Disaster Movies Can’t Keep Pace With a World of Catastrophes
It’s become a cliché to observe that news coverage of disasters like the LA wildfires resembles a Hollywood movie. Yet the movies themselves are now shying away from depicting our disastrous reality by peddling easy myths of technological quick fixes.
When Twister finally spawned a sequel last year, it became the vehicle for a new take on natural calamities, one that complacently suggests we can overcome them with simple human effort and ingenuity. (Universal Pictures)
The 1996 movie Twister contains a memorable moment of bovine elevation. As a powerful pair of tornadoes touch down, a cow suddenly flies across the screen. “Cow,” says Jo (Helen Hunt). “We got cows,” says a passenger. Moments later, a cow again flies past. “Another cow,” says Jo. “Actually, I think that was the same one,” remarks Bill (Bill Paxton).
The infamous scene comes from a self-aware romantic comedy about the destructiveness of tornadoes and the limited ability of science to control their power. As we have learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and the effects of climate change, humans are hardly masters of the universe. Yet Twister’s acknowledgment of our collective limitations seems both quaint and refreshing.
If the news media have reported on this year’s Los Angeles fires as though they were producing a disaster movie, big-budget blockbusters themselves reflect a changing perspective in American society on such disasters. Remakes and sequels are especially helpful in tracking those shifts, since they provide us with similar narratives but from different cultural times.
When Twister finally spawned its own sequel last year, in line with the insatiable Hollywood appetite for consuming its own past, it became the vehicle for a new take on natural calamities, one that complacently suggests we can overcome them with simple human effort and ingenuity.
The Limits of Individual Innovation
Twister gives us a sense of how Americans viewed natural disasters at the time when Mike Davis wrote his celebrated essay “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” which has deservedly attracted fresh attention since the start of this year. Set in Oklahoma, the film follows a ragtag team of tornado chasers who use cutting-edge science to save people. Their goal is to learn about tornadoes by releasing sensors into them, eventually enabling the team to provide a fifteen-minute warning to those threatened.
The two protagonists, Bill and Jo, are a married couple on the precipice of divorce. He shows up to get her to sign the divorce papers so he can get married to his new fiancée, who is tagging along.
While Bill now works as a studio weatherman, he is “a human barometer.” He picks up dirt, looks at clouds, and smells the air to learn where a tornado will appear.
His fiancée, Melissa (Jami Gertz), is a reproductive therapist who has taken away his masculinity, which he fights to regain over the course of the film. After Melissa gracefully bows out, Bill and Jo’s marriage is renewed in this “comedy of remarriage” that coincides with their scientific success.
Bill and Jo’s experience reflects American values of the mid-1990s: a family working together, with the help of some government grant money, can turn their ideas into a public good that will save lives. When Bill and Jo survive one last, massive tornado, they lay snuggled together, share a kiss, and argue as a married, bickering couple over who will run the lab and who will analyze the data. Altruistic science always comes first in their marriage.
The film’s villain is Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes), who once worked for Bill and Jo, stole Bill’s idea, and is now out to make money. As Bill observes, “Jonas went out and got himself some corporate sponsors. He’s in it for the money, not the science.” He is also “in love with himself” and seeks media fame. The film mocks the idea of corporate sponsorship by depicting the tornado chasers cutting up Pepsi cans to attach to the sensors so they will fly into tornadoes.
Twister adopts a modest but optimistic view of America’s ability to solve the structural problems natural disasters reveal. It requires teamwork aimed at doing the right thing, rather than making a personal profit, to develop and use science for everyone’s benefit. Yet the film also cautions us about the limits of such efforts, since the world cannot be controlled. Bill and Jo respect nature, identifying the most extreme tornado, an EF5, as the “finger of God.” Science cannot prevent all forms of destruction.
As Jo and Bill arrive at a drive-in movie theater, managing to rescue some, but not all, of the patrons, a tornado levels the theaters. A famous scene from The Shining is playing in the background, with a psychotic Jack Nicholson in the role of the big bad wolf, screaming “Here’s Johnny!” as he smashes through a door with an axe. We are given an implicit reminder that nature (including human nature) is an inherently chaotic and uncontrollable force.
