What is Twister about?
In Twister, the tornado primarily represents Jo’s trauma over the loss of her dad. She has to come to terms with the fact that “things go wrong. You can’t explain it. You can’t predict it.” Almost everyone has been hit by a “tornado’ in life, something that went wrong and was unpredictable, inexplicable. You can get really hung up playing the “what if…” game and trying to find logic in chaos. Or accept that chaos exists and you learn from it and move on from it the best you can, supported by those you love. Additional themes include how couples handle stress in their relationship, as well as how technology is used and by whom.
Cast
- Jo Harding – Helen Hunt
- Young Jo – Alexa Vega
- Aunt Meg – Lois Smith
- Bill Harding – Bill Paxton
- Dr. Melissa Reeves – Jami Gertz
- Dusty Davies – Philip Seymour Hoffman
- Rabbit – Alan Ruck
- Laurence – Jeremy Davies
- Beltzer – Todd Field
- Joey – Joey Slotnick
- Alan – Sean Whalen
- Jonas Miller – Cary Elwes
- Written by – Michael Crichton | Anne-Marie Martin
- Directed by – Jan de Bont
Tornadoes represent the chaos of life
It might seem crazy to some people when you say Twister has symbolism and metaphor. But it does. The tornadoes actually do represent something. This becomes clear about an hour into the movie, when Jo and Bill narrowly avoid the ferocious F4. The sensors from Dorothy III spill all over the road. Bill accepts the failed attempt to scan the tornado. But Jo doesn’t. She’s desperate for it to work. So much so that she’s willing to risk her life in what would be a futile effort to salvage the sensors. Why?
- Bill: Listen to yourself! You’re obsessed!
- Jo: You’ve never seen what that thing can do, so don’t talk to me about—
- B: I JUST SAW IT!
- J: YOU’VE NEVER SEEN IT! You’ve never seen it miss this house and miss that house and come after you.
- B: Christ, Jo, is that what you think it did?
- J: I don’t know.
- B: Jesus, Jo, why can’t you just forget it?
- J: You don’t understand, okay? You’ll never know.
- B: When’s it gonna be enough, huh? How close do you have to get? Talk to me. Jo, things go wrong. You can’t explain it. You can’t predict it. Killing yourself won’t bring your dad back. I’m sorry he died. But it was a long time ago. You gotta move on. Stop living in the past and look at what you got right in front of you.
- J: What are you saying?
- B: Me, Jo.
The key words are “Things go wrong. You can’t explain it. You can’t predict it.” Twister opens with the F5 that hits Jo’s farm and sucks her dad into oblivion. You can substitute the tornado for any random act that claims a life: car crash, lightning bolt, heart attack, a mass shooting, slipping on ice and hitting your head, tripping over a cat and falling down the stairs, earthquake, shark attack, gas leak, fire, fire ants. Whenever we lose someone to an accident, it reminds us of how fragile life is and how little control we have in the world.
On the plot level, Dorothy’s sensors will allow scientists to better explain and predict tornados. On the symbolic level, it represents Jo finding a sense of closure and acceptance when it comes to her dad’s passing. So when Dorothy IV is a success, Jo has that emotional breakthrough. Which is why both the opening and closing scenes involve an encounter with an F5. Jo resuming her relationship with Bill is a sign that she’s ready to move forward. She’s no longer the traumatized kid looking for answers but an adult who has come to terms with the realities of life and can find calm in the eye of the storm.
Tornados and Bill and Melissa’s relationship
For Jo, the tornado represented tragedy. For Bill, it’s something else. We see that the Bill in a relationship with Melissa is different from the Bill who had chased tornados with the team. With Melissa, a doctor, he had been buttoned-up, well-presented, calm, tamed. And was going corporate with a local weatherman gig. But the “true” Bill, the Bill who loves chasing storms, is passionate, daring, imperfect but admirable.
Both Melissa and Jo bring out these two sides of Bill. With Melissa, he’s more proper and domesticated. With Jo, he’s more true to his emotions. When things are calm in life and the world, he and Melissa are good. But he and Jo fight. When things are stormy and deadly, Bill and Melissa are no good. While he and Jo compliment each other perfectly.
