This article was downloaded by: [Brown, William]

On: 5 February 2009

Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 908466175]
Publisher Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House,
37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

New Review of Film and Television Studies

Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713701127

It's a shark eat shark world: Steven Spielberg's ambiguous politics

William Brown a
a
Department of Film Studies, University of St Andrews, Fife, UK

Online Publication Date: 01 March 2009

To cite this Article Brown, William(2009)'It's a shark eat shark world: Steven Spielberg's ambiguous politics',New Review of Film and
Television Studies,7:1,13 — 22
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17400300802602858
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400300802602858

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf

This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or
systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or
distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents
will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses
should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss,
actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly
or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
 New Review of Film and Television Studies
Vol. 7, No. 1, March 2009, 13–22

RESEARCH ARTICLE
It’s a shark eat shark world: Steven Spielberg’s ambiguous politics
William Brown*

Department of Film Studies, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Fife, UK

This paper attempts to put forward a playful interpretation of the films of Steven
Spielberg, by relating them to the workings of capitalism. This relationship is
understood in terms of both the form and content of his films, and also in terms
of how Spielberg’s films operate culturally as products of Hollywood, which is
itself a capitalist machine par excellence. Capitalism is in particular defined as a
Downloaded By: [Brown, William] At: 13:09 5 February 2009

system that produces its own ‘others’; that is, capital produces its own outsiders
and opponents in order to be able to consume them so as always to be
expanding. In Spielberg’s films, we see a range of attitudes taken towards
‘others’: some are depicted as irrevocably evil and to be destroyed, while others
again are threatened with destruction, but elicit our sympathy and often escape.
These differing attitudes towards ‘others’ demonstrate the ambiguous nature of
Spielberg’s representations of (and relation to) capital. Is he, like Jaws, a shark
that cannot stop feeding? Or is he a shark hunter, ready to skewer capital
precisely by bringing it ever closer to its end?
Keywords: Steven Spielberg; capitalism; Deleuze and Guattari; Otherness

This paper does not involve a specific reading of individual films by Spielberg,
although it will dip into, borrow from, and play with the potential meaning of
various of his films. Furthermore, it does not attempt to locate Spielberg’s work
within a particular cultural and, more specifically, an industrial context. Both of
these tasks, which we might respectively call interpreting and contextualising
Spielberg and his films, have been more than adequately undertaken.1
Instead, this paper seeks to use Spielberg as a paradigm of the ambiguous
processes that take place not within the specific context of the Hollywood film
industry, but rather in the wider and more generalised workings of capitalism, the
processes of capital itself. In order to do this, we must briefly define capitalism and
the ways in which it works, but we must also begin by providing a brief explanation
of Spielberg so as to make it clear why he works as the embodiment not just of New
Hollywood and the blockbuster, but of capital itself.
In a celebrated article, Stephen Heath (1992) urged viewers to engage with the
‘ideological operation’ of Spielberg’s films, Heath himself seeing Jaws (1975) as
working in relation to the Watergate incident of 1972. In addition, critics have
interpreted that film’s eponymous monster in a variety of ways, prompting
Friedman to conclude that this Great White is a blank screen on to which many

*Email: wjrcb@st-andrews.ac.uk

ISSN 1740-0309 print/ISSN 1740-7923 online

# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17400300802602858
http://www.informaworld.com
 14 W. Brown

interpretations can be projected (2006, 163–4). However, precisely because of its

ambiguity (what Fredric Jameson [1979] would term its ‘ideological polysemous-
ness’), the creature can also be interpreted as a metaphor not only for Spielberg’s
own ambiguous relationship to the system that produces his films, namely
Hollywood, but also for the ambiguous processes of capitalism. It is with the
shark metaphor in mind, so conveniently the subject matter of Spielberg’s first true
commercial success as a filmmaker, that we can begin to define capital – and, after
Heath, to look at the operations of capitalist ideology in Spielberg’s films, relating
them not just to a particular moment in history, but to capitalism itself.
Evidently, Marx (1976) remains a monolithic figure in terms of his definition of
capital, and he understood well that capitalist production begot its own negation.
However, where Marx saw the exploitation of the working classes as leading
inevitably to their revolt and empowerment, it is hard today to remain so optimistic
in the face of capitalism’s inevitable production of its ‘other’. Jean-Paul Sartre
Downloaded By: [Brown, William] At: 13:09 5 February 2009

