What The Hell Does Any of This Even Mean?: "Jaws"

When one teaches poetry in the classroom, there are two ideas one frequently and immediately has to demolish before interesting conversations can occur. The first is that there exists a definitive understanding, or interpretation, of what a poem means. This notion is often held by otherwise smart students who are terrified by poetry, because they've been taught that symbolism is about one-to-one correspondence or decoding (The moon in Bishop's "Insomnia" represents loneliness!) and that the goal of a class like this is to figure out the hidden, fixed meaning of the poem and then write a paper demonstrating that, like a champion puzzler, they've followed the clues through to success.

The second idea lies directly opposite the first and is as strongly held, usually by the free-thinkers in the classroom. This is that a poem can mean anything we want it to ("Dulce et Decorum Est" is actually about a really bad breakup!) and that the goal is to use the interpretation of the poem as a disquisition on one's own feelings or politics. Under this rubric, everyone's reading of the poem is obviously different – and equally right – and discussion of it consists in a discussion of ourselves, unbothered by any attempt at a common understanding of what the text actually says.

It's seldom in the course of talking about art that one gets to trade in categoricals, but the absolute, categorical answer to both these positions is: No. Wrong. Banish these ideas from your mind and never let them see the light of day again.

The first and less interesting reason for this is that those positions make for bad thinking and bad essays. The second and more interesting reason is that art is about communicating the human experience, and one of the fundamental facts about that experience is that it is unique to each individual. Which means that artistic communication is translation, is interpretation, is fundamentally about nuance and the struggle to understand. This can never be equivalent to solving a riddle, because other human beings will always be opaque to us, nor can it be a matter of our own feelings and internality, because we are, after all, dealing with something that someone else made.

This is all fine and good. But it raises a question, because it rests on an assumption.

The assumption is that there is always an interpretation available, always a discussion to be had about what the work of art means because it somehow means something more than what it just is.

The question is this: what happens if there is no interpretation available? Can this ever be the case? What if a piece of art, say a movie, is fundamentally resistant to interpretation in any but the most basic sense? What if it is simply what it is and nothing more?

Then you have Jaws. Maybe. These things are confusing, and my thoughts here – even more than is usually the case in this journal –  are a matter of speculation and exploration.

There's a lot that can be said about Jaws. It's a spectacular, perhaps flawless adventure movie. It launched Steven Spielberg's career into the stratosphere. It played an enormous role in shifting the course of American filmmaking, both by establishing the tradition of the "summer blockbuster" and by helping shift Hollywood's focus toward entertainment spectacles and away from the perhaps more cerebral, perhaps more sophisticated, perhaps more politically and sociologically engaged (or perhaps not) "American New Wave" film movement of the late '60s and early '70s.

But what's it about?

Well, it's about a shark. This shark, a great white, call it Jaws, takes up residence off a Martha's Vineyard-type island at the beginning of the summer tourist season and begins eating people. This creates problems, and not just for the people who end up in the monster's tummy. After the first death, Police Chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider), a native of New York City who's scared of the ocean but loves the peace and quiet of Amity Island (the majority of his work here involves things like dealing with young kids "karate-ing" the town's white picket fences), immediately files a report noting that there's a shark in the waters offshore.

The townspeople, led by the Mayor (Murray Hamilton) go into revolt. If there's a killer shark in the water, then the beaches must be closed, which means the summer tourists will go elsewhere, devastating the town's economy. Ergo, there's no shark around here!

Oh but there is. Jaws eats a young kid in one of the best and most precisely executed death scenes in all of American cinema, and the townspeople reverse course. Now they decide that the best policy is to go out in an ocean-faring mob, bearing chum and dynamite instead of pitchforks, and execute the beast. And they do! The return to land is triumphant. Unfortunately, announces a recently arrived marine biologist named Matt Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss), the shark they caught isn't a great white. It's a tiger shark ("A what?") and its jaws are waaay too small to belong to Jaws.

So Brody and Hooper hire a fractious shark hunter named Quint (Robert Shaw), to take them out to the open ocean to hunt down the menace. The three are at first antagonistic toward one another ("Slow ahead? I can go slow ahead. Come down here and chum some of this shit.") but then bond over the scars they've received, literally and figuratively, over the course of their lives. The final problem they face is that Quint's boat isn’t big enough, so that when they do catch up with Jaws it sinks the boat, devouring Quint in the process. All is saved by the fact that Jaws gets a scuba tank stuck in its teeth, which Brody detonates with a rifle bullet. Jaws explodes; Brody and Hooper construct a makeshift raft out of the wreckage of the boat and paddle back to shore.

(When I was younger, I worked in a San Francisco restaurant where I knew a guy who'd grown up on Martha's Vinyard, where the film was shot. He described the filming of that final scene as the single greatest day of his young life: his father had been hired to help pack a massive rubber sleeve with TNT and raw meat, and my friend got to watch from a rowboat just off camera while they towed the thing out and then exploded it. Why this did not cause him to immediately drop out of grade school and become a filmmaker, as it would have done me, I'll never know.)

There have, of course, been innumerable interpretations of the film forwarded, many of them by heavyweights like Fredric Jameson, Slavoj Zizek, and Andrew Britton. These interpretations, both academic and popular, interest me because of the degree to which they are unconvincing.

Often, readings of the film pivot on the America of 1975, when Jaws was released, arguing that it has to do with either a reaction to the cynicism of the moment (post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, mid-stagflation) or an embodiment of that cynicism. It's either, that is, a feel-good assertion that Americans can overcome any of the dangers lurking in our metaphorical waters...or it's a clear-eyed assessment of the way American capitalists and politicians are willing to sacrifice anything for a buck, the shark and the islanders, under this latter reading, both posing an equal threat to Brody's everyman.