That happens in life. There are couples who are really good together as long as their relationship has no drama, but they completely fall apart the moment something serious happens. And then you have couples who are messy but can ride every wave, brave every storm, because they just work.
With Bill and Melissa on the brink of marriage, you can view the tornados as the challenge of going from “dating” to “married”. A more realistic movie might have two characters get engaged in the opening scene then decide to move in together and plan their wedding. But when they move in, they start arguing about things like which direction the toilet paper should face, or who cooks, if they clean the house themselves or get cleaners, do they have separate checking accounts or combine finances? That’s just moving in together. Marriage has way more going on. What if one of them loses their job? What if they struggle with getting pregnant? What if one still wants to hang out with their friends a few nights a week and the other one doesn’t like the friends?
It’s blue skies versus gray. Sunny days versus stormy weeks. Melissa and Bill could not handle bad weather, so to speak.
For Jo and Bill, they struggled when things were blue. And it seems part of that may have been Jo still being so consumed with her grief. Which is why Bill told her “Stop living in the past and look at what you got right in front of you.” You can imagine that was probably at the root of their marital woes and why they separated in the first place. That Jo maintained an emotional distance because she had unaddressed trauma about loss and was scared to lose someone else. But over the course of the film, she finds closure and the two of them can begin anew.
Human experience versus technology
Twister has, believe it or not, a subtheme! The movie positions Bill as someone who has studied tornados and storms, is an expert on them, passionate about them, and is arguably one of the best chasers in the game because he’s so knowledgeable that he can predict a twister’s behavior. Then you have his rival, Miller. Miller has all the high-tech gadgets and systems, all this information at his fingertips, but he doesn’t know what to do with it. He uses technology as a shortcut, but it can’t replicate or replace Bill’s experience. Which is why Miller is always one step behind and stealing from Bill.
That’s not to say technology is entirely evil. Jo and Bill launch Dorothy, tech they hope will make tornado prediction far more accurate and timely. That’s huge. But it’s technology developed and wielded by knowledgeable experts. Not by people like Miller who want to use it solely to get ahead.
I feel like this is kind of similar to what Crichton was doing with Jurassic Park. In that movie, science isn’t the problem. It’s capitalism wielding science purely for profit and with no sense of respect. In Twisters, we see the difference between technology used by experts versus cheaters.
Jo’s dad…was kind of dumb?
As serious as an F5 tornado is, Jo and her family were in the shelter, underground. Even if the door flew off, they had plenty of room at the back of the cellar. It’s unlikely debris would have reached them. And also unlikely the wind could suck any of them across the space, up the stairs, and out into the air. So all Jo’s dad had to do was move to the back of the shelter with the rest of his family. Instead…he hung onto a door that he knew would get ripped up into the sky. Very, very bad decision-making on his part. Which is actually a critique of the script. The dad was trying to do a brave thing and protect his family.
Was that Jo’s mom or aunt? What happened to the mom?
It’s Jo’s aunt, not a nickname the team has for Jo’s mom. It’s a bit strange because only Jo’s dad passed away in the opening scene. Why do they never say what happened to her mother? I wish I had an answer. It’s possible that Jo and her mother went to live with Aunt Meg, since their house was probably destroyed. And Jo’s mom eventually passed from natural causes? The movie does take place 27-years-later. So a lot could happen. But it is…bad writing to introduce the mom in the opening scene, put a lot of weight on Jo’s relationship with her father, then never once mention the movie again.
What was Dorothy supposed to do?
Dorothy seems to be the name of the container. And inside the container were hundreds of small devices that are supposed to fly into the tornado and send back detailed information about wind behavior, the funnel structure, and air flow, velocity, etc. Information that had been, up to that point, impossible to collect. When they finally succeed, you can see the data hit their computer. One of the main goals for Jo is using this research to improve early-warning systems so people, like those in Oklahoma, have more time to get to safety.
