For children of the American Midwest, there is perhaps no film more traumatizing than the 1996 weather horror blockbuster Twister. It is Jaws for kids who grew up nowhere near the sea: a monster movie that takes one of nature’s very real dangers and gives it what feels like an inescapable, malevolent consciousness. The film opens on the Oklahoma farm inhabited by a young Jo Harding (played as an adult by Helen Hunt), her parents, and her dog, Toby. It’s morning, though it could easily be mistaken for night given that the sky is black and growling. Next comes an actual checklist of worst childhood fears: Jo’s parents panic at the news that a tornado is coming, they race to a storm shelter that’s several yards away from their front door, they almost leave the dog behind (!!), and finally, Jo’s dad gets sucked up by the twister like an ant into a vacuum cleaner. This trauma fuels Jo’s passion for chasing tornadoes when she’s older: She wants to understand why her dad got slurped up into the sky like the end of a spaghetti noodle. But while she blames the twister for his fate, I am here to say what no one else is willing to: It was entirely his own damn fault. Tornado innocent.
First, let me make one thing clear: The odds of you being sucked away by a tornado are extremely remote. People who die in tornadoes die because houses or cars or power lines fly into them, or because tornadoes can turn bits of otherwise harmless debris into bullets. But the tornadoes of Twister function more cinematically. They suck people up, unless they’re holding onto pipes. Debris happens, but in a way that’s dramatically convenient. Still, even if I accept that the tornadoes of this film aren’t based on real weather but instead on the question “what if Godzilla, but a huge Roomba?” Jo’s dad still can’t beat the dummy allegations. They are in an underground storm cellar. While they wait for the tornado to pass overhead, Jo’s dad decides to hold an already latched door closed to prevent the tornado from getting inside. The mistakes here are two fold: One, Jo’s dad was never going to actually hold that door shut. He has biceps and undoubtedly great core strength from a life of farming, but that won’t overpower an F5 twister. Two, he is now too close to the tornado and attached to a giant piece of metal and wood big enough to act as a sail, sending him up into the sky like a bottle rocket of childhood trauma.
One might argue that the suckiest part of the twister came when Jo’s dad was holding the door, and his extra muscle is the only thing that saved his family. But if that’s at all true, then why, when the tornado won this arm wrestling contest and sucked the door off, did everyone else in the shelter not get sucked out? A whole shelf of preserves is left intact! Even the Yorkshire terrier stays rooted to the ground. Clearly, Jo’s dad gets sucked because he is holding onto a big door that’s getting sucked, not because the sucking has entered the shelter to suck out all its inhabitants.
Jo’s dad enters an unwinnable fight because he refuses to accept that he is powerless. And while that is an inarguably ill-advised choice, it’s not at odds with the themes of the film. Twister is all about the horror of realizing that despite all our science and technology and our rag-tag bands of lovable storm chasers, we do not actually control much of what happens to us. We can do everything right and still find ourselves being slurped up into the stratosphere simply because we are one of the billions of people scurrying around on the face of a planet that is indifferent to our survival. Jo, like her dad, is unable to contend with the reality of this, so she, too, throws much of her life away to fight the actual wind, trying to hold it accountable. But you can’t close doors nature wants to open, no matter how much you lift. All you can do is let go.
