Entanglements of adaptation, allegory, and reception: Jaws and An Enemy of the People

ABSTRACT In this article the authors discuss Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) with Henrik Ibsen’s En Folkefiende (An Enemy of the People; 1882) as a test case for formulating a better theoretical understanding of adaptations that are neither “announced” nor “extended”; the analysis thus explores adaptation as a special form of intertextuality. The authors reference other cinematic engagements with the same play, including Hans Steinhoff’s Ein Volksfeind (1937), Detlef Sierck’s La Habanera (1937), George Schaefer’s An Enemy of the People (1978), Satyajit Ray’s Ganashatru (1989), and Erik Skjoldbjærg’s En folkefiende (2005), as they investigate the importance of polysemic allegorical structures, the inherently “dialectical” nature of the process of adaptation, the role of reception in newer theories of adaptation, and the implications of understanding adaptation as a particular film genre. The authors propose viewing adaptation as a process that necessarily includes the audience’s understanding of hypotext and hypertext in ways that influence meaning production; it invites consideration of the source text in the film’s reception, consequently linking the source text and its author to other cultural and social discourses that, in turn, influence their reception reflexively in light of the adaptation.

According to screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, he and Steven Spielberg "always referred to Jaws as Moby-Dick meets An Enemy of the People" (Baer 2008, 204). While the connections with Herman Melville's 1851 novel have been examined in the scholarly and critical literature (Biskind 1975;Torry 1993;Dowling 2014;Robinson 2016;Buck 2018), the uses Spielberg made of Henrik Ibsen's 1882 drama En Folkefiende (An Enemy of the People) have been largely unexplored, despite frequent (if passing) references in both the critical reception of Spielberg's film (Malcolm 1975;Andrews 1999;Naerø 2008;French 2012) and scholarship on Ibsen's play (Rønning 2000;Waerp 2007;Engelstad 2010). Given the many references, it may seem surprising that no sustained analyses of the connections between Jaws (1975) and An Enemy of the People have been published. This may be because this relationship strains the limits of what viewers expect from a film adaptation of a known literary work. As neither "announced" nor "extended" (though perhaps "deliberate"), in Linda Hutcheon's terminology, we view Jaws as a useful test case for examining the conceptual limits of adaptation regarding where mere intertextual referencing ends and adaptation begins, as well as how adaptation as a process influences genre expectations relating to both the source text (or hypotext) and the adaptation as product (or hypertext) (Hutcheon 2013, xvi).
Jaws is in one very important sense a completely unambiguous adaptation, building as it does on Peter Benchley's popular (albeit disturbingly racist) 1974 novel of the same name. Benchley and Gottlieb are credited for the screenplay of Spielberg's film, although as Gottlieb himself acknowledges, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Howard Sackler made a major uncredited contribution to the screenplay (Gottlieb 2001, 197 note 13). 1 Nigel Andrews suggests that Benchley drew on An Enemy of the People for the "initial story of clashing interests and moral doubledealing in a small town" (Andrews 1999, 4); but as Arne Lunde points out, the film adaptation is actually closer to Ibsen's play than the novel is. 2 There is little else in the novel to suggest a connection to the play. In Benchley's Jaws, for example, the meeting with the town's selectmen, which takes place behind closed doors in the mayor's office, has almost none of the dramaturgical impact that the open public meetings in An Enemy of the People and Spielberg's Jaws have (1974,. The complicated relationship between Jaws and its various hypotexts might be viewed as what Thomas Leitch calls a "triangular notion of intertextuality," a rhetorical strategy that "depends on ascribing their value to a classic earlier text and protecting that value by invoking a second earlier text as betraying it" (1990,147). In this sense, Benchley's novel is the unfaithful "remake" and Jaws is positioned as the true heir to the classics, An Enemy of the People and Moby-Dick. Yet for many if not most casual Jaws viewers, none of these hypotexts have any relevance to their experience of the film, particularly since they are not announced.
Leitch questions the popular notion that an adaptation must be "extended and announced as such" (2012,88). This intervention is crucial to our thinking about the limits of adaptation because it allows for two conceptual moves on our part. On the one hand, it directs attention toward underlying structural similarities. Regardless of the question of its literary origins, upon its release Jaws was widely interpreted as an allegory about the Vietnam War or the Nixon Watergate scandal. It is our hypothesis that it is the underlying structure of political allegory in combination with its ensuing reception that makes it meaningful to claim that Jaws functions as an adaptation of An Enemy of the People.
On the other hand, if the relationship of a given work to a possible hypotext is not necessarily announced, extended, or even deliberate on the part of its creator, audiences themselves may play an important role in linking the work to that hypotext, in some cases reframing the work as an adaptation. This suggests that examining the reception of a work can help to determine whether the relationship is loosely intertextual or crosses over into adaptation. Highlighting the constructive role played by audiences in determining what is and what is not an adaptation is in line with both Nico Dicecco's "reception model of adaptation" (2017, 607) and the "reception-based definition of adaptation" suggested by Dennis Cutchins and Kathryn Meeks (2018, 303). In our view, adaptation as a process necessarily includes the audience's understanding of hypotext and hypertext in ways that influence meaning production; it invites consideration of the source text in the film's reception, consequently linking the source text and its author to other cultural and social discourses that, moreover, influence their reception reflexively in light of the adaptation. To push this point: by anchoring definitions and questions of adaptation in reception processes, it matters less whether Spielberg had a thorough knowledge of Ibsen's play and made intended use of An Enemy of the People in the production process than whether audiences and critics activate the play in their interpretative interaction with the film.
Since no in-depth comparison between Ibsen's play and Spielberg's film has yet been carried out, we will first present an adaptation analysis of how this intertextual layering and a "conceptual flipping back and forth" between Jaws and An Enemy of the People raises specific questions and prompts specific readings (Hutcheon 2013, 139). The most remarkable aspects here concern how the clashing of discourses in Spielberg's film draws its strength from the same allegorical structure that underlies Ibsen's play, which leads us to a more detailed consideration of how the structure of political allegory might relate to adaptation. This in turn returns us to the question of how to distinguish between intertextuality and adaptation. Finally, we explore adaptation as one possible generic route among many in the reception of Jaws.

