When I shuffled out of the cinema, squinting into the bright daylight, I still wasn’t sure who Twisters is actually for. It certainly isn’t for me.
Nobody was calling for a Twister II – even when the first film came out and did relatively well at the box office. Aside from the CGI cow (which fans of classic Simpsons will delight in learning was actually a disguised CGI zebra first made for Jumanji) which famously got caught up in a poorly-rendered tornado, the movie had little cultural impact. It was quintessential 90s-nothingness.
But at a time when rich and powerful people are yearning to go back to a time before the eternal systemic collapse of our current century, perhaps I have figured out who this is actually for.
Brickhammer
The plot centres on Kate Carter (Daisy Edgar-Jones), a meteorologist and former storm chaser who abandons her rural Oklahoma home after her science experiment to break up tornados gets several of her friends killed. She spends some time working in New York with a storm warning agency, until the sole survivor of her original group, Javi (Anthony Ramos) turns up asking for help with a new experiment – backed by the military and private capital. Kate seems to be the only person who doesn’t somehow get bad vibes from that combination.
Upon arrival back in Oklahoma, where apparently more tornadoes are happening than ever before, Kate, Javi and the ominously named Storm Par team set to work following some storms with a military-grade radar. That’s when, with all the finesse of a Jerry Brickhammer production, the film sets about establishing some abrasively traditional stakes for an audience it assumes probably can’t read, let alone pick up on context clues.
The archetypal shit-head Yank hero rocks into town, blaring some amorphous New Country through the high-fidelity speakers bolted on to his special tornado-proof utility vehicle. Tyler Owens (Glenn Powell) channels his most stereotypical modern cowboy, as the abrasively ALL-AMERICAN HERO who uses natural disasters to put on jaw-dropping 4th of July displays. There is much hootin’ and hollerin’ as he and his squad blast star-spangled rockets into the mouth of a tornado. He’s the good guy – and by the end he will have helped Kate rediscover herself – and the true spirit of America – on the way to defeating all tornados once and for all.
It’s the kind of thematic counterbalance that might have held sway in the unipolar moment of the 90s – where, as the sole purveyor of international propaganda, the US got to paint its clear-eyed patriots as the inherent goodies in every and any scenario. But that was before the war on terror. That was before so many horrific, hideous events – including the unwavering sponsorship of a genocide – reminded the world what the narrative embodiments of this nation and its ideology actually represent.
So, returning to the question of who this is for, it is desperate to revert to the perception of a world where people would say, as jingoistic hack Aaron Sorkin once put it, “Thank God the Americans are here.” But at the same time, it is utterly unwilling to address any of the reasons why that is precisely the opposite of what the rest of the world says, when the nation’s flag does hove into view.
To me, the answer seems plain. This is a film by Hollywood’s establishment Democrats – ancient millionaires who have done very well with things just the way they are – aimed at coaxing people into backing the political project of similarly-aged individuals, who are also doing just fine. As an election campaign is unfolding where an ailing Joe Biden (and now a middle-of-the-road Kamala Harris) have steadfastly offered nothing besides ‘unity’, while doing everything in their power to avoid talking about their abject failures to help their constituents (from infrastructure renewal, to defending abortion laws, to protecting the LGBT+ community, to reinforcing labour rights). All that was on the table was united against ‘anyone but Donald Trump’, pretending that everything is just dandy as long as the Orange One is kept out of the White House. And like that campaign, the result of the designed-by-committee propaganda piece that is Twisters, is a film which doesn’t know how to speak to anyone under the age 60, who isn’t willing to utterly ignore a quarter century of intervening history since the first movie.
Time-warp
Exemplifying this is the fact that, almost 30 years after the first Twister film, its ‘standalone sequel’ is still crammed with the same old references to The Wizard of Oz. While a film from the 1930s (or a book published in 1900) might still seem like relevant cultural capital to the many septuagenarians among Hollywood’s producer-class, the frame of reference they are wedded to is fading from living memory. (Unless you are involved in the drag scene, anyway, and it seems the Ven-diagram where that world and the world depicted in Twisters intersect is really narrow, if it indeed exists…)
The problems with this – besides the absurdity of cultural products from extremely old people trying to appeal to younger viewers – come into play because however badly this film wants to paint a picture of a united America for centrists to rally behind, there are clear signs that the people behind the movie know there are some things they cannot wholly avoid. In part, this is because they know what they are trying to sell us is bullshit, and there are quite a few areas where they need to pre-emptively cover their backsides, if anyone pays the film even a modicum of attention.
