we need to talk about twisters
But for on a movie screen1, I’ve never seen a tornado at all. I have always loved big weather or what passed, for me, as big weather. Thunderstorms, heat lightning and buckets of snow. I liked it if the power went out. Wore bibbed ski pants to lie quiet in the yard and watch white flakes flutter and fall and melt on my eyes and also to ride a purple sled down the slope of our grass out front and straight across the street. Where I grew up there are so many trees. I thought once that I was used to rugged conditions. Stupid, really, but we make such a to-do about having seasons. The truth is that Massachusetts is mild. Equanimeous. The American Northeast, for all its cultural overrepresentation is, in terms of climate, far more bark than bite. One can walk trails all day under red and yellow leaves without ever fearing the blue cover everywhere will crack itself to make a monster, sucking, eating, erasing someone’s whole world in seconds. So far anyway. A “microburst” touched down two miles from my parents’ house ten years ago and ripped a hillside clean. All those trees I was always used to. I don’t even really know what that means, a microburst, but that this means it was far less bad than such weather can be. And I know that only last summer did the trees begin filling the hole it left behind. Only last summer, driving by, did I see a beginning slowly climb from the wreck. I used to want more weather. My first earthquake was thrilling. I like when the sky looks too big. When traveling the blown open places at the middle of this country the sky eats up more of your world than seems possible. Driving to California with my sister six years and a life ago I was bowled over2 by the portentous emptiness of Arkansas and North Texas, by a sky so big you almost had to cry out, gasp. There was something magical and threatening about being alive in so much space, seeing and seen for what feels like forever.
TWISTERS (2024) has basically nothing to do with TWISTER (1996). Given the impossibility of recreating the all killer no filler balls to the ball stupidity and high wire sexiness of Bill Paxton doing up his ex-wife Helen Hunt’s seatbelt in a leaping truck while Philip Seymour Hoffman and future TAR director Todd Field goof off in the distance, I think this departure is basically for the best. TWISTER is a wonderfully horny adventure film for adults, and we do not live in times which produce such spectacles. TWISTERS is more sensitive and sometimes a little in its own way but also silly and playful and frightening in the adrenaline rush fire and screaming and my-reclining-cinema-seat-is-pummeling-me-with-the-semi-erotic-purr-of-Dolby-Atmos way that an action film should be, the kind of sugar rush fear we are chasing in the first place when we pay to get into one of those seats, and frightening in a lingering, melancholy3 way. There is reason to worry. Shooting rockets into a storm is good fun but we all know the weather is getting worse.4 This film has no kissing5; whole towns are swallowed. In TWISTER we watch the bad guys, the squares, the snobs, unlikable corporate wretches be gobbled by the storm. In TWISTERS the wind will take anyone.
I will get out ahead of all this and tell you that Daisy Edgar-Jones as traumatized meteorologist Kate Carter (wonderfully bland name—she and Glen Powell’s Tyler Owens combine for a powerful duo of nondescript American whiteness) is mid at best in this. Didn’t bother me that much.6 However limp Edgar-Jones sometimes came across, too caged, not funny enough, blurry at the edges, she has, still, a most lovely long neck, and even a truly hideous blonde dye job did not take away from the winsome doll eyes which presumably got her into acting in the first place. The chemistry between Mrs. Normal People and 2024’s Great American Sweetheart Glen Powell, in so much as there is some, is not going to launch any prepubescent sexual awakenings in the manner that the original film did for me, but he is personally charming enough and she a sufficiently blank space for one to accept a gentle romantic blossoming amidst the motels and rodeo playlands getting swept into the sky. When they were huddled together against the winds in an empty inground pool, bloodied and wet with rain and tears, I found suddenly that I did not at all want them to peel apart. And that was enough.
TWISTERS should be seen big and loud and with candy in your lap. There is a very funny puke gag that Megan and I were still talking about in bed as we went to sleep. Anthony Ramos gets little to do but is convincingly pained and pining as Kate’s old friend who is now storm chasing with the financial backing of a comically villainous land developer, and he does get a small but winning third act turn. Katy O’Brian is there being hot and weird as part of the gang that supports Powell’s cowboy storm chaser YouTube channel7. That entire supporting crew radiate a warmth and cheery unkemptness which honors the snickering ragtag spirit of TWISTER and—much more importantly—makes for a great hang. The storm touches down during a street fair and the easy up canopies under which wares had been hocked became deadly threats and this chilled me more than I could possibly have anticipated. A whole wall flies off a movie theater, screen collapsing and falling away as if it never were, and everyone inside, all of them scared and hurt and crying, hiding, pitch over sideways like miniatures in the kicked over dollhouse of a rotten kid. My knees were at my chin. I laughed, I cried, I thought, oh, the sky is going to kill us one day if the ocean hasn’t done it first and I hope I’ll do a lot more stupid, brave, goofy shit between now and then.
also the TWISTER ride at Universal Studios Florida when I was eight.
really cannot overstate how awed I was out there and although basically nobody in my life is at all interested in accompanying me I do long to go back and do more than drive away.
The MINARI heads in the room will see “Directed by Lee Isaac Chung” and see right away how beefy blockbuster TWISTERS ended up taking such a tender approach to the dangers and beauties of life in the American heartland.
See Julia Armfield’s PRIVATE RITES for more on this.
that TWISTERS does not include as its crescendo a single lip lock is so insane and indefensible that it has for me flipped around to being very funny and perhaps innovative. Tornadoes made Bill and Jo want to fuck; Tornadoes make Kate and Tyler want to cry. We really did arrive to this party on Earth at the craggily end when all the drinks are watered down and no one has left the heart even to dance.
I will get out ahead of this all and tell you, also, that Kiernan Shipka only gets a handful of minutes on screen but made enough from that I missed her when she was gone to such a degree that I found myself wondering what the version of this movie where she played the lead instead might be like.
Don’t really believe in “spoilers” as it were, and this is certainly not a film which depends on even the mildest twist for its pleasures, but I refuse to say anything more about the do-gooder, rocket-firing, cowboy YouTube channel of it all because it’s actually really cute and so, so stupid and should be experienced fresh if possible. I will say that Maura Tierney, as Kate’s mother, got the biggest laugh of the entire film from our sold-out audience with just her wordless reaction to a t-shirt gifted to her by the Tornado Wrangler himself.