The Hidden Truth of Jaws: Antisemitism and Interpretation

As the movie Jaws is celebrated on its 50^th anniversary, it is interesting to examine what the film really tells us about America. If you simply replace one letter in the title, you end up with Jews. So what is the connection between Jews and Jaws?

On one level, the film narrates the story of how people respond to a perceived approaching danger on a personal and collective level. Instead of the local citizens being able to enjoy their summer time in the water, they are constantly reminded that some evil lurks under the surface. Meanwhile, a police chief who has come up recently from New York is not only coded as Jewish (Roy Scheider), but he is seen as being in conflict with the idyllic WASPy Cape Cod culture.

If you listen to a conversation near the start of the film, you hear that the beautiful and peaceful coastal town has been invaded by outsiders who don’t fit into the local culture. Of course, the movie does not explicitly connect Jews, New Yorkers, and the shark, but this is how the primary processes in the unconscious work. Through a process of symbolic associations and substitutions, the phobic fear that people have about the dangerous animal is connected to the anxiety they experience when they encounter New York Jews in their White Anglo-Saxon Protestant safe haven.

So why would Spielberg weave his own concern about antisemitism into his blockbuster horror film? Perhaps, the power of the film comes from the fact that the director actually identifies with the monster. Moreover, at the same time that we encounter the symbolic Jews invading the non-Jewish homeland, a character played by a Jewish actor (Richard Dreyfuss) is brought in to save the day. As a nerdy academic with a trust fund, Dreyfuss’s character, Hooper, is opposed by the hardened, manly shark-hunter Quint. In fact, when they first meet, Quint examines Hooper’s hands and states, “You have city hands, Mr. Hooper. You been countin' money all your life.” By connecting this academic researcher to cities and money, a classic antisemitic stereotype is presented. However, on the imaginary level of the movie, Jews are represented as both symbols of weakness and the power to resolve problems.

An irrational aspect of our unconscious fantasies is that we can play multiple parts at once as the law of non-contradiction is suspended in our imagination. Interestingly, in our current political age, we also see Jews as representing both as a threat and the solution to American geo-politics. On the one hand, the Trump administration has bonded with Israel’s tough military, and on the other hand, there is an almost paranoid fear of antisemitism spreading throughout the society. In this case, Jewish people represent both the aggressive attacker and cultural victims.

Interestingly, in Jaws, the real threat is posed by the mayor who is willing to risk a shark attack in order to keep business going at the beach town. Here we see how capitalism is presented as driving an immoral disregard for human life. The shark then also represents the pure drive for money at any cost, which echoes the common antisemitic connection between Jews and destructive capitalism. In other words, the phobic public is trained to focus on the anxiety-provoking presence of Jewish people and not on the sociopathic nature of compulsive capitalism.

In the current political context, it is vital to see how the symbol of the Jew is used as an empty signifier prone to represent different cultural projections. For instance, at the same moment Trump appears to bond with the Jewish state and fight domestic antisemitism, he enables Neo-Nazis and a vast array of antisemitic conspiracy theories. It is therefore essential to use psychoanalytic concepts and practices to decode the use of “The Jews” for political and psychological purposes.