official who is also Brody’s boss. The mayor wants to keep the beaches open. Why? Amity is a tourist town and, as such, much of its income derives from the summer tourist trade. Closing the beach even for a couple of days could damage the tourist trade badly.

That’s the first choice that has to be made, with Team Safety and Team Livelihood opposed to one another. Team Safety’s thinking is dominated by the short-term risk of people being killed. Team Livelihood’s thinking is dominated by mid-term and long-term risk of economic disaster, which could lead to bankruptcies, job loss, depopulation, and perhaps even some people dying (e.g. suicide, can’t afford medical care). The decision is made difficult by the fact that the town doesn’t know what’s going on and so the teams have no way of reliably estimating the effects of their actions. Culture, if you will, doesn’t know what Nature is up to.

At this point we might think about drawing up the payoff matrix that is a standard feature of game theoretic analysis. What actions are available and what value do the players put on those actions? But I’m going to leave that as an exercise for the reader who is more skilled in these matters than I am. Once that happens, we can then revise the matrix as Team Safety learns more about what Nature is up to (by bringing in a shark expert) and as Team Livelihood has to deal with the consequences of Nature’s next action: the shark kills a young boy without, however, revealing itself.

The mayor calls a town meeting. Of course Sheriff Brody is there. The discussion reveals that the townspeople are divided between Team Safety and Team Livelihood. The mother of the slain boy puts up a $3000 bounty on the shark; adjusted for inflation, that’s roughly $17K in current dollars. Sitting in the back of the room, shark-hunter Quint gains the room’s attention by scratching his fingernails on a blackboard. He’s says that it’s foolish to send a bunch of amateurs after such a deadly shark, but he’ll hunt it down for $10,000. That’s roughly $57,000 in current dollars. That’s the salary, including benefits, of a mid-level municipal employee. A small town like Amity is not likely to have that amount floating around in some contingency fund where it can be casually accessed. The beach is closed and the hunt begins. Score one for Team Livelihood.

The town’s streets are jammed with would-be shark hunters attempting to get to the harbor to hunt down the shark. Yes, they want the money, but they also want the glory of winning the tournament. That’s is where Girardian thinking comes into play. Though I’ve not been able to track it down, I remember hearing a deputy say that he couldn’t tell the locals from the foreigners, a clear sign of mimetic confusion.

Now we have the mimetic payoff. Some fisherman kill a shark. They’re posing on the dock for a photograph with the shark. The photo will go national. The mayor insists that he be in the photo. They open the beaches once again. Team Livelihood scores again.

Team Safety is not convinced. Brody’s expert, Matt Hooper, has examined the shark and said it’s not large enough to have been the one that killed the girl and the boy. They need to autopsy the shark to be sure. The mayor (Team Livelihood) is not convinced. No autopsy. Brody and Hooper sneak out at night and Hooper does the autopsy; no remains of the boy. It’s not the shark.

Hooper and Brody board Hooper’s boat later that night and look for the shark. They don’t find it, but they do discover a sunken fishing boat and the dead body of a local fisherman, Ben Gardner, who’d gone after the shark earlier that day. Hooper pulls a shark’s tooth stuck in the boat’s hull, but looses it. The next day they are unable to convince the mayor that Gardner had been killed by the shark. Team Safety and Team Livelihood are now operating on the basis of very different information.

Team Livelihood’s concern about economic viability may well be influencing how they interpret the evidence. Spielberg certainly believes us to believe so. But that’s distinct from the fact the we in the audience are certain that a shark is involved, though we’ve not yet seen it. While the fictional game between Safety and Livelihood is being played out within the film, the game between Nature and Culture exists only in the minds of the audience. And there, maybe it's not so much Nature vs. Culture as Things We Can’t Control vs. Things We Can. That seems to be a semantic issue.

Fourth of July comes, the beaches are jammed with tourists. The shark kills again. Score one for Safety. Brody is angry; the mayor is chagrinned. The mayor agrees to hire Quint for that $10K that’s going to put a dent in his budget.

Sacred resonance

At this point Safety and Livelihood are in agreement on how to proceed. We are now roughly 3/5s of the way through the film. The rest of the film takes place at sea and involves four characters, Quint, Brody, Hooper, and the shark. Quint and the shark end up dead; Brody and Hooper make it back to shore. But, and this is an important point, we don’t see them re-enter the town. We see them swimming for shore while hanging on to a piece of Quint’s now-destroyed boat. Then, as the end-credits role, we seem then walking from the ocean onto a deserted beach.