(2000) similarly analyses relations between the self and the Other, describing the
relationship between the two as a symbiotic one of separation/negation (identifying
the Other as other), as well as one of assimilation (trying to assimilate the freedom
of the Other). However, Sartre does not explicitly locate the production of the other
within the capitalist system. Writing in the aftermath of May 1968, and therefore at
a time of disillusionment in the Communist project (i.e. not sharing Marx’s
confidence in a revolution led by the proletariat), it is Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari (1983, 2004) who perhaps best explain the relationship between capitalism
and the production and assimilation of others. In their two-volume work on
capitalism and schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari set forth a complex and rich
system of definitions for capital, aspects of which have become key concepts in
cultural studies, film studies, and philosophy alike, and it is in their description of
the processes of the production and assimilation of otherness that Deleuze and
Guattari develop the concepts of permanent revolution and axiomatics, upon both
of which I should like to draw here.
On the level of cultural production, permanent revolution is perhaps clearly
articulated in the emergence of such phenomena as trends and fashions; what we
might refer to as the quest for the next ‘big thing’. Since there is in this quest both a
circular movement (fashions repeat themselves) and a linear movement (the very
‘nextness’ of the next big thing suggests a progression through time), we come to
understand capitalism as an ever-expanding process in need of phenomena that are,
on a certain level, ‘without’ it (or ‘next’, i.e. not yet here and now). It is ‘into’ these
other or ‘next’ phenomena that capital can expand. In other words, capital needs
that which is ‘other’ to it in order to expand.
However, we should also bear in mind that this ‘other’ can only be produced by
the capitalist system itself. That is, whilst the ‘other’ is outside of and ‘next up’ for a
certain section of capitalist society (most notably the consumer), it is also already
part of the capitalist system on the level of capital’s wider functioning. Perhaps the
inherent homogenisation of that which appears ‘other’ (that which is ‘next’) is best
understood through what Deleuze and Guattari term axiomatics or axiomatisation
(2004, 454–73).
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 15

Axiomatisation is the process whereby an other is rendered part of the system.

In effect, capital takes that which is other to it (and, by and large, this means that
which stands in opposition to it) and integrates it, consumes it, cannibalises it,
makes it mainstream. Clear examples of a counter-culture serving eventually only to
reinforce the dominant capitalist ideology can be found in recent history: the hippy
movement, punk, hip hop, Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, all initially counter-cultural
movements that became commercialised, deprived of their political power, brought
inside the system. It is with axiomatisation in mind that Steven Shaviro argues that
that which seeks to subvert a dominant ideology only really reinforces that
ideology, hence the idea that capital’s ‘others’ are always already part of the
capitalist system (1993, 68).2 And it is for this reason that we can understand
Deleuze and Guattari’s recommendation always to follow lines of flight and
constantly to become other so as not to be axiomatised and deprived of one’s
heterogeneity/otherness.3
Downloaded By: [Brown, William] At: 13:09 5 February 2009

Hollywood, with its current system of horizontal integration, provides a clear

example of capital working through a system of expansion through permanent
revolution via the production, axiomatisation, and then the consumption of others.
Ever on the lookout for new talent, Hollywood brings in ‘others’ (both individuals and
styles) from ‘other’ cinemas and axiomatises them such that what was once outside of
Hollywood is brought into the Hollywood system, allowing it to expand ever further.
Taking the shark from Jaws as our metaphor, we see that capitalism, and Hollywood
itself, is an all-consuming ‘shark’ that must always move forward – for, like a shark, it
runs the risk of sinking if it ever stops. To paraphrase Richard Dreyfuss’s Hooper (and
Jon Lewis 2003)4 – and using a further metaphor that would be most pleasing to
Deleuze and Guattari, who themselves saw all things as machines – capital, and
Hollywood, is the perfect money-making machine. It never stops.
Where does Spielberg stand in relation to this system? What in his films can
indicate to us both his desired and his actual relationship to this system, if they are
not one and the same thing? Has Spielberg been ‘axiomatised’? Or is he, in a
metaphor that would please both the filmmaker and Deleuze and Guattari,
consistently undertaking lines of flight from Hollywood?
In order to answer these questions, I should like to erect a playful interpretative
geography (a ‘spiel-berg’) of Spielberg’s ideological position in relation to
Hollywood. Is he himself one of a shiver of sharks, reinforcing the capitalist ethos
of consumption (Spielberg as businessman)? Is he a shark hunter, whose work,
ostensibly pro-Hollywood, in fact spears the shark of capital? Or does he play a
more ambiguous role, creating big budget movies that critique capitalism and yet
which also reinforce it, not least through their popularity?
At first glance, Spielberg appears a conservative filmmaker, since his films
depict a universe in which Otherness is kept firmly as Other; in which Otherness,
although a product of capitalism, is not so much axiomatised as destroyed
(although axiomatisation can be seen as a kind of death/destruction). In Duel
(1971), the driver of the truck cannot be bargained with or bought. He can only be
killed. Similarly, the shark in Jaws cannot be incorporated into the money-making
system of the beach and must be destroyed for normality (profit-making) to be
 16 W. Brown

