1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 53: Twister

I’m watching YouTube videos with Samuel. His request: “Some tornadoes in Nebraska.”

That’s my boy.

The best scene in The Wizard of Oz is the tornado scene. Same goes for Dr. T and the Women. That tornado scene turns into a birthing scene: Richard Gere falls out of the sky, wakes up in the desert, staggers into a peasant’s hut, and helps to deliver a child. My favorite, though, is the “tornadoes over Los Angeles” scene in The Day After Tomorrow.

Those movies have many things going for them, but that’s beside the point. As long as your special effects are adequate, your tornado movie will be awesome. That’s just a consequence of what it is to be a tornado.

You can make your tornadoes as realistic or as surrealistic as you like: tornadoes are ordinary and bizarre. You can have lousy actors. You can have a lousy story. You can have a tornado full of sharks. (No, I haven’t seen that movie.) The tornado itself will cover a multitude of sins.

Twister, mercifully, has lots and lots of scenes with tornadoes.

Its “human interest” story is pretty dumb. Roger Ebert describes it:

Melissa is not happy. One minute she’s engaged to handsome young Bill Harding, who has a promising career as a TV weatherman ahead of him. The next minute, she’s cowering in a pickup truck while tornadoes blow houses at her. And Bill can’t wait to find another tornado. “When you told me you wanted to chase tornadoes,” she tells him, “I thought that was a metaphor.” It is a metaphor, Melissa, but not for Bill’s dream. It’s a metaphor for Twister, a movie that chases tornadoes with such single-minded dedication that plot, character, dialogue and even your engagement all disappear into the Suck Zone – which is, we learn, that part of the tornado that sucks up everything in its path. By the end of the film, we have seen trees, TV towers, drive-in theaters, trucks, houses, barns and even cows sucked up by the Zone. Well, maybe only one cow. “I think it’s the same one, coming past again,” Bill tells Jo.

I feel sorry for Melissa (Jami Gertz), the only sane person in the movie. If I had to be married to Melissa or to Jo (Helen Hunt), I’d choose Melissa. Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) wants to choose Melissa but can’t. Jo’s got him sucked in, chasing after her dream, which is a death wish. (There are better death-wish movies from 1996: Maborosi; Normal Life.) When Jo was a little girl, she had to watch a tornado suck her dad out of a storm cellar. It screwed her up real good.

The domestic-strife-in-a-tornado theme would be detailed with infinitely greater sensitivity a year later, in an episode of King of the Hill.

Again, all of this is beside the point. This movie has tornadoes; and not in a coy way, the way Jaws has a shark but overwhelmingly consists of people waiting around for the shark. (Take Shelter might be the best tornado movie in that vein. If the people in Jaws are like, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat,” the guy in Take Shelter is like, “We’re gonna need a better storm cellar.”) The tornadoes in Twister are visible and plentiful, and they get better as the movie goes along. I confess, the first few tornadoes underwhelmed me, but the last two or three made the viewing worthwhile. Gene Siskel famously said: “I always ask myself, ‘Is the movie that I am watching as interesting as a documentary of the same actors having lunch together?’” In the case of Twister, a better question might be: Is this movie as interesting as a documentary about the same tornadoes? The answer is: Alas, probably not. All the YouTube videos in this entry are more interesting than Twister. But that doesn’t mean Twister isn’t awesome. It has a plethora of tornadoes. And it has lots of good location filming (in Oklahoma, mostly), and breathtaking skies.

P.S. I told Samuel the movie might be scary, so he stayed at the top of the stairs and listened but didn’t watch. He kept saying, “Oh my goodness! Oh my gracious!”

The loneliest practices

I suppose Mishawaka could have another deep-freeze, what with it’s being April, but I’ve begun cutting the grass again. A week after the first mowing, the lawn has regrown so quickly that it looks like a jungle. Mowing is much easier this year, now that (a) I know better what I’m doing, and (b) I’m in better physical condition.

As my mower chews up the cud, I can’t help but to ruminate over After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre. His theory of the virtues depends, in part, on the notion of a practice, which he defines as

any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.

By way of illustration, MacIntyre says – notoriously – that “bricklaying is not a practice; architecture is.”

