Twisters.

I’ve always loved storms. I think it might come from performance anxiety—I used to be a pretty good runner, and I knew that if it was a perfect weather kind of day, there was no one I could blame if I was not a good runner, but if it was a downpour, if I could barely even make out the course ahead of me, then nobody could blame me if I didn’t do well. The funny thing is that I usually did do well on rainy race days (even rainy basketball days, where the rain didn’t affect the playing directly but filled us all with a kind of buzzy, electric energy, like because the world was howling, nothing else was quite the same). I raced well and I played basketball well when it was raining hard, storming, because I could finally figure out how to take the pressure off, something I’m not great at most of the time. 

When I first started dating my boyfriend, on our second date, I left him in the parking lot while I went inside to grab something, and when I came out it was a monsoon outside (not literally but this is what it felt like). He was sheltering under an awning, and it was hilarious to me because neither of us had an umbrella, and this had happened out of nowhere, all this rain, and suddenly the pressure was off. 

One of my sisters was born during a tornado, and though I was only like five at the time (I remember absolutely nothing about the occasion), I’m sure it was exciting to one moment be huddling in a basement with my grandmother and other siblings, and the next be presented with this entirely new person, whom the storm—maybe—had brung in. 

I know that storms also bring a lot of bad—tornadoes especially—and what I liked about Twisters, in part, was how they didn’t shy away from this. I went to see it in this movie theatre in Atlanta that’s in the middle of an abandoned mall. You have to leave your car in a massive mall parking lot, walk through a long spooky hallway, and then suddenly there is popcorn and people taking your ticket and other people mulling around, waiting for whatever story they’re here to see. The screens and sound are not great (at least in the rooms I’ve been in), but it feels old school in that way. There is no HD, there is no surround sound but we get the sense of what’s going on anyway—we piece it together. 

I went alone to this movie, and this older Black couple sat beside me, and we were all gasping when the tornado came. I won’t tell you why we were gasping, but I hadn’t realized beforehand how dangerous tornadoes can be. Sure, this is a Hollywood movie and therefore probably not an accurate description of tornado rage, but to think a storm can grow stronger and stronger until it can kill you, until it can kill tens, hundreds, maybe even thousands of people, and if not kill them then definitely wreck their homes, it was more than I’d imagined. Me, tucked into a basement, waiting for my sister to be born. Me, on many occasions, tucked into a bathtub that my mom had layered with blankets and pillows so that we could sleep somewhere safer than the rest of the house while yet another tornado was lurking. 

I’ve been safe during tornadoes, even though, growing up in Tennessee, they came by often—tore down parts of a college campus not ten minutes away from our house. I’ve been safe so I hadn’t anticipated the potential gnarliness a tornado can bring, and it was exhilarating to both see this (no doubt dramatized) in Twisters and know—in this case—that it was fictional, that no one was actually gone. 

I loved how storm-centered the film was and how nerdy—it’s about what we might call “storm scientists,” people studying tornadoes, the protagonist trying to figure out how to slow down a tornado’s power before it runs through a small town. It’s about people who are doing this for profit and people who are doing this for community, how you can be doing the same things for drastically different reasons—how this—why you’re doing what you’re doing—eventually begins to shape who you are. 

Twisters is a fun film and a gasp-filled film (me and the couple I was sitting by definitely bonded over the wildness of experiencing it together). It’s also a Southern film without being a racist film (what a relief, that we can slowly learn to focus on the land of the South and begin to include all the different kinds of people who live there, instead of this narrative that the South is always and only what people afraid of difference want it to be). It was worth seeing, I think, and if you catch it during an actual storm—have you been in the movies while it’s raining?— the whole world outside of the movies for a minute might just wash away.

Image: Universal Pictures