Žižek: What does the shark stand for? There were different, even mutually exclusive answers to this question. On the one hand some critics claimed that obviously the shark stands for the foreign threat to ordinary Americans. The shark is a metaphor for either natural disaster, storms or immigrants threatening United States citizens and so on. On the other hand it’s interesting to note that Fidel Castro who loves the film once said that for him it was obvious that Jaws is kind of a leftist Marxist film and that Jaws is kind of a metaphor for brutal big capital exploiting ordinary Americans. So which is the right answer? I claim none of them and at the same time all of them. Ordinary Americans, as ordinary people in all countries, have a multitude of fears. We fear all kind of things. We fear maybe, immigrants or people whom we perceive as lower than ourselves attacking us. We fear people raping our children. We fear natural disasters, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, we fear corrupted politicians. We fear big companies which can basically do with us whatever they want. The function of the shark is to unite all these fears so that we can in a way trade all these fears for one fear alone. In this way our experience of reality gets much simpler.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 01:06:51 +0000
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