Decoding the politics of iconic movies thenorthlines.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from thenorthlines.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Peter Benchley’s novel
Jaws was published in 1974. In 1975 it was turned into a film. For years various cultural critics, most famously the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, have deconstructed
Jaws to mean more than just a story about a fictional tourist spot, Amity Island, being tormented by a shark.
Peter Biskind in his 1999 book
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls writes that, since the novel and its film adaptation arrived during a particularly severe economic and political crisis in the US,
Jaws immediately struck a chord with an audience disoriented by the apparently indefinable nature of the crisis.
In 2012, Žižek saw the shark as a combination of prejudices and fears that are encapsulated into a single definable entity, so that a bemused polity is able to clearly perceive it as the cause of society’s dread. To Žižek, the shark of Amity Island can thus be understood as a metaphor of any community seen to be existing outside the homogeneity of the majority community
SMOKERS CORNER: READING THE POLITICS OF FILMS - Newspaper dawn.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dawn.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.