restored. Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) both tell
the story of how, in trying to create and then to axiomatise dinosaurs, in trying to
turn dinosaurs into a tourist attraction, the Other becomes hostile and starts to
attack the park owners. The dinosaurs must eventually be destroyed. We can
compare this to the Alien films,5 in which otherness, the alien, is always to be kept
alive and used for profit by the Company, in spite of the threat the alien poses to
human life. This bleak but perhaps more realistic vision is far from the case in
Spielberg’s own alien invasion story, War of the Worlds (2005), in which, again, the
aliens must be killed.
Various of Spielberg’s films extend destruction of others (maintaining
otherness) into the human realm. Among these are Raiders of the Lost Ark
(1981), Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), and Saving Private Ryan (1998).
In each example the Germans are, like truck drivers, sharks, dinosaurs, and aliens,
portrayed as irrevocably Other and must similarly be destroyed. In particular,
Downloaded By: [Brown, William] At: 13:09 5 February 2009

Saving Private Ryan shows an attempt by Upham (Jeremy Davies), who speaks
German, to befriend enemy captives. However, even though he can speak the same
language as his enemies, he discovers that only hatred can exist between them. The
Americans set free a German soldier, who comes back later in the film to kill one of
Upham’s comrades by stabbing him. Upham himself finally captures the German
again, and, rather than trying to communicate, he now shoots him in cold blood.
Given that these films seem to endorse a hostile reaction to others, we could
argue that Spielberg is, broadly speaking, critiquing the capitalist system’s
production of others. Others are not an opportunity for expansion (be that a
cultural, political, ideological, or even military expansion), but a threat to the
homely (American) values that Spielberg also endorses. Indeed, if Spielberg depicts
the impossibility of positive axiomatisation in his films (others can only be
destroyed; there is no dialogue), as cultural products (as blockbusters), Spielberg’s
films also present the destruction of these others as a spectacle that very much
drives the ever-hungry capitalist machine that his films help to feed. On the level of
content, trucks, sharks, dinosaurs, and Germans are produced as an other and then
consumed in the most violent manner possible; as film products, viewers are also
encouraged to applaud the destruction of the other rather than to critique it. Even
Bruce, the shark model used on Jaws, is, as part of the Amity ‘ride’ featured in the
Universal Studios Tour, deprived of any potential to threaten us.
For this reason, Spielberg emerges, according to the above films, as a very
conservative filmmaker, keen not only to preserve otherness as other, but to
destroy/consume that otherness in the most violent way possible. However,
Spielberg does not only make films in which others are an outside threat that must
be destroyed. He also makes films that seem to take the side of people or creatures
that are other or who are ‘othered’ in the course of the film.
Amistad (1997) invites audiences to mourn the plight of but also to celebrate the
independence of African slaves. A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) elicits sympathy
for robots that are used and then discarded/destroyed. E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
(1982) must go home come the end of that film. And, of course, in Schindler’s List
(1993), ‘evil’ Germans buy, sell, consume, and destroy Jews.
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 17

