TWISTER
Of all the films relished in all the Bijous of a moviemanic youth, Gunga Din seemed most cut to fit the hankering after adventure and companionable misogeny of the preadolescent male clubhouse. For readers who've forgotten -- or never sampled -- the l939 classic's wildly un-PC pleasures, its protagonists are three scalawag British army sergeants who delight in derring-do during the heyday of the Raj. Their solidarity is threatened by dashing Douglas Fairbanks, Jr's plans to wed his Colonel's palid daughter, and forsake his comrades for the palid joys of domesticity back in England.
How the hearts of my fellow eleven year barbarians were gladdened when Gary Grant and Andrew McLaughlin persuaded Fairbanks to join them in one last perilous mission -- infiltrating the lair of a native death cult! How we savored the frissons evoked by the malevolent leader's charge to his dusky followers (white men in black face): "Kill for the love of killing!...Kill as you would be killed!! Kill for the love of Kali!! KILL!!! KILL!!! KILL!!!" We admired the heros' insolent cool in the teeth of torture, rejoiced at their last minute rescue -- but particularly exulted when Fairbanks rejected his sappy sweetheart for the pleasures of perpetual homosocial buddyhood.
A tale of crazies who chase rampaging tornadoes in the name of scientific progress would seem to lie far afield of Gunga Din's Kiplinesque setting. But with no great art, a bit of fashionable Nineties gender-bending, and a decibel level whose immoderation is exceeded only by its profits, Twister (l996) recasts Din's preadolescent preoccupations in the format of a summer blockbuster -- a perennial habitat of decerebrate macho fantasy.
Jan De Bont cut his teeth as a photographer on action vehicles like Die Hard (l988) and Lethal Weapon 3 (l992) before making his directorial debut with Speed (1994). In the latter, De Bont pared the action genre to a lean, mean essence, reminiscent of Chuck Jones' magisterial redaction of helter-skelter chase cartoons in the Road Runner series. Speed's minimalist content didn't linger overmuch in the mind, but its sheer visual bravura was exhilarating, with not a jot of excessive sentimentality. This time around, however, Twister's potential for similar roller-coaster propulsiveness has been compromised by an impossibly bathetic narrative agenda.
The hands may be the hands of De Bont; but the film's authentic voice surely belongs to its senior executive producer, Steven Spielberg -- with chief screenwriter Michael Crichton a willing accomplice in a bid to match the staggering commercial success of the Spielberg/Chrichton pairing in Jurassic Park [l993]. After the summary achievement of Schindler's List (l993), Spielberg returns with a vengeance in Twister to the vacuous pop culture roots of his previous blockbusters. He's subverted De Bont's considerable skill in yet another rehash of his favorite preoccupations -- the trvail of divorce, the naive enthusiasm for childhood virtue and pluck, a dimmish recommendation of heart over head -- of which more presently.
Like E.T. (l982), the Indiana Jones series (l98l, l984, l989), Hook (l99l), and Jurassic Park, Twister mediates perennial Spielberg concerns through a grandiose gloss of the slight Thirties and Forties juvenilia he cherished as a youth growing up in the Forties and Fifties: cliff-hanger Saturday afternoon movie serials replete with super-scientific gizmos, ripping yarns set in faraway climes like Gunga Din, so forth. Twister's foreign territory is the American heartland, its fruited plains rendered alien by ferocious tornadic meterology.
The roiling cumulus clouds, titanic bolts of lightning, tympanic thunder, manic clatter of hailstones announcing the tornado's appalling onslaught, its insane basso ostinato howl as of a thousand freight trains -- all are stunningly accomplished through De Bont's kinetic direction, the integration of astonishing live special effects with Industrial Light and Magic's cutting-edge computer technology. Notwithstanding the formidable display of cinematic craft, Twister banally anthropomorphizes a value-neutral force of nature into a Din-like avatar of Kali, just as Jurassic Park construed its raptors as ad hominem vicious (and Jaws (l975) its shark, to far better effect).
The overwhelming trauma which typically threatens or befalls a child in Spielberg's universe is the bourgeois family's sundering, often wedded to inconsolable paternal loss by death or abandonment.(1) The tornado is definitively personified malicious during Twister's establishing flashback, when it invades a Midwestern storm cellar, and plucks a valiant father into its spout while his wife and child look helplessly on.
Flash forward to the present: that child has become Jo Harding (Helen Hunt), who now seeks to master her father's loss by making the investigation of the ill winds her life's work. Jo is the sort of feisty, tough-talking woman regularly depicted in the halcyon days of Hollywood studio cinema, who gains admittance to a priveleged male fellowship of newsroom, war, mining camp, safari, or the detection of crime by proving herself a reliable chum. A staple in Howard Hawks oeuvre, the feminine buddy figures memorably in To Have and Have Not (l944) and The Big Sleep (l946). Pictures like Hawks' The Thing (l95l) or Hatari (l962) customarily treat her as the male group's second-string mascot until the boss grows smitten with her.