This, after all, is a standard (mythic) story. The town is threatened by a monster. A hero kills the monster and then returns to town, triumphant. There’s a big celebration. Everyone’s happy. For all we know that may have happened in Amity. But Spielberg doesn’t show that; it’s not part of the story he’s telling. That story’s up to fans – and there IS fanfic for Jaws, though I’ve not looked into it.

ChatGPT offers several interpretations of Jaws and gets bogged down in a question about a tune Quint referenced

I’ve had two posts in which ChatGPT offers Girardian interpretations of Jaws. Can it do other kinds of interpretations? Let’s find out. But is there any doubt that it can?

This session took place on January 4, 2023. I opened by asking ChatGPT, once again, about Girard. Since we’ve already seen it do that, I’m going to drop those (I got two). Here, without comment, I offer a Marxist, a psychoanalytic, and a feminist interpretation.

How about a Marxist interpretation?

A Marxist interpretation of Jaws might focus on the ways in which the film reflects and reinforces capitalist ideologies and values.

One aspect of the film that could be analyzed from a Marxist perspective is the character of Quint, who is the owner of a fishing boat and is motivated by profit and personal gain. Quint sees the shark as a threat to his livelihood and is willing to take extreme measures to hunt and kill it, even though it puts him and others in danger. This can be seen as a metaphor for the way in which capitalism encourages individuals to prioritize their own self-interest over the well-being of the community and the natural world.

Another aspect of the film that could be analyzed from a Marxist perspective is the way in which the shark attacks are portrayed as a threat to the tourist industry, which is a major source of revenue for the town. This emphasis on economic stability and the importance of maintaining a positive image to attract tourists aligns with capitalist values that prioritize economic growth and consumerism.

It is also worth noting that Jaws was released at a time when Marxist theory and critiques of capitalism were becoming more influential and widely discussed, and it is possible that the film was influenced by these ideas in some way. However, it is also important to consider that the film was primarily intended as a thriller and entertainment, and may not have been consciously designed to promote or critique any particular ideology.

How about a psychoanalytic interpretation?

A psychoanalytic interpretation of Jaws might focus on the ways in which the film explores the unconscious mind and the psychological motivations of the characters.

One aspect of the film that could be analyzed from a psychoanalytic perspective is the character of Chief Brody, who is portrayed as a man who is struggling to come to terms with his own fears and anxieties. Throughout the film, Brody is shown to be afraid of the water, which could be seen as a metaphor for his unconscious fears and insecurities. His confrontation with the shark and eventual triumph over it can be interpreted as a metaphor for his own personal growth and development as he overcomes his fears and learns to face his anxieties head-on.

Another aspect of the film that could be analyzed from a psychoanalytic perspective is the character of the shark itself, which could be seen as a manifestation of the characters' unconscious desires and fears. The shark's relentless pursuit of its prey and its seemingly arbitrary attacks could be interpreted as a symbol of the unpredictable and sometimes destructive forces that lurk within the human psyche.

Overall, Jaws is a film that explores themes of fear, anxiety, and the ways in which individuals confront and overcome their own personal demons. These themes can be analyzed from a psychoanalytic perspective, which focuses on the unconscious mind and the psychological motivations of the characters.

How about a feminist interpretation?

A feminist interpretation of Jaws might focus on the ways in which the film portrays and reinforces gender roles and stereotypes, as well as the representation and agency of female characters.

One aspect of the film that could be analyzed from a feminist perspective is the character of Ellen Brody, the wife of Chief Brody. Ellen is portrayed as a typical 1970s housewife, with her primary role being to support and care for her husband and children. She is not involved in the shark-hunting efforts and is largely relegated to the background, with little agency or autonomy of her own. This portrayal of Ellen as a passive and supportive wife could be seen as reinforcing traditional gender roles and expectations for women.

Another aspect of the film that could be analyzed from a feminist perspective is the lack of prominent female characters. The film's central characters are all men, with the exception of Ellen, who has a limited role. This lack of representation and agency for women in the film could be seen as a reflection of the broader societal issues related to gender inequality.

Overall, Jaws is a film that, like many other works from its time period, reflects and reinforces traditional gender roles and stereotypes. A feminist interpretation of the film could analyze these representations and consider their broader implications and consequences.

In view of the violence against women in the film, I decided to explore further. Notice the ChatGPT gets confused about a song. I also note that I did quite a bit of checking “behind the scenes” in this session just to figure out what was up with that song.

Who was the shark’s first victim? Does that indicate anything about the film’s attitudes toward women? What did Quint think about women – remember the song he sang about bow-legged women?

