
Money on the Left
Money on the Left is a monthly, interdisciplinary podcast that reclaims money’s public powers for intersectional politics. Staging critical conversations with leading historians, theorists, organizers, and activists, the show draws upon Modern Monetary Theory and constitutional approaches to money to advance new forms of left critique and practice. It is hosted by William Saas and Scott Ferguson and presented in partnership with Monthly Review magazine. Check out our website: https://moneyontheleft.org Follow us on Bluesky
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Money on the Left
JAWS at 50: Birth of the Neoliberal Blockbuster
In honor of the 50th anniversary of JAWS (1975), we are proud to publish a 2020 lecture about Steven Spielberg's film by Scott Ferguson. Far from a simple celebration, the lecture critically situates JAWS as the first genuine New Hollywood blockbuster and the originator of a distinctly neoliberal aesthetic that would come to dominate Hollywood for the next five decades. Ferguson explores the film's influence on Hollywood, its innovative use of television advertising, and its role in establishing the high-concept blockbuster. The majority of the lecture, however, teases out the film's profound aesthetic reorganization of Hollywood cinema.
JAWS, Ferguson shows, employs a wide range of techniques, such as the "Spielberg face," "God lights," and what he calls the "quasi-diegetic" camera, which work together to create a sublime, immersive experience grounded in immediate physical relations. In this new aesthetic regime, abstraction is repressed, physics reigns supreme, and cinematic movement is reduced to zero-sum displacements of material forces and entities. Ferguson connects this immersive aesthetic to JAWS's narrative treatment of money as an essentially private, scarce, and politically unanswerable thing. Through this analysis, the lecture demonstrates how JAWS both expresses and contributes to a broader turn toward neoliberalism in 1970s America, revealing cinema's role in shaping the economic and political imagination of an era.