Most conspicuously among these is the film snuffing out the romance it was so obviously building towards. Hollywood is now scared to death of ‘intimate’ scenes in the wake of the #MeToo moment – partially this may be because it is still riddled with abusers, incapable of overseeing such scenes without it becoming a future ‘issue’. So, in the conclusion, the couple who have been pawed at clumsily by the film’s heavy-handed context clues never get the climactic kiss you would expect at the end of this kind of popcorn fodder. The closest they get is a long – and decidedly weird – period of simulated post-coital panting, after narrowly surviving an encounter with one of the titular twisters. But as amusing as moving from a direct romantic engagement to panting, wind fetishism as a means to still do sex without the sex is, there are other issues to consider.
The desire to present the film’s ideology through the lends of a big, dumb spectacle is also hamstrung by a need to appease science in some way – but not in a way that brings too much baggage with it. As Aliens was to Alien, the pluralisation of the title tells us there are now multiple tornadoes to contend with in Twisters. However, the film finds itself in a No Man’s Land, where it is at the same time devoted to being ‘scientifically plausible’, and also keen not to talk about a certain, inconvenient truth. So, while the lovers of B-movies among us might have gone into the cinema hoping the title will mean a twin-tornado attack manifests (with the storm-chasers over-confident in being safe from one giant twister moving past them, only to realise the storm’s even larger sibling has been sneaking up behind them), we are treated to a brief, fleeting image of a double-nado, with one side almost immediately dying out – because that’s just how it happens. But at the same time, the film does not dare to approach the question as to why there are suddenly thousands of tornados hitting the central US. That’s happening in real life, in conspicuous correlation with the planet’s heating. “DON’T THINK TOO HARD ABOUT IT” the movie seems to scream, as our protagonists scramble to invent technology which can kill a tornado – an absurd cinematic embodiment of the Flex Tape meme.
Further to this, the film wants you to believe that somehow the America of today has license to be caught trousers-down by any form of disaster. But not only is this a post-9/11 film, it is a film which comes after the devastation of Katrina. It is depicting an America which has supposedly seen the grim consequences of cutting corners on the health and safety of the population, and of the horrific places that decades of neo-liberalism can lead to. Infrastructure and housing built during a race to the bottom inevitably crumbles at the first sign of stress (something which will also become horrifically apparent the next time a hurricane hits the southern coast), leaving thousands homeless, jobless or dead. So, as Twisters depicts towns with populations of thousands (and houses built of match-sticks, and storm-shelters apparently only built to house a hundred bodies or so) torn to shreds by the relentless twisters, it becomes increasingly unbelievable that nobody has anything to say beyond the idea gee, it sure would be nice if we could kill tornadoes.
One final signifier of Twisters struggling to provide the world a slice of naked nostalgia, while still being hobbled by the way the world is now, is the make-up of Tyler Owens’ rag-tag team of redneck ‘tornado wranglers. The designed-by-committee team clearly wanted to play up to the idea that ‘Real America’ is best represented by dirty hands and a country twang – with Tyler’s reckless but affable crew pitted against the clean-cut, business-minded precision of Storm Par. Initially presented as hapless oafs, throwing themselves into mindless thrill-seeking to indulge their social media followers, the true motives of Tyler’s gang – leveraging this clout to provide relief for the victims of tornados – presents an obvious parallel with the Storm Par operation, which eventually turns out has been able to source its expensive equipment by agreeing to hand its data over to a wealthy businessman so he knows where a tornado has struck, so he can buy up the land for cheap (it’s a plot that makes very little sense – because, especially in the age of 24-hour news and the internet, it’s really obvious where a tornado has already struck, so this Storm Par investment is just an unnecessary extra expense). So, it’s the age-old city-slicker suits against the plaid-clad workin’ man – the only way mainstream cinema ever feels it can get away with class-coded conflict.