In Twister, Jo is the boss -- commanding a ragtag wise-cracking crew of fringe scientists who reincarnate the Hawksian band of brothers, and who one can easily imagine living in a tree house when not off pursuing tornados. Despite the invention of sophisticated distant surveillance techniques (vide infra), Crichton would have it that essential tornado research requires putting elaborate measuring equipment directly in the giant storm's path. The knowledge thus obtained hopefully could yield a more effective early warning system, but the script's clunky inference is that Jo, Ahab-like, unconsciously seeks to destroy the twister, rather than merely to understand it.
Jo's husband, Bill (Bill Paxton) formerly lead the team. He was known as "The Extreme" -- the boldest, most intuitive tracker of them all -- could suss out a twister's arrival by sifting the local dirt through his fingers -- until he quit the field and his wife. His decision was spurred by Jo's driven disposition, a shortfall of support for his controversial studies, and a dawning realization that he had to start acting his age, always a questionable notion in Spielberg's universe. Reprising the Douglas Fairbanks character in Gunga Din, he's about to become immured in feckless maturity by bastardizing his talent through working as a TV weatherman, and marrying Melissa, a lusty but ultra-conventional sex therapist.
Melissa has been pushing relentlessly for Bill's divorce; he wants his wife to stop procrastinating and sign the papers. As Tinseltown luck would have it, they find Jo camped in the Oklahoma flatlands, drawn by an alert of the biggest winds in a generation. Jo hopes to test the prototype of Bill's cherished "Dorothy" project: cannisters which will release a cluster of sensors to ascend into a twister's vortex. The device could provide the most accurate gauge of tornadic forces yet -- assuming it can be emplaced without being destroyed along with its emplacers. (In reality, such experimentation is performed far less dangerously with ultra-sensitive mobile radar equipment).
Spielberg films -- notably E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (l977) -- are often informed by a facile populism, compounded out of a kid's distrust of authority and a perversely Luddite thrust (one notes that Spielberg himself has been an impressive innovator in screen technology, wielding enormous authority within and outside his industry).(2) In Twister, the specter of dehumanizing authority and machinery is raised by Jonas Miller, an unscrupulous rival from Bill's schooldays who has boosted his theories, built his own "Dorothy". and assembled a rival chase team with the help -- as they say on PBS -- of major corporate funding.
Miller's vehicles are sleek, his equipment state-of-the-art, his strategy obsessively planful, as opposed to the battered pickups, jury-rigged equipment, and seat-of-the pants tactics of Jo and her ragamuffins. "He's only in it for the money," one of them mocks, although precisely how huge profits could ever be generated from tornadoes is never clarified. Perhaps AT&T or MacDonald's is backing Miller like the Olympics, for the good PR.
The thrill of the chase predictably proves irrestible for Bill. Soon he's back in harness, Melissa in tow, hurtling down highways and byways, playing touch and go with the maelstroms as she yammers New Age homilies to impotent clients over her cellular phone. Encircled by an awesome slurry of detritus, the twisters vacuum up everything and everyone in their path with escalating fury.
For awhile, the narrative enlists Melissa as a goggle-eyed fount of pesky questions in aid of educating viewers. But precious little instruction occurs here, for scientific schlockmeister Crichton has curiously departed from his customary practise of relaying the straight poop on whatever the subject at hand through stick-figure characterizations. Instead, much arcane techi-talk is spouted about "suck zones", "downdrafts", "microbursts", and the like. This febrile chatter seems intended to excite rather than inform. As in Crichton's ER television series, the manic palaver aims at impressing viewers with the jargon of an expertise only members of an elite scientific elite could grasp (presumably including Crichton himself).
With her a la page duds and Fay Wray shrieks, Melissa eventually proves no match for fearless Jo and her tomboy outfits. She quits the scene; together with his team, Miller is rather horribly expunged when his hubris and blind worship of instrumenation lead him to ignore Bill's heart-over-head instinct that a twister is about to fatally double back. The reunited couple, their madcap "kids" trailing behind, then embark upon ever more hair-raising attempts to put the precious cannisters and themselves in harms way.
With one damaged device remaining, the team refits "Dorothy"'s sensors to gaudy spirals cut from Pepsi-Cola cans. The entire array is sucked into the hugest twister yet -- "FORCE FIVE!!!" (whatever that means) -- constituting the most dazzling coup of product placement yet in a supposedly business-bashing film. Companies pay maximum coin for such not-so-subliminal advertising, but Spielberg was using it long before it became profitable, out of his loopy affection for the icons of consumer culture.
With "Dorothy"'s precious data recorded, the twisters exit as abruptly as they entered. The film ends upon Bill and Joe's jubilant embrace against a Disney-rainbowed sky. Their achievement is modest, only the smallest step towards saving lives through more timely notice that the beast is on the prowl. But, reminiscent of the conclusions of Jaws and Jurassic Park -- and fulfilling Jo's fantasy -- this risibly triumphalist finale somehow intimates that the beast itself has been slain -- with the integrity of the middle-class family so dear to Spielberg's heart restored in the process.
