A post by Anaïs Giannuzzo
In 1975, something happened that would change our world: Steven Spielberg’s movie Jaws was released. Since then, the shark population has has fallen to around 70% of the original population (Pacoureau et al. 2021). To say that Jaws was the cause of this would be wrong – our increasing appetite for fish combined with bad fishing techniques, our demand for beauty products (in this case: for squalene), and the lack of regulations are the main causes of the decline (Dulvy et al. 2017). But, as Christopher Neff argues, the representation of sharks provided by Jaws has made it okay for us that they be killed without much or any control (Neff 2015): in the US, a surge of shark hunters were exposing their catches with the pride of having eliminated a ‘man killer’ (Beryl 2012); Australia passed laws that enabled the killing of a greater amount of sharks than before (Neff 2015); and more generally, shark attacks were systematically reported by the media as though they were perpetrated by a rogue, psychopathic shark (Beryl 2012; Neff 2015; Peace 2015).
This is precisely the picture Jaws induced (not just the movie, the 1974-published book with the same title, too): a representation of sharks – especially of the great white shark – as (1) having intentions, (2) being blood thirsty, and (3) being a predator of humans. This (fallacious) shark-deviation is the so-called ‘rogue’ shark (the term originates in Jaws). Rogue sharks have the intention to murder specific humans, which they hunt for weeks or months.
I predict that most of the audience of Jaws would say that the representation of sharks in both the movie and the book is fictional. In spite of that, the representation had, for many, an impact on their daily life, as it shaped the way in which they perceived real sharks and saw certain actions as justified (see discussion of similar phenomena in Goffin and Friend 2022). So the question is, how can a fictional representation of sharks have such an influence when people know it doesn’t correspond to the world?
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