But this kind of storytelling-by-numbers doesn’t work anymore, because the connotations of the kind of people who drive a truck through a tornado to shoot red, white and blue fireworks into its heart, while blaring Kid Rock-adjacent pseudo-country through loud-speakers is not what it would have been in 1996. That’s not to say that there hadn’t already been a historically entrenched attempt to belittle of that kind of person in the 90s. But in post-MAGA America, where that culture was heavily associated with forces raining violence on the Black Lives Matter movement, the committee behind Twisters clearly became wary of the optics of an all-white team of rednecks showing us all about the true American way. Especially while their leader targets all of his animosity towards a rival of Latin heritage.
To counter this, the committee decided to cast a Black actor as diversity wallpaper, to waylay the sense of unease the audience this is for might have started to feel. The thing is this is conspicuously cynical, because Sasha Lane as Lily has almost nothing to do. She is the drone operator for Tyler’s crew, and the drone obviously does not survive particularly well in a tornado, so Lily is left twiddling her thumbs for long spells of time, just happy to be there so we don’t get the idea these are the wrong kind of hillbilly. It’s a shame because she could have been the most interesting character in the film, if she were allowed to talk about the political and social contradictions her presence is addressing, or to have any kind of back-story and personality.
It is also clear how little the team behind Twisters were actually invested in this character – who has no potential areas of growth, or personal revelation, because she has less of an arc than Ben (Harry Hadden-Paton), a weaselly London journalist profiling Tyler from the back-seat of his four-by-four. Screaming and squirming, he eventually learns how to respect the subjects of the story he was clearly just there to exploit for a click-bait article. Why does this matter? Because his character, his involvement and eventual approval, matters more to the ageing committee than Lily. Because he is a white, college educated male – the kind who the centrist establishment ultimately is still utterly beholden to.
Nothing to sell
Perhaps this also explains why Twisters received five write-ups (including three positive reviews) from The Guardian alone, following its release. In one it was lauded as a film which “almost has it all”, while another called it a “teeth rattling sequel” – and I can imagine if I were a mainstream journalist who had just had my dick sucked by a film that reassures me my opinion is the most valid of all, I might say something similar.
But beyond servicing the same usual suspects that America’s establishment Democrats always kowtow to, the film does a bad job of engaging anyone else. The superficial diversity still paints Black and Latin people as objects for wealthy and powerful people to manoeuvre into place to cover their arses, rather than meaningfully engage with.
Anyone from the communities allegedly represented by Tyler would be within their rights to come away feeling deeply patronised by the film’s surface-level engagement with life outside the coastal elite – assuming it’s all just baseball, cornfields and rodeos. Meanwhile, it blatantly suggests the fact their towns fall apart when the wind blows hard is just par for the course – rather than a symptom of being abandoned by the state and capital – and they’ll all get over it as soon as they shoot off some ‘Mercan fireworks to the beat of the latest Jelly Roll hit, while they down some watery lager.
Even beyond any of that, though, even if you aren’t at all invested in any of the egg-shell-walking politics of Twisters, even if you just take this as a big, dumb, fun move – it disappoints there too. After all the sterilised, de-sexed, greyscale CGI positing itself as fun, the film manages to close on an arguably even grimmer note –
But what might be most infuriating is that all of this comes after a final signifier that this is all just bullshit, that is only supposed to be for lower-class consumption. Twisters closes with a cameo from Paul Scheer of bad movie podcast How Did This Get Made – an ultimate wink to whatever technocrats may be in the audience, that we know this is nonsense. An article for another day will be a ‘Who Critiques the Critics’ on How Did This Get Made – a show where members of the Hollywood club (each with plenty of crap in their own IMDb CV) make a commodity out of sneering at the mis-steps of poorer filmmakers. But I bring it up here, because the cameo is an acknowledgement that Hollywood, perhaps the world’s premier creator of meaning, doesn’t even believe what it is selling.
The idea factory has run out of ideas. In a time when the wheels have fallen off, where the promises of capitalism have demonstrably failed to pay off, when people are seeing their standard of living collapse amid a climate crisis that system has instigated, Twisters shows that besides reheated irony-laced left-overs, the purveyors of meaning have nothing left to sell.