If there is a lack of consistency in Spielberg, in that he sometimes tells stories in

which others are gloriously destroyed and at other times is critical of a world that
adopts that very same attitude to these others, then he runs the risk of hypocrisy.
That said, even in Spielberg’s most ‘worthy’ films, in which he could (and perhaps
should) challenge the system of production and consumption, his politics remain
deeply conservative. It is only thanks to white Americans Baldwin (Matthew
McConaughey) and John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) that the African
captives find a voice in Amistad. In Schindler’s List, not only are the Germans, with
the exception of Schindler (Liam Neeson), irrevocably evil for their more than
willing participation in the Holocaust, but it is only a white non-Jewish male who
can save (some of) the Jews from the most terrible of fates, against which,
apparently, they can do nothing. In A.I., David (Haley Joel Osment) never
transcends its programming in order to become autonomous (i.e. the A.I. in A.I. is
not in the popular sense A.I. at all – that is, a machine capable of thinking for itself,
Downloaded By: [Brown, William] At: 13:09 5 February 2009

making of A.I. a film that is itself only artificially intelligent). In other words, even
when we are invited to side with victims of the negative aspects of production and
consumption, Spielberg presents a world incapable of change except thanks to those
who already dominate it (revolution not as revolutionary, but as a controlled
spectacle that has indeed already been axiomatised as part of the system).
This conservatism reaches perhaps its most devastating realisation in the
aesthetics of Schindler’s List. During this film, we are presented with German points
of view at various stages. For example, we see from Goeth’s (Ralph Fiennes)
viewpoint as he looks through a telescopic sight and shoots prisoners. The first
scene in which we see the much-talked about red dress (e.g. Kolker 2004, 293) also
takes place at a moment when we see Schindler’s point of view. This latter instance
is particularly dangerous: if the red dress symbolises Schindler’s growing awareness
of the destruction taking place around him, then we must also consider how the film
equally conditions us to see Jews not in colour (as real people), but only as entities
in a black and white world. One must at a certain point ask, in spite of the immense
complexities and the good intentions of the film, whether Schindler’s List is not in
fact an invitation to sympathise with the German point of view, whilst claiming to
do the opposite. And yet, we also know that Spielberg presents those Germans as
irrevocably evil, so, when we target Jews via Goeth’s telescopic sight, is Spielberg
really problematising our understanding of Goeth as a character, or is he trying to
tell us that he, and maybe we spectators, too, are just like Goeth in our leisurely
consumption of humans?6
If Spielberg depicts axiomatisation as a cynical and negative process (one that his
films, as products, also enact), he equally presents it as a specifically adult process.
Whereas in the adult world, as Kipling would say, East is East and West is West and
never the twain shall meet, the young, the rebellious, and the youthful in Spielberg are
capable of transcending the adult boundaries between humans and aliens (Elliott
[Henry Thomas] in E.T.), between Allies and the Japanese (Jim [Christian Bale] in
Empire of the Sun [1987]), between robots and humans (David in A.I.). Indiana Jones,
who, in The Last Crusade, finds the Holy Grail, which can allow perpetual youth, also
fits into this childish Spielberg paradigm, in which the young, the rebellious, and the
 18 W. Brown

youthful are the heroes. Perhaps, however, this schema is most clearly articulated in
Hook (1991), where an adult Peter Pan (Robin Williams) must return to Neverland in
order to free his imprisoned children. By becoming a child once again, the character is
able to fly, and this (line of) flight enables escape.
At the last, therefore, might we trace a line through Spielberg’s films in which
youth and the youthful are seen to enact the anti-capitalist, or, perhaps better, the
a-capitalist strategy of ‘flying away’, something that Spielberg often depicts literally
(E.T.). It seems that only children can do this, or children in adult form (Robin
Williams is an overgrown child, as confirmed in Francis Ford Coppola’s Jack
[1996]; Tom Hanks, a sometime Spielberg collaborator, broke through with Penny
Marshall’s Big [1988], as if he, too, has always been known as a man-boy, as
Murray Pomerance [2005] would term it). This suggests awareness on the
filmmaker’s part that adults are always already part of the capitalist system, that
(white, male American) adults have already been axiomatised. Perhaps this is the
Downloaded By: [Brown, William] At: 13:09 5 February 2009

