Two of Steven Spielberg’s early films, Duel (1971) and Jaws (1975), have been accused of upholding apolitical, if not conservative, ideological structures. Writers Thomas S. Frentz and Janice Hocker Rushing, building on the interpretations of Frederic Jameson and Jane Caputi, account for three readings that see Jaws as a vehicle for conservative ideologies (Frentz and Rushing 16). Lester D. Friedman enumerates some sixteen different critical readings of Jaws (Friedman 163-164), summarizing that like in both these films, “[t]raditional communal values emerge triumphant in Spielberg’s horror movies” (ibid. 179). Addressing the director’s broader oeuvre, Friedman explains that “Spielberg is preoccupied with how men ought to act in their culturally assigned positions and how they often fail to perform these roles adequately. This theme characterizes the director’s career: it is evident in early films like Duel and Jaws” (ibid. 129-130). However, these films feature stripped bare chase narratives that call attention to their unswerving structures. The forward-moving linearity of these narratives and their protagonists is analogous to the American ethos of individual freedom, staying in one’s lane, adhering to the status quo. By defying linearity and boundaries, the monsters of these films demand that the protagonists also disrupt their straight lives. These movements and deviations are foregrounded by both these films’ cinematic minimalism, a term I will define below. Diverging from linear trajectories, crossing borders and boundaries signifies transgression and subversion of the patriarchal middle-class American status quo in Duel and Jaws.
Cinematic minimalism, to begin, is both a narrative and an aesthetic code of filmmaking. Narrative in cinematic minimalism consists of creating a story that involves only the most rudimentary of plot elements. In Duel, David Mann (Dennis Weaver) is the only character we know, and therefore the only person our sympathies might be aligned with. In fact, the character’s last name conveys the full extent of his appeal as a hero: the fact that he is a Man(n) makes him our protagonist by default. The monster, meanwhile, is menacing and unknown, only vaguely human and more often referred to as “the truck,” its psyche incomprehensible and its movements unpredictable. In both these films the monster is evil materialized in the form most befitting the setting. By pitting a representative of our lifestyle – however unsympathetic – against an irrational evil, Spielberg aligns the audience with the former, manipulating our emotions with attack after attack by the latter. Using the narrative devices and characters of cinematic minimalism, Spielberg creates plots that consist of successive exercises in suspense.
With story elements broken down to their most basic expressions, cinematic minimalism allows directors to perform elaborate technical feats. However, these exercises in technological mastery and manipulation are foregrounded by a minimalist mis-en-scene and visual code. The aesthetics of cinematic minimalism are barren and sleek, making masterful camera angles and movements, editing patterns and musical scores self-evident. In the pared down visual landscapes of Duel and Jaws, Spielberg is free to display his filmmaking skills, creativity and inventiveness. A brilliant and conspicuous camera movement near the beginning of Duel provides an example. The shot begins with a close-up on David driving his car through the driver-side window, then moves forward, showing the entire length of the truck, ending with a menacing view of its front grill while its engine roars. With only three elements to keep track of – car, truck and road – Spielberg lets us focus on his striking movement from one to the next, presumably shot from a car driving alongside the action. The use of sound effects is also striking in this scene, the smooth engine noise of David’s car being drowned out by the loud roar of the truck. In Jaws, similarly sparse story elements foreground both technical achievement and musical manipulation. When Alex Kinter is killed, the basic story elements of shark and innocent white American child are givens. Rather, the underwater shot from the shark’s point of view calls the audience’s attention to the technical means involved in having a highly mobile underwater camera. The shot also makes self-evident use of John Williams’s musical score, one that has remained in the American collective conscience ever since. In cinematic minimalism, then, story elements are transparent so that technical expertise can be foregrounded.
That said, cinematic minimalism does not employ the same strategy many critics have attributed to Blockbuster cinema. The latter emphasizes grandiose action scenes with complexly choreographed sequences and many characters and movements to keep track of. Films that qualify for cinematic minimalism place less emphasis on filling the screen with spectacular effects. Instead, the sparse landscape makes cinematic manipulations more apparent, giving the audience a greater sense of the technical means being deployed. One critic, for instance, giving a detailed account of the scene leading up to Alex Kinter’s death in Jaws, points out to what extent cinematic devices such as colour-coding, camera angles, editing rhythms, ambient sound and music create a complex set of reactions in the viewer (Friedman 169-173). Because the elements on-screen are so simple, cinematic minimalism makes us aware of the camera itself, and the other cinematic manipulations taking place outside the diegesis. Other films that provide examples of cinematic minimalism are Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) and many Alfred Hitchcock mysteries, most notably Rope (1948). Already, then, with pared down landscapes and settings that call forth cinematic devices, these films call attention to their own means in a manner that is unusual for Hollywood films.