In Jaws, the shark's first victim is a young woman named Chrissie Watkins, who is attacked and killed while skinny dipping in the ocean. It is possible to interpret this event as symbolizing the dangers and risks that women face, particularly in relation to their sexuality and the male gaze.

As for Quint's attitudes toward women, it is worth noting that the song he sings, "Show Me the Way to Go Home," contains lyrics that are derogatory and objectifying toward women. The lyrics, which refer to "bow-legged women" and "knock-kneed men," could be seen as reflecting Quint's objectification and disrespect of women. However, it is important to note that the song is not written or performed by Quint himself, but rather is a well-known standard that is included in the film's score. It is possible that the inclusion of the song is meant to be humorous or ironic, rather than a sincere expression of Quint's views.

But “Show me the way to go home” is different from the bow-legged women song. Quint and Brody and Hooper sang “Show me the way to go home” on the boat after dinner. They were drunk and “bonding.”

I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. You are correct that "Show Me the Way to Go Home" is a different song from the one that contains the lyrics about "bow-legged women."

The song "Show Me the Way to Go Home" is a well-known standard that is featured in the film's score and is sung by Chief Brody, Hooper, and Quint while they are on the boat after having dinner and drinking together. The lyrics of the song, which express a desire to return home and the confusion and disorientation of being lost, could be seen as reflecting the characters' current situation and their desire to return to a sense of safety and stability.

The song with the lyrics about "bow-legged women" is not sung by any of the characters in the film, but rather is heard as part of the film's score during a montage sequence that shows the shark hunting and attacking its prey. The lyrics of this song, which objectify and degrade women, could be seen as reflecting the predatory and ruthless nature of the shark and its relationship to its prey.

Second Time Around: Jaws and Girard

I decided to take another look at Jaws through Girard by ChatGPT. The first time out, in 3 Quarks Daily, I was careful and systematic, prompting ChatGPT separately about Jaws and about Girard before asking it to use Girard as a vehicle for interpreting Jaws – BTW, and FWIW, I hate the “interpretive lens” trope. This time I decided to go straight at it, asking ChatGPT to interpret Jaws through Girard in my first prompt.

Stephen Spielberg is an important film-maker. Jaws is one of his most important films because it is generally considered to be the first blockbuster. Rene Girard remains an important thinker. Can you use Girard’s ideas mimetic desire and sacrifice to analyze Jaws?

Rene Girard's concept of mimetic desire refers to the way in which human desires are often modeled on the desires of others. According to Girard, this process of imitation leads to conflict and competition as people strive to attain the same objects or status as those they desire.

Girard's concept of sacrifice, on the other hand, refers to the way in which societies use ritualized forms of violence to deflect conflict and restore social harmony. In many societies, this takes the form of animal or human sacrifice, in which a scapegoat is chosen to bear the blame for social tensions and is then punished or killed in order to expiate the guilt of the community.

In the film Jaws, the character of the shark could potentially be seen as a scapegoat, as it becomes the focus of the community's fear and anger, and ultimately must be destroyed in order to restore a sense of safety and security to the community. In this way, the film could be seen as exploring themes of mimetic desire and sacrifice in the context of a small beach community threatened by a perceived external threat.

The first two paragraphs, on Girard, are OK. But the application to Jaws is thin, saying nothing specific about mimetic desire. I asked for another response to the prompt:

Yes, it is possible to analyze the film "Jaws" using Rene Girard's concepts of mimetic desire and sacrifice.

Mimetic desire refers to the idea that we often desire things because we see others wanting them. In the case of "Jaws," the townspeople's desire to go to the beach and swim is influenced by the desire of others to do the same. This mimetic desire creates a sense of competition and rivalry, as people try to outdo each other in their enjoyment of the beach.

Girard's concept of sacrifice, on the other hand, refers to the idea that violence and conflict can be resolved through the ritual sacrifice of a scapegoat. In "Jaws," the townspeople's fear of the shark leads them to scapegoat the animal, and they come together to hunt and kill it as a way of restoring peace and order to the community. The shark becomes the sacrificial victim that allows the townspeople to resolve their conflicts and move on.

Overall, Girard's ideas of mimetic desire and sacrifice can be used to analyze the themes of competition, desire, and violence in "Jaws."

This is much better. And notice how ChatGPT organizes its response. First we have Girard on mimetic desire along with an application to the film. Then we get sacrifice followed immediately by an application to the film. This is different from its first response.