very story that is told by Spielberg’s Catch Me If You Can (2002): Frank Abagnale’s
constant lines of flight and becoming other do eventually come to an end; not only
does it end, but Frank ends up being wholly axiomatised (or simply he ‘grows up’),
working as he does on preventing criminals from committing precisely the kinds of
anti-capitalist/a-capitalist forgeries that he himself carried out.7
As mentioned, there is, however, a bias towards white (and usually American)
males as the only ones capable of this escape strategy, a trope that is reinforced by
films like Amistad and Schindler’s List, in which the others are incapable of
defending or saving themselves. In other words, if there are dreams of escape in
Spielberg’s world, it also seems that this escape is the preserve only of those who can
afford it (who already belong to the dominant, that is, capitalist, group).
Perhaps this is the story of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), in which a
fantasist from the First World/First Cinema, Roy, manages to flee with the aliens
from the Third World/Third Cinema, something that the representative of the
Second World/Second Cinema, François Truffaut, does not do, despite having
studied aliens and tried genuinely to make contact with them for years. In other
words, flight is a fantasy that involves no real work, but in which faith alone (and a
sense of one’s own status as ‘chosen’) merits escape. This last minute and often
undeserved reprieve, characterised also by Spielberg’s use of deus ex machina
devices, could be legitimate were it not, however, for the fact that Spielberg so
overwhelmingly reaffirms the workings of capital elsewhere in his films.
Spielberg’s conservative politics become clearer when we look at how his films
operate culturally. As Thomas Elsaesser (2001) suggests, the films catch them young
and keep them ‘hooked’ forever. If we were tempted to describe cinema itself as an
escape, as a line of flight, then we must admit that it is, here, an illusory one, since
the escape on offer merely reinforces the negative aspects of capital. Spielberg and
his capitalist films do not axiomatise, but they render us other (make us childish), so
as to consume us/our money. Spielberg is the shark.
So far, so standard. However, can we at the last discover a way in which
Spielberg’s films do subvert systems of the production and consumption of others?
For, whilst Spielberg’s films feature an obvious, Manichean system of insiders and
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 19

outsiders, others who cannot be reconciled, they also feature much more
ambivalent, or ‘other’ others.
Whilst in Jaws the shark is obviously an Other that must be annihilated,
Hooper, Quint, and Brody are of course also others. This is arguably signalled in
Hooper and Quint’s ability to think like the shark, but it is in their tangles with the
mayor, who is driven by the desire for profit, that the trio emerges as truly other.
Both the shark and the profiteers from Amity emerge as two sides that reinforce the
same system of production and consumption; Hooper, Quint, and Brody,
meanwhile, exist somewhere in between, in a much more ambiguous zone.
Having been used for a given purpose (eradicating the shark threat), they are in
the end discarded, as life (the endless quest for profit) goes on as normal.
In the first three Indiana Jones films (which includes the as-yet unmentioned
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom from 1984), we see the intrepid Indy travelling
around the world in search of mythical artefacts. Nazis and Thuggees are seemingly
Downloaded By: [Brown, William] At: 13:09 5 February 2009

evil and beyond redemption. However, whilst the badness of these groups is
unquestionable, it is Indy who is the real outsider. Indy might have seen magical and
God-proving miracles, but these are swept under the carpet and Indy is never allowed
to keep what he finds and is given little or no reward. Indy never gets any profit (and
by the next film he has also lost the girl). By not working for money or profit (by day
he is only a humble lecturer), Indy retains his freedom, and this paradoxical freedom
through powerlessness subverts the normal relationships at play between consumers
and consumed. (This is reaffirmed by the fact that Indy, a name reminiscent of
independence, is not the real name of Junior Jones, a name that he rejects, thereby also
rejecting – symbolically and for an initial period at least – the patriarchal system that
created him.) By working for free, Indy is indeed exploited, but he is also independent.8
The overwhelming presence of the Stars and Stripes at the climax of Saving
Private Ryan might seem to make it as pro-American a film as you could see. The
Manichean opposition of ‘good’ Americans and ‘bad’ Nazis might also seem a
simplification of complex matters (this reaches its most ironic culmination in the
form of sniper Jackson, who prays as he shoots, convinced that he is doing God’s
work by killing Germans). What ambiguity here?
Rescuing Ryan is a meaning-making exercise in public relations, a piece of
propaganda designed to maintain morale and control. Captain Miller leads his men
on a mission that all know to be pointless. However, they go through with it; the men
follow their orders and as a result march towards their death: war is consumption.
However, the film’s two survivors, Upham and Ryan, are noteworthy, because
whilst all of their comrades follow orders, fight, and die, they do not. Upham is
supposed to fight but cannot (he kills the German after the end of the battle;
otherwise, he watches his comrade be stabbed rather than fight). Ryan is ordered to
leave for America, but does not. That the two disregard their orders perhaps makes
them ‘strong’ characters, but even if their individuality and desire not to be
controlled marks them out, this does not mean that they are blind to the
pointlessness of their job. Rather, their refusal to obey orders highlights the very
futility of what they are doing. The film, however, does present as survivors those
who will not be told what to do, those who will not be consumed.9
 20 W. Brown

