the politics of twisters
hot people and wind but also... good intentions sublimated and the value of prevention?
The new Twisters movie is ostensibly a summer action flick utilizing 4DX (it seems nobody can agree exactly what the fourth dimension is, so it’s a combo of water, air, and light effects), reutilizing existing intellectual property, cementing Glen Powell as a lead romantic interest, and once again employing Daisy Edgar-Jones to play American (loved her in Normal People, just unsure she needs to participate in Midwestern appropriation). But it’s also kind of a fun articulation of a political tension that haunts me.
(Twisters spoilers forthcoming… but do we watch Twisters for its twists? It’s not about the twists, it’s about the friends with intense romantic tension that we make along the way… and the bumpy tilty 4DX effects.)
The film, directed by Lee Isaac Chung (he also did Minari! we love the Midwest), follows Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), starting when she is a bright-eyed grad student in meteorology in her home state of Oklahoma, hoping she has a scientific solution to stop tornadoes in their tracks. Her first field test ends in tragedy.
We jump to five years in the future when she’s working a desk job at the National Weather Service in New York, still traumatized by her mistakes. Her former classmate/friend-turned-weather-entrepreneur Javi (Anthony Ramos) convinces her to return to OK during an unprecedented “outbreak” of tornadoes to help his company, Storm Par, to set up sensors to create detailed 3D scans so they can better understand the formation of tornadoes. This requires a fleet of pickup trucks, military-grade ex-machina-sensors, and attendant staff who are characterized as a menagerie of PhD-holders. Javi offhandedly mentions receiving funding from “investors” who are interested in how weather relates to “housing developments” for this endeavor.
Kate uses her preternatural weather observation talents to aid Storm Par, as they zoom around on dirt roads tracking burgeoning storms, rivalled by charming Tyler Owens (Glen Powell) and his motley YouTuber “tornado wrangling” crew.
When a tornado they’re chasing hits a small town, Kate demands that they help pull civilians out of the wreckage instead of tracking down the sensor that contains valuable data.
She realizes during her work with Javi that his top investor is a real estate shark who is lowballing victims of tornadoes with cash offers to buy up their land in a moment of crisis and destruction. This is a very real and extensive, often predatory industry. Though the marketing copy is usually about helping homeowners in an “ugly situation,” the reality is often grosser than that. Cash buyers often target those going through illness, loss, divorce, and other crises, using public records to reach out and badger people at their lowest, offering what can seem like the only or easiest option in a dark time.
Throughout the film, Javi expresses the desire to help people, but his ambitions have allowed him to justify accepting funding and its accompanying pressures from someone profiting off of the very people he hoped to help. Pragmatically, pretty much all money comes with strings attached, and of course cutthroat corporations and investors are the ones with the most money to front technologically complex and expensive operations like the theoretical company Storm Par. Government grant funding, if it did exist, would likely be extremely narrow and arduous to apply for.
At the start, it would probably also be easy to view Storm Par/Javi and the real estate shark’s interests as overlapping or aligned—they all want to get a better understanding of tornadoes, after all. Over time, however, the profit motive can easily curdle the whole operation; being able to predict a tornado in order to raise home insurance prices or target homeowners to buy their land for cheap in cash, for example, are more short-term profitable than investment in disaster preparedness or prevention of tornadoes. Helping people is a nice little treat on the side or a reputational shield, not a priority.
The professionalism and formalism of Storm Par—uniform polos, shiny tech, institutional credibility (they namecheck NASA and MIT)—creates a sense of trustworthiness and authority that soothes concerns at first. They’re handing out business cards to tornado-wrecked families, saying “Let us know if there’s anything we can do.” Meanwhile, Tyler and friends are portrayed as slightly bedraggled, ragtag, borderline irresponsible, and clout-chasing, which they somewhat inevitably are given the fact that they’re YouTubers. However, it’s ultimately Tyler’s team that is handing out free water and meals and assisting in the evacuation of towns. They appear less organized, but they have their own structures, expertise, and mission, even if they would not call any of it by those names.
After Javi and Kate have a dispute about the investor, Kate breaks from Storm Par. Tyler is able to help reinvigorate and rework her theories about how to interfere with the conditions that allow a tornado to form by releasing sodium polyacrylate and silver iodide upwards into a tornado.
Storm Par and Kate/Tyler go trekking after the same upcoming twister. When the tornado shifts paths and barrels towards a nearby town, Kate and Tyler’s crew rush to help people evacuate and take shelter. Javi moves to do the same, while his business partner Scott (David Corenswet) attempts to force him to turn around back towards the tornado, ultimately admitting that he does not care about the people in the town, but instead about the data collection and its ensuing profits from the real estate shark.
