Nobody goes to Hollywood movies, much less disaster movies, seeking realism. The catastrophes in summer blockbusters — superstorms, cyclones, earthquakes, tsunamis — can seem downright thrilling, especially when you factor in the personal dramas and simmering romances that are woven into the mayhem. There is no such thrill in real-life disasters — where the true horror story lies in just how poorly prepared we are for these increasingly common events, and how quickly a spectacular crisis transitions to a crushing procession of tedious setbacks and everyday frustrations.
I first saw the trailer for “Twisters” — which opens in theaters on Friday — in May at a movie theater in Houston, where I live. I’d just returned from a trip to find my hometown had been slammed by a derecho, which, I soon learned, is a particularly nasty breed of windstorm. My power was out, and it was hot (as Houston in the spring generally is), so I decided to hit the nearest multiplex that had electricity. Before the main feature started, up popped the pretty faces of a cocky cowboy “tornado wrangler,” played by Glen Powell, and the more science-minded meteorologist, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, with whom he exchanges quips. “You don’t face your fears,” the wrangler tells the scientist. “You ride ’em.”
Yee-haw, I thought in the theater, as I wondered if my air-conditioning at home was back on.
Last week, another powerful storm battered Houston, as Hurricane Beryl had a brief but eventful landfall on the South Texas coast. Record-high ocean temperatures had given Beryl a big boost, making it the most powerful hurricane on record this early in the Atlantic hurricane season. It killed 22 people (as of the latest tally), flooded roads and left more than two million people without power; last I checked, around 200,000 were still without electricity. A blockbuster romp like “Twisters” is a safe and sanitized way to experience a natural disaster: as a fantasy. But we can’t let an escapist version of the climate crisis blind us to how woefully unready we are for the effects of the real thing.
If Hollywood wanted to make a more accurate disaster movie, the plot might look something like this: After yet another unprecedented storm, the hero wakes up day after day sweaty and irritable. He tries in vain to reach a human being who can provide information on when the power might be back on. The food in the fridge is quickly rotting, so it gets tossed. The Wi-Fi is down as well, making work difficult, if not impossible. There’s a two-hour wait at the few gas stations still open.
In these post-catastrophe conditions life becomes a simmering boil — and I do mean boil — of aggravation interrupted by long bouts of tedium. “It’s very hot, and it’s very boring,” as a 12-year-old quoted in The Texas Tribune put it in the wake of Hurricane Beryl. “There’s nothing to do, you just have to sit there.” Or, to paraphrase “Twisters,” you just have to ride it.
Hollywood has long tried to capture nature’s fickleness in the most dramatic terms possible. The 1970s brought us “Earthquake” (a seismic apocalypse in Los Angeles) and “The Andromeda Strain” (deadly pathogen threatens mankind), as well as deadly insect movies like “The Swarm” (killer bees), “Empire of the Ants” (gigantic ants) and “The Giant Spider Invasion” — all reflections of a newly heightened awareness, probably stoked by best sellers like Rachel Carson’s 1962 exposé “Silent Spring,” that Mother Nature was getting a little peeved. But anxiety over climate catastrophe was funneled into cool-looking effects and larger-than-life monsters, like giant spiders, which were way more fun to watch onscreen than a bunch of people complaining about smog.
As a summer tent-pole movie, “Twisters” delivers the requisite spectacle, as trucks fly and storm chasers race. (In a nice meta-moment, the screen of a crowded movie theater is sucked into the gusty abyss.) But for all its swirling chaos, “Twisters” doesn’t even pay lip service to climate change — and that’s no surprise. Outside of occasional exceptions like “Wall-E” or the TV series “Extrapolations,” climate change isn’t sexy or exciting enough for Hollywood entertainment.
The depiction of disaster in “Twisters” belies the true nature of modern catastrophes, which linger for days, weeks and months as the victims deal with the on-the-ground realities of our refusal to adjust to, let alone forestall, this unfolding crisis. We may cheer the big-screen storm wrangler as he leads his heroic crew in his geared-up pickup truck to shoot fireworks into the tornado’s funnel. But we never see him or his crew cleaning up the wreckage in the ensuing weeks, filling out insurance forms or praying for the return of air-conditioning in sweltering heat.
From Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans to Superstorm Sandy in New York, we’ve seen time and again how the full scope of a climate disaster isn’t contained in the moment the levees break or the oceans surge. Even as we thrill to escapist fare like “Twisters,” insurance companies are pulling back on policies in flood- and fire-prone areas, which is like an ominous movie trailer for the disasters yet to come.
There is one element of “Twisters” that rings true emotionally in my experience as a storm-battered Houstonian. In several scenes, storm chasers halt their pursuit of the tornado to aid the residents of a shattered, battered town — even as rapacious speculators swoop in to buy ravaged land at a discount. Natural disasters don’t bring out the best in everyone, but they do tend to remind us of our shared humanity.
In Houston, I’ve heard many stories over the last two weeks of people who were lucky enough not to lose power offering strangers beds, or freezer space, or air-conditioned rooms for simply hanging out. One friend even camped out in his buddy’s bookstore, hunkering down in the science fiction section. None of those moments would add a thrill factor to a summer blockbuster. Yet they show us what kind of heroism survival in a climate crisis requires of all of us.
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