Things I have enjoyed this week: Twisters

A film where a woman gets to do ... stuff. (contains spoilers)

Several nights a week I can be found in front of my television, scanning the channels for something to watch that might straddle the impossible divide that comprises satisfying both me and my partner, and usually leaves me feeling like I’m in the back room at Blockbuster Video (one for the older kids!), raking through a million titles I’ve only vaguely heard of.

And at least once a week we will start a film that within 20 minutes has me sighing with boredom. Because unless it’s specifically a romcom, or a quirky middle-aged ladyfilm starring Diane Keaton, the dynamic will inevitably involve Men Doing Things – be it business, heroism, crime, or extreme violence, and Women Occasionally Popping Up to a) watch b) be terrified  or c) be adoring afterwards (look up the stats for male dialogue vs female dialogue in movies, if you want to feel properly disheartened).

I will start sighing and rolling my eyes, and my partner will eventually tear his from the screen and say: are you not enjoying this? Me: let me know when a woman gets to do something that isn’t a) scream, b) nag or c) jiggle her boobs.

I’m usually safe to play Words With Friends for at least another half hour.

I thought of this the other night when we watched Twisters, an action film that hadn’t even appeared on my horizons (a bit like actual twisters hoho). It’s Lee Isaac Chung’s sequel to the 1996 Jan de Bont version, which I love. I am still genuinely overexcited at having moved to a house from which I can walk to three different cinemas, so I checked the night’s listings, booked tickets and off we went.

I love big action films. Being in a packed cinema, clutching the hand of someone who jumps just as high out of their seat as you do, hearing everyone else’s whoops and squeals. Films should be a communal experience; it feels important to be thrown into the action via an enormous screen and surround sound, rather than lying on your sofa breaking off occasionally to scroll through your emails or annoy the cat.

I think my last action film was The Fall Guy, and I enjoyed this more, despite my slavish adoration of Emily Blunt. In an action film you need to understand instinctively the emotional state of your lead at any time, the journey they are on (if you want to get technical, their Inciting Incident, their First Act Turns, their All Is Lost moment). Twisters delivers all those in spades, along with the very watchable Daisy Edgar Jones and Glenn Powell (why are people so anti-GP? He seems perfectly benign to me). And if it doesn’t entirely pass the Bechdel test, she talks a lot more about cloud formations, precipitation and therms than she does about, you know, boys.

But the thing that really got me was that this movie hit every single action trope button – and then at the end, after GP raced to the airport and DEJ was about to leave… they didn’t kiss. Every single beat in the movie had led the audience to believe this would happen, the meet cute, the helpless snappings of courtship, as Jilly Cooper puts it, the saving each other from various meteorological disasters. GP skidded into Departures, they gazed intently at each other, I think they may even have hugged, but … NO TONGUES. Not even a polite grazing of lips.

Walking home, I decided I loved that editorial decision. DEJ just got to slay her demons, kill off a killer typhoon with something that looked like washing suds and win over the hot guy but with no reference to her sexual organs! She just got to be … a person! I hadn’t even thought about how radical that felt until it happened, how rare it is that a woman is allowed to just… be?

I think the last time that dynamic hit me was watching Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, where she wasn’t just allowed to be a woman with no reference to sex, but also a really badly behaved woman who was not punished for it. When does that ever happen?

I read afterwards that Twisters’ director had filmed a kiss, but it had been removed on the say so of Steven Spielberg, the film’s executive producer. Powell, approving of the decision, said afterwards: “This movie is not about them finding love. It’s returning Kate to the thing that she loves, which is storm chasing.”

But the next day, a woman journalist friend messaged me, furious. “I don’t know – why can’t she be a scientist and also get to snog a hot guy? I mean if a male scientist had saved Oklahoma from tornadoes, he’d get a snog.”

So then (and this is why I’d be a terrible columnist) I found myself swinging back the other way. Why shouldn’t DEJ get to save Oklahoma and also get a good snog? It’s a fair point.

I still haven’t worked out what I feel about it. Just that it was notable, I guess, that a young pretty woman got to exist in a big budget film without a paw on her, and that she also got to be the person with agency who ran out in the storm to do the crazy yet courageous thing that would save everybody, while two male leads looked terrified and then grief-stricken, and finally, admiring and worshipful (welcome to our world, guys!)

Maybe it would have been better if they’d kissed, or maybe not (for those who want to see GP and DEJ kissing, there is footage of the alt. ending circulating on what was once Twitter). But it’s nice to know that in a few months’ time when I’m scrolling mindlessly through the streaming offerings in my living room, there will be at least one film where I don’t roll my eyes and want to turn off after twenty minutes.

Also: it’s really good fun. Go see it.