Characters and plot points
In terms of narrative structure, An Enemy of the People differs substantially from Jaws. Doctor Tomas Stockmann fails in his attempt to warn of a deadly microscopic infestation in the water and is ridiculed and ostracized, whereas in Jaws police chief Martin Brody and oceanographer Matt Hooper succeed in killing the shark that threatens the public and presumably become heroes. Nonetheless, echoes of the play can still be seen in the constellation of characters and plot elements from the film. It is widely accepted that the major part of the film, during which the protagonists pursue the great white shark by boat, leaves An Enemy of the People behind and morphs into an adaptation of Moby-Dick.
The iconic moment when Captain Sam Quint scratches the chalkboard in Jaws does not, however, necessarily signal complete abandonment of An Enemy of the People for all viewers. One could arguably read the film's new protagonist as a version of Ibsen's Captain Horster, even though any traces of this character's romantic interest in Tomas Stockmann's daughter is missing in the film. Both Quint and Horster are sea captains as well as outsiders, in the sense that they are detached from society and democratic processes. Horster does not care about politics and says that democracy would fare poorly at sea (Ibsen 2008, 548-49), whereas Quint dismisses democratic processes by asserting that "there are too many captains on this Island." Reading the construction of Quint with Ibsen's play as an intertext also makes it possible to extend the bifurcation of Dr. Stockmann into multiple characters in Spielberg's film. In this light, the more masculine and maniacal aspects of Ibsen's doctor that come to light in the play's fourth act-character traits not recognizable in Brody-are transferred onto the shark hunter in Spielberg's adaptation.
We want to open up for the possibility of continuing to read Jaws as an adaptation as adaptation even after the introduction of Quint, by focusing on how similarities and deviances from An Enemy of the People are played out in Spielberg's blockbuster, despite the differences in dramaturgy that strain this mode of spectatorship. Whether Jaws functions as an adaptation, in other words, depends on how audiences and critics activate the play in reciprocal and cumulative ways, in line with the reception-oriented models of adaptation.
Both Jaws and An Enemy of the People are set in idyllic resort towns. Amity Island is a popular summer vacation spot in New England, while the unnamed coastal town in southern Norway depicted in An Enemy of the People has a thriving spa with many visitors. Both tourist destinations are threatened by an invasive but natural threat; the microscopic "infusoria"-a now archaic term for various microorganisms-that pollute the waters of the spa in Ibsen's play are reimagined as a giant killer shark that stalks the beaches of Amity Island. Both plots center around whistleblowers who seek to protect the public from an invasive menace in conflict with public officials who want to promote economic interests by hushing up the threat. The news media serves as a complicating factor in both plots as well.
There are a number of suggestive one-to-one parallels-but also differences-across a number of the characters (see Figure 1). Among these roles, the most central relationship is that of the whistleblowers and the profiteering mayors. Arne Engelstad points out that the main theme of An Enemy of the People can be reduced to "the conflict between scientific truth and short-term profit" (2010,379). In Ibsen's play, the conflict is heightened by the fact that the protagonist doctor and the antagonist mayor are brothers. Without this familial tension, Spielberg relies on the public roles of Martin Brody and Larry Vaughn and presents a more idyllic nuclear family; as chief of police, Martin Brody states early in the film that his mandate is to protect the people, while as mayor, Larry Vaughn has the economic interests of the town at heart. Tomas Stockmann and Martin Brody place human life and safety above economic progress. Many have noted that in Jaws the role of the whistleblower is bifurcated, with Chief Brody calling upon external help from an expert from "the Oceanographic Institute," Matt Hooper, to assist him in figuring out how to eliminate the threat of the shark. This is, in fact, in keeping with the character of Tomas Stockmann, who also relies on outside scientific expertise when he sends water samples to "the university" to confirm his suspicions about the infusoria (Ibsen 2008, 560). Both Tomas Stockmann and Martin Brody are happily married men who are affectionate toward their wives and children, though conversely in Benchley's novel Martin Brody's wife Ellen is unhappy and has an affair with Matt Hooper. Finally, Tomas Stockmann is framed as a kind of alien, having returned to his hometown after working for many years in the far North of Norway. In this regard as well he resembles Brody, whose alien status as a New Yorker is repeatedly highlighted in the film.
In both Jaws and An Enemy of the People the mayors appear in their official capacity only; we gain little or no insight into the personal lives of Peter Stockmann (other than that he lives alone [Ibsen 2008, 547]) and Larry Vaughn. They thus rather single-mindedly represent the pursuit of profit at all costs. Another parallel between the two plots is that the antagonists both have multiple roles that complicate their positions. Spielberg increases Larry Vaughn's financial interest in the economic growth of Amity Island by making it clear that he is a real estate agent; there is a sign for "Vaughn's Realty" on his car door. Similarly, Peter Stockmann is the chairman of the board for the spa. A further complicating factor in An Enemy of the People is the mayor's additional role as "Politimester" (chief of police; Ibsen 2008, 530); in this position, he, like Martin Brody, should have the safety of his citizens at heart, but he seems remarkably willing to sacrifice them in exchange for economic gain. Larry Vaughn challenges Martin Brody's authority to close down the beaches, evoking bureaucratic red tape ("going by the book," as Meadows comments) and the higher authority of the city board.