I wonder if J.M. Coetzee is having a little fun with this statement when, in Summertime, he writes of himself –

week after week, using a shovel and a wheelbarrow, he mixes sand, stone, cement and water; block after block he pours liquid concrete and levels it. His back hurts, his arms and wrists are so stiff that he can barely hold a pen. Above all the labour bores him. Yet he is not unhappy. … In fact, once he forgets about the time he is giving up, the work begins to take on its own pleasure. There is such a thing as a well-laid slab whose well-laidness is plain for all to see

– and when, a little later in the book, he attempts to situate his own slab-laying within a cultural history.

I take it that if laying brick isn’t a practice but architecture is, then mowing the lawn isn’t a practice but lawnscaping is. (Surely, what Hank Hill and his neighbors do is a practice.) So, perhaps I’m engaged in a practice when (a) mowing “begins to take on its own pleasure” – when I derive satisfaction from going in straight lines, not damaging the grass, etc. – and (b), what arguably is more important for MacIntyre, I ask friends for advice about how to cut the grass.

More likely, though, for MacIntyre, what I’m doing is not a practice. This is because, for the most part, it’s only incidentally cooperative. I very well could mow my lawn (lay brick, etc.) – mindful of “goods internal to that form of activity” – in drastic isolation. To a considerable extent, because of COVID and because of who I am and the society in which I live, I have no other option than to realize these goods in isolation.

This is what Coetzee does when he lays concrete; this is what Coetzee’s Michael K does when he gardens clandestinely – at night, on an abandoned farm in the countryside (where “there is time for everything”). This, mostly, is what I do when I mow the lawn or study philosophy or the Bible. This is what my life has come to – where it was headed all along.

“A man should cut his own lawn”

Most quarantining in Indiana will end soon, but here’s something that may provide solace for those who remain at home:

Champions League classics on YouTube, from B/R Football.

Today’s video is of the final of 2009 between Manchester United and Barcelona.

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An adorable groundhog now resides in a tunnel under our front porch. Everyone advises that we remove it so it doesn’t dig holes in our foundation.

How does one humanely remove a groundhog?

As Karin & I consider this, we enjoy watching the beast frolic out on the lawn. It eats mouthfuls of freshly cut grass. It flees into its tunnel whenever a car drives by.

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The front lawn was cut by our pastor and church board chairman. Like Hank Hill and his Rainey Street friends, they’d do it for fun if I’d let them.

Both of these generous men offered to give me their spare mowers. I ended up accepting the church board chairman’s push mower. Sadly, his riding mower didn’t fit through the gate to our back yard, and so yesterday I had to use the push mower to cut most of that lawn.

But not all of it. This was the lawn’s first trimming of the season, and the grass was very tall. I was defeated by several especially thick clumps of well-watered stalks at the bottom of the slope. The mower would shut off if I cut more than a few square inches at a time. (I wonder if, on those obstinate sections, a reel mower would do better. Or a scythe.)

I’m sore all over, and my hands are raw, but I’m determined to head back out to finish the job. After a sustained period of rain, it seems as if every head of household on our street is out mowing.

The vanilla method

Karin took two days off from work, and so we did quite a lot of shopping and appointment keeping.

At a thrift store, I bought eleven books.

We took Jasper to the vet’s for a follow-up appointment. When we brought him home, little Ziva again attacked him; but this time, we’d been advised by the vet to put vanilla on Ziva’s nose so that she wouldn’t smell Jasper’s oddness.

The tactic succeeded after three applications of vanilla. The kitties were kind to each other for the rest of the evening.

Today, Karin went to a friend’s house to bake cookies, and I stayed at home to read whatever I could about U.S. Senator and presidential aspirant Cory Booker (a New Jersey Democrat).

Liberal-leaning people of my age in South Bend are gung-ho about our mayor, Peter Buttigieg, whose forthcoming book depicts him rolling up his sleeves to repair our city (as if he himself were going to fill in the potholes). They want him to run for President. And, indeed, he’s just announced that he won’t seek mayoral reelection; it’s presumed he’ll aim higher.

I don’t know if I’d want Buttigieg or Booker to be the next U.S. President. If I were talking to Hank Hill, he’d tell me that both of these guys have too much “flash.” (I’d much rather have a leader like Bertie of The King’s Speech, which Karin & I watched last night: one who appreciates the burden of leadership well enough to stammer when confronted with it.) But it strikes me that Buttigieg and Booker are very alike with respect to ideology (centrist liberalism), formative background (well-to-do middle class; Ivy League; Oxford), and political experience (largely mayoral); only, under each category, Booker has the better credentials.

