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I couldn’t figure out how to weave the lines of argumentation that follow below into my essay from several months ago, so I just cut it from the more-or-less final draft. I certainly have a tendency to write bloated essays, finding it rather difficult to cut things out once the idea has already come to me, or finding the essay expanding out of control with it now requiring much more research than originally intended, so that I end up never finishing it. However, I’ve developed more restraint, I feel. So, that being said, I liked what these scraps of writing contributed enough to include them elsewhere.

• Even in the perceived comfort of the burbs, Jaws and its cinematic progeny nonetheless allegorize the anxieties and desires of the (ironically) diminishing stability of middle-class American life.

• Yet, in New Hollywood the biggest revolution was not stylistically or thematically, or even related to filmmaking. It was bigger than that–much bigger–a corporate revolution. Four years before the release of Jaws, the Powell Memo outlined the means by which corporations in the United States could fortify their position within American commerce and government, in corrosive antagonism to the already crumbling relic of the New Deal. More specifically and of utmost relevance here, Powell encourages corporations and their ownership of the media apparatus to be better spent influencing public opinion. This, of course, had obvious and unforeseen cultural consequences. Amongst business conservatives like Powell, the “inequitable taxation” of exceptional business leaders promoted the oncoming neoliberalization. But are these leaders individuals or corporations? This acutely obtuse application of language is key to Powell’s later court decisions as a Supreme Court justice, namely First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, in which corporations are granted the same rigorous legal protections under the First Amendment as an individual. The individual reigns supreme. And while Spielberg optimistically places his faith back in the individual after being bombarded with images of the failure of the American way of life, his faith in the everyman who can still do good as long as he remains unfettered, he (perhaps?) naively reifies the protection and re-reification of the subject as the center of political action, itself at the center of what Powell deemed an “Attack on [the] American Free Enterprise System.” Not to mention, turning himself into a pop auteur in the process, the very essence of late twentieth century cinema and beyond. The mythological individualization of cinema.

• Heroes come together as does the audience in a theater (less of an occurrence nowadays, with individuals or their families opting to stream at home)

• community amid postwar suburbanization undermined

• In his confidential memorandum addressed to the Chamber of Commerce, Powell sows the seeds that would blossom into the neoliberal revolution.

• When the memo was exposed by Jack Anderson of The Washington Post two years later, the blockbuster was well under way.

• tight knit communities, immediate over extended family