Twisters (2024, Chung)
Note: Major spoiler in paragraph three.
It’s easy to tell that Lee Isaac Chung—director of the modest, exceptional Arkansas drama Minari—wants to make a earnest paean to middle America and its folk culture while integrating the inexorable blemish of capital and technology on that culture, both popularizing it and demeaning it. The movie he made attempting to do that is fast-moving, well-performed, and fun. It’s just as easy to tell, however, that Twisters is as much a victim of that blemish as the culture it is depicting.
It doesn’t help that I saw Twisters with perhaps the most hostile audience imaginable for this type of thing: midday Saturday on the Upper West Side in Manhattan during the movie’s second week in theaters. This audience was inclined to deride rather than to embrace, to overcompensate for the discomfort that emerges from Chung’s ultra-sincerity rather than to roll with it. Kate blowing the dandelion was certainly the most audibly demeaned, yet it was also the film's most graceful moment, the one that reminded me most of Minari. But for all their braying condescension, the audience was also able to accurately identify when the movie was completely full of shit, which it is often. To wit:
Kate arrives home at her mother’s farm following many years of isolation in The Big City, sequestering herself from both her family and her identity as an Oklahoman. Her homecoming is announced by “Out of Oklahoma”, a thudding song performed by Lainey Wilson for this movie that traffics in ridiculous cliches about nature and ground transportation. In spite of brief digressions into the transcendental, Chung’s sweet spot, Twisters exhorts its Americana appeal so forcefully as to negate it entirely. Following the homecoming, Kate's mom offers further platitudes about how high prices have soared, how difficult it's been to get by in increasingly intense weather (don't EVER mention climate change) . . . but she's still here. It's the hollow, didactic meditations on How We Live Now boardroom suits create for Normal Americans. The film is so pedantic, it features the worst of tendencies among insecure screenwriters: to explain the thing we’re about to see, show us the thing they told us we were going to see, and then regurgitate what we just saw. Some of the stuff we see is genuinely cool (we go inside a Hell Tornado!), but this happens too many times to count. The only interesting idea here comes during the climax, when the entire town of El Reno runs to hide in a movie theater in hopes that it will save them. It doesn't, but it serves as a temporary respite while the gears of advanced tornado warfare turn just outside of town. It's as much a capitulation to technology as it is a eulogy for the role movies used to play in our lives. I disagree with the thesis, but that the notion made it in at all is fascinating.
Contrast what's offered here with what we get in Twister. Twister is stuffed to the gills with American iconography--John Deere tractors; Dodge trucks; grand, pastoral shots of grassland--yet it makes room for individuality. Eric Clapton blares from loudspeakers. Real solidarity is evinced between unique characters, not lifeless cardboard cutouts. There's so much open space in these films: fill it with personality! That is the American experience--we have all this land, so much of it gorgeous, and really what kind of people inhabit it? Funny people, crazy people, weird people, good people, and bad people too. But one thing unites this plurality--to be Normal in America is not to be Normal at all: it is to be yourself, for better and for worse. We deserve movies which speak to that, even if the Hell Tornado at the end is super fucking cool.