So, I say to my South Bend friends (if any of you read this): if you like Buttigieg, support Booker instead.

Otherwise, cast your net elsewhere.

(See, that’s the trouble with having studied moral philosophy: one finds oneself unable to make categorical recommendations; one can only make conditional ones. Vanilla. Earlier today, I was rereading Luther’s On the Bondage of the Will, which was in a collection I’d bought at the thrift store, and Luther was upbraiding Erasmus for exhibiting the same tendency, i.e., for not being unconditionally assertive. I don’t think Luther and I would have gotten along.)

“The boy ain’t right”

Whatever happened to Bobby Hill?

He grew up to be Aaron Paul.

A prayer for Ecuador

Karin’s birthday was on Monday. She & I were too tired to go out. But yesterday we did go out, to the laundromat; and, while the clothes were washing, we left to get some ice-cream. Karin put some of it into a styrofoam container and brought it back with her to the laundromat. But she didn’t eat it there, because dead bugs were falling from the ceiling.

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Tonight, again, we went out. We bought mountains of groceries. Then we stopped at a used-media store called Disc Replay. Karin bought an old Nintendo game, Crash Bandicoot, as a present to herself. I bought Seasons 1 and 2 of King of the Hill for very cheap.

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Mary now works with me at IUSB, tutoring students in the writing of papers. The baroque requirements of the First-Year Writing program are driving her nuts. (That was how it was for me, too, the first couple of years that I worked at IUSB.)

I’m finally making good on my promise to write an IUSB-style First-Year Writing paper. And I’m doing it the way that IUSB wants its students to do it: I’m writing the body paragraphs before I write the thesis statement. (This is one of the program’s features that drives Mary nuts.)

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Ecuador will play against Chile tomorrow (Thursday). The situation is dire: several players haven’t been playing regularly with their clubs; our captain, Walter Ayoví, is injured; Antonio Valencia is accused of having cheated on his wife; and Énner Valencia is compelled to sneak in and out of the stadium to avoid being arrested for failing to pay his child support. Under these circumstances, I’m reluctant to ask God for victory over the Chileans. But I believe that our God is a merciful God: that he is with those who call out to him in repentance. Repent, compatriots! Repent, and reclaim God’s favor!

George Saunders

His old hipster voice repulses me. But I’m also comforted, because while I’m reading George Saunders I’m thinking, I could do this; in a way, I already do this. (How: Embed colloquialisms into strange contexts; transcribe each auditory quirk using punctuation that respects the ear, or logic, but injures the eye.)

No, these days, the stylist I envy is Michael Dummett. His sentences are enormous but never too long: comma after relentless comma gently cushions each from crashing. Read the preface and introduction to Dummett’s opus; download the entire book here (would that be legal? Would it be moral? On Tuesday, at the bus station, I refused a beggar a dollar, on the ground that begging is against the law; when the beggar asked if I always obey the law, I said, Yeah, pretty much. But now I’m encouraging readers to ignore the law). Again: Read Dummett’s preface and introduction; enjoy his ire, in a tome on sense and reference, quantifiers, proper names, etc. (and what a lovely old typeface!).

I’m not sure I believe what I wrote in the first paragraph. It doesn’t quite describe what’s so weird about George Saunders. His interior monologues, for example. The low-prole boy might be chained up in the yard; the low-prole kitchen table might have a tire on it; those details aren’t so weird. What’s weird is the low-prole mother’s private thought-stream: not low-prole dialect but Standard English, no, worse, Hipster English, with silent punctuation (slashes) intruding into her thoughts. 

So what she’d love, for tonight? Was getting the pup sold, putting the kids to bed early, and then, Jimmy seeing her as all organized in terms of the pup, they could mess around and afterward lie there making plans, and he could do that laugh/snort thing in her hair again.

Why that laugh/snort meant so much to her she had no freaking idea. It was just one of the weird things about the Wonder That Was Her, ha ha ha.

Freaking, ending in i-n-g, not in i-n-’. And the ha ha ha echoes the language of the other woman in the story, the foil, the middle-class woman. The low-prole woman uses language above her station. That’s weird. It’s not like the scene in King of the Hill when Boomhauer talks “normal”; no, it’s as if Saunders were saying, I’ll “humanize” you by lending you a voice you’d never have, not even in your imagination, ha ha ha. And so we’re always conscious of the author talking over – drowning out! – the character.