Beach Reading: Jaws as a Curriculum of Community

• In Event: Monstrous Curriculum Conversations

Abstract

As the film Jaws enjoys renewed attention in 2015 for its fortieth anniversary, critical and interpretive distance have sharpened and the film has been interrogated as a psychosexual play on Moby Dick, an elegiac meditation on death, as well as an ambivalent treatment of the U.S. and its crisis of confidence in a post-Nixon 1970s. Inspired and yet tired by such readings, I read Jaws as a pedagogical text, one that instructs viewers carefully – and beautifully – in a curriculum of community. Putting to use concepts from Jaques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, and J. Hillis Miller on community, ethics, and witnessing, I contend Jaws works at an educative level to interrupt how we “learn” in/of a “community.”

Jaws demonstrates how the beach community of Amity is destabilized not so much by the shark itself, but by how language and affect operates (or fails to operate) in the action and dialogue of the community’s members (Chief Brody, his wife Ellen and their children, Mayor Vaughan, Hooper, Quint, and assorted beachgoers). This operates pedagogically through a curriculum of form and affect that do not seek to re-present, but to engage viewers in ethical encounters of belonging and becoming with the community of Amity through the film’s gaps, silences, and extra-discursive moments. Running throughout the film is a pedagogical set-up of what Nancy terms an imperative ethics, a “we must” that animates the members of Amity’s community in their confrontation with non-absolutes that cannot be justified or grounded on a conventional sense of right and wrong: (1) Mayor Vaughan’s attempts to keep the beach and community functioning at all costs; (2) Quint’s sacrificial desire for escape and permanent absolution (in the face of the town’s citizens and the face of the shark); (3) Hooper’s dogged sense of perfection and science; and (4) Brody’s taut, tortured inability to shake off doubt.

Author

• Mark Helmsing, University of Wyoming