Another twist in Jaws is the fact that the "medical inspector" changes his initial finding of cause of death from "shark attack" to "boating accident," presumably under pressure from the mayor. Thus, unlike in An Enemy of the People, the medical profession is implicated in the public deception. Doctors typically have a privileged position as truthtellers in Ibsen's plays, and it is thus no accident that Tomas Stockmann is a medical doctor, albeit one who shows signs of being a "lamarkiansk [sic] humanist" (Lamarckian humanist) and a "sosialt engasjert rasehygieniker" (socially engaged race hygienist) at heart (Jakobsen 1998, 88). The fundamental difference between Stockmann and the medical inspector is that, while Stockmann may rather ridiculously think of society as consisting of a lower class of "køtermennesker" (mutt-people) and a social elite of pure-bred "puddelmennesker" (poodle-people), he would never lie about someone's cause of death, especially not in support of the mayor's cover-up (Ibsen 2008, 677).
The newspaper editor Meadows is much more closely tied to the mayor's agenda than Hovstad is. In the first act of An Enemy of the People, Hovstad initially takes the side of Tomas Stockmann and by the second act goes even further, arguing that the real cause of the problem the doctor has identified is the corruption of the rich men in power; in the third act he goes so far as to call Tomas Stockmann's article revealing the water pollution "et rent Mesterstykke" (a pure masterpiece; Ibsen 2008, 563;575-6;613). By the end of the third act, however, he has entirely reversed his position, clearly submitting to the mayor's arguments about the financial security of the town (Ibsen 2008, 632). Meadows, on the other hand, is on Larry Vaughn's side from the very beginning. He joins the mayor in questioning Martin Brody's authority to close down the beaches and later, just before the town hall meeting, states that he intends to downplay the second death in the film (the child Alex Kintner), calling it a "small story" that he is going "to bury as deep as [he] can." Differences in the constellations of offspring are worth noting as well. In An Enemy of the People, the Stockmanns have two young sons and an adult daughter, Petra, who is an independent voice and important moral compass in the play. Her role is primarily to point out the hypocrisy of Hovstad. Benchley gives Brody three boys, a teenager and two younger sons, while Spielberg dispenses with the oldest boy. Nonetheless, it is possible to interpret Chrissie Watkins as a kind of replacement for Petra Stockmann. She appears in the opening sequence in both novel and film as an independent and modern young woman, eager for the attention of her male companion, but also eager for the freedom of swimming in the ocean, even when the man is too drunk to join her. Chrissie Watkins is punished for her independence and promiscuity with death by shark, most overtly in Benchley's novel, as Andrews points out (1999, 24). In other words, she suffers the stereotypical fate of sexually active young women in the horror movie genre more generally-the more sexually active, the more likely they are to die, with only the most morally upstanding among them surviving to become the "final girl" left standing, according to Carol Clover (1992). Petra Stockmann, on the other hand, survives and potentially even thrives, despite being punished by the small-minded townspeople when she is fired from her job as a teacher. 3 Dramaturgically speaking, the town hall meeting provides a turning point in both An Enemy of the People and Jaws. Ibsen devotes the entire fourth act of his play to a town hall meeting in which the crusading protagonist is defeated by the mayor and the forces of "den kompakte majoritet" (the compact majority; Ibsen 2008, 670), though not without giving an impassioned speech that many scholars have identified as expressing Nietzschean elitism and contempt for the working class. 4 Martin Brody plays a much more marginal role in the town hall meeting in Jaws, which is called after the second shark death has occurred on Amity Island. He is overshadowed in the meeting by a new protagonist, shark hunter Captain Quint. In Jaws scholarship, the meeting is often seen to mark the beginnings of the Moby-Dick narrative within the film, as Quint is revealed to be as single-mindedly obsessed with the great white shark as Captain Ahab is with the white whale (Dowling 2014, 51-2).
When Wieland Schwanebeck writes that "die ersten 30 Minuten von Jaws sind eine durchaus werkgetreue Adaption von Ein Volksfeind" (the first 30 minutes of Jaws is a completely faithful adaptation of An Enemy of the People) this is not strictly accurate (2015,18). A conservative reading of the film's "fidelity" would concentrate most of the main action of acts 1-3 in An Enemy of the People within the brief ferry ride where Martin Brody goes out to warn a team of swimmers about the shark, but is intercepted by a delegation consisting of Larry Vaughn, Harry Meadows, the medical inspector, two selectmen, and deputy Hendricks. 5 And even if we include the parallel scenes that establish the harmonious family life of the protagonists of the two works, we are still well short of thirty minutes of "werkgetreue" (faithful) adaptation in Jaws. In fact, the town meeting scene occurs after only eighteen minutes of running time, and those minutes also contain sequences that have no direct parallels in the diegesis of An Enemy of the People; this includes the bonfire setup, the skinny-dipping sequence where Chrissie Watkins is killed by the shark, and the locating of her corpse. If we equate the discovery of the shark in Jaws with Tomas Stockmann's discovery of the infusoria, we see that much of the film's opening concerns events that take place prior to the action in Ibsen's play. These sequences are "amplifications" in Robert Stam's sense of the term (2000,66). And indeed, as Egil Törnqvist has pointed out, it is typically in the opening sequences where the greatest variations from the hypotext occur in screen adaptations of Ibsen's plays (2000, 61-72).
We see an example of amplifying the discovery of the lurking threat in the opening of Norwegian director Per Bronken's 1972 television adaptation of An Enemy of the People for the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. Bronken opens with a sequence depicting Tomas Stockmann in a rowboat, quietly taking the samples that he will send to the university for analysis before the action of the play proper commences. In Bronken's dramatization, we see this through the eyes of Morten Kiil, who spies on his son-in-law; since Kiil's tannery may be the source of the infusoria, this point-of -view increases the tension and mystery (Ibsen, 2008 709). More recently, Norwegian director Erik Skjoldbjaerg's 2005 feature film, En folkefiende (An Enemy of the People), presents a long sequence partway through the movie in which Tomas Stockmann and his son Eilif search for water samples deep within a cave.
Here too it turns out that the father-in-law is the ultimate source of the pollution, in this case because of leaching from barrels of banned herbicide that he illegally buried on the family farm. There is no direct parallel to Morten Kiil in Spielberg's Jaws. 6 The junk that Matt Hooper pulls from the gut of the tiger shark does suggest some degree of human fault and thus perhaps an underlying ecocritical perspective; Spielberg, however, never fully develops this theme.
