The Desire of Horror
Charla's love of horror movies combine with Marty's love of psychoanalysis and history of religions. This is a review and analysis of horror movies and what they say about desire.
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The Desire of Horror
16. Jaws
The desire of the unknowable other takes on new depths in the impenetrable, black eyes of a shark. Matt Hooper, the marine biologist played by Richard Dreyfuss, waxes poetic about the almost eternal perfection of the shark's form, which was designed by evolution for the singular purpose of hunting. But there is a sort of ambiguous place for the shark at the top of the of sea's food chain since the more recent arrival of an even more effective and vicious apex predatory in the form of the human intention. A shark's blank eyes may give no indication of its intentions, but at least they can be inferred from their actions. The human intention is belied by their eyes' deceptive transparency. Even when the human speaks its desire, it remains hidden. Human intention is unknowable both in relation to each other and to themselves. Hidden behind the thin veneer of the Freudian Unconscious, human intention lies in internal contradiction to itself.
Quint, played by Robert Shaw, is insane with his desire to confront the shark. Like Ahab's desire for the White Whale, it is a hidden intention that emerges as a reckless madness that puts the other crew in danger. But the specific contours of his obsession begin to emerge one evening out at sea when Quint recalls in nightmarish details his experience of being torpedoed while aboard the USS Indianapolis after delivering the Atomic Bombs during World War II. The sharks that attacked and killed most of the crew seem to represent the mystery at the heart of the blank violence of the war and especially of those incomprehensible blasts delivered to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Martin Brody, played by Roy Scheider, also must face his own demons presented as a phobia of water but which seem to express his feelings of impotence about the incomprehensible crime of 1970's New York City, which he left to live a simpler, more intentional, island life in the vacation town of Amity. But as Freud taught, whatever is repressed returns with a vengeance until it is faced head on.
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