Earlier in the film, the viewer sees Scott introducing a local owner of a tornado-decimated bar as his uncle, making you feel like he is someone who is as personally and empathetically invested as the other characters. Yet the same circumstances and knowledge are worn differently by different people. This is where simplified identity politics falters; your backstory does not inherently bestow moral authority, or even contextual authority. Letting people use their personal stories as a narrative to deny other peoples’ opinions or to accrue their own influence and power, often by using a pandering and stereotypical version of events, is how you end up with clowns like Republican Vice Presidential nominee Jance Dance Vance.
The tornado tears through the small town, threatening EF-5 levels of damage, until Kate is able to release the sodium polyacrylate and silver iodide, halting the twister. Her theory about removing the moisture from a tornado turns out to be right.
The final scene of Twisters takes place at the airport, with Kate leaving Oklahoma to go pitch her tornado solution in the hopes of securing funding to conduct more research on this groundbreaking field of tornado-ending science.
The fact that she could potentially be denied any further resources to develop this life-saving prevention tactic feels insane, but totally possible. I can imagine funders and opposition asking for the data that she was supposed to collect while rushing to save dozens of peoples’ lives, then ignoring or manipulating its interpretation even if it did exist. I recognize this may sound cynical, but think of how many universal basic income pilots exist, and their resounding results, and the current political viability of UBI in the United States.
Another constant struggle here is that prevention is unsexy. It’s not a quick win for a politician. If you succeed in preventing the disaster, there’s no good photo op, people might not even notice, and the damage that didn’t happen will be undercounted and underestimated. There is not enough credit given. Look at America’s underfunded public health departments. Very few people are thinking about the disease outbreaks that were nipped in the bud, the illnesses we’ve eradicated or come close to eradicating, the hugely meaningful difference that clean water makes. It will be taken for granted. The beautiful and horrible thing about people is that we habituate rapidly to our current state of existence. If the science of Twisters were feasible in our world, that would only be one small step towards actually preventing tornadoes. The bigger fight would be in rallying support and funding, implementing it, and maintaining the critical infrastructure. None of those create an iconic moment like seeing someone get pulled out of rubble, even though the lack of rubble means that many people get to keep living their lives. A generation would pass and people would be complacent and accustomed to a lack of tornadoes and then some alt right or alt left movement or conspiracy would spring up about the tech used to prevent tornadoes.
At one point in the film, Kate and Tyler are fleeing an active tornado and rush into a motel hoping they have a basement or some other form of shelter. A woman in the lobby tells them with comically frustrating confidence that “9 out of 10 times, there is no tornado.” The tornado sirens go flying off their poles, cutting off the eerie sound. “See?” she says, thinking her wisdom is being validated. She and several other unnamed people in this scene are then promptly sucked into the tornado and killed. We are not built to successfully intake and process all the information available today and evaluate risks well. Individual knowledge and preparedness is just one often fallible piece of the puzzle. It would be both more effective and in some ways easier to address such problems upstream, but the political will and focus is incredibly challenging to muster and requires decades of playing the long game from many angles.
Twisters is a movie about weather, but lowkey it’s also kind of a movie about how good intentions often get mangled by defeat and by fucked up incentive structures. It’s easy to think that nobody wants a disaster to ever happen, that if we could prevent them, we would. But it’s not that anybody necessarily actively wants a disaster, it’s that other priorities and opportunities and red tape and delusions end up in the way.
content (not derogatory)
popcraveification of news/finding out biden dropped out of the election via horny chain text or meme
trump campaign’s theory of victory (came out before biden was out but still wild to understand the professionalization and infrastructure building happening over there, and how hard they may or may not pivot now)
men, please, read a novel, it’s for your own good
white boy stock value at an all-time high
this summer’s hottest ailment is hormone anxiety
i love the hannah montana era of pop stars
romance writers rewrote the rules
the endless quest to replace alcohol (i don’t think we will ever do it but i’d appreciate if people got wayyyy less stupid and weird about sobriety or even just abstaining from drinking every now and then)
does anyone want to get me one of these cute canadian dept of agriculture prints…
on celebrity and giving up your face to the public
excerpt from a memoir i’m excited to read - an honest woman by charlotte shane
“deeply still in love” by ROLE MODEL
“close to you” by gracie abrams
books-wise i’m reading sloane crosley’s grief is for people and and craft: stories i wrote for the devil by ananda lima
None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring.”