When I was a kid I was really into sharks. Posters, puzzle and game books, bathtub toys.... I was also into dinosaurs, and when I learned that sharks had existed alongside dinosaurs, I thought of the basically as real-life living prehistoric predators. Super cool! So when JAWS was released, I had to see it, even though I was only 7. According to my mom, I bugged her enough that she agreed to drive me 20 miles to the theater to a showing, and after the first ten minutes I was so scared that I wanted to leave, but she refused.
In the years since, I didn't think of the movie too often, but when I did I thought of it basically as a monster movie. A horrible beast terrorizes a community of innocent folks until some hero saves them.
Watching it again, I was struck by how much it is, or tries to be, the story of Martin Brody and his quest/struggle to be accepted as the island's police chief, despite being an off-islander big city cop. In that story, the shark is not so much a horrific monster as it is a conventional villain, thwarting the hero's quest.
In fact, that was one of the more disturbing things about the story: that while the shark preys on oblivious swimmers and boaters, the true victim is Brody. He is the one that we are supposed to care about being affected. The actual victims are not really even characters in the story. They are human only so that their suffering (and that of their loved ones) is significant enough for it to impact Brody's quest for acceptance.
Yes, this is a monster movie, and it's something of a trope that the victims in monster movies serve at least partially to make the monster that much more terrifying. But the choice to center the powerful white man as the "real" victim (especially when the first two victims are a woman and a boy) felt way too close to home these days.
That idea came back to me last week when reading about the September 11, 2001, attacks again. Part of what has been reprehensible about the response of Trump and Republicans and their supporters has been their claim of victimhood in those attacks. People actually died and lost friends and family in those attacks, but we, the "patriots", are the *true* victims! Like the storytellers of JAWS, many people have created their own meaning about the violence that took place -- a meaning that centers themselves.
Of course it's true that significant events have an affect on people only peripherally impacted by them, and every person has their own important and valid story about what 9/11 means to them. But when it comes to establishing *the* story (if that is something one is claiming exists), a choice has to be made about *whose* story it is. Too often that choice goes unmade by the people with the loudest voices, who assume that there really is only one story, so of course their own story serves just as well as anyone else's.