With their very simple visual codes, Duel and Jaws often make use of virtually abstract compositions that feature sharp lines and monochrome colour planes. In Duel, the line in question is most often the road, which is surrounded by green and golden fields, rocky hills or small country homes and businesses. As the film begins on the road, with Spielberg’s camera mounted to the front of David’s car, the road stands for continuity, safety and assurance. As David leaves the city and heads into the agricultural and desert areas traversed by “Highway 14 just north of
The truck, furthermore, is not subject to the same isolation that David experiences outside his suburban middle-class comfort zone. In a moment that brings Duel into dialogue with texts like the Transformers movie and series – in which machines like trucks, trains and planes are given human attributes – the road runs parallel to another set of lines, train tracks. As David speeds ahead, trying to evade the truck and in the same moment overtaking the train, the truck honks three times, to which the train responds with the same three honks. Clearly, the large freight vehicles that facilitate commerce across the expansive North American continent are in league against David. In fact, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to assume that with this exchange of honks the train and truck are plotting the railroad-crossing scene later, when the truck almost pushes David into the passing train. Again, this scene presents the crossing of lines as dangerous and transgressive, but, interestingly, necessary for David’s survival. The line of the road in Duel, staying on it and moving forward over it, mediates between the order it represents and the surrounding chaos of unsettled countryside.
Lines perform a similarly mediatory function in Jaws, though taking different forms in the film’s two halves. The abstract composition changes between the first and second parts of the film: the small-town horror narrative and the chase plot (Lemkin 9). In the former, the golden Amity island beach forms a line, with the town to one side and the blue ocean on the other. This strip of beach is the primary setting for the film’s first half, “it is between this archetypal uncontrollable wilderness and the archetypal American landscape that Spielberg spins his tale” (ibid. 6). By setting the first half of Jaws on the Amity beaches, “Spielberg thrusts his characters in a liminal zone and exposes them to danger” (ibid. 6). Again, to leave this line and go into the ocean becomes a transgressive activity, one harshly punished by the irrational evil represented by the shark. The beach, then, is a borderline between an idealized American status quo and the immense and threatening ocean. In a telling scene, Chief Brody and his forces attempt to extend this border by creating a line of boats with armed men some hundred feet offshore. However, this manipulation and extension of the shoreline fails miserably. While the line of boats attempts to mediate between the actual shoreline and the ocean, the shark crosses it and two other borders, entering “the pond” through an inlet and going under a bridge. This undermines Brody’s project, pointing out how fluid and uncontrollable the ocean is. Incapable of civilizing even those hundred feet of the ocean closest to the beach, Brody has no choice but leave Amity and meet the shark on its own turf.
Once Jaws becomes a chase narrative, the line is no longer Amity’s beach, but the wake of white water left by the movements of Quint’s boat, the Orca. This line traces the movements of the boat, and stands in contrast to the trajectories of the super-mobile shark. Because the boat is set on a constantly moving ocean with no markers of distance or space, it never appears to turn, instead only going forwards or backwards. The shark, on the other hand, turns around, dives and comes back up, criss-crosses the boat’s path and even seems to swim backwards in a couple of moments, a movement real sharks cannot actually perform. The fluidity of the shark’s movements stands in contrast to the rigid forward and backward capacities of the Orca. The multiplicity of movements demonstrated by the shark ultimately overcomes the boat, which only breaks free of the forward/backward dichotomy of linear movements as it sinks below the ocean’s surface. By abandoning forward-movement and staging a final face-off with the shark, the protagonists disregard the status quo of linear progress. In doing so, the three men abandon the line they had drawn through the untamed ocean with the movement of their boat, adopting strategies more akin to the shark’s subversive movements.
In both Duel and Jaws, the monsters are transgressive for the ways they undermine borders and lines between civilized and uncivilized areas. The truck in Duel defies the linear movements of David, turning around and coming back, crossing the road and leaving it any number of times. David, meanwhile, can only conceive of moving forward, stopping only occasionally and each time with a great deal of difficulty. In fact, whenever he tries to stop, he crashes his car or loses control of it. The truck, however, displays a great deal of agility in manipulating and negotiating the road, most notably when it destroys the roadside snake shack and telephone booth by carving a series of circles both on an off the road. David slowly begins to use the truck’s tactics, stopping on several occasions in hopes of evading his foe. For instance, he pulls over and hides below the road and takes a nap after the truck passes him, assuming that it will keep moving forward. However, once he takes back to the road he quickly catches up to the truck, which has pulled over and waited for him. David eventually learns from the truck, and in the climactic confrontation not only leaves the road completely, but turns around for the first time. It is only after he has turned around, something the truck does several times throughout Duel, that David is able to vanquish his enemy. Thus, by appropriating the transgressive behaviour of the truck, David escapes the normative forward movement that constitutes the American status quo, and emerges victorious.