In amplifying these moments of discovery, these much less widely known adaptations share a critical feature with Jaws. But where both of the Norwegian adaptations maintain the character Tomas Stockmann's bravery in facing up to his fellow citizens, particularly in the town meeting sequence, Spielberg's Brody is passive to a striking degree; he struggles even to speak when Mayor Vaughn asks for an account of how the police plan to protect the public. Whereas the variations on Tomas Stockmann's character presented by Ibsen, Bronken, and Skjoldbjaerg all emphasize his uncompromising willingness to stand up to a hostile public, regardless of the personal consequences, Martin Brody clearly needs the other two characters who support him in his battle with both the mayor and the shark, Sam Quint and Matt Hooper. It is Quint who not only speaks at length during the town meeting, but who also effectively shuts down any objections to his pursuit of the shark. He is thus quite unlike Ibsen's Tomas Stockmann, who is thoroughly ridiculed and humiliated by both his brother and his fellow citizens in the course of the town meeting in the play.
Quint functions as a catalyst who makes it possible for the otherwise passive Brody, terrified as he is of boats and water, to hunt and kill the shark. Quint, like Melville's Captain Ahab, operates outside the realm of mainstream society. Much has been made of the need to sacrifice Quint for allegorical purposes relating to the contemporary American context; he represents an outdated way of life, while Brody and Hooper project a new, more optimistic vision of American society. Frederic Jameson suggests that Jaws presents an ideological critique in which Brody and Hooper represent the combined forces of "law and order" and "the new technocracy of the multinational corporations," which willingly sacrifice the old order of American "private enterprise . . . and . . . classical liberalism" that Quint represents in order to construct a utopian vision in which boundless capitalism defeats the collective anxieties represented by the shark and establishes a new social order (1990,. 7 There is no parallel to Quint in his role as shark hunter in An Enemy of the People, and consequently the infusoria remain unconquered at the end of the play. 8 Tomas Stockmann's only weapon is the rhetorical power of persuasion, which he links to scientific knowledge, but which ultimately fails. The perceived external threat is also much more abstract; microorganisms do not instill the same visceral fear that a shark does. Moreover, Ibsen seems to suggest that Tomas Stockmann is at least to a certain degree complicit in the danger, given that his father-in-law owns the tannery thought to have polluted the waters; although he did initially suggest an alternative system for piping water to the spa facility from further upstream, he ultimately went along with his brother's less expensive but more dangerous plan to pipe the water from downstream from the tannery (Ibsen 2008, 562-3).
Tomas Stockmann's ethical positioning in An Enemy of the People is thus much messier than that of Martin Brody and Matt Hooper, who come across as essentially innocent in Jaws. They bear no personal responsibility for the presence of the shark in the waters off Amity Island. When Alex Kintner's mourning mother blames Brody and slaps his face, it likely strikes viewers as unfair because they know that the real responsibility for keeping the beach open lies with the mayor. This point was reiterated in 2020 by Mary McNamara in an impassioned opinion piece prompted by the death of Lee Fiero, the actor who played Mrs. Kintner, due to complications from COVID-19. For McNamara, who exclaims "we are all Mrs. Kintner now," the mayor remains unambiguously responsible for the boy's death, just as she viewed the American president at the time as culpable in the death of Fiero and thousands of other Americans because of his unwillingness to inform the public about the dangers of the virus (McNamara 2020). The political allegory virtually writes itself.

Political allegory
Given that so much of Jaws is devoted to a quite different narrative arc and given that the similarities in characters are relatively superficial, it might appear that the grounds for calling the film an adaptation of the play are rather tenuous. Nonetheless, we want to argue that the fundamental allegorical similarity that underlies both narratives does in fact make it meaningful to speak of Jaws as an adaptation of An Enemy of the People. This allegorical structure relates to the conflict between whistleblower and powerful profiteer. It is a conflict that appears in multiple forms in multiple historical and cultural contexts. In the current historical moment, we see it reflected ironically in Boris Johnson's 2006 quip that Larry Vaughn is the "real hero" of Jaws or Donald J. Trump's frequent invocation of the phrase "enemy of the people" to condemn journalists who seek to reveal alleged corruption and coverups on the part of his administration (O'Donoghue 2020). There has been a striking increase in the number of stage productions of An Enemy of the People around the globe in recent years. Out of the 1,794 registered productions of the play since it premiered in 1883, fully 566 were staged between 2010 and 2019. That is a significant jump from previous decades, with 339 productions in the aughts, 183 productions in the 1990s, and only 91 and 95 in the 1980s and 1970s respectively. Moreover, it surpasses the entire number of productions staged between 1883 and 1969, which totals 554. 9 In this regard, Spielberg appears to have been a bellwether in activating the allegorical structure of An Enemy of the People.
