bill paxton from twister is cancelled
you damn dirty dog, bill
Last week, I said I would be discussing Twisters. I have not seen Twisters yet. What I have seen is Twister, so what you’re getting is opinions on instead is a movie from 1996.
I concur with this excellent Vulture article, in that while the tornadoes are cool and the flying cows are magnificent, the most important aspect of Twister is the emotional terrorism at its centre. A man abandons his kind, beautiful, endlessly patient fiancée for his ex-wife, and we’re supposed to cheer for it? No. This is wrong. Bill Paxton’s character in Twister is a no-good fuckboy using his tornado addiction to cover for his emotional inconstancy. I hope his relationship with Helen Hunt immediately failed.
Congratulations to Twisters on its big box-office opening in the US. That’s not any of my concern right now.
What I did see this weekend was Janet Planet, the film directorial debut of beloved playwright Annie Baker. I’m not familiar with her theatrical work, unfortunately -
(not for lack of trying, mind you, I did book to see her latest play Infinite Life at the National Theatre last December but there were engineering works on the Thameslink line, but it’s also worth saying that I could have rebooked had I checked the website and planned ahead so it’s really nobody’s fault but mine)
-but this was a pretty compelling introduction to Baker’s world/planet. What’s most striking about Janet Planet is how unreassuring and spiky and ultimately open-ended its portrayal of a mother-daughter relationship is.
The film drops in on a co-dependent dynamic between a mildly depressed single mother stuck in a string of bad relationships and a pre-teen daughter who may be queer and who I have diagnosed in my official capacity as autistic, and leaves them little further on in their own processes of self-discovery. It’s not a harsh or a cruel film, and Baker clearly treats her characters with genuine empathy, but she is also completely unwilling to coddle them, and by extension coddle the audience.
You’re left with this uneasy, pinprick sadness, and the feeling that, while it’s very possible these two women can figure all their shit out, there’s a good chance that they may never be happy.
I’m selling this film to you, right? It sounds fun, right?
I am not currently on the job market, but if anyone in A24 ever needed some freelance copywriting, I could find some room on weekends.
The rest of this newsletter was written before Joe Biden announced that he is stepping down as a Presidential candidate for this year’s election. This actually doesn’t matter at all, in any way, to anything I have written above, but maybe it can serve as helpful context for a simpler time. I’m not sure it would, honestly. Speaking from the vantage point of a world where Kamala Harris is now the likely Democratic nominee, I still feel vexed and anguished about the behaviour of Bill Paxton’s character in Twister towards his fiancée. Regardless of political context, that there is a bad man and a woman who deserves better.
I didn’t even get to episode three of Douglas is Cancelled, which vindicated some of my yapping from the previous newsletter. I do enjoy this title scheme, though, so I’m keeping it.
558 words! We are on a road to improvement.
See you next week, where I have a bad feeling that Deadpool may come up in discussion.