Escape From Spite Culture
'Twisters,' seething theatre kids, and why it's better to tell dating stories in person vs. online
I recently watched Twisters and I left the theatres not only entertained, but also a bit confused as to why this movie had been marketed as one that catered to so-called red state audiences. One NYT piece said that the movie was a hit with more politically moderate and conservative audiences because of its refusal to preach about climate change in a narrative about worsening weather-related disasters.1
But this wasn’t just all media speculation. Twisters’ creative team also made reassuring statements to those who aren’t metropolitan progressives. In an interview with The Telegraph, actor Glen Powell said that “there are vast parts of America that have been underserved in terms of movies that they want to see” and the article writer describes Powell as feeling “unease about the recent creep of what might be described as progressive moral signalling into Hollywood’s output.”2 In The Hollywood Reporter, director Lee Isaac Chung said his team didn’t want to make a movie where they’d be “preaching a message” in reference to there not being any mention of climate change in the movie.3
However, in the same interview, Chung also correctly says that in the movie, they do acknowledge that weather problems are getting worse and need to be addressed. And while Twisters’ solution of shooting magic powder into tornadoes to zap them out of existence is likely movie-science bogus, the point is still that rational, cooperative, and environmentally sustainable answers are our main hope to climate-related catastrophes.
There were also other elements of the movie that opportunistic culture-war Youtubers could’ve used to attack the movie as too woke. Let’s say one of the cast members tweeted something that clearly signaled that they were on the left side of the culture wars, especially the online culture wears. How would these key elements of the movie suddenly look?
It’s Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), not Tyler (Glen Powell), who’s the main character and who ends up saving the day
Tyler starts off cocky and condescending, but as time goes on, becomes increasingly deferential to Kate, even telling a reporter that she, not he, is the real story
The supporting cast is racially diverse, most notably Javi (Anthony Ramos), and the closest thing the movie has to villains are two white guys: Javi’s stormchasing partner and the land developer mogul
Though Kate eventually ends up with Tyler, she spends most of the movie mourning the death of her black boyfriend
A kiss scene between Kate and Tyler was cut out, partially because it didn’t test well with young female audiences4
Glen Powell is nice to and appreciative of women5
I can easily imagine how this movie would’ve been criticized. Another piece of modern feminist propaganda where a girlboss humbles and sidelines even an all-American cowboy/scientist/influencer. Yet another sign of the shameful decline of the Western man. Too much rainbow-coalition pandering. Race-mixing bullshit (the bad kind, where it involves a white woman). Surrendering to neo-puritanical mobs that want little kids to see trans people engage in orgies but fume at an attractive heterosexual couple even hugging each other. Glen Powell’s just a cucked simp in disguise.
But no culture war erupted over this movie. Most people liked it, even if they probably thought it was silly. While there are some egregiously hardheaded and hardhearted people, most people are won over by things done well and when they don’t feel sneered at (like putting the songs they like on the playlist more often).
A little over a year ago, I wrote about the Tossed Salad Principle in our tiresome culture wars in which spite and score-settling were the real holy tenets of certain segments of the so-called social progressives in culture industries.6 For them, a covert woke movie (which Twisters actually is) would be intolerably dissatisfying because their enemies wouldn’t have been made miserable in defeat and humiliation. In the past few years, there have been things like She-Hulk and Velma and much of the new Star Wars cultural products that absolutely must’ve been made with the overriding goal of screaming “Eat it!” at their enemies, whether perceived or real. It’s hard for me to believe that the creative teams on those works prioritized artistic, or even just entertainment, goals above this burning desire.
And of course, the above-mentioned stuff begets a counter-revolution on the right. The less we talk about the likes of Mr. Birchum, the better. It just gets kind of depressing otherwise.
So we’re all caught in the middle of a war between eternally aggrieved and talentless theatre kids on both sides of the culture war, fought between those who’ve just made it into Hollywood and those who haven’t. A select few screenwriters and Youtubers will continue to feast and fatten on this bacterial anger in symbiosis while the rest of us have to suffer through their dreck.
Spite culture fueled by the Tossed Salad Principle isn’t just god-awful for art and entertainment, but also rots our society. I’ve written before about why online interactions make even the most even-keeled among us quick to rage (if you’ll indulge me in quoting myself from an older piece):
But I do get easily angry at people online. If those people were to say the same thing online but to my face, I think I’d be quite chill. Part of that would just be natural conflict aversion in IRL encounters. But when someone says something to you, even if it’s highly critical or even just insulting, there’s a certain level of respect being paid. He’s taken time out of his day and also risked putting himself in an uncomfortable, even potentially hostile, situation. There’s no performative aspect either, no flailing of arms or caterwauling to play to a crowd to garner sympathy. It’s just between you two.
In contrast, public online communication—like on Twitter—combines the worst of direct and passive aggression. So many things written and said online often feels personally targeted at you, even though chances are that it's not. But it’s worse because the attacker isn’t even paying you the baseline level of respect to addressing you in person and in private. Instead, he seems to be talking at you and past you, telling a one-sided story for everyone else to witness, with you either not being expected to reply or if you do, having to do so in front of a biased audience that he’s cultivated. And you probably don’t even know this perceived attacker beyond a few posts, if even that. So he becomes a caricature of a composite of your most resentment-drawing people from memories or from your imagination. And we all engage in our own personal Two Minutes Hate.7
Recently, I was out having drinks with some friends of mine. In our conversation group were four people, including me: two men and two women. One of the women was telling us about a terrible date she’d had with a guy I can only describe as a very high maintenance man. At the end of the story, she joked that this was why women chose the bear, and she and the other woman gave each other high fives and we all had a good laugh.
Now imagine this played out on Twitter or TikTok and what kind of widespread reaction this may have caused: the rancor, the bitterness, the seething, the harassment, the projection of one’s past experiences onto total strangers (who may be bots). Even in face-to-face conversation, miscommunication is rife, either because one person is inarticulate or the other is imperceptive. Or both. Now reduce all communicative signals to just text. Most people aren’t good writers. And even the good writers aren’t always successful in perfectly conveying what they really mean. It’s hard to be funny with just the written word, for instance. Most people come off a lot more serious and cold than they really are when they write. All these online interactions are undoubtedly playing a significant part in fueling these anti-social and anti-artistic tendencies.
Having recently returned from traveling (and vowing to spend less time online), I quickly realized how difficult that is when you have a desk job. Nobody’s working every single minute of their workday. How else to fill that time? Maybe we should all just become farmers. Not in tornado alley, though. Unless Kate’s magic powder actually works.
I’m not sure how to close this out, so I’ll just talk about my favourite scene in either Twister movie, which is the steak breakfast scene in the original movie. Those monstrous hunks of beef, sizzling on the pans by the dozen as they swim in translucent bubbling frying eggs. Revolting, yet also irresistible. I’ve always wanted to try such a breakfast, especially with that famous Meg’s Gravy.
‘Twisters’ Director on Not Mentioning Climate Change: Movies Shouldn’t “Preach a Message” | The Hollywood Reporter
Great piece. In addition to Chung, I suspect Powell’s involvement was also key to toning down potential culture wars. He’s very interesting- in an interview with the NY Times he talks about how he knows a big part of a Hollywood actor’s job is to make other people money and he takes that part of the job at least as seriously as the artistic parts: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/07/movies/glen-powell-hit-man-twisters.html
I’ve made a vow to start locking my phone in my desk drawer when I go back to the office next week. PowerPoint isn’t glamorous or even interesting, but it beats doomscrolling at work just because you’re bored.