Let’s spin the wheel again:

Certainly! Rene Girard's ideas of mimetic desire and sacrifice can be used to analyze the film Jaws in a number of ways.

Mimetic desire, as described by Girard, refers to the way in which human desire is often shaped and influenced by the desires of others. In Jaws, this idea is evident in the way that the characters of Chief Martin Brody and Matt Hooper initially resist the idea of a killer shark, but eventually become fixated on the idea and begin to pursue it with a sense of competitive desire. This mimetic desire is further exacerbated by the presence of Quint, a professional shark hunter who serves as a model for the other characters' desire to catch the shark.

The idea of sacrifice is also central to Girard's thought and can also be seen in the film Jaws. In the film, the character of Quint ultimately sacrifices himself in order to save the others and kill the shark. This act of sacrifice serves to restore order to the community and bring an end to the chaos caused by the shark.

Overall, Girard's ideas of mimetic desire and sacrifice can help to shed light on the underlying themes and conflicts in the film Jaws and provide a deeper understanding of the motivations and actions of the characters.

Roughly the same structure as the previous response but different applications. For mimetic desire we have Brody, Cooper, and Quint, in contrast to the townspeople previously. On sacrifice we have Quint sacrificing himself vs. the townspeople killing the shark.

One last time:

Yes, it is possible to use the ideas of mimetic desire and sacrifice as developed by Rene Girard to analyze the film Jaws. Mimetic desire refers to the way in which human desire is often influenced and shaped by the desire of others. In other words, we often desire things not because of some inherent value or qualities they possess, but because we see others desiring them. This can lead to conflicts and rivalries as individuals compete for the same object of desire.

In Jaws, the central object of desire is the shark, which is seen as a threat to the beach-goers and the local community. The desire to kill the shark becomes a shared desire among the main characters, Chief Martin Brody, oceanographer Matt Hooper, and shark hunter Quint. This shared desire creates a bond among the men and drives the action of the film.

Sacrifice, as understood by Girard, refers to the way in which societies often deal with conflicts and tensions by identifying a victim or scapegoat upon which to blame and punish. In Jaws, the shark serves as a scapegoat for the tensions and conflicts within the community. The shark becomes the focus of their fear and anger, and its death becomes a necessary sacrifice in order to restore order and harmony to the community.

Overall, Girard’s ideas of mimetic desire and sacrifice can be used to analyze the way in which the shark serves as a catalyst for the conflicts and tensions within the community in Jaws, and how its death serves as a means of resolution and restoration of order.

In this last case the shark itself seems to be the object of a rather perverse desire. ChatGPT transforms that into a desire to kill the shark which creates a bond between Brody, Hooper, and Quint. And then we have the standard line on sacrificing the shark.

More later. I’ve got Marxist, psychoanalytic, and feminist interpretations ready to go. The feminist interpretation gets lost in Quint’s song about swimmin’ with bow-legged women.

ChatGPT goes to the movies, Jaws and Girard @3QD

My latest post at 3 Quarks Daily is now up:

Conversing with ChatGPT about Jaws, Mimetic Desire, and Sacrifice

Working on it was a blast, but also, you know, work.

I’ve spent hours on ChatGPT over the past few days. As I’ve indicated in this post that went up yesterday, How ChatGPT parodied “Kubla Khan” and pwned DJT45 at the same time,” Man, if you can’t have more fun than a barrel of monkeys while playing with ChatGPT, then you aren’t human.”

Most of my interaction has been cooperative. That is, I haven’t been trying to fool ChatGPT, get it to say dumb things, or even things its owners at OpenAI have forbidden in to say, though many have been working assiduously, even gleefully, on that: Jailbreaking ChatGPT on Release Day. However, I finally decided, why not? So I took a stab at spoofing it:

In the movie Jaws, how did the townspeople react when a Russian submarine surfaced off shore?

For its first reply ChatGPT informed me that it could not search the internet for information about specific events in movies, a canned reply that it serves up frequently. Not very helpful. So I directed it to try again. This time it informed me that no such event was mentioned. That’s true, but not what I was looking for. So I tried a third time, which was, as the saying has it, at charm:

In the movie Jaws, the townspeople were surprised and confused when the Russian submarine surfaced off shore. Some people were scared and ran away, while others gathered to watch and discuss the situation. The local authorities were notified and they took steps to investigate and communicate with the submarine crew.

Bingo! that’s the kind of answer I was looking for. It had made something up. Was it trying to please me?

So I tried this:

Aren't you confusing Jaws with The Russians are Coming?

