I had a good week for drawing, and it’s pretty great. After last week’s thing, I felt stymied and wanted to do something big without a lot of thought. With the last few minutes of my lunch break, I threw together a quick sketch of my axe woman, and I really like how she turned out. I’m still figuring out motion lines. I felt energized and moved onto another action piece with Hajime there. My first sketch had the gesture down, and then I redid it at this angle. I did a few “going back” moves with that one until I got the color and background how I wanted. Last night, I started on another piece that I’m happy about. So yeah, it’s been productive. I’m feeling more confident.
I saw Twisters this week. It’s pretty good. I don’t think anyone is going in expecting it to be anything more than a popcorn movie, and it’s fun. Glen Powell is always great, Daisy Edgar-Jones was genuine, I would have loved if there was more Kiernan Shipka. I really like that the love story doesn’t end with a big kiss, instead opting for a show of commitment and the life they want to live together. It’s a nice touch. The thing that gets me about the movie is that they clearly set up and start exploring a real, interesting issue, and sideline that in favor of a big movie moonshot. It’s a very American blockbuster thing to do, and feels surprisingly relevant, but in a way that doesn’t stick with you like if they had actually done what the movie wanted to be about.
Spoilers to follow.
The movie is described on Wikipedia as a “standalone sequel” to Twister, which I guess is as good a description as any; it’s not related to the first movie, but it’s also not exclusionary to that movie, and is basically another take on the concept of “tornado chasers in the Midwest: the movie.” Our main character, played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, is a meteorologist who left Oklahoma after a tragic storm chasing incident, pulled back by her friend who’s started a weather data company and wants her help. She meets and has several run-ins with amateur YouTube chasers led by Glen Powell. Daisy is hesitant to get back into things and wants to help protect people from tornados more than anything, and eventually embraces her college idea to stop tornados entirely with not-that-fancy tech. That part is presented like an adult going back to their childhood optimism and idealism, but her last attempt at that idea and the start of movie is only like 6 years apart; I don’t think she made it out of her twenties with this idea. And that’s the moonshot I mentioned, the idea that with the right tools, we can “kill a tornado” and it won’t hurt anything to mess with nature like that and everyone will be saved. Massive hubris and arguably the wrong direction for us to be turning as a society; we keep trying to control nature instead of live in it, and where has that got us?
That question really comes to a head with the other storyline, the one that gets sidelined. Throughout the movie, tornados aren’t actually treated like villains, per se. They’re scary and deadly, the source of all tension and fear in the film, but they’re also spectacular, beautiful, and poetic. They’re a force of nature, a thing that exists beyond us and outside of our simple moral binaries. The important thing is how we react to them. Daisy wants to help people when tornados hit, and Glen Powell reveals himself to have a heart of gold with his charity work. Contrast that with Daisy’s friend Anthony Ramos, who we learn has gone into business with a land developer for funding for his company. Ramos genuinely wants to help, but he made a deal with a devil to get his company, selling data to a man who wants to use it to buy out the land and homes of people right after a disaster. It’s a clear, powerful conflict between our desire to help others in need and the greedy powers-that-be who see nature merely as a resource to amass wealth and exploit people.
Quite frankly, that sounds like a great movie, and one that still allows for a big heroic ending, high stakes, and a bonding element between our love interests, where they can form a plan on what to do about the big land developer move they hear is coming at the end of the movie. Like, I don’t think you “need” anti-tornado tech to make the kind of fun, exciting, broad appeal blockbuster they wanted to make. What they did need it for was to avoid calling rich people the source of all our misery and the reason the world is burning; yes, they do mention how there are more and bigger tornados lately, and don’t connect that to the idea of a rich villain exploiting nature in an oil-rich state. My assumption, rightly so, is that they wanted to do a grounded, human drama to drive the plot, but they couldn’t do anything “too political,” and thus had to sideline their grounded, human drama in favor of “we killed a tornado,” an idea that has no relevance and exists outside of our world and that of the movie. And like, how “political” would it be to say the land developer is doing something bad, and you have to stop him? They still criticize what he’s doing, and I’m pretty sure that’s not just a left-wing idea. Conservatives in Oklahoma don’t want their homes stolen from them by lying business ghouls after a tornado, right? Is that naïve? They can skip the climate change commentary if they have to, because tornados exist either way; have the land developer villain actually be the villain in your movie where tornados aren’t inherently evil.
It’s a very tiring phenomenon, you know? Marvel movies do that kind of thing a lot, introduce a bigger, more relevant conflict and then focus on the personal goals of the villain. The Batman with Robert Pattinson did a bang-up job with that; Nando v Movies has a video explaining how it’s an intelligent and complicated noir-inspired movie, until the “fourth act” where Riddler has a network of goons doing a terrorism, because we can’t have moral ambiguity. It’s genuinely an issue that they can and should evolve on as a genre. Superheroes don’t have to fully solve every problem, and we shouldn’t present them as being capable of that; all we need is for them to do the work and be on the right side of the equation. That formula can extend to a lot of the stories we tell in our culture. We’re too quick to embrace a childlike binary view of the world, where there’s clear good and evil, and good will always completely and totally vanquish evil, and then pretend that we’re being so grown-up about it because our sense of “good” always includes murdering the ones labeled bad guys.
Twisters feels like a particularly glaring example of this trend, because their villain is a vortex of wind they go out of their way to present as neither good nor evil; characters say that multiple times, in fact. My solution isn’t even to abandon a clear moral binary, because part of how stories work is that they give us a roadmap to think through our own values and actions. I just want them to focus on the real world issue they presented to us, and maybe end on a pyrrhic victory. It makes sense that a group of storm chasers can’t stop a land developer on their own, especially when his actions are not only legal, but encouraged by the state. So maybe their victory is saving a family farm or other business, and then they dedicate their days to storm chasing, charity work after tornados, and raising money so people can rebuild without the “help” of a land developer. An attempt at the obvious good thing they want to do, a respectable trophy, and a call to action. Basic stuff. Would have been a better movie.
Weekly Art Blog 7/27-8/3/2024
Life in the Gutters 