This summer, for the first time ever, I watched the movie Jaws. In all honesty, I was underwhelmed by the film, but that didn’t prevent me from getting absolutely covered in goosebumps when someone told me that the technology wasn’t there yet in 1978 to create a convincing shark, which forced Spielberg to improvise— The shark appeared in the film in small, dramatic glimpses; we see attacks from the shark’s point of view; sound, that famous music, indicates that the shark is near rather than a visual; and later, when the mechanical shark was
malfunctioning, Spielberg had the idea to use barrels from the set. In the film, the barrels are attached to the shark so that they can see when it’s coming. Steve Korb notes that “These would then be used to show the presence of the shark when the actual shark wasn’t available” due to its frequent malfunctions. My goosebumps, though, were a product of the power of limitations: the limitations that filmmakers faced led to an even more mysterious, suspenseful film than if they had been able to render a CGI shark in 1978, or if their mechanical shark simply functioned a bit more regularly. Their limitations became a strength. (Goosebumps!)
The same idea is at play in Gabe Cohn’s New York Times piece, “How Slender Man Became Legend.” Cohan opens his article by saying that “Slender Man is scary not because of what you know about him but because of what you don’t know.” Like the shark in Jaws, the mystery surrounding Slender Man is precisely what creates the suspense, discomfort, and ultimately fear. Slender Man, though, has been created through different means than Jaws. Steven Spielberg deliberately created a flickering image (leaning heavily into multimodality, I might add) of the shark. Slender Man, on the other hand, was created through the flickering signifiers created and built upon by many different individuals, all contributing to the lore on their own.
I feel the need to add the disclaimer here that I am still working on my theory knowledge, but when we apply structuralism here, things get pretty interesting. The signifiers in each of these situations are constantly changing— or, as N. Katherine Hayles termed them, flickering signifiers. These signifiers in Jaws include the music, the barrels, and, occasionally, a glimpse of the actual shark. For Slender Man, Gabe Cohn explains that the signifiers are photoshopped images, “hieroglyphs and faux 16th-century German woodcuts,” and even fake newspaper articles. These signifiers are flickering, ever-changing, but all seem to point to the same signified, which is the concept or idea of the shark or Slender Man. In the case of Slender Man, the signified is altered with ever signifier. That may be the case for Jaws, too, as the concept of the shark grows more ominous with each signifier, but this is a much smaller change than Slender Man-as-signified undergoes. Neither of these “signifieds” really have referents; that is, neither the shark from Jaws nor Slender Man really exists in reality, which gives the changing signifier even more power over the signified. As Hayles writes, ““demateriality . . . affects human and textual bodies on two levels at once as a change in the body . . . and a change in the message” (73–76). There certainly seems to be a change in both body and message as a result of the flickering signifiers, but more broadly as a result of the demateriality of both signifieds.
Hayles applies this concept to many other signifiers, including writing and bodies and speech. In Jaws and in Slender Man, though, we see flickering signifiers emphasized.
Hi Gina,
The way you tie in the shark’s shifting presence with flickering signifiers is awesome! In particular, the way we experience fear when a signifier can’t be confirmed/pinned down is so interesting, as it implies unexpected things about how we view digital communication and relationships. As Hayles suggests, digital signifiers aren’t the same as absent signifiers; therefore, it’s the ever-shifting outline of that which is submerged (the shark, the vast [invented] history of Slender Man) that creates discomfort. She also likens to body horror the “mutation” that digital replication enacts, as the repetition of coding creates untraceable paths of order and randomness. In absence of Jaws himself, the barrels and his two-note theme seem to represent him as a threatening idea with a (somewhat) formless signifier. In this case, might the ocean’s vastness simulate the digital replication process, so that what is untraceable is too vast for us to (mentally and physically) navigate?
I’d be curious to see if this anxiety extends to any of the digital elements we take for granted; do avatars (which are changeable fragments of images that come to represent us online) flicker, and represent each of us as unknowable? Is it stretching the definition of “body horror” to include symbols that give shape to an unclear (and digitally altered) body?
Great post!
-Christopher Munde
Hello Gina! This was a great post to read for several reasons. One, I think you are a great writer. Two, the topic you chose is very interesting. Third, I am a huge fan of all Spielberg films! I think your connection between flickering signifiers, Jaws, and Slender man is fascinating. I agree with you in how it can be scarier to know something is there, but not actually see it. People have heard about Slenderman here and there and yet, because there is still a lot unknown about the character, it leaves a chilling and uncomfortable feeling over people. Flickering signifiers is a new concept to me, and I will be focusing on it for my last blog post. I also agree with the idea that because of the dematerialization, there is an effect on the body. textual bodies, and the message. I also agree with your opinion on the movie Jaws. No matter how many times I have seen it, I do not feel a certain way as many do. However, with Jurassic Park, sometimes knowing a dinosaur is there and not directly seeing it is way scarier! Awesome post!
I love the way you made flickering signification so accessible in this post. In the case of Jaws, it seems like this is applied to a replication of the real that already exists or could exist, while in Slenderman flickering signification is applied to giving shape to something that exists in the imaginations of countless individuals coming together through digitized (or hybrid) media. We can think about how these works of the imagination were constructed before digital media. They have existed as long as we have have literature and art, with simple oral storytelling and human performance being one of the starting points (what is folklore?) But then Slenderman seems to also be a running commentary on flickering signification itself. Anxiety and distress in itself is difficult to grasp, it is energy and emotion, but digital media gave a shape to it in Slenderman. This also happens in movies like Jaws, but we tend not to be pressed to think much about what is happening because we react to a “realistic” depiction of something that has more or less happened in the real world and been reported upon (shark attacks). It was not until the Slenderman “murder” (attempted) that the public began to realize that a construct could be “real” as a shark for some vulnerable people.