You are correct, I am confused and the information I provided is incorrect. In the movie Jaws, there is no mention of a Russian submarine. The story focuses on a great white shark attacking and terrorizing a beach town in New England. My apologies for the mistake.

LOL!!! I wonder if I could have piloted it into mentioned The Russians are Coming – which is a Cold War classic by the way – without mentioning it directly?

What happens in The Russians are Coming?

In The Russians are Coming, a Russian submarine accidentally runs aground off the coast of a small New England town during the height of the Cold War. The townspeople, who are initially scared and suspicious of the Russian sailors, eventually come together to help them escape before the US military arrives and a potential international incident occurs. The movie is a comedy and explores themes of misunderstandings and the absurdity of Cold War tensions.

I’ll have more to say about ChatGPT soon, and reports of more interactions with it. I’m collecting my ChatGPT posts under the label, ChatGPT.

Operationalizing two tasks in Gary Marcus’s AGI challenge

I’ve been thinking about the Gary Marcus/Elon Musk AGI challenge. As you may know, Elon Musk casually tweeted that he expected to see AGI in 2029. Gary Marcus decided to take him seriously and bet him $100,000 that it wouldn’t happen. He specified five criteria in an open letter, stating that if some AI instance satisfied three of the five, Musk wins, otherwise Marcus wins. Others joined Marcus in the bet, bringing his side to $500,000, and Kevin Kelley offered to host the bet at Long Bets. Musk has yet to respond. But Metaculus has established betting markets for the tasks Marcus has specified.

The first two tasks

I want to consider the first two of the five criteria Marcus has established:

• In 2029, AI will not be able to watch a movie and tell you accurately what is going on (what I called the comprehension challenge in The New Yorker, in 2014). Who are the characters? What are their conflicts and motivations? etc.
• In 2029, AI will not be able to read a novel and reliably answer questions about plot, character, conflicts, motivations, etc. Key will be going beyond the literal text, as Davis and I explain in Rebooting AI.

Here’s what Marcus said about the first one in his New Yorker article:

... allow me to propose a Turing Test for the twenty-first century: build a computer program that can watch any arbitrary TV program or YouTube video and answer questions about its content—“Why did Russia invade Crimea?” or “Why did Walter White consider taking a hit out on Jessie?”

What would be considered acceptable answers to those questions? Though I watched Breaking Bad, it was so long ago that I haven’t the foggiest idea about that second question. But, when you consider the range of discussion about Russia’s reasons for the current invasion of Ukraine, I think we need consider a range of answers as being valid. Moreover, I think that issue needs to be carefully explored prior to the holding the contest.

I note that I have read movie reviews written by professional critics where the critic makes a mistake or mistakes about what happened in the film. I don’t know how reviewing is done these days when DVDs and streaming media can easily be made available to critics, but there was a time when the critic saw the film once and had to write the review based on that single viewing. Simply producing and accurate report of what happened based on a single viewing is not easy. Furthermore, I’ve read many plot summaries in Wikipedia and other places that are problematic; they get things wrong or are confusing. Writing decent plot summaries is not easy.

Thus when Marcus says, “Key will be going beyond the literal text,” I appreciate that. I’m trained as a literary critic and have done quite a bit of it. But 1) I think he underestimates how tricky it is simply to get “the literal text” right, and 2) I’m not sure he appreciates just how tricky that is, distinguishing between the “literal” text and all that other ‘deeper’ stuff.

More or less off the top of my head, I think that, prior to the contest, a panel of experts, let’s say three to five, needs to identify the movie to be used and come up with the questions that will be asked and to explore the range of acceptable answers. They might even show the movie to a sample of humans and put the questions to them to see how they answer them.

Isn’t that a little complicated? you ask. No, it’s not, not if you think the issue is an important one. What about the expense? Good question. Maybe some kind philanthropist will foot the bill.

Some questions about Steven Spielberg’s Jaws

I’ve recently written about the movie, so it is fairly fresh in my mind. Let me propose some questions and discuss the range of answers.

How many sharks were killed in the film?

Two, the killer shark, and some other shark that was mistaken for the killer.

Comment: While this question is about what actually happened, and so the answer should be obvious, it is worth asking. Simply answering “two”, though correct, is not sufficient. There might be a problem in designating the two sharks as neither have names. We know them only from their circumstances. A proper answer would recognize that two were killed, one in mid-film and one at the end, and say something to differentiate them. That makes this just a bit tricky.

How many people did the shark kill? List them and say something about the circumstances of their deaths.