If some of Spielberg’s films feature characters that survive because they assert
and/or cling to their independence, then there perhaps emerges a strand of anti-
capitalist thought in his work. It is fairly hidden and at best ambiguous, but it can
nonetheless be recognised.
I should like to end with a consideration of Oskar Schindler, and propose that
Spielberg could himself be a Schindler-figure within Hollywood. A noted capitalist,
it is only by incorporating his Jewish workers into the very machine that seeks to
destroy them that Schindler manages to save some of them. This paradox is
intriguing. Schindler uses capitalism in order to subvert itself; both insider and
outsider, this dual status renders Schindler more wholly other (especially if that
which directly seeks to overthrow a system indirectly reinforces it). Schindler’s good
deeds are recognised in the film, but not immediately; he may have saved many
lives, but he still has to flee the Allies, since his disguise as Nazi industrialist is so
convincing that no one would tell him apart from the real thing. Schindler can only
Downloaded By: [Brown, William] At: 13:09 5 February 2009

carry out his revolutionary plans by wearing the mask of conformity.10

Whether he is wary of this or not, Spielberg, as insider, has the potential to be
more subversive than filmmakers who directly oppose Hollywood’s dominance;
Spielberg might, by increasing Hollywood’s hegemony, take it to its logical end,
when, exhausted, Hollywood can go no further. By consistently feeding it, Spielberg
ensures that the shark of capital grows, but he also brings this machine closer to
saturation point (the shark in Jaws of course explodes when killed). It is in this sense
that Spielberg can be seen as occupying an ambivalent position with regard to
Hollywood and capital in general: the purveyor par excellence of the Hollywood
product, Spielberg also brings capital closer to its end.11

Notes
1. See in particular Buckland (2006), Friedman (2006), and Morris (2007).
2. ‘The mode of critique is insufficiently radical, since it remains in silent complicity with
the model it criticises.’
3. I am indebted to my reviewers for much helpful feedback on an earlier draft of this
paper, especially for pointing me in the direction of work by Anthony Wilden. In System
and Structure (1980), Wilden also identifies how capital must consistently grow, how it
must exploit (and ‘buy off’) members of its system, and, most importantly, how it ‘carries
the seeds of a new society within it’. Furthermore, Wilden also argues that ‘dissent must
transcend the status of negative identification. In short, all dissent must be of a higher
logical type than that with which it is in conflict.’ Such an argument would reaffirm both
the way in which directly to oppose something is to reinforce it, as well as the need to find
what Deleuze and Guattari term a ‘line of flight’. Wilden has perhaps been overlooked in
terms of how his work might affect an understanding of cinema, not least in the ‘digital’
era, since System and Structure deals, among other things, with the relationship between
analogue and digital systems. (See Wilden 1980, 391–4 and lvii.)
4. Heath also demands that the term machine be introduced in order to function somewhere
between industry and text. See Heath (1992, 512).
5. Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979), Aliens (James Cameron, 1986), Alien3 (David Fincher, 1992),
and Alien: Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997).
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 21

6. A similar case could be made for Jaws, in which we also see attacks from the shark’s
‘perspective’ – a technique that Heath (1992, 510–1) also briefly discusses.
7. We might compare this conservative ending to that of Thelma and Louise (Ridley Scott,
1991), in which the titular heroines prefer to drive their car into the Grand Canyon than
be caught and/or axiomatised.
8. Another, often-overlooked, Spielberg film that perhaps presents a similar thesis is The
Terminal (2004), in which Krakhozian national Viktor Navorski (Tom Hanks again) is
imprisoned in an airport for several years, unable to return home and unable to enter the
USA. In this international ‘no man’s land’ Viktor similarly finds some sort of ‘freedom’
(working for free for others).
In contrast to The Terminal and the earlier Indiana Jones films, however, Indiana
Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) seemingly takes a turn for the pro-
capitalist/conservative. Here, Jones sees off a group of Communists (Indy, of all people,
professes ‘I like Ike’), who are in search of the titular object, which in fact belongs to/
forms part of aliens from another dimension. The film criticises those who seek
Downloaded By: [Brown, William] At: 13:09 5 February 2009

