Hollywood’s weird spin on tornadoes and climate change » Yale Climate Connections

Editor’s note: Spoilers follow.

Filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung spent the formative years of his childhood in Arkansas. Living a figurative block or two away from the famous “Tornado Alley,” Chung has a personal history with the swirling storms. He knows how they shape the psyche of anyone who grows up in that part of the Midwest, and he brought that experience and knowledge to his direction of “Twisters.”

As a result, moviegoers were entertained and thrilled by the storm chases he staged against sweeping vistas of the American prairie. And they were moved by the dramatic arc of its central character, Kate Cooper (played by Daisy Edgar Jones), who sought redemption and meaning after her graduate research project on the hydrodynamics of tornadoes led to the deaths of three friends and colleagues, including her boyfriend. That’s how “Twisters,” just ending its theatrical run, became the fourth-highest-grossing movie of the summer. (The film is now available for online streaming.)

But Chung’s direction also sparked controversy for what wasn’t in “Twisters” – any mention of climate change. In at least seven commentaries – in the Chicago Tribune, CNN, Grist, Guardian, the New York Times, Salon, and Slate – that absence figured in the title or the opening paragraph.

I, too, was surprised. When, for the 20th anniversary of “The Day After Tomorrow,” I viewed trailers of upcoming summer attractions for possible ties to climate change, I figured “Twisters” was a good prospect for a cli-fi movie. How could one tell a story about tornadoes in 2024 without talking about climate change?

Chung delivered a three-part answer to my question in interviews with CNN and the New Yorker: (1) “The science behind climate change and tornadoes [isn’t] clear.” (2) He didn’t want to “creat[e] a feeling that we’re preaching a message,” which might reduce the entire film to a vehicle for a climate “message” and thereby limit its box office success. Because (3) “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

Science, tornadoes, and uncertainty

Researchers would readily agree that the science linking climate and tornadoes, especially regarding their frequency and strength, is uncertain. But that does not mean climate science has nothing to say. Trends too long and too consistent to be explained by random variation have emerged: the geographical range for tornadoes is shifting south and eastward, and clusters – several tornadoes spinning down over the same area in a short period of time – are occurring more frequently.

Read: Climate change and tornadoes: Any connection?

Chung himself acknowledged these findings in his interview with the New Yorker and during his appearance before the Hollywood Climate Summit. So he knew he had the option of including both the science and the uncertainty in “Twisters.”

Which could have been done rather easily.

Like the original 1996 movie, “Twisters” includes scenes in which the characters watch TV news for weather forecasts and tornado alerts. It’s not hard to imagine an exchange between an anchor and a meteorologist that addresses climate change:

Bob, we’re getting lots of emails, texts, and voicemails asking whether climate change has anything to do with this fierce run of tornadoes we’re seeing.

That’s a question climate researchers and meteorologists are asking themselves, Sharon. But at present, the science linking the intensity and frequency of tornadoes with the climate, which we know we’re changing, is uncertain. We’re more confident about other trends we’re observing – the alley is shifting south and east, and we’re seeing more clusters – but we don’t fully understand what’s behind these changes. In short, Sharon, we think there are links, but we can’t fully explain them yet.

Lines very like these were part of a recent NPR story about the surprising run of tornadoes in upstate New York.

In New York state, at least 26 tornadoes have touched down this year so far, the most ever recorded. That has left state officials and residents wondering … what role human-caused climate change might be playing. As WSKG’s Rebecca Redelmeyer reports, the science is complicated.

Three linked radio stations deliver NPR across much of Oklahoma, and they include “All Things Considered,” the iconic program that featured this story in its August 9 edition, in their schedules. In other words, real-live Oklahomans heard a news story about climate change and tornadoes. In a movie, however, one can’t use a radio broadcast to share a radar map of tornado activity; for that one needs video clips from a TV station.

But more and more TV stations across the United States, especially in the Midwest, are now owned by media enterprises with a decidedly conservative bent. A prime example is Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns two of the bigger stations in Oklahoma. In 2023, Sinclair fired a reporter at its Lynchburg, Virginia, station for talking about climate change without including balancing denials.

In other Midwestern media markets, meteorologists who were expressly brought in to expand coverage of climate change have been hounded from their jobs by the complaints, and often threats, of small but vociferous groups of viewers.

On his own terms, then, Chung may have been right. In a true “reflection of the [Oklahoma] world” in which he set his film, TV meteorologists might not ever talk about climate change during tornado season.

Still, Chung had a choice. Instead of editing “climate change” out of “Twisters” and leaving just quickly passing references to its effects (“unprecedented,” “droughts,” “wheat prices”), he could have trusted in his artistic ability to make climate change an organic part of a realistic portrayal of life with tornadoes. That, after all, is the goal of the creative consultants at Good Energy: make the inclusion of climate change in movie and TV stories set in the present or near-to-mid-term future the rule, rather than the exception.

“Climate change” as a trigger phrase?

