How to Write a Marxist Critique: Jaws

It may strike some people as amazingly at how easy it is to apply a Marxist critique to any text. What those people don't seem to get-and will probably never get-is how right on the target Karl Marx was in his critique of capitalism. And that's why it's ridiculously easy to apply Marxist principles to literature and film. If you are going to write a Marxist critique as a college term paper the overriding thing you must remember is in a Marxist paper everything can be boiled down to how economics drives the plot. Many works of literature lend themselves easily to a Marxist interpretation, but by way of example I shall use a text not normally associated with something as profound as a Marxist critique.

Steven Spielberg burst onto the theatrical film scene with the original summer blockbuster, Jaws. When one normally reads a review of that movie, it is framed-for reason I simply do not get-in terms of a horror movie. I've never really gotten why Jaws makes list of scariest movies ever. Of course, that famous movie about the shark attacking Amity Island also lends itself quite well to a psychological reading of the text, placing the shark within its confines as a horror movie character as the Other that must be destroyed or annihilated before its threat to the normalcy of society succeeds in tearing it apart. But I reject that reading as being far too facile.