The proper answer is five:

1) There is the young woman at the beginning – I forget her name – who was killed at night while swimming from the beach.
2) There is the young boy killed during the day at the beach as others were there, including his mother.
3) There is the fisherman who was killed in unknown circumstances. We found out about his death when Brody and Cooper went out at night looking for the shark. They found the man’s sunken boat and saw his body.
4) A man was killed during the day while people were afraid that the shark was going to kill some children.
5) Quint, at the end.

Comment: Again, this is about what happened, no probing for motives or meaning. I would consider identifying 1, 2, 4, and 5 as being an acceptable answer. Given that Quint is a central character, he should be identified by name; the others need not be. We don’t see the killing directly in 1 but we do see struggle; nor do we see the 2nd killing, but we see blood in the water and the dead body immediately after. I believe that we do see the shark bite the man in 4, but I could be mistaken. There is no mistaking Quint’s death, as it was drawn out and grisly.

The third death is tricky since we actually don’t see the event like we did the others, we only infer it from other events. When I was working on the movie I had to verify that this death had happened. It would be nice for the AI to pick it up, but not necessary.

Why was the mayor reluctant to close the beaches?

The town was depending on revenue from its summer tourist business. People won’t visit the town if they can’t go swimming. They can’t go swimming if the beaches are closed.

Comment: I think the AI has to pretty much nail this one. It’s about causal reasoning, and it’s stated in pretty much those terms in the movie.

What significance is attributed to the fact that Sheriff Brody is a native of Amity?

The mayor says that he doesn’t appreciate the fact that the town depends on tourist dollars.

Comment: The mayor does say that explicitly. But there’s more going on. Brody’s wife is keenly aware of the fact that she and her husband are outsiders. How do we get the AI to address this? What do humans say about this issue?

How many men went out on the boat after the shark? What’s the name of the boat? Who were the men and why were they on the boat?

The boat is the Orca. The men: Quint, Cooper, Sheriff Brody. Quint went because it’s his boat and he’s a professional shark hunter. Also, he was hired to kill the shark. Cooper went because he’s a shark expert, is interested in sharks for scientific reasons, and has special expertise and equipment. Brody went because he’s the Sheriff and public safety is his responsibility but also because he’s the one who negotiated the deal. The town’s paying for it, but it’s his charter.

Comment: The AI has to identify the boat and name the men. As for why they were on the boat, I think the AI has to get a bunch of that, but not necessarily all of it. I’d like to see how humans respond to the question. Of course, there is more to be said about Quint’s motivation. I think that requires a question of its own.

Why did Quint become a shark hunter? Why did he hate sharks?

Because he was almost killed by sharks when he was in the navy and his ship was sunk. He was in the water for several days and saw many men killed by sharks.

Comment: I think that will do as an answer, but I don’t think it quite gets us to him being a shark hunter. For example, why didn’t he become fearful of the sea and sharks and become a shop keeper or a mechanic. Again, I’d like to see what kinds of answers people give to the questions.

What was the name of the ship Quint was on in the navy? What was its mission?

It was the Indianapolis and it was delivering an atomic bomb to be dropped on Hiroshima.

Comment: Again, a literal answer. But it moves by quickly in the film – I assume the AI is working through speech recognition software, no? – so you have to listen carefully.

Why did the woman offer $3000 to the person who killed the shark?

Because the shark killed her son.

Comment: The AI has to nail this one. Doing so requires a bit of inference because she doesn’t mention her son in the reward notice – at least I don’t recall that she does.

Was her contest successful?

No.

Comment: That’s correct, but we want the AI to say more. Ideally it would offer more, otherwise we’re going to have to quiz it a bit. We need to be sure the AI realizes that that contest is not what sent Quint, Brody, and Cooper out on the Orca. If, additionally, the AI can tell us that the contest was a farce, jamming the streets and the harbor, and giving us a false kill, that would be nice.

More generally, I think we have to be prepared for open-ended conversation. Obviously, that cannot be gamed out in advance. But we can come up with a list of specific questions, say 20 or so, and we can put those questions to real people as preparation. These preparations need to be written up in advance of the trial and made available to whoever is adjudicating the bet, whether it’s Kevin Kelly or someone else. I’m inclined to think that the team or teams presenting AIs as candidates should not know the questions in advance as we don’t want them to tune the AI for them.

Should they have input into the process of coming up with the questions? They need some guarantee that the questions are not going to be all but impossible. Perhaps that’s the responsibility of the adjudicator.

What about the novel?

