‘Twister’: Give the Actors Credit

Three nights before “Twister” was released, four tornadoes ripped paths of destruction within miles of my childhood home in Gage County, Neb. The next morning in Beatrice, the county seat, people counted the blessings of no loss of life and began the long process of clearing away the damage, estimated roughly at $10 million. That night, I spent the better part of two hours on the phone with my father, waiting out uncertain moments as another bank of thunderstorms brought relief from months of drought to our family farm and threatened more destruction in the same breath.

Although Nebraska was my home for the better part of four decades, I somehow escaped the horror of seeing those deadly funnels in action. I have seen wide swaths of destruction carved through the countryside.

Tornadoes are a fact of life in the Midwest and no less devastating than the pain and loss Californians endure with earthquakes. I’ve lived here less than two years and it still amuses me to hear native preferences to earthquakes over tornadoes; Nebraskans prefer tornadoes. Familiarities and loyalties breed interesting complacencies.

Four days after that night in Gage County, I did what I love to do best in California: I found a theater with a screen 10 times bigger than life and a state-of-the-art sound system and I went to see “Twister.” What I saw moved me beyond tears and left me with a new understanding of how much our lives are influenced and strengthened by the energies of nature.

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In “Bring on the Debris” (Sunday Calendar, May 12), director Jan De Bont painted an impressive portrait of the visual power of the storm but his statement pointing to the tornado as “the star of our movie” does a great injustice to the actors who captured, from their own imaginations, a sense of the terror and the primal harmonies that exist between man and nature. It may do an even greater injustice to the movie-goers who might miss their story.

Both Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt have portrayed quite brilliantly a story of what compels everyday people to make contributions for the betterment of mankind.

Revel in the fury of the tornadoes but realize without the characters’ emotional connections to the intense energies swirling around them and the power it wields to drive them apart and bring them together a tornado’s existence would simply be just another destructive act of nature.

Midwesterners face nature’s challenge in varying degrees every day of their lives. Californians face nature on this land’s own unique set of terms. And we’re all stronger for having survived.