Hollywood Utopia

expressed in such texts. While such evocations of ‘nature’ often remain a narrative
ploy embedded in the background, I would again suggest that dramatic, even
excessive foregrounding moments help to reveal aspects of nature which are often
ignored by textual analysis and undervalued as a site of critical exposition. The use
of natural sublime landscapes and directly ‘unmediated’ evocations of raw nature
is becoming more successfully foregrounded within generic popular texts like
Twister.
The pretext of the narrative involves attempts to get a piece of scientific equipment
-significantly called Dorothy - directly up into the core of a twister so that it can
measure its potency. The machine’s name explicitly references the child
protagonist in The Wizard of Oz (1939), who had to ascend through a twister into
another world to find her true identity and achieve a rite-of-passage
transformation. Unlike the exposition of nature in Wizard of Oz, which produced
an allegorical magical/fantasy world that must in the end be curbed, Twister more
directly affords raw nature an excessive potency which is not determined by human
psychological expression, yet is nevertheless used to signify indexically the
emotional experience of heterosexual love.
This is evidenced at the climax of the film when the struggling couple have to face
the awesome horror of the twister together. To observe such sublime nature they
tie themselves to a pipe that runs deep into the ground and await their fate. The
illogicality of this survival strategy (like the fantasy of escape in The Wizard of Oz)
‘works’ on a mythic and romantic level and is not questioned by the internal logic
of the narrative. The faltering couple both visually and metaphorically consummate
their love by looking up into the heart/eye of the twister. As a result the lovers and
audience are treated to the ultimate experience (‘money shot’) of a twister’s
sublime core hovering above, as it fully engulfs them. This ‘natural’ (SFX)
confrontation is reminiscent of finally looking into the mouth of the shark in Jaws,
which was only illustrated/fetishised by static reproductions in nature books. While
filmic mediation must remain somewhat artificial, nevertheless such a simulacrum
has found a way of mapping and mimetically recording nature’s potency. With the
visualising power of special effects, discussed in detail below, human agents can
begin to experience the unpredictable energy of ‘wild’ nature. 18
Whereas conventional blockbuster special effects often capture a multiplicity of
extrasensory experiences, nature films use special effects to augment more natural
phenomena, like tornadoes in this instance. Extended moments of visual excess in
the film give primacy to the awesome power of nature within the holistic ecosystem
of planet Earth. This primacy helps foreground narrative engagement with
ecological issues rather than allowing nature to be represented simply as an
undifferentiated background or a foil to frame human intervention to act out a
heroic narrative. The experience of witnessing active twisters remains the key
2 Nature Film and Ecology 65