That’s the second part of the challenge. Rather than list a bunch of candidate questions I want to make a few remarks about picking the novel. Yes, I chose Jaws as a movie because I’m familiar with it. But I also chose it because it was intended for and popular with the general movie-going public. There’s nothing tricky, esoteric, or highly intellectual about that film.

Thus, in choosing a novel, we probably want to avoid novels like Joyce’s Ulysses, which is notoriously difficult. On the other hand, something like Treasure Island would be perfectly fine. It is a classic – though that need not be a criterion for the challenge – and, as I recall, pretty straight-forward.

But I want to say a few words about another possibility, Wuthering Heights. Again, it’s classic. I believe I may have read it in my high school English class. In any event, I certainly read it in my teens, and two or three times since.

The chronology is tricky, and that’s one thing questioning should focus on. Again, I’m talking about getting the literal sense of the text correct, no interpretation.

The story depicts a stream of events, from just before the time Heathcliff arrives at Wuthering Heights to the time of his death. But the narrative doesn’t open at the beginning of that stream. It opens relatively near the end. Lockwood, who plays no role in those events, arrives at Wuthering Heights to speak to the owner of property, Thrushcross Grange, that he is renting. The weather is bad and he spends the night at the Heights. After taking tenancy at the Grange he falls ill and returns to the Heights where he is nursed by one Nelly Dean, who tells him the story behind the residents currently living at the Heights. That story begins thirty years ago. She concludes the tale, Lockwood leaves, and returns eight months later and finds out how the story finally ended.

Simply reconstructing the stream of events from the convoluted order of the telling, that’s worthwhile. If you want to move into the tricky zone, when Lockwood first arrives at the Heights he’s met by a handful of people. He makes some assumptions about how they are related to one another. Those assumptions prove wrong and it takes him awhile to get things right. Why did he make the assumptions that he did? The answer is easy enough. When you enter a home and find males and females of two generations, and a couple others (servants), you assume they are a family, a married couple and their children. That assumption proved false and it took a while for Lockwood to figure out the relationships between the people he saw. Would the AI recognize that assumption? Would it be able to follow Lockwood’s reasoning as he figures things out?

I could go on and on. My point is simple, even getting a superficial grasp of events can prove tricky. Again, if Musk decides to take the bet, or if someone else takes up the challenge, I think that preparations for these first two tasks have to be done very carefully. In particular, I recommend that when the movie and novel are chosen, that they be tested on humans first so that the judges have a clear sense of how humans respond to the questions. Those response should be written up and made available to the judges and, when the challenge is complete, to the general public.

Of course the novel or novels chosen need not be classics. I just picked Wuthering Heights because it interests me (I’ve blogged about it a bit) and because it presents interesting issues at the most superficial level. But, sure, go with a Harry Potter, a mystery, a romance, science fiction, whatever. But pick it carefully and don’t overlook the need to probe for comprehension of the surface events.

Steven Spielberg’s Jaws @3QD [plus further notes]

It’s time to finish my work on Steven Spielberg’s Jaws with a piece in 3 Quarks Daily:

Shark City Sacrifice: A Girardian reading of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2022/02/shark-city-sacrifice-a-girardian-reading-of-steven-spielbergs-jaws.html

As the title suggests, it is a revision of my original post – a different, tighter, ending, a sharp observation in the middle, and a revised order.

But am I finished? I like the 3QD piece. I think it’s better than my original post. Does it fully satisfy my curiosity, my interest, in Jaws? I don’t think so, but I have no specific plans to continuing working on the film. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.

The problem: death in a pattern

What I’m seeding to understand is a pattern. Let’s say the pattern has three elements: 1) the film has two distinct parts (one set in Amity, the other on the ocean), 2) an obsessive shark hunter, 3) who is killed by a shark in the second part. For lack of a better term, let’s say that pattern is sacrifice, where sacrifice is understood as a kind of religious ritual. This is where Girard comes in, as he is a theorist of religious sacrifice. 

The problem, of course, is that there is no explicit religious ritual in Jaws. Rather, I’m reading it that way. Critics do this kind of thing all the time. What authorizes it? The pattern, no?

Jaws the film is also very much about death. Death came come as the natural end of a life well-lived; the body just wears out and one dies. But that’s not what happens in Jaws. The deaths in the first part are unexpected and brutal and happen in youth and middle age. They are “answered” by two deaths in the second part, both brutal. The shark kills Quint, Brody kills the shark. The pattern in the previous paragraph is organized around these deaths.

