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Wednesday
Last week, when I was using the figure of Mack the Knife in Three Penny Opera to explain why Donald Trump’s fans are drawn to him, I initially missed the shark connection—which is to say, Mackie is compared to a shark while Donald Trump is obsessed with the fish. Recently, the former president went on a weird riff about how, if he had to make a choice between death by electronic boat battery or death by shark, he would choose the former.
Trump has a visceral hatred of sharks, as we learned when Stormy Daniels revealed how they watched Shark Week during their non-dinner date. Trump’s obsession gives me the opportunity to reflect back on the significance of the best-selling novel and blockbuster film Jaws, which gripped the country in 1974-75.
Daniels writes that Trump is “terrified of sharks. He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’” This obsession with sharks prompted a recent suggestion by Andy Borowitz that Joe Biden come to tomorrow’s debate dressed in a shark costume:
“There is nothing in the debate rules that prohibits a participant from dressing as a giant man-eating fish,” a Biden spokesman said.
As if to taunt his adversary, Biden appeared in a video today dressed as the carnivorous sea creature, telling Trump, “Shark Week came early, pal.”
In case you missed it, here’s Trump’s riff. I run it in its entirety (you’re free to skip over it) because it’s been prompting people to query whether Trump is losing it. Washington Post columnist Gene Robinson, for instance, observed in his understated way,
In 2016, Trump said outrageous things at his campaign rallies to be entertaining. In 2024, his tangents raise serious questions about his mental fitness.
So here’s the shark tangent, which started off (I think) as an attack on electronic vehicles and moved on to electronic boats:
I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’
By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately, do you notice that? Lot of sharks. I watched some guys justifying it today: ‘Well they weren’t really that angry, they bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry but they misunderstood who she was.’ These people are crazy. He said, ‘There’s no problem with sharks, they just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming.’ No, really got decimated, and other people, too, a lot of shark attacks.
So I said, ‘There’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards, or here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking? Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?’ Because I will tell you, he didn’t know the answer.
He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ I said, ‘I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water.’ But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted? I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark. So we’re going to end that, we’re going to end it for boats, we’re going to end it for trucks.
While Trump’s tangent is whacky, his fear of sharks has a classic psychological explanation, brought to you courtesy of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Freud says that whatever we fear, we repress and what we repress becomes toxic and returns to us in the form of nightmares and neurosis. “Secrets make us sick” covers the first point and “the return of the repressed” the second.
So what is Trump’s fear? Of being vulnerable and therefore (in his eyes) not a real man. (Many authoritarians have this fear.) Strong women especially are seen as emasculating threats, and one of the forms this fear takes is of the vagina dentata or toothed vagina, which swallows up one’s manhood. Sharks fit this archetype particularly well although Jung talks about how the fear can take the form of other predatory animals as well.
One of the most famous literary toothed vaginas is Scylla in The Odyssey. This six-headed female monster lurks in a cave and springs out as mariners pass, grabbing sailors. Scylla is paired with the giant whirlpool Charybdis, another devouring vagina. As a warrior epic, it makes sense that Homer’s poem would present Odysseus with a number of female threats to his manhood. (There’s also Circe, Calypso, the Sirens, and the cannibalistic giantess who rules over the Laestrygonians.)
Jung’s word for the phenomena is anima, man’s female side. If men accept this side of themselves, they will achieve balance and the monsters will lose their toxic power. But if they don’t—and Trump certainly hasn’t—these animals will haunt their dreams (and not only their dreams, as we are seeing with Trump). Men in the grip of toxic masculinity believe they can prove themselves by asserting their dominance over women—grab them by their pussies—but that just makes the problem worse.
One can attribute the immense popularity of Jaws to male anxieties of the era. At the time, second wave feminism was at its height while, at the same time, America’s period of the Great Prosperity was coming to an end. Men were losing their jobs or finding it more difficult to raise their families. And then the country lost its first war.
In short, men who defined themselves by their manliness felt themselves dangerously exposed.
There were a lot of movies in the early seventies of masculinity under threat, from Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies to Charles Bronson’s Walking Tall. But Jaws held special prominence. As men read the book and watched the film, they (1) saw their anxieties articulated and (2) could indulge in a revenge fantasy wish fulfillment. The man with the bigger boat defeats the toothed monster from the id.
The satisfaction was short-lived, however, because Benchley’s story doesn’t address the underlying anxieties in a substantive way. The problem with pop culture is that, while offering temporary sugar highs, it doesn’t last long.
