The Narrative of Twisters' Success

In hailing Twisters a success the press is telling a story that goes as follows:

Those liberal coastal elitists out in Lalaland usually ignore the heartland, but this time somehow they ended up making a movie that really speaks to them, and lo and behold the movie was a hit and the liberal coastal elitists are just totally flummoxed by how well it did! Finally they are going to learn that they have been ignoring their natural audience all along--and may start treating it right.

We have heard it all before--many, many, many times, with the very regularity with which we hear the narrative debunking the narrative itself, because as with so many such narratives it is actually one of the standard promotional packages for Hollywood's products (which is what a lot of the political nonsense we see about Hollywood is really about). To cite one of the more significant recent occasions on which this was the case, consider the reception enjoyed by Top Gun 2 (Top Gun: Maverick).

The narrative was just as false, simple-minded, and irresponsible then as it is now, even if it was not necessarily false and simple-minded in all the same exact ways. After all, Top Gun 2 was not a mere "heartland" hit but a national and global one for which that "liberal coastal elite" supposedly averse to flag-waving, militaristic display and the rest cheerled with a rarely seen unanimity and breathlessness. (Just check out the Rotten Tomatoes score--and for that matter, how it compared with how critics evaluated the original Top Gun back in 1986, the score almost 40 points higher even when it was basically the same movie.) Thus did the movie break the $700 million barrier domestically, and stop just short of $1.5 billion globally.

By contrast with that spectacular box office performance, Twisters is as yet . . . not a great success. Nor showing any sign of becoming one. I do not see it taking in even a quarter of what Top Gun 2 did globally, or a third of what it made domestically, even before we bring the considerable price inflation of the last two years into the matter. Indeed, the math indicates the possibility of the movie's losing money.

However, there are those unfortunate constancies in the narrative.

That the great, the only, consequential political divide in America is a regional/cultural divide between "Blue" and "Red."

That Hollywood is on the "Blue" and "left" side of the divide.

That Hollywood puts pushing a "left" ideology ahead of making money.

Etcetera, etcetera.

Not only does this narrative have no relation whatsoever to reality (for starters, MEDIA IS A BUSINESS, and the movie studios giant corporations owned by funds like BlackRock, a fact which has made Hollywood the neoliberal economy in miniature, with a politics to match), but the reason why so many are taking, or pretending to take, this cheap promotional maneuver seriously is that it makes for an exceedingly self-serving narrative for those who stoke the fires of culture war, and mean to go on stoking it any which way they can--which includes persons and interests on both sides of the line, who share more in common with each other than they do with the general public whatever their state, Red, Blue, Purple or anything else.

Exemplary of this is how the supposed "liberals" of the New York Times, not passing up this chance to do their bit for climate inactivism, have hailed this weather disaster-themed movie's not mentioning climate change as a great and significant gesture toward Red staters, as they cynically ignore the fact that in real life real climate denialism is a minority even among Republicans--while the hacks at the Times yet again promote the destructive lie that climate change is a matter of "cultural differences" rather than science, technology, economics and the politics of hard interest that has done so much to confuse the issue and obstruct action on the problem.