Twisters · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The image that stays with you is a flat line with one thing standing on it.

Dan Mindel shoots Oklahoma in anamorphic widescreen and drops the horizon low, so the frame is mostly sky. When a tornado comes, it comes as a vertical. One dark column in a country where almost nothing else stands up. Grain elevator, power pole, storm. Everything else out there lies down.

That composition is the film's whole argument, and it is also the clearest textbook case I know of something Gilles Deleuze called the encompasser. Writing about cinema in the early 1980s, Deleuze noticed that most American movies run on a deal between a person and a milieu. The milieu is not scenery. It is pressure. It gathers, it bears down, and eventually it squeezes an act out of somebody, and the act, if it lands, changes the milieu back. Situation, action, transformed situation. He called this the large form of the action-image and thought it was the engine of Hollywood. The Western runs it on the frontier. The disaster picture runs it on weather. Twisters runs it on a supercell over central Oklahoma, and Mindel's low horizon is that pressure made visible: sky owns four-fifths of the picture, and the humans are a smear along the bottom edge.

Here is why the lens earns its keep. Deleuze thought this form broke. Around 1948, in Italy, filmmakers started making films about people to whom things happened that they could not answer. A boy watches. A woman walks. The situation never resolves, because nobody in it has an action adequate to what they have seen. Deleuze called those people seers, and called what traps them a pure optical situation: an image you can only look at, not act on. For him that was the birth of modern cinema, and most of the art film since has come out of it.

Twisters starts there. The prologue hands Kate a catastrophe she survives and blames herself for, and the film's next move is to put her behind a desk, reading weather on a screen instead of driving into it. She has been converted into a watcher. Daisy Edgar-Jones plays her guarded and internal, and the restraint is the point, because what is broken in her isn't nerve exactly. It's the wiring between seeing and doing.

Deleuze took that wiring from Bergson, who described a living creature as a gap: a perception comes in, a hesitation happens, an action goes out. The gap is where we live. He called it the interval, the centre of indetermination. Trauma widens it. Kate's arc is the closing of it, and the dossier's phrase for the performance, recovered nerve over demonstrative heroics, is a description of a sensory-motor circuit being re-welded one storm at a time. So this big populist studio picture does something genuinely odd for 2024: it runs Deleuze's history of cinema backwards. It begins its heroine in the time-image and walks her back into the movement-image, and it treats that repair as a moral good rather than a naivety.

Watch how the picture breathes. Mindel and editor Terilyn A. Shropshire alternate two spatial registers: the enormous level plain with a storm parked in it, then the tight embedded camera inside a truck cab, on a running body, low among debris. Deleuze had a name for that alternation, respiration-space, the pulse between the vast milieu and the taut line of action drawn through it. Most disaster films forget the first half and deliver continuous assault. Shropshire, who cut Love & Basketball and The Woman King, holds the quiet interstitial scenes long enough that the tightening means something, then converges separated groups toward a last-minute rescue. That's Griffith's oldest machine, the organic American montage, still running clean.

The tornadoes themselves are a Deleuzian object in a way the 1996 film could not quite be. Deleuze argued that cinema's real break with painting and sculpture was the any-instant-whatever: older arts posed motion at its climactic, meaningful moment, while film samples motion at ordinary equidistant instants and reconstitutes it. A 2024 volumetric fluid simulation is that principle industrialized. This storm has no pose. It has only a next state, computed from the last one — rain-wrapped, multi-vortex, fire-laced. ILM's 1996 tornado was a convincing shape composited onto real plains. Chung's is a process, and the difference is legible on screen.

Sound does the other half. The image can hold a tornado at a distance; the mix cannot, and doesn't try. That low-frequency roar built for large-format rooms is Deleuze's out-of-field, the part of the world the frame can't contain. Except that when the thing is rain-wrapped you can't even point at it. It stops being adjacent space and becomes pressure with no address. The most frightening thing in the movie is almost entirely a sound decision.

The debts are specific. From Twister (1996): the Dorothy sensor-deployment climax, the diner-and-motel roadside geography, the science-crew-chases-storm staging. From Jaws: the discipline of rationing the threat while low-frequency dread and small-town texture carry the scenes between attacks. From War of the Worlds (2005): keeping the camera on the ground among running people instead of surveying ruin from above. From The Towering Inferno and the 70s cycle: catastrophe as a sorting machine for moral worth, which is the only reason the rival team's disaster capitalism reads as villainy. And from Days of Heaven, the plains as protagonist, the debt Chung honors most and the one Minari trained him for. Natural light, real weather, rural work filmed with attention rather than condescension.

So what did it do? It made the case, at scale, that a director of intimate regional realism could take the biggest form in the studio system and improve it by refusing to look down on it. Notice too where the form strains. Deleuze called the duel at the heart of the action-image the binomial, force against force: hero versus villain, man versus milieu. Twisters wants that duel and can't have it, because you cannot beat weather. Kate's moisture-absorbing polymer is a fantasy of ending the binomial rather than winning it, which is a stranger and more modern wish than anything in the 1996 picture.

Then Chung declines the kiss. In the large form, the transformed situation is supposed to seal everything, couple included. He leaves one thing unsealed. It is a small crack in a very well-built circuit, and it's why the film sticks: it closes the storm and leaves the people open. Next time, watch the horizon line instead of the funnel. The film tells you where the pressure is coming from long before anything touches down.