Allegory is a rhetorical figure that, as Franco Moretti describes, underwent a transformation during the nineteenth century. While it had been a productive trope that generated more or less fixed meaning in earlier periods, with the rise of romanticism it came to be seen as overly rigid. As Moretti puts it, "being conventional, allegory gradually acquires a whole series of pejorative connotations. It is an artificial figure, mechanical, dead" (1996,78). With the rise of capitalism, however, this starts to change, and allegory takes on new significance. A number of thinkers have pointed out a parallel between the structure of allegory and the structure of the commodity as understood by Karl Marx in Das Kapital (1867). Following Moretti's useful summary, "Like the commodity, allegory humanizes things (making them move and speak), and it reifies human beings. In both cases, furthermore, an abstract reality (exchange value, allegorical meaning) subordinates and almost hides the concrete reality of use value and literal meaning" (Moretti 1996, 78-9). Moretti builds his analysis on Hans-Georg Gadamer's description of how radical societal change in the nineteenth century altered how allegory came to be understood: Once Gadamer's "firm traditions" are broken, the old signs do not fall dumb at all: if anything, they speak in even louder voices. They have been transformed into so many hieroglyphics, and seem to say to the interpreter: there is a sign, here, so there is assuredly also a meaning; but since the key is now lost, you are free to interpret it as you like. (1996,83) Moretti calls this a transition from a "univocal" function of allegory to one that is "polysemous"; in relation to Melville's Moby-Dick and other nineteenthcentury texts that make active use of allegory, he points out that "protagonists are not so much the story's characters, as its signs" (1996, 86, italics original). Perhaps the appeal of the modern figure of allegory is that it promises "the revelation of a sacred text: the certainty that plunges its roots into the established tradition of the most distant past" but at the same time through its now "limitless polysemy," it opens itself up "to innumerable future interpretations" (Moretti 1996, 88). This tension between the notion of some fixed, knowable truth on the one hand, and an infinite flexibility of assigning meaning or value on the other, is certainly present in Jaws as well. In his discussion of the multiple interpretations of the shark, for example, Jameson writes that "none of these readings can be said to be wrong or aberrant, but their very multiplicity suggests that the vocation of the symbol-the killer shark -lies less in any single message or meaning than in its very capacity to absorb and organize all of these quite distinct anxieties together" (1990,26). But whereas Jameson locates this polysemy primarily in the specific imaginative function of the shark, we want to emphasize that it applies equally to the heroes and indeed to the film (and Ibsen's play) as a whole. 10 In an attempt to understand the broader ideological implications of Jaws, Jameson hypothesizes that "works of mass culture cannot be ideological without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated" (1990,29). The contrast between the idyllic (even utopian) tourist destinations in which Jaws and An Enemy of the People are set and the harsh real-world political fiascos that an allegorical reading of these narratives reveals is striking. In both film and play the townspeople stand to lose everything regardless of the outcome of the struggle between whistleblower and politician; if the political cover-up is maintained the townspeople will lose their health or even their lives, and if it is exposed, they will lose their economic livelihood. The struggle between whistleblower and profiteer is fundamentally ideological in nature. In seeking to expose the health risk, Tomas Stockmann may indeed have morality on his side, but he is also perfectly willing to sacrifice the economic security of his fellow townspeople in a manner that demonstrates an arrogant disregard for the complexity of the situation and the precarity of the individual in a capitalist society. This is why Tomas Stockmann's Nietzschean undertones are so unsettling in Ibsen's play.
Both Jaws and An Enemy of the People have inspired repeated direct comparison to contemporary political issues throughout their respective reception histories. Andrews gives an overview of political cartoons from 1975 that hints at the seemingly endless allegorical potential of the blockbuster film: Jaws became the flavour of the year in political cartoons. There were over thirty of these featuring a variant on the movie's poster. The shark was cast as the Soviet submarine force, inflation, the energy crisis or Ronald Reagan (pre-presidency). The nubile swimmer-victim was the Statue of Liberty, Congressional ineffectiveness or President Ford. (1999, Even Fidel Castro famously and enthusiastically approved of Spielberg's film as an explicitly Marxist critique of capitalism (Andrews 1999, 118). While this kind of polysemous allegorizing of the film continues to this day, much of the critical and scholarly reception of Jaws argues that the film comments either on the Vietnam War-with the shark standing in for an unseen enemy that attacks out of nowhere with deadly force, much as the Viet Cong were imagined and experienced-or the Nixon Watergate scandal-most obviously through the attempts by Mayor Larry Vaughn to cover up the shark attacks -or both (see e.g. Biskind 1975, 26;Heath 1976, 25;Torry 1993, 32-33). Because of Quint's chilling retelling of the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in World War II, Jaws is also frequently evoked whenever a military scandal involving a failure of leadership occurs (Torry 1993, 34;Andrews 1999, 138).
Ibsen conceived of An Enemy of the People as political commentary from its very inception. H.G. Kohler documents Ibsen's awareness of the realworld case of a medical doctor, Eduard Meissner, who was threatened by an angry mob and driven from his position in 1832 for his whistleblowing relating to the spread of the cholera epidemic in the spa town of Teplitz (1990Teplitz ( , 1125; see also Koht 1954, 134;Ystad 2008, 599). Orm Øverland gives a relatively early example of the play's perceived social and political relevance from the USA: "In 1903 John Corbin in the New York Times recommended the sending of a 'carload of Ibsen's play to Ithaca' where doctors apparently had tried to play down a serious typhoid epidemic by giving it the more harmless name, 'Ithaca fever'" (1969,164). The acclaimed Indian director Satyajit Ray's 1989 adaptation of An Enemy of the People, Ganashatru, is a striking example of how the central allegory can be seamlessly transported to an entirely different context. Ray replaces Ibsen's spa with a Hindu temple that dispenses holy water. In a familiar pattern, the local doctor, Ashok Gupta, who discovers the contamination, comes into conflict with the chairman of the temple, who happens to be his younger brother Nishith and who attempts to silence Dr. Gupta in pursuit of profit. In this version, the doctor ultimately triumphs, gaining the full support of the people. Engelstad is critical of this substantial change in the plot but does not attempt to frame it in relation to political and cultural trends in India (2010, 380). On the other hand, Rochelle Wright, who is otherwise critical of the adaptation (she argues that it "obliterates Ibsen's spirit and intention"), does situate the adaptation within Indian debates concerning religion and secularism (2006, 135). 11 In this regard, the radical alteration from Ibsen's "den staerkeste mand i verden, det er han, som står meste alene" (the strongest man in the world is he who stands alone) to a triumphant "I am not alone!" in Ray's version serves a quite specific ideological function, which is aligned with a broader program of inclusivity in addressing, among other possibilities, sectarian conflict in South Asia (Ibsen 2008, 727).