knowledge (chief Commie Irina Spalko, played by Cate Blanchett, is punished for asking
the aliens to reveal to her the secrets of the universe), as well as those who are greedy
(Ray Winstone’s Mac is also punished for trying to steal too much treasure). Indy,
meanwhile, discovers that he has a son, Mutt (Shia LaBeouf), and marries old flame
Marion (Karen Allen). At his wedding, Indy takes his hat from Mutt, suggesting that
Indy, despite his age, is not ready yet to give up his mantle.
In other words, the film endorses modesty in riches (okay), but also suggests that we
should not question the workings of the world or seek knowledge (not okay), while
endorsing family values and patriarchy (conservative). If Indy named himself after the
family dog in order to differentiate himself from his father (positive), Mutt is named not
after a specific dog, but dogs in general. Furthermore, Mutt’s transition is from
independent wild one (as seen in his initial Brando-esque appearance) to tamed lapdog
(Mutt readily hands back to his old man the hat that signifies Indy’s independence). Indy
(like Spielberg?) has finally become well and truly axiomatised; unlike Roy from Close
Encounters, Indy chooses not to escape, but instead to seek conformity/become what he
has always hated: the ignorant family patriarch.
9. Although the film perhaps also suggests that survival is somehow a ‘bad’ thing, in that
Upham is seemingly the least sympathetic character, whilst Ryan cannot cope with the
meaning of his survival, hence his emotional breakdown upon finding Miller’s grave. Is
Spielberg suggesting somehow that we should be consumed ‘for the greater good’?
10. In this sense, Schindler is reminiscent of Alfred de Musset’s famous hero, Lorenzo, from
his play Lorenzaccio (1988, 273), in which the hero says that ‘le vice a été pour moi un
vêtement; maintenant, il est collé à ma peau’ (‘I have worn vice like a garment; now it is
stuck to my skin’ [my translation]).
11. This logic of not opposing, but of feeding capital also has filmic expression, but not in the
work of Spielberg. In Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994), Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) eventually
defeats the deranged Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper) not by slowing down the train that
is due to crash, but by accelerating it, precisely so that it does crash.

References
Buckland, Warren. 2006. Directed by Steven Spielberg: Poetics of the contemporary
Hollywood blockbuster. New York and London: Continuum.
 22 W. Brown

Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans.
Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. London: Athlone Press.
———. 2004. A thousand plateaux. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum.
Elsaesser, Thomas. 2001. The blockbuster: Everything connects, but not everything goes. In
The end of cinema as we know it: American film in the nineties, ed. Jon Lewis, 11–22.
New York: New York University Press.
Friedman, Lester D. 2006. Citizen Spielberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
Heath, Stephen. 1992. Jaws, ideology, and film theory. In Movies and methods: An anthology,
Vol. 2, ed. Bill Nichols, 509–14. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 1979. Reification and utopia in mass culture. Social Text 1 (Winter):
130–48.
Kolker, Robert. 2004. A cinema of loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg,
Altman, 3rd ed. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lewis, Jon. 2003. The perfect money machine(s): George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and
auteurism in the new Hollywood. Film International 1 no. 1 (January): 12–26.
Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital: A critique of political economy, Vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Downloaded By: [Brown, William] At: 13:09 5 February 2009

Morris, Nigel. 2007. The cinema of Steven Spielberg: Empire of light. London: Wallflower
Press.
Musset, Alfred de. 1988. Lorenzaccio. Paris: Flammarion.
Pomerance, Murray. 2005. The man-boys of Steven Spielberg. In Where the boys are:
Cinemas of masculinity and youth, ed. Murray Pomerance and Frances Gateward,
133–54. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. 2000. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology.
Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. London: Routledge.
Shaviro, Steven. 1993. The cinematic body (Theory out of bounds). Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Wilden, Anthony. 1980. System and structure: Essays in communication and exchange.
London: Tavistock.