Another line of thought wants to see in Jaws some kind of representation of the unconscious, the thing that swims beneath the surface, and of our eternal struggle with this thing. References to Moby Dick and Grendel abound. Yet another line, perhaps best articulated by the fantastically overwrought film Orca from 1977, which serves as both rip-off and response to Jaws, is that it's a kind of anti-environmentalist smuggling device, a damning display of humanity's fear, hatred, and eventual destruction of nature itself.

Why do I find these unconvincing? Here I find myself in, as it were, murkier waters. The simplest, and truest, answer is that they don't resonate with me, don't give me the sensation of a tuning fork well struck. Like good art, I find that good criticism gives me the feeling of harmony, of things being brought into line, of a vista opened that feels, intuitively, right. Sometimes this happens immediately, and sometimes it happens on reflection. It has never happened when someone tried to give me a reading of Jaws.

The film feels to me both cynical and hopeful. Both scared and triumphant. Its relationship to the America of 1975, in other words, seems blandly descriptive rather than analytical in an either intentional or unintentional way. In fact, if I may use this language, which I'll try to give substance to in a moment, the whole film feels descriptive rather than analytical. Unlike Moby Dick, it does not seem to be about the deeper things that drive us, so much as about the contingency of experience (Quint and Hooper, in particular, react to the shark as they do because of explicitly stated things that happened in the past, rather than out of more fundamental psychological stirrings that are so prominent in Ahab). The environmentalist critique seems germane but not central, and in the end too obvious to be of much use. Yes, we are indeed scared of large animals capable of eating us.

Much like the shark itself shrugs off every bullet fired into it (as opposed to into the canister of air stuck in its teeth), Jaws seems to shrug off these critical attempts. None of them penetrate. It cannot be pierced. To return to the language of the opening of these notes, the film feels to me like a thing that simply is, rather than a thing that lends itself to interpretation.

And yet, like a poem, Jaws is certainly a communication, from Spielberg to us. So why does it seem to me so monolithic, resistant both to interpretation and to personal or political loading?

I think the answer lies in the kind of story it tells, as constructed by Spielberg's monumental and particular talent.

It is, as I said above, an adventure story. I know of no greatly useful definition of this term other than it involves someone going on an adventure. And certainly, many adventure stories have deeper meanings on offer. The story of the escapade with the sword in the stone resulting in a new King of England is loaded with things that we can ponder at length, as are stories like Aliens (in a good way) and Avatar (not in a good way, I would argue, as they end up making the film into exactly the opposite of what it seems to think it is).

But Jaws resists. Because of this, I'm tempted to call it a "boys' adventure story," with the thought that there's an immaturity to these tales that prevents depth, but this is obviously not quite right either: Huckleberry Finn rises up to protest. So for the moment I will suggest, rather inelegantly, that Jaws is an adventure story in which there is little (or nothing) more than adventure itself. The escapade, the thrill, the derring-do constitute the is, the answer to the question of what it is. It's an adventurous adventure.

And it's here that Spielberg's ability comes into play. That he is one of the most talented of American directors I do not question. But talent, like intelligence, is not a thing that can be defined on a single scale or by a single metric. Spielberg's talent is one of a kind of fantastically accomplished lifting, a raising us up out of our (metaphorical or literal) seats and suspending us there.

A wonderful place to see this is in his facility with blocking (how the actors move in relation to each other and to the frame). When one watches one of his impossibly well-blocked sequences (an example in Jaws is the moment when Brody and Hooper try to convince the Mayor to take the shark seriously, ending up with the reveal of the billboard covered with graffiti) the grace and accomplishment of them is tremendous; yet this accomplishment is almost entirely subsumed, rendered invisible, by the electric charge they create.

Everything in these sequences – and in his films overall when Spielberg is operating at his fullest capacities – feels real or natural, and at the same time to have a heightened existence. It is both life as we know it, and life as an adventure that thrills us because it lies beyond the bounds of what we can ever hope to experience. And not just his blocking but all of his technical abilities contribute to this, including his wonderful feel for working with actors (the dinner table sequence where Brody's young son imitates him, which then leads to Hooper's entrance with the two wine bottles, is a great example). The hair on our arms raises. The tension and forward momentum lift us, propel us.

But, if I may push this imagining of what we experience or feel when we watch a film one step further, in Jaws this construction goes only upwards. It has no roots, does not descend into the subsurface. The surface of the movie (the text of it, if you will) pushes us to feel excitement, a certain kind of enlivening terror, the thrill of a magnitude of experience just out of our non-screen-world reach; and once it has pushed us up into the air like this (again, if you will) it holds us there. Where it does not ever threaten to put us is into the realm of things below, the realm of hidden meanings, of hidden drives, unspoken things that we (or the American society of 1975) can feel but not articulate, sense but not understand.

Spielberg is often accused of being sentimental. I do not know if he is or not, but I do think he is drawn to spinning the kind of yarns I'm describing here, which with his aid float magnificently a few yards off the ground, without being tethered to stakes driven into that ground. And I think the purity of his talent is both the source of, and results in, this feeling. We are all given our blessings and our curses.

Or at least that's as close as I can come right now to working through my feelings about Jaws. Perhaps someday I'll watch the film again, or reread some analysis of it, and something will resonate and I'll be struck by a better idea of what the film means. Or perhaps not.

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