In stage performances of An Enemy of the People, theater directors use the play to express specific political agendas, as Frode Helland discusses in connection with German director Thomas Ostermeier's critique of capitalism. Helland argues that Ibsen is a "contextually over-determined phenomenon" harnessed for the promotion of both left-and right-wing ideologies (2015, 30-1). According to Helland, "the ideological ambivalence that made the play suitable within Goebbels' propaganda system was also the reason that Arthur Miller felt the need to adapt the play when he made his version as a critique of the anti-communist hysteria of the McCarthy era in America" (2015,31). The American dramatist's heavily modified translation from 1950, which eliminates Ibsen's undertones of authoritarianism and elitism, has had an enormous, if largely unacknowledged impact in the Anglophone context and beyond. 12 We see a clear example of Miller's sanitization of Dr. Stockmann in actor Steve McQueen's pet project, the version of An Enemy of the People directed by George Schaefer and released in 1978. The opening credits announce the film as based on An Enemy of the People "as adapted for the American stage by Arthur Miller." McQueen plays Tomas Stockmann as a passive, self-sacrificing hero. Noting the actor's long hair and beard, Helge Rønning calls the character "Christ-like" and almost a "martyr" (2000,86). Schaefer establishes this characterization in an amplified opening sequence during which the doctor tends to his brother Peter, carefully examining him behind the closed doors of his office. The mayor in this version is gravely ill and the fact that Tomas lovingly cares for him without revealing his illness to anyone makes the betrayal later in the film all the more egregious. 13 Schaefer's whitewashed version needs to be understood within a broader film historical tradition of adapting Ibsen for commercial purposes in Hollywood and other major film markets. Eirik Frisvold Hanssen notes in his study of American silent film adaptations of Ibsen in the 1910s that studios were wary of Ibsen's plays and protagonists from the very beginning. Ibsen's reputation "was based to a large extent on controversy and moral ambiguity," and as Hanssen points out, these were precisely the "distinctive characteristics that film adapters during this period were attempting to avoid, even actively resist" (2017,171). We see a clear example of this in the 1915 version of Ibsen's Ghosts (Gengangere, 1881) produced by D.W. Griffith, in which the play's controversial but central themes of syphilis and euthanasia were removed entirely. As Hanssen points out, the "unwelcome moral transgressions and ambiguities" of Ibsen's texts in general were seen as a problem (2017,175). Similarly, Nazi star director Hans Steinhoff's Ein Volksfeind (1937) inserts a new opening sequence and ending in a film that turns Tomas Stockmann into a much less morally ambiguous character who is rehabilitated by the Nazi regime in the end.
Thor Holt has explored the ideological uses that Steinhoff made of Ibsen's source text in Ein Volksfeind, arguing that what on the surface appears to be "an innocuous adaptation, only with a happy ending not to be found in Ibsen's play" is in fact "a Gesamtkunstwerk in the service of the Nazi state and its insidious racial agenda" (2020,194). Steinhoff transforms Ibsen's An Enemy of the People into a story about "German" victimization, where Ibsen's "compact majority" resembles "Jewish" forces that ostensibly have debased the soul and soil of the nation. This adaptation supports the hateful racist rhetoric of the Nazi regime and preaches the primacy of the Volksgemeinschaft (people's community), which is represented by Tomas Stockmann, Petra Stockmann, and the journalist Hofstetten (Hovstad) in the film (see also Rønning 2000, 86). 14 The pattern that emerges is that film adaptations of Ibsen's works tend to retain the underlying allegorical structure while updating the setting, inserting a new opening sequence, removing controversial topics depending on the socio-political pressures of the time and place in which a given play is adapted, reforging the protagonists into positive role models, and changing the ending to support the overt political and ideological implications of the film; these are precisely the transformations we see when examining Jaws in relation to An Enemy of the People.
Although the suspense and excitement of the shark hunt takes up most of the film, these sequences could have been significantly shortened without altering the politics and thematic content of Jaws, which remain remarkably conservative regarding gender and family dynamics. In other words, much of the "infidelity" to Ibsen writes itself neatly into the gender and family politics of Spielberg's films more generally. As Robert Kolker asserts, these features support the Hollywood conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s, where "two things have to happen: the family unit needs to be secured against an external threat and the male member of that unit need not only to protect (or in some instances avenge) the family but, in the process, must prove himself" (2011,231). After a loosening of traditional values and sexual taboos in the 1960s, Emanuel Levy remarks how Hollywood in the 1970s returned to family themes, arguing that Spielberg exemplified this trend as the "strongest defendant of white, middle-class suburbanism as the ideal of American Way of Life" (1991,194). Replicating the more progressive gender politics of Ibsen's play (largely expressed through the figure of Petra Stockmann) would deviate strongly from the larger ideological project of Spielberg's output in the 1970s, but the allegorical structure of the play is flexible enough to contain a completely different message. In this sense, Jaws might even be seen as part of a patriarchal backlash against the larger emancipatory project that is the hallmark of Ibsen's dramatic oeuvre.
The cruel death of Chrissie Watkins, the restoration of ideal masculinity on the part of the whistleblower, the supportive wife, and the ideal of the middle-class suburban family are all aspects of the film that come to light through the kind of "conceptual flipping back and forth" between the two texts that Hutcheon argues is central to the act of reading adaptations as adaptations (2013,139). Further film historical contextualization suggests that Jaws, in fact, differs less from other, more overtly announced adaptations of the play than previously assumed.

