Show Me the Way to Go Home: Jaws and Its Sexual Subtext
Jaws (1975) was Steven Spielberg's first major success as a director. The film established a new box-office plateau, earning 100 million on first release.It was the director's first major collaboration with composer John Williams, with whom Spielberg had partnered previously on Sugarland Express and with whom he would form one of the longest director-composer relationships in history, producing a series of legendary film scores, starting with Jaws, for which Williams won an Oscar.
The score is dominated by a two-note motif for cello combined with a three-note motif for tuba, associated with the shark. A harp glissando is used as an underwater motif.
Yet the music is significant for what is unscored. Thus there is no theme for the married couple, Martin Brody and his wife, Ellen, a clue to the film's subtext.
It's true the film can be enjoyed as an adventure thriller, in some ways even a horror film, translating land demons into sea monsters. Or Jaws can be enjoyed as a slasher movie in the style of Psycho, with the shark an aquatic version of Norman Bates, its sharp teeth replacing Bates' sharp knife. Indeed, Williams' music often evokes Bernard Herrmann's great score for Psycho, as well as Stravinsky's legendary percussive ballet score for Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), with shades of Prokofiev.
Regardless of the genre in which Jaws is placed, the film has a subtext of another kind. This is evident from the beginning when a sexually aroused male, seated around a campfire near the ocean, and in an inebriated stupor, stumbles to catch up with a female group member who has just flirted with him. Her mauling, by a shark, moments later, establishes the film's theme: there's safety on the shore and away from women.
This sexual subtext is suggested in our introduction to Brody, significantly, in his bedroom. He awakens, leaving his wife in bed as he stares listlessly outside his window at the sun streaming in across the water, disturbing his sleep.
This bedroom scene is tantalizingly ambiguous. Brody's wife, Ellen, lies in bed, as if in post-coital satisfaction. But it becomes evident the couple have been asleep, recently awakened by their radio alarm.
Their little boy returns from morning play and shows his injured finger to his mother—a phallic symbol of boyish mutilation fears—a theme that runs throughout the film, as we see images of mutilated bodies in both real life and shark manuals. As in a later scene with the three shark hunters on the boat, the boy's display of his wound has an element of bravado in it, as if denying his fear even as he voices it.
This fear is echoed in Brody's anxious concern over his son, prompting him to warn his son away from the swings, the way that Brody himself avoids the water. Later the boy says that swimming pools are for "old ladies. Brody concurs, asking only that his son please "the old man," linking himself with old ladies and their unmanly fears.
Similarly, the shark hunter Quint (Robert Shaw) is evidently hunting sharks as a displaced form of sexual bravado, obsessively singing of leaving fair Spanish ladies. As his obsession increases so does his defiant singing of the sea shanty. Later he proudly shows his body wounds, including his "castrated" phallic tooth, whose replacement he defiantly removes in a show of denial, as if to say, "I don't mind being wounded/castrated—I enjoy it."
The shark expert, Hooper, now feels compelled to exchange stories of wounds with Quint in what quickly becomes an implicit homosexual scene, including crossed legs, mutual exposure of flesh, and comparative measurement of scars, similar to what adolescent boys do at puberty. Meanwhile Brody modestly studies his own wound—what looks like his belly button. The assumption is that the male is wounded at birth.
Hooper hits the nail on the head when he calls one of his wounds a love wound, while Quint mysteriously declines to explain another wound, evidently a debrased (removed) tattoo of a woman who left him—wounding him. At this point Hooper sarcastically refers to Quint's mother, linking Quint's love wound also to motherly love.
Brody's eyeline match to the harbor's arch of a shark's mouth, complete with jagged teeth, stirs his manhood and he subsequently decides to pursue the shark. In mythology this symbol is called the Vagina Dentata, or vaginal teeth, linking the pursuit of the shark with the quest for masculinity.
This Brody achieves when he shoots the shark, exploding an incendiary device previously implanted in the shark. The effect is of sexual orgasm, the gun being another phallic symbol.
Having achieved sexual satisfaction vicariously, away from women, Brody and Hooper float in apparent post-coital bliss along the maternal waters of the Great Mother. Spielberg could have followed with a brief sequence showing how Brody's conquest of the shark bonded him with his wife in confident masculinity. But he chose instead to end with two men in apparent homosexual bliss floating down maternal waters, like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Jim floating down the Mississippi. "Home" for these men is anyplace away from women.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment