Anaïs Giannuzzo works as a PhD student on Julia Langkau’s SNSF project "Creativity, Imagination and Tradition". She is particularly interested in narratives. She thinks fictional narratives, as well as narratives about real life, can offer us an understanding of our daily lives (but as you’ll see in the post, they can also misguide us), and she desires to figure out why and how they do so. She also works on creativity in relation to artificial intelligence and virtual reality.
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?
According to Friend, fiction and the emotions they elicit are not “quarantined” within their own realm – we do not emote towards fiction, then close the book, and shut our experience out completely (Friend 2022, 260–61). The effect of fiction can linger, e.g., we might feel gloomy after watching Call Me By Your Name; we can think about characters further, e.g., we can imagine what Elio would do in certain situations. Friend offers rational and irrational examples of the impact that fiction may have on our lives. Covering one’s house with garlic and crosses because we fear the vampire Lestat is not rational, whereas feeling with slaves and their descendants after reading Beloved is rational (Friend 2022, 267). This is because in the first case, we fear a being that does not exist in our world; in the second case, we extract from the world of the fiction an understanding of real life events. The impact Jaws had on the shark population is a case of fiction having massively influenced irrational behaviour. The rogue shark does not exist: sharks do not hunt a specific human for weeks on end.
But Friend’s normative claim concerning irrationality does not explain how the fictional representation of sharks was exported into real life. Let’s have a closer look at how this may have come about. At the start, we have a narrative, with which people engage (Jaws). The fictional narrative causes the audience to build a representation of the rogue shark in their imagination. This imaginative representation is then ‘extracted’ from the fiction and used to understand real life events: real life sharks can be rogue sharks, and shark attacks are perpetrated by rogue sharks. In cases such as this, I take it that the representation in the imagination has a narrative structure. By this I mean that the content of the imagination has a complex, narrative, form: it is not only propositional, but also imagistic and experiential, and it is moreover structured in a certain way.
What does it mean for the representation to have a narrative structure? Compared to the definitions that reduce the narrative to a causal and temporal structure between disparate events (Currie 2010; Lamarque 2014), I prefer Peter Goldie’s account. Goldie (2012) says that causal relations are very common, but not necessary for something to be a narrative. He defines narratives as the compilation of “raw materials” such as subjects, thoughts, events, emotions, feelings etc., into a narrative structure. For raw material to have a narrative structure means that it is arranged in a “coherent”, “meaningful” way which includes evaluations and emotions. What is more, the narrative represents the raw material from a certain perspective, and need not be told out loud or written, as long as it has narrative structure.
The representation of the rogue shark in our imagination is likely that of a set of properties, such as the one provided above: a rogue shark (1) has intentions, (2) is blood thirsty, and (3) is a predator of humans. This set of properties could take the form of a proposition such as: “Some sharks are rogue. They are more intelligent than other marine beings. They intentionally choose, track and hunt their victims.” It could also take the form of an image or of a sensation, e.g. the shark’s sharp teeth, their strength, etc. But likely, it will encompass all three. Here, we already have a very basic narrative representation. This representation connects ‘raw material’ and reveals a certain perspective on sharks (originally Spielberg’s perspective); the representation is coherent and meaningful and exhibits emotional and evaluative stances towards the content.
But the imaginative representation is more complex than this set of properties (otherwise, why not just call it a belief or a characterisation of sharks? See Camp 2017). Because the representation of the rogue shark results from our experience of the movie, this experience permeates into the narrative imagining. This makes the narrative imagining even more coloured, more vivid (Langkau 2021). Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of impressions that could be part of the narrative imagining:
[the movie music]
[the suspense]
[the pain of the victims]
[the blood]
[the violence]
[the vulnerability of the naked woman swimming alone in the dark waters, compared to the massive strength of the shark]
[the fear of the people of the town of Amity Island]
[our own fear when watching the movie]
Thus the narrative imagining encompasses not just sets of attributes organised in a narrative structure, but also our own emotions, feelings, impressions, and memories. The different elements involved in the representation of the rogue shark, such as the music, the blood, the suspense, our own fear etc., make this representation especially vivid. It is not just that people acquired a new (false) belief about sharks when watching Jaws, they actually developed a vivid, narrative representation of them.
The imagining in the form of a narrative in turn orients behaviour and thoughts in real life. Although I am not yet able to offer a complete explanation of how this might take place (to be continued), I can seek some support from the psychological concept of ‘scripts’. Scripts are “sets of rules” that serve as “cognitive shortcuts” for dealing with the complexity of our lives and that shape “cognitive and behavioral responses” (He and Fisher 2020, 4607). Our script of the world, e.g. of romantic relationships or of sharks, guides us towards interpreting and behaving in accordance with it without thinking much about it: from childhood on, we learn how to behave towards and think about certain things (He and Fisher 2020, 4607).
Complex narrative representations could have a similar effect. Jaws indeed seems to have had this effect, of pushing some towards developing a sort of script about sharks. But I take it that the narrative representation is more than a mere cognitive shortcut. The fact that the rogue shark representation is vivid and rich, i.e. that it is emotionally and evaluatively charged, will influence the nature and intensity of our responses towards sharks in real life. Next time we go to the beach, we might be wary when swimming, and we may immediately suppose that the reason why the life guard jumped into the water is a shark attack. Next time we hear of a shark killed by hunters, we may feel satisfaction.
Of course, when letting fiction guide our actions and thoughts, one ought to be careful. Sometimes it leads us astray, as in the Jaws case. The impact the ‘rogue’ shark had led the book’s author Peter Benchley to pursue activism for shark conservation and Spielberg to apologise for the impact his movie had on the shark population (Jackson 2006; Sedacca 2022). But sometimes, fiction guides us for the better, for instance because we learn new things about ourselves and others. To end on a more tempered note, Jaws had a positive consequence, too: it was “also responsible for a flood of scientific interest in sharks, and an expansion of shark conservation groups around the world” (Beryl 2012, 57).
References:
Beryl, Ferancis. 2012. ‘Before and After “Jaws”: Changing Representations of Shark Attacks’. Australian Association for Maritime History, The Great Circle, 34 (2): 44–64.
Camp, Elisabeth. 2017. ‘Perspectives in Imaginative Engagement with Fiction’. Philosophical Perspectives 31 (1): 73–102. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpe.12102.
Currie, Gregory. 2010. Narratives and Narrators. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199282609.001.0001.
Dulvy, Nicholas K., Colin A. Simpfendorfer, Lindsay N. K. Davidson, Sonja V. Fordham, Amie Bräutigam, Glenn Sant, and David J. Welch. 2017. ‘Challenges and Priorities in Shark and Ray Conservation’. Current Biology 27 (11): R565–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.04.038.
Friend, Stacie. 2022. ‘Emotion in Fiction: State of the Art’. The British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (2): 257–71. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/ayab060.
Goffin, Kris, and Stacie Friend. 2022. ‘Learning Implicit Biases from Fiction’. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (2): 129–39. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaac/kpab078.
Goldie, Peter. 2012. The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199230730.001.0001.
He, Theresa H., and Alexandra N. Fisher. 2020. ‘Scripts’. In Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences, edited by Virgil Zeigler-Hill and Todd K. Shackelford, 4606–9. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_1901.
Jackson, Derrick Z. 2006. ‘Opinion | Endangeredpredators’. The New York Times, 16 February 2006, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/16/opinion/endangeredpredators.html.
Lamarque, Peter. 2014. The Opacity of Narrative. London; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International.
Neff, Christopher. 2015. ‘The Jaws Effect: How Movie Narratives Are Used to Influence Policy Responses to Shark Bites in Western Australia’. Australian Journal of Political Science 50 (1): 114–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/10361146.2014.989385.
Pacoureau, Nathan, Cassandra L. Rigby, Peter M. Kyne, Richard B. Sherley, Henning Winker, John K. Carlson, Sonja V. Fordham, et al. 2021. ‘Half a Century of Global Decline in Oceanic Sharks and Rays’. Nature 589 (7843): 567–71. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-03173-9.
Peace, Adrian. 2015. ‘Shark Attack!: A Cultural Approach’. Anthropology Today 31 (5): 3–7. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8322.12197.
Sedacca, Matthew. 2022. ‘Steven Spielberg Apologizes for “Jaws” Impact on Sharks’. 18 December 2022. https://nypost.com/2022/12/17/steven-spielberg-apologizes-for-jaws-impact-on-sharks/.