Adaptation and Intertextuality
In her introduction to An Enemy of the People, Vigdis Ystad makes a point that seems to escape much of the scholarly reception of the play, namely that it has intertextual parallels to William Shakespeare's Coriolanus (1609). She argues that Ibsen may have taken his title from the Danish translation of this work (2008,592). 15 The main connection lies, however, in the stubborn and uncompromising character of the two protagonists themselves rather than in Ibsen's whistleblower plot. At least one scholar has pointed out a similar link between the personalities of Coriolanus and Melville's Captain Ahab, which in turn links back to the similarities between Ahab and Quint, further heightening the complex intertextual undertow in Jaws (Barnett 1983, 142). Julie Sanders frames adaptation as a "sub-section" of intertextuality, which she in turn defines as "how texts encompass and respond to other texts both during the process of their creation and composition and in terms of the individual reader's or spectator's response" (2006 17; 2). Yet, as Leitch notes, she, like Hutcheon, "declines to draw a categorical distinction between the two terms" (2012,88). It is our position that adaptation is something qualitatively different than intertextuality, but where exactly the dividing line goes has not been fully articulated. Despite leaving an apparent opening for the effects of the "individual reader's or spectator's response" or reception of a given work, neither Sanders nor Hutcheon's explorations of the phenomenon of adaptation-as rich as they otherwise are-fully account for the polysemous nature of both hyper-and hypotexts that openly invite multiple simultaneous allegorical readings in the way that Jaws and An Enemy of the People do. We argue thus that the way interpretation functions within allegorical structures may be part of why adaptations feel like a different category than intertextuality more generally.
Sanders and Hutcheon seem to suggest that any given adaptation is an essentially stable transposition to a specific cultural and historic context that presents a similarly fixed interpretation of the hypotext on the part of its creators. Regardless of whether a given adaptation exemplifies the "transposition," "commentary," or "analogue" categories first developed by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, Sanders posits that the resulting work of art has a more or less fixed meaning that can be uncovered through a relatively unambiguous process of decoding on the part of the audience (2006,. Even when Sanders considers examples of the relatively autonomous "analogue" category of adaptations, such as Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979), her focus is more on whether knowledge that the film is an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899) is "necessary" for the viewer to understand it than on the dynamic process of generating meaning between hypotext and hypertext. Sanders' methodology resembles Hutcheon's "who, what, where, when, why, and how" approach to adaptation analysis, which also falls short of fully accounting for less clear-cut examples and their ensuing receptions.
We find another useful test case for the importance of the relationship between allegorical structures and interpretation in adaptations in Detlef Sierck's La Habanera from 1937, the last film before the director fled Germany and reinvented himself in Hollywood as Douglas Sirk. Sierck was deeply familiar with Ibsen's dramas through his work as a theater director, having staged Pillars of Society in 1923 andJohn Gabriel Borkman in 1925. Moreover, he went on to direct a film adaptation of Pillars of Society in 1935 (Stützen der Gesellschaft), in which the connection to the hypotext is clearly announced. Like Jaws, the relationship between An Enemy of the People and La Habanera is unannounced and, while the plot has certain similarities, it cannot be said to be extended. In La Habanera, an unidentified plague hits the island nation of Puerto Rico, with any news about the disease's devastating effects being suppressed by the main villain, Don Pedro de Avila, in order to ensure continuing profits from his fruit export business regardless of the danger this poses to the local inhabitants. 16 Among other motifs recognizable from Ibsen's An Enemy of the People is how Don Pedro hinders the Swedish doctor Nagel in his attempt to find a cure and make the disaster publicly known, which echoes Tomas Stockmann's effort in Ibsen's play and attests to how film adaptations of An Enemy of the People tend to amplify and dramatize the discovery of the threat. Sierck contrasts the doctor's self-sacrificing devotion to duty and strong conviction of the importance of truth with the dubious and hypocritical scheming of Don Pedro.
The conflict between whistleblower and powerful profiteer remains at the core but it is repackaged within a racialized melodramatic love story in which the two men compete for the love of the female lead, Astrée Sternhjelm, played by the biggest film star of the Third Reich, the Swedish actor Zarah Leander. In Eric Rentschler's reading of the film, La Habanera, like Ibsen's An Enemy of the People before it and Spielberg's Jaws after, "served multiple purposes." The setting of Puerto Rico can be read both as a racialized, lawless island and the authoritarian Nazi state's displaced double; the film thus generates "an ideological surplus value and unconscious meaning" (1996,134). The relationship between La Habanera and An Enemy of the People is not so much intertextual as structural, in that it replicates the political allegory of Ibsen's play, but without the overt intertextual activation of the hypotext that we see in, for example, the critical reception of Jaws.

Adaptation and genre
Whereas much existing adaptation theory might exclude Jaws as an adaptation of An Enemy of the People, there are good reasons not to disqualify it. Dennis Cutchins draws on Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of dialogism to stress how intertextual interconnections should not be anchored in questions of "influence," but are primarily the work of the reader, or, in the case of film, the spectator (2017,84). Simply put, where some perceive an adaptation, others do not, independent of whether the film is announced as an adaptation or whether the director knowingly interpreted the relevant source text in the production process. One consequence of our focus on reception, is that the intentional fallacy tied to announced adaptations, guided as they are by how filmmakers or production companies intend a film to be seen, is largely eliminated.
A less frequently discussed but productive way of thinking about adaptation is in relation to genre. The process of reading a film as an adaptation, in which the spectator searches for traces of the hypotext, closely resembles how genre functions in reception more generally, especially given the fact that part of the pleasure of spectatorship is the anticipation of what comes next according to generic conventions that the viewer invests in the film. It is this horizon of expectation that forms the core of "adaptation as adaptation" in Hutcheon's theory, as the viewer repeatedly likens the film to a former, in this case, literary text (2013, 6).
In Film/Genre (1999), Rick Altman stresses generic pleasure as a key factor for how a viewer chooses to engage with a film. He revises our understanding of generic operations, emphasizes that multi-generic plots are the rule in Hollywood films, and connects the roles played by industry, critics, and audiences in making and re-making genre. According to Altman, moreover, "generic experiences" are generated by the viewers themselves, who "invest their energy in extremely diverse modes" (1999,151). In Altman's view, genres are more productively understood as unpredictable social forces than as fixed categories serving as ideological entrapment for passive consumers. This allows for active audience participation that even has the capacity to modify and create new generic itineraries.
