Movie Review: Twister (1996)

“We’ve got cows.”

In addition to numerous tornadoes, Twister has: Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, Cary Elwes, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Ruck, Jeremy Davies, Zach Grenier, and Patrick Fischler. Also, cows.

After losing her father in a tornado, Jo (Helen Hunt) grows up to be a weather scientist. She marries and is in the process of divorcing Bill (Bill Paxton), who is also really into weather, but in a more intuitive way. Jo runs a motley crew of tornado fetishists who have finally figured out how to see inside of a tornado, thus improving our tornado knowledge, leading to an improved early-warning system.

But really, these folks just like to drive fast on midwestern backroads in big pickups in search of thrills and wind. It’s basically Mad Max: Tornado Alley, with a big F-5 tornado as the quest object rather than water.

It’s a lot of fun. Jo’s crew is, by today’s cinematic standards, rather large, but the writers (including Michael Crichton!) give you just enough sense of each secondary character that you wind up caring about them even if they aren’t played by an actor who later became famous.

Twister is a talky movie. Not in the sense that the characters have deep conversations—they don’t—but in the sense that they talk over each other all the time, chatting with the rapacious familiarity of a group of people who show their love for one another through jokes and one-upmanship. This does result in some odd patterns, like everyone saying everything twice on their CB radios (“We have debris! We have debris!”), but the preponderance of dialogue fills the space where a more complicated plot might have been.

Because this plot, which takes place in about 24 hours, is simple: find tornado, fail to get sensors into tornado, lather, rinse, repeat. It’s a classic try-fail cycle, with a Joseph Campbell “belly of the beast” moment at the crucial two-thirds mark. The antagonists are technically a group of corporate-funded twister-hunters led by Cary Elwes (a “corporate butt-kiss”), but really the Big Bad is tornadoes.

If one were inclined to do a Lacanian reading of this text, there’s plenty of material. At one point a twister attacks a drive-thru movie theatre playing The Shining. It destroys the screen at the iconic “Here’s Johnny!” scene. Since a twister destroyed—that is, lifted up and carried away—Jo’s father in her childhood, this fabulous cinematic moment links twisters (all twisters, since it’s not the same twister, but all twisters are the same twister) to the destruction/withdrawal of the father to one of the twentieth-century’s best portrayals of atavistic paternal violence.

Lacan argues that there is resonance between the non de pére (the “father’s no” or “father’s interdiction”) and the nom de pére (the father’s name). Interdictions are built into paternity; the father is the law-giver; the father is also in a perpetual state of withdrawal. Jack Torrance in the book is, of course, really a John. (It’s not just a Johnny Carson reference). Just as Jack Nicholson states his character’s true nom we can see the non built into that declamation—and that, of course, is when the twister destroys the screen. The twister, like all twisters, is therefore the father, but also the law-giver who limits Jo’s true potential.

Jo must defeat the paternal interdiction of the twister, which is by implication the fact that no one has ever seen “inside” of a twister. The twister is, therefore, the Lacanian real, typically inaccessible given the overlays of the imaginary (her own thoughts about her father) and the symbolic (The Shining, the cultural portrayal of fatherhood). But Jo does see the inside of a twister (along with Bill), thereby fully access the real, opening her up for a true relationship that is no longer weighed down by the trauma of paternal interdiction and loss.

All of that is, of course, nonsense that can also be summed up with an unsurprising spoiler: Jo and Bill kiss at the end.

I expected this movie to be bad, and it wasn’t. The special effects have held up really well, all things considered, and I wound up liking the characters much more than I expected.

It all felt very nineties, which of course it is, but in a way that reminded me of how even stupid action movies felt a bit more lived-in than so many blockbusters do today. Twister felt like a movie made by people for people, rather than by corporate suits for hypothetical demographics. It’s not as cheesy as something like Tremors or as high-quality as other favorite nineties films, but I didn’t want it to be.

I wanted flying cows, and I got them.

Four out of four F-5s.

Josie Kafka is a full-time cat servant and part-time rogue demon hunter. (What's a rogue demon?)

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