How To Tell A Story

My kid wants to watch Jaws.

Forgetting for a brief moment my incalculable angst at how quickly my children are growing up, I am, on the one hand, elated to finally be on the cusp of sharing some of my favorite "(adult) movies with my kids.

On the other, his request prompted an interesting discussion between us where I had to explain how different Jaws is from other “scary” classics like, Jurassic Park.

Sure, there’s some pretty obvious similarities: For example, both films feature people being eaten alive.

In both films, humans insert themselves into a food chain where they are not the alpha. Both are iconic as hell, both are adapted from novels, with different screenwriters, but directed by the same iconic director, using many of the same cinematic tools (most notably, like Alien, not fully revealing the “bad guy” until well into the movie).

But there are also so many, many differences between them, and in talking them over (and over) with an impatient, skeptical ten year old, it reminded me just how much intentions matter, and how much the intended audience matters.

Intentions — intended audiences, messages, lessons, carefully calibrated for maximum effect — are what make the bodies that pile up in the cold-open shootout in Star Wars: A New Hope different from the ones on Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan.

Knowing your audience is what makes the Emperor’s fictional Stormtroopers different from Hitler’s real life Storm Troopers, what makes a revived T.Rex different than ancient IRL Jaws.

At the right age, it’ll definitely give you nightmares, but the first situation simply, definitely will not happen to you — you have less than zero odds of being ripped off a toilet by a T.Rex or blasted by force lightning by a Sith Lord.

But the latter situation could very well happen to you, because at some point in your life you will probably go into the ocean and because sharks actively (if relatively rarely) eat people, because they have been around for hundreds of millions of years and we are just the next soft and delicious treat to wander into waves.

But in trying to explain these things to him, I thought about how much deeper a movie like Jaws can intentionally be, because the intended audience is (supposedly) more capable of deeper lessons.

On the surface (get it?), Jaws doesn’t seem to want to say as much about “us” and our choices as something like The Wire or Parasite, but look deeper and you can see a story about fatherhood, about the middle class, the power of local government, about corrupt politicians in the time of Nixon, or if you’re Fidel Castro, about a heroic great white shark absolutely laying waste to American capitalism.

As with most art, YMMV.

For my ten year old, most of that doesn’t apply yet, so my argument to him was simplified:

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