"For instance, patriarchal power in Jaws clearly is meaningful only inasmuch as it excludes and subordinates woman. She means something which must be external to patriarchy, if it is to mean what it pretends to mean. The idealizing patriarchal meaning deconstructs at those moments when literal material connections back to woman emerge. This is especially clear during the metaphoric quest for the shark, a quintessentially male, public adventure severed entirely from female-dominated life. Yet that quest cannot do without certain literal motifs of sexual power and potency. Brody's literal glance into his pants in search of the missing phallus establishes a metonymic connection which both enables and disables the sexual metaphor of the quest. For the quest doesn't make sense except as a confirmation of manhood, that is, as the ability to perform with women. Woman is always there, in other words, as threatening perhaps as the shark."
Hoo boy. First of all, in the famous scar-sharing scene, Brody does not look into his pants, at least not in the way the authors are suggesting; he pulls up his shirt to reveal an appendectomy scar, then tucks it down because it pales compared to Quint and Hooper's wounds. It's also a bit of a stretch to claim, as Ryan and Kellner do a few pages earlier, that a boy is killed by the shark because an attempted seduction by Brody's wife "distracts him from his duties." Said seduction is nothing more than a tame back rub to assuage Brody's nerves; in any case, he's distracted not by her but by a man who appears in front of him and obstructs his field of vision.
--from Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of
Contemporary Hollywood Film, by Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner (1988)
Hoo boy. First of all, in the famous scar-sharing scene, Brody does not look into his pants, at least not in the way the authors are suggesting; he pulls up his shirt to reveal an appendectomy scar, then tucks it down because it pales compared to Quint and Hooper's wounds. It's also a bit of a stretch to claim, as Ryan and Kellner do a few pages earlier, that a boy is killed by the shark because an attempted seduction by Brody's wife "distracts him from his duties." Said seduction is nothing more than a tame back rub to assuage Brody's nerves; in any case, he's distracted not by her but by a man who appears in front of him and obstructs his field of vision.
I'll admit that my frontal lobes can get buzzed by this kind of subtextual analysis. Too much film criticism takes the filmmakers' interpretations at face value, when those are often the least reliable (and most monosyllabic) accounts. When an eggheaded approach turns me off (right around, say, page 64), I can always stop reading and return to my Netflix queue. But I'd hate to be a young film studies major forced to scarf down a semester's worth of Camera Politica, the very sort of intellectual cholesterol that killed my enjoyment of literature for years after graduation. (If Jaws is as much a glorification of male machismo as the authors contend, why is the salty war veteran Quint devoured while the pensive Brody and the bookish Hooper survive?) It's great to consider movies worthy of serious scholarship; it should happen more often. But if you're going to be scholarly you should still write clearly. And if you're not going to write clearly, at least get your facts straight.
