3. In place of these suspended sexual relations, there sets in the homosexualizing companionship of “Three Men in a Boat,” with noble ends and viriloid violence. We know that in the American cinema, this companionship is defined by the exclusion of two scorned groups: women and politicians (suspected of enjoying shady pleasures compared to men, the real ones). Additionally, the film creates a triple alliance, uniting the hunter, the scientist, and the cop. This alliance also takes on a class character: Quint, the prole who doesn’t behave himself in public (played by Shakespearian actor Robert Shaw), and two representatives of the middle classes (the modest, daydreaming professor—Richard Dreyfuss—and a down-on-his-luck cop) fighting the corruption of money: profit-hungry developers, the irresponsible beach-going masses, venal mayors. Lastly, it’s a question of uniting the movie theater, turning it into a collective of fear, bombarded like never before by an advertising campaign that makes it as difficult to escape Jaws (the film) as it is for the film’s extras to escape the shark’s teeth.

4. “Boo! Scare me!” is therefore weighed down by “How do we reassure them?” and “What price do we pay?” A poorly placed desire (the young people smoking on the beach, soon dismissed by the fiction) will be replaced by a more socializable desire, a desire to be done with horror, a desire to return to normal. This is the function of disaster movies. But it’s not the only one: for what we are simultaneously given to desire is normativity. In that respect, this kind of cinema borders on the fascistizing.

What scares more than three hundred thousand spectators in one week? And what do they use to reassure themselves? The mise en scène of a violence that, as Alain Bergala rightly notes, “guarantees the very conditions of the spectator’s pleasure and his subsequent adherence to any incarnation of counterviolence.”

It’s the deathless cry of a drill sergeant shouting: “Line up! I only want to see one head!” Nothing that juts out: a body (like an army corps or a social body) that’s full, smooth, and homogenous. A body you could compare to a circle closing, except in the one place where it gapes open. That’s the place where the shark appears: here, the shark is what Lacan describes in his “schema of the hoop net” as the obturator, the objet a. Who is the shark? Nothing more than the actualization—arriving like a hallucination from outside the hoop net—that there is something rotten on the inside that is attracting the fish. This something is the enemy within, that is to say everything that experiences jouissance. The supposed jouissance of the young people at the beginning, the proven jouissance of the asocial duovidual formed of the hunter and the scientist. For there’s nothing forcing Quint to persevere in the hunt other than the fatal outcome he foresees: being incorporated into the great white. nothing forces the scientist to reproduce the scenographic cube (cage) of the quattro-cento deep beneath the sea and right under the shark’s nose. He’s obviously a cinephile. Neither he nor Quint will kill the beast. 

5. A normalizing imagination can be staged. Quite simply. It involves filming everything (events, extras) from two—and only two—points of view: those of the hunter and the hunted. There’s no point of view (spatial, moral, political), no place for the camera, and therefore for the spectator, other than this double position. It’s frivolous to speak of “identification” in cinema if one hasn’t seen that in this kind of film the identification is with the hunter/hunted couple, with specular oscillation, short circuits of knowledge and point of view, the loss of any kind of point of reference, all placed in the gray-ish skin of the other—in other words, everything that leads to a total irresponsibilization. In the alternation of this double point of view, the camera is always in the place of the swimming child for whom the shark is just a speeding black rectangle, then, in the next shot, in the place of the shark for whom the child’s leg is just what’s sticking out of the water.

“Gray Matter” appears in Footlights: Critical Notebooks (1970–1982), which has just been published by Semiotext(e), and is available to purchase from the Metrograph Bookstore.

Serge Daney became the editor of Cahiers du Cinéma in 1974. In 1981, he left Cahiers and wrote about visual culture for Libération, turning his attention to television and coverage of the gulf War. He collaborated with Claire Denis on a documentary film, Jacques Rivette, le veilleur (1990). He died of AIDS-related causes in 1992.