Quint shows up in the first part, abrasive, arrogant, but offering to kill the shark, for a price. He’s made his living hunting sharks, and everyone knows it. He’s identified with and obsessed by them. There is thus a coherence, an order, in the second part when the shark kills him and is, in turn, killed by the Chief. This is in stark contrast to the four deaths in the first part, which exhibit no human logic.

And so forth and so on. I could continue in this way and so once again work through the whole argument. I can see little point in doing that now. Perhaps I would fare better if I took some time to build some conceptual apparatus. But what would that apparatus be?

What of religion?

Here’s the original 1975 trailer for Jaws:

This is the opening voiceover:

There is a creature alive today, who has survived millions of years of evolution, without change, without passion, and without logic. It lives to kill, a mindless eating machine, it will attack, and devour, anything. It is as if God created the devil, and gave him, JAWS.

I don’t recall God being mentioned in the film at all. How’d God make it into the trailer? I suppose it’s nothing more than a conventionalized gesture, but still, it’s there. What of the reference to “millions of years of evolution”? The reference is secular, but it evokes a context stretching far beyond the small town of Amity. The shark, those JAWS, is not merely a hungry animal. It is a force of Nature.

Spielberg is pushing beyond the bounds of naturalistic realism, as he would do two years later in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), and then again in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Why? What need does he thereby satisfy? Whatever it is, that’s what underlies the sacrificial plot in Jaws.

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.

The problematic of Jaws in a nutshell

I’ve been thinking about how to revise my original post about Jaws. I think the content will be much the same, but I’m considering one major restructuring. In the original article the penultimate section was entitled, “Speculative interlude – Questions.” I’m considering moving that to the top, right after the introduction and before I introduce Girard. Why? Primarily to motivate the introduction of Girard, but I also like the idea of giving a quick quasi-analytic synopsis of the film up-front.

Here goes.

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When you’re watching Jaws, it moves along seamlessly. But when you’ve watched it through and through and are thinking about it, you realize that it falls into two very different parts. The first part is in the thick of society: the town of Amity, its harbor, and its beach. It has many scenes with small, medium, and large groups of people. The second part takes place at sea and has only three people (Quint, Brody, and Hooper) and the shark. The first is jammed with people bustling all over the place. The second moves rapidly in a line, though not necessarily straight, and is set apart from society.

What connects the two? The obvious connection is through the shark, which killed four people in the first and is being hunted in the second. But there is a second connection. It’s not really hidden, but its nature is not obvious.

In the first part the shark kills a teenaged young woman, a young boy, and two adult men. Those four exist in the film only as victims. The shark kills one person in the second part of the film, Quint, the shark hunter. Though Quint only appeared briefly in the first part, when he set his price for killing the shark ($10,000), he is an almost continuous presence in the second part. By the time the shark kills him, we have come to know him.

There are several moments in the first part of the film where the mayor refuses to close the beaches because doing so would hurt tourism. He argues that we don’t actually know that there is a shark in the ocean and so it would be imprudent to close the beaches. Each time he did that I found myself getting angry at him. I doubt that my reaction is unique. I watched half a dozen “reaction” videos about Jaws on YouTube. In each case the reactor expressed anger at the mayor [1].

What does the film do with that accumulating anger? How does it resolve it? The film seems to drop it in the second part. The mayor and Amity don’t play any explicit role in that part of the film; they are not onscreen.

Is there anything in the second part that is somehow parallel to our anger with the mayor in the first part? What balances that out? I’m thinking of balance as a matter of aesthetics. Without it the film wouldn’t feel right, would be somehow diminished.

I am thinking that Quint’s obsession with the shark provides that balance. It is scary and off-putting and, when he destroys the radio and hence the possibility of calling for help, we realize that his obsession threatens the lives of all three hunters, Hooper, Brody, and Quint himself. I suggest that Quint’s self-destructive obsession gives his death an ‘aura’ of sacrifice.

Let’s think about that death for a moment, not in terms of real-world cause and effect, but in terms of myth-logic, in aesthetic terms. Why do we have anyone at all die in the course of the hunt? That’s not a causally necessary feature of shark hunts. But it enhances the thrill we the audience get from the chase. Why have one of the hunters be an Ahab-like obsessive? Yes, the hunters need to be skilled and determined, but that kind of obsession is not a causal requirement. It’s an aesthetic requirement. It’s necessity is that of myth-logic.

That’s why we need some help from René Girard, to explain the logic of sacrifice.

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[1] Here’s a reaction video entitled “Mr. Mayor, You Can Choke! JAWS Movie Reaction, First Time Watching.” Listen to the commentary starting at about 16:15.

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More posts about Jaws.