The importance of turning around, then, draws attention to the Spielbergian motif of looking back. In an insightful article, Johanna Schneller points out that those important characters in Spielberg’s films are always the ones who look back rather than forward: “Spielberg knows that turning backwards sets a person apart from a crowd: Your perspective is immediately different; on film, you instantly become an Individual” (R2). Furthermore, she posits that this lends reflections, rear-view mirrors and car rear windows particular thematic weight as framing devices. “With your eyes in a rear-view mirror, you are pulling into the future but looking into the past. It’s nostalgia made physical. And no one is better at capturing a particularly American form of nostalgia than Spielberg” (ibid. R2). This notion of Spielberg’s cinema as fundamentally nostalgic for a long-gone American society compliments Jonathan Lemkin’s analysis of Amity, the fictional town of
The protagonists of Duel and Jaws, then, overcome their habit of looking back while moving forward, and adopt their foe’s ability to turn around completely, but also to divert their course. After exclamations of “He turned around,” or “He’s coming back around,” the heroes take on these very same characteristics. To some extent, this may simply be due to how compelling Spielberg’s monsters are when compared with his heroes. As one critic observes regarding Jaws, “though the ominous shark has a great deal of life, the film’s central characters are thinly sketched” (Auster 116). However, this also testifies to the tremendous appeal of these monsters for being able to transgress the conventions and bindings of archetypal modern American life. When David defeats the truck at the end of Duel, he does so by leaving the road, turning around and destroying his car in order to ensure his freedom and survival. The film’s final image is of David looking out over a pristine wilderness, free from the constraints of social convention and decorum that his car symbolized. This is a utopian ending, one that does not posit a return to David’s dissatisfying life as an office employee and alienated father and husband. He has adopted the truck’s ability to take the road less-traveled, cross boundaries and move in a non-linear mode.
Similarly, the ending of Jaws does not enact a return to land and the family, but ends instead with Hooper and Brody clearly on the “wilderness” side of the line traced by the beach. Friedman says of Jaws that “[a]s is often the case in Spielberg’s films, the seemingly ordinary man who appears awkwardly out of place in the environment he is forced to inhabit defeats the threat to society” (165). He, like most critics writing on the film, goes on to posit that in neutralizing the threat, Brody and Hooper uphold the status quo exemplified by the town of
The protagonists of Duel and Jaws, by learning from their enemies, offer a progressive rather than regressive social model. The boundary-crossing shark and truck, though defeated, live on to some extent in the men who destroyed them. This internalizing of certain elements of the monsters aligns these two films with what Robin Wood has termed the progressive horror movie model in his book chapter “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 1970s”. According to Wood, when the monsters and the heroes share certain recognizable traits, the film admits to a certain “spirit of negativity” (93), dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs and desire for positive change. The heroes of these two Spielberg films adopt the monsters’ abilities to cross boundaries, pursue multiple directions of action, ultimately allowing them to confront the anxieties that chase them. In doing so, Duel and Jaws admit the shortcomings of 1970s American culture, and offer solutions to overcoming those difficulties. Both films foreground those means by adhering to cinematic minimalism, which creates an uncomplicated narrative and visual code whose abstract compositions call attention to movements across lines and borders.
Note: Written for English 480: American Cinema of the 1970s – the Two New Hollywoods course taught by Prof. Derek Nystrom at
Works Cited
Auster, Albert and Leaonard Quart. American Film and Society since 1945. 3rd ed.
Caputi, Jane E. “Jaws as Patriarchal Myth.” Journal of Popular Film 6 (1978): 305-326.
Duel. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Dennis Weaver (David Mann). Universal TV, 1971.
Frentz, Thomas S. and Janice Hocker Rushing. “Integrating Ideology and Archetype in Rhetorical Criticism, Part II: A Case Study of Jaws.” In The Films of Steven Spielberg. Ed. Charles L. P. Silet.
Friedman, Lester D. Citizen Spielberg.
Jameson, Frederic. Signatures of the Visible.
Jaws. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Roy Scheider (Martin Brody), Robert Shaw (Quint), Richard Dreyfuss (Matt Hooper),
Lemkin, Jonathan. “Archetypal Landscapes and Jaws.” In The Films of Steven Spielberg. Ed. Charles L. P. Silet.
Schneller, Johanna. “Smoke and rear-view mirrors: Spielberg looks back at an always better past.” Globe and Mail
Wood, Robin. “The American Nightmare: Horror in the 1970s.” In
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