Three conservative responses to “Twisters” celebrated Chung’s decision to exclude “climate change” from his movie. According to these authors, whose pieces appeared in the Federalist, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, these words are perceived as a jarring intrusion, an alienating message. By not including liberal signifiers in movies like “Inside-Out 2” and “Twisters,” these commentators argued, Hollywood was finally admitting that “woke” doesn’t sell. Filmmakers had a new message for red states: “Our movies are for you.”

These responses appear to provide further backing for Chung’s claim that including “climate change” would have detracted from his realistic depiction of rural Oklahoma. But these conservative commentaries almost certainly overstate the case.

A recent study found that most people underestimate how much their fellow citizens are concerned about climate change and overestimate the level of opposition they might encounter if they do talk about climate change. Yes, one might encounter one of those angry community members who bully meteorologists who talk about climate change, but they are a minority.

The message of “Twisters”

This leaves us with Chung’s final argument that Hollywood movies do not, and should not, have “messages.” From the standpoint of communications theory, this is nonsensical. All movies have socio-cultural-political-scientific messages. Movies that appear to be free of messages are, in fact, delivering messages that affirm that status quo.

By not including the words “climate change,” “Twisters” delivers a message about the politics, and relative (un)importance, of climate change in the United States. The movie as a whole, I would argue, delivers a message about life with tornadoes that reinforces American stereotypes ill-suited to the generational challenge we confront in climate change. To make this point clear, however, I need to share more of the plot.

Although dubbed “a stand-alone sequel,” “Twisters” is better understood as a 2024 remake of the 1996 “Twister.” The latter shares many plot elements and storylines with the former; it even repeats a few lines of dialogue. Both movies have two teams of storm chasers: one straight-laced and corporate, the other rough-and-tumble and ad hoc. Both films include a storm whisperer and a romantic triangle. And both films begin with a traumatic event in the past, one that shapes the life of one of the main characters.

The storm chasers at the center of the story, in both movies, (1) shelter under a bridge, (2) retreat to dinner with family for recuperation and exposition, (3) encounter a major tornado at the movies, (4) have an “ah-ha” moment that enables them to fix a problem with their equipment or strategy, and (5) successfully employ their improved equipment/strategy in their final encounter with a tornado.

The two stories differ, however, in their ultimate goals. The rough-and-tumble team in “Twister” wants to gather data from inside a tornado in order to create better warning systems. In contrast, Katy, in “Twisters,” wants to disrupt a tornado, to make it spin apart in its track.

In order to save a town and her colleagues from imminent destruction, Katy executes their new and improved strategy for disrupting a tornado. First, she fires rockets with silver iodide payloads into the strengthening tornado, triggering a drenching rain. Then, huddling in the team’s fortified and anchored truck, she opens the barrels filled with water-absorbing polymers, which the tornado swiftly snatches up. The effect is almost immediate; the tornado spins apart.

So what messages does “Twisters” deliver?

In the 90 minutes leading up to the plot’s climactic encounter, “Twisters” delivered social messages about friendship, community, resilience, and relationships. What I would describe as the respectful romance between Katy and Tyler (played by Glen Powell, who has never had to wait this long to be mentioned in a piece about “Twisters”) was quite touching.

“Twisters” also inveighed against disaster capitalism, with a subplot about a real estate developer who buys up underinsured properties for fractions of their previous market value after they have been destroyed by the latest tornado.

There’s a lot going in this movie. Which is why it’s disappointing that its conclusion falls back on two tired tropes of American popular culture: techno-optimism and the eccentric, independent, and plucky scientist/inventor. “Twisters” tacitly promises that tornadoes will eventually be tamed. And that work will be done not by buttoned-up Ph.D.s working for corporations or universities but by rough-and-tumble, in-the-field wranglers tinkering with computer models, chemicals, equipment, vehicles, and, ultimately, the storms themselves.

For Jeva Lange, writing at Heatmap, this message makes geoengineering “the real hero of ‘Twisters’.” But as she readily acknowledges, citing one of the scientific advisers for the project, the plan depicted isn’t feasible. Tons of polymers would have to be infused into tornadoes, not just a half-dozen barrels or so, which would then still take several minutes to work, not the 30 or so seconds shown in the film. And that’s just one tornado. How would one move the tons of polymers around to intercept multiple tornadoes, across multiple counties and states, at the same time? And how many tons of polymers can the soil and groundwater absorb, even after successful interceptions, before the land becomes too toxic for agriculture?

Could it be useful to learn how to disrupt a tornado? Almost certainly. Could one then make a feasible practice of regularly disrupting tornadoes? Almost certainly not.

On balance then, Chung has chosen not to mention the legitimate science of climate change in order to tell a false techno-optimistic story about homegrown tornado wranglers.

But in the process of making this choice, Chung has revealed how deep the cultural divide on climate change has become. If not Chung himself, and this is still an open question, Hollywood seems to believe that the very words “climate change” can exact a painful cost at the box office. Painful enough to keep the words out of a script.

Someone should tell Hollywood that even in red states people believe climate change is real, and in most other countries this isn’t even a question. Don’t edit films for red America; edit them for the world – and the future.

And please include “climate change” in the extended director’s cut of “Twisters” for the Blu-ray.

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