Twister is pervaded by the signatures of the curiously hollow, high-concept McMovie which has been flourishing since the Reagan era -- impoverished narrative and characters; breakneck pacing and cutting; stilted, constricted dialogue -- and numerous allusions to earlier pictures. I have speculated that the latter are contrived to substantiate the cinematic literacy of the high concept vehicle's creators; also to confer a cachet of excellence, or at least success by association.(3)
As noted, the allusions strewn about Twister liberally reference classic adventure fare like Gunga Din, and Hawksian band of brothers/perilous employment movies. One also discerns signatures of the Fifties Irwin Allen "Who-will-live-and-who-will-die?" disaster genre. But Twister most consciously, persistently aspires to evoke resonances with The Wizard of Oz (l939) both visually and textually. Amongst a plethora of narrative analogies, Jo can be read as a contemporary Dorothy Gale; her generous Aunt Meg (Lois Hunt) prefigures Dorothy's beloved mother surrogate, Aunt Em; and by a stretch Bill interprets as a conflation of brainy scarecrow and the Great Oz ("The Extreme") himself.
Taken entire, the Spielberg\Crichton\De Bont enterprise emerges as an idioscynratic contested homage, inflected by occulted Oedipality, of the sort Spielberg undertook in Always (l995), his disastrous adaptation of Victor Fleming's A Guy Named Joe (l943).(4) Always recreated Fleming's crisply moving romantic fantasy about World War II fighter pilots into a no-brainer romantic fantasy about contemporary fire fighting pilots. The remake's competitive adulation smothered the original's modest flight sequences with wretchedly excessive imagery and sound, just as Twister's hyperbolic representations and Dolby din both respectfully cite, and dwarf the modestly effective cyclone sequences of Wizard.
In striking contrast to Always' rivalrous pumping up its aerial source material, the intense ardor of Spencer Tracy/Irene Dunne's couple in A Guy Named Joe dwindles down into Richard Dreyfuss/Holly Hunter's strangely tepid lovemaking in the remake (they could have snuck away from their overnight camp bunks). Like those juvenilized sweethearts, Bill and Jo only come alive in their dangerous work. Their blatant lack of sexual chemistry stems neither from inauspicious casting or acting: Hunt and Paxton are as fully capable of the sizzle De Bont elicited from Sundra Bullock and Keanu Reeves in Speed. The blame should rather be assigned to a producer who may well have overawed his director, specifically to Steven Spielberg's utter inability to convey adult passion on screen throughout his career.
A psychoanalytic reading of The Wizard of Oz suggests that the fierce wind which sweeps its heroine to Oz is symbolic of Dorothy Gale's pubertal rite de passage.(5) Once she successfully grapples with her adolescent conflicts over the rainbow, Dorothy can return to her Kansas home and commence her life's real journey towards authentic selfhood. But the masculine hero of Twister progresses through regression, exemplifying the approbation of unaccountable childhood jouissance over the burdens of mature choice which pervades Spielberg's work.(6)
In sum, Bill Harding recovers from his brief flirtation with the grown-ups, sends mature sensuality packing (embodied by the much ridiculed Melissa), and cheerfully resumes his former Peter Pan persona. Reminiscent of Gunga Din's child-men, Bill, with his androgyne Wendy and their gang of lost scientific boys, are now gloriously free to roam the American heartland, chasing eternally after their own puppy-dog tails.
REFERENCES
l. Spielberg is reticent about discussing his early life, but his parents' divorce during adolescence after an ideal (or idealized) suburban upbringing was clearly hurtful, and its signatures may be discovered in many of his pictures (Harvey Roy Greenberg, "Raiders Of The Lost Text: Remaking as Contested Homage in Always", in Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch. New York: Columbia University Press, l993, pp. 2ll-224).
2. Spielberg's father has a background in electrical engineering, and helped design early computer technology. While the son passionately identified with his father's scientific interests and inherited his capabilities, accounts of their early relationship point to a certain amount of rivalrous friction initiated from Spielberg's side of the generation gap. His mother's artistic talents and emotive nature provided an intense alternate source of identification, which I have theorized dictated an internal struggle during his youth reminiscent of a Thomas Mann hero. The entire psychodynamic constellation, while not notably pathological, could possibly account for the ambivalence manifested in his films towards the very technology he also lauds. For further discussion on this point, see "Raiders", ibid.
3. Harvey Roy Greenberg. "On The McMovie: Less Is Less At The Simplex", ibid, pp. l84-2lO.
4. The potential Oedipal conflict residing in the remaking process, and its possible resolutions are explored in "Raiders", ibid.
5. ____________, "The Wizard Of Oz: Little Girl Lost -- and Found", in The Movies On Your Mind, l975, pp. 13-32.
6. The infantilizing tendency both in Spielberg and George Lucas' oeuvres has been tellingly elucidated by Peter Biskind ("Blockbuster: The Last Crusade", in Seeing Through Movies, Mark Crispin Miller, Ed., New York: Pantheon, l990, pp. 112-49).