Arguably, the many references to Ibsen's An Enemy of the People in the critical reception of Jaws gradually bring "(Ibsen) adaptation" to light as one generic itinerary among many, thus adding to the plethora of genres discussed in the scholarly literature on Jaws. Sofia Glasl, for instance, identifies horror, thriller, adventure film, and buddymovie as central ingredients in a film that draws on and combines "einer Vielzahl an Meta-und Subgenres" (a multitude of meta-and sub-genres; 2015, 112; see also Melia 2020 on the relevance of the western for Jaws). We understand adaptation as genre in how knowing audiences can activate An Enemy of the People in their encounter with Jaws and seek pleasure by comparing and contrasting the hypotext with the hypertext. 17 Adaptation as one generic route among many can vary from highly unlikely (a viewer may have never heard of the connection; a viewer may have read a review mentioning Ibsen but have no knowledge of the play; alternately the viewer may simply choose to let other generic itineraries guide their interpretation of the film) to highly likely (not only active but hyper-active Ibsen readers who, like us, eagerly invest their knowledge of An Enemy of the People into their evaluation of Jaws). While we are not suggesting that adaptation is the only relevant genre lens for interpreting Jaws, we see it as one of many highly productive categories for understanding the film and its broader cultural impact.

Conclusion
Why does Jaws "feel" like so much more of an adaptation of An Enemy of the People than it "actually" is in terms of running time? More important than a scene-by-scene or character-to-character comparison, are the links forged between film and play through a mutually reflexive reception history. The very fact that An Enemy of the People figures as an almost obligatory (if often completely superficial) touchstone in so much of the Jaws reception suggests in turn that readers and audiences today approach the play with a very different horizon of expectation than before 1975. Jørgen Bruhn is only the latest in a series of adaptation theorists (going back to André Bazin) who ask, "Should we not admit that the adaptive process is dialectical, and that the source text is changed in the process as well?" (2013, 70). It is just as possible that Jaws has contributed meaningfully to how An Enemy of the People is understood and activated by contemporary audiences as it is that an awareness that An Enemy of the People is a hypotext for Jaws contributes to how we understand the film.
The two are, for example, linked imaginatively when Julian Zelizer compares the former president's downplaying of the seriousness of the COVID-19 virus to the actions of Larry Vaughn. A Twitter post by actor Jim Carrey conveys this point visually (see Figure 2). In his opinion piece, Zelizer describes a frightening new situation where "our shark is a virus." Here we see that, even without mentioning Ibsen explicitly, Zelizer circles back to the play, pointing out that "today, too, we are on a mission to thwart an organism that can kill us. Our intrepid 'shark hunters' are health care workers and scientists" (2020). While it is unclear whether he is at all aware of the connection to An Enemy of the People, the comment inevitably activates a reflexive interpretive chain for those who recognize it. The political allegory of An Enemy of the People seems ripe for adaptation in these times, with the threat of global pandemics and climate change reactivating the play on numerous levels.
Our exploration of the relationship between Jaws and An Enemy of the People suggests that Ibsen's most substantial contribution to film history lies less in traditional announced adaptations of his works, such as Schaefer's An Enemy of the People, than in the polysemous allegorical structures that underlie his plays. In ways that remain to be explored, similar political allegories are central to a number of films that may have been influenced by An Enemy of the People or mutated from Jaws. Steven Soderbergh, for example, has called Jaws his favorite film and both Erin Brockovich (2000) and Contagion (2011) share reminiscent conflict structures (Gabriel 1991). And as Rønning points out, Hollywood films as diverse as High Noon (Fred Zinneman, 1952) and Dante's Peak (Roger Donaldson, 1997) echo An Enemy of the People in that they feature a "lonely soothsayer who stands for truth and real values" whose knowledge is rejected by the local community; as with Jaws, this structure is easily linked to the current political climate-McCarthyism and the Korean War in the case of High Noon (2000,86). 18 Like La Habanera, films like Dante's Peak and High Noon activate the allegorical structure of An Enemy of the People and reference it intertextually, but ultimately do not read as full-blown adaptations.
Even more suggestively, Stanley Cavell notes how female characters in classic Hollywood melodramas are true "descendants of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House" (1996,(78)(79)(80)(81)(82), and that in comedies of remarriage, Ibsen's play from 1879 "establishes a problematic to which the genre of remarriage constitutes a particular direction of response" (1981,23). Yet, in a rather sweeping judgment, Ibsen scholar Robert Ferguson has dismissed the impact of Ibsen on film history more generally, arguing that adaptations of his plays have failed to leave "any particular mark on the film histories of their countries of origin," because of what he sees as the almost insurmountable "problems of adapting Ibsen for the screen" (2006,48). It is symptomatic that Ferguson does not seriously consider unannounced adaptations like Jaws.
Reception processes influence the viewer's generic pleasure and the reflexive generation of polysemous meaning in ways that go beyond mere intertextuality. This leads us to argue in favor of using "adaptation" rather than "intertextuality" as a productive guide for understanding unannounced filmatizations that rely on allegorical structures like Jaws. We find that the complex allegorical entanglements between Jaws and An Enemy of the People suggest that adaptation studies has much to gain from more explicitly incorporating reception, especially in unannounced cases. Finally, we find that Spielberg's Jaws is arguably the hypertext that more than any other has reactivated, influenced, and amplified Ibsen's play. unrecognized part of its [Jaws'] extensive crossgeneric hybridity" and claims that Spielberg "specifically references" High Noon and other classic Hollywood westerns (2020, 185).

Notes on contributors
Ellen Rees earned her Ph.D. from the University of Washington (1995) and is a professor of Scandinavian literature at the University of Oslo's Centre for Ibsen Studies. She recently completed a book on popular receptions of Ibsen (forthcoming on Scandinavian Academic Press in 2022) and has published widely on Norwegian literature and film.
Thor Holt earned his Ph.D. from the University of Oslo (2020) and is a visiting senior lecturer at the Centre for Ibsen Studies. He wrote his dissertation on Nazi era adaptations of Henrik Ibsen and is currently working on Weimar cinema (as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley).

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).