A Blustery Day for a Baby: Technologies of Family Formation in Twister

I have erred against every common-place notion of decorum; I have been open and sincere where I ought to have been reserved, spiritless, dull, and deceitful—had I talked only of the weather and the roads . . . this reproach would have been spared.

—Marianne Dashwood in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811)

In this essay, I treat Jan de Bont's film Twister (US, 1996) as a proof text of one of our most venerable laws of etiquette, made lucid by Jane Austen's impetuous romantic character in Sense and Sensibility, Marianne Dashwood. Talking about the weather and the roads, as this movie devoted to storm chasers in the Oklahoma Tornado Alley does, is polite but deceitful. In the Midwest, where Twisteris set, manners no doubt differ from those in Austen's England, but polite familiarity still depends on talk of weather and roads. Storms that disturb North American seasonal weather patter ns can prove simultaneously a disaster for crops and a boon to masculinity, as befits a place where male bonding is weather bonding. Under the unremitting substitution of ardent weather talk for a vocabulary of emotions, one can report having been subdued by something greater than oneself—without invoking subjectivity at all. Tailor-made for abashed fathers and blustery forecasters alike, weather talk achieves a prosaic language of the extraordinary: a measure of shared milestones that come in homey units like the Fahrenheit scale, not an uncomfortable emotional barometer with notches for falling in love, coming out of the closet, or trying unsuccessfully to conceive a baby. For example, the 1997-98 El Niño phenomenon is the only spectacle to exceed the sweeping theorem of codependency as a handy explanation for our condition of universal dysfunction. Surrendering to emotional determinism, codependency behaves for popular psychology precisely as El Niño does for weather: it is the forecast that makes prediction monotonous, but it compensates with a chronicle of compounding disasters that is, in its own way, deeply satisfying. Like other disruptions of intimacy, El Niño and codependency are blanket explanations that we are conspicuously forbidden to regard as mundane.

What does Twister, an action movie where the enemy is a tornado, have to tell us about our peculiarly American style of deflecting intimacy while creating familiarity by talking about the weather? The film is peopled by meteorologists as well as their rebel counterparts, the storm chasers, and a single therapist who speaks the clichéd languages of the recovery movement. That therapist, Dr. Melissa Reeves (Jami Gertz), is engaged to Bill Harding (Bill Paxton), and she accompanies him on a trip to recover his divorce papers from his estranged wife Jo Harding (Helen Hunt). On one level, the movie devotes itself to establishing a familiarity without intimacy: the script's goal is to reunite a couple on the brink of divorce without ever resolving a single emotional conflict between them—without ever surmising that men are from Mars, women are from Venus, or reprising any other stale motto from the intimacy industry. On another level, the movie metonymically links weather forecasting with fertility treatments that reproduce a family without sexual contact. By marking discussion of emotions as the terrain of the unlikable Dr. Reeves, the film shows us how to have families without intimacy and how to replicate the familial without endorsing the therapeutic family cell.

Oddly, few were gratified that the Belgian director de Bont took the time to fashion an American epic out of our habit of blustering about the weather. Though the film became a box-office hit, Twisterwas poorly received by critics, barring the grudging acknowledgement that its widely hyped special effects accomplished what they were intended to do. Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Timesmovie critic and resolute normalizer of American subjectivity, complained that de Bont spent no time on character development in his film, noting that the viewer...