The Triumph of Real America
The sequel movie Twisters was released twenty-eight years later in 2024. It offers an alternative, populist vision in which a few “real” Americans protect their communities. Where Twister opened with Jo’s childhood trauma of seeing her father swept away by a tornado, Twisters begins with the trauma of Oklahoman protagonist Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) who watches her closest friends swept away as a result of her college science project to “tame” a tornado in order to win a “big fat grant.”
When the movie jumps forward five years, she is working in weather forecasting in New York City. Her only surviving friend, Javi (Anthony Ramos), tries to persuade her to return to Oklahoma to work on his team of tornado chasers. “I didn’t expect you to move somewhere like New York,” he tells her. When Kate replies hesitantly that “New York’s great. I like it here, people are nice,” she is almost immediately run over by a taxi, whose driver screams at her.
In line with its emphasis on local communities, Twisters was shot in Oklahoma. Real towns appear, like Sapulpa, the place where Kate grew up and where her mom still works on the family farm. As one of Kate’s friends remarks in the opening scene, “Man, I love Oklahoma.”
Oklahoma represents the “real” America in the film, even if this is a reactionary image of the state. In reality, Sapulpa is today a suburb tethered economically to Tulsa, Oklahoma’s second-largest city and one that is culturally and demographically diverse. The film’s nostalgic version of Oklahoma bears much the same relationship to the actual state that its supposedly realistic but entirely computer-generated tornadoes bear to an actual storm.
The movie openly critiques academic science. The scientists who Javi oversees consist of “PhDs from NASA, FEMA, NOAA, NWS” — the alphabet soup of federal agencies. Their goal is an entrepreneurial one — to map tornadoes and collect data — which they share with an investor who buys up destroyed property at bargain rates. The most callous member of his team is Scott (David Corenswet), who comes equipped with a PhD from MIT, a classic elitist East Coast institution.
In Twisters, local knowledge and experience is what will save the day, not academic learning. Kate was a graduate student, but she never finished her studies and instead draws on her personal experience to chase tornadoes. Like her predecessor Bill, Kate “has a gift.” She is innately attuned to weather, looking at the direction of grass blowing in fields, and letting a dandelion blow in the air.
The motley group of scrappy individuals are now “Tornado Wranglers” who enjoy the thrill of chasing after tornadoes and shooting fireworks into the middle of the funnel cloud, crowdfunding themselves by streaming their adventures on YouTube with over a million subscribers. Scott snidely offers the East Coast perspective: “Hillbillies with a YouTube channel.”
Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) leads the Tornado Wranglers. He did go to college but is a “cowboy scientist,” with his own “natural instinct.” As one member of his team puts it, “We don’t need PhDs and fancy gadgets to do what we do. . . . These guys have seen more tornadoes than anyone else in this lot combined.” Instead they turn to cool gadgets, such as a drone modeled on a real-world development from local universities or Tyler’s Dodge Ram (also based on real-life chaser trucks). They build what they need.
Illusion of Mastery
If Twister acknowledged human limitations, Twisters advocates for the limitless possibilities of human innovation. The film fleetingly acknowledges that tornadoes and other natural events have worsened over the last three decades, but it infamously refrains from mentioning climate change. Mitigation efforts, such as clean energy, are depicted as irrelevant: in one scene, a tornado destroys a field of wind turbines whose blades fly off in every direction.
The film ends by suggesting that we do not have to address climate change directly, since real Americans can solve the problem through entrepreneurial ingenuity: destroying tornadoes to control nature. At the end, a local theater is playing another old film, this time Frankenstein. But in contrast with Mary Shelley’s nineteenth-century story, Kate successfully harnesses the power of her own invention.
If Frankenstein was a warning about scientific hubris, with a distinct echo in the first Twister movie, Twisters offers us the illusion of complete mastery over nature by the people of Middle America through a combination of local knowledge, experience, and hard work. Efforts to reduce climate change by adopting new forms of energy and careful planning are unnecessary. This represents the new common sense.