One Obvious Antagonist
It’s a challenge these days not to see everything with a political slant. This is what happens to our country every four years leading up to a presidential election. We start to go into our respective camps and hunker down. We get agitated and worrisome.
Why?
Because we know a rebalancing or a shifting is coming. It’s like the car is in need of a tune up. Or like a storm is brewing, and we have prepare. Which ever your metaphor, change is coming, and I for one can see it and feel it everywhere.
I recently watched the new Twisters movie, and the entire film was layered with cultural and political hues, the plot and characters imbued with American archetypes.
There was Kate, the book smart American blonde girl, traumatized by a killer tornado, but now back in Oklahoma to help her former storm chasing buddy, the Latino, Javi, now working for a 3D imaging company backed by a mysterious investor. Enter Tyler, a rougish good-ole boy and self-proclaimed “tornado wrangler” with a raucous entourage.
The juxtaposition of these two storm chasing crews made me think: in today’s world who are the “thought descendants” of the Founding Fathers? Is it the sophisticated, uniformed technology group with what appears to be professional standards? Or is it the rowdy and wild, in-your-face rag tag trying to make their fame on social media?
It made me think of how our society and government often works. Each team has their own standards of what optics should be, plus, their own convenient justifications for why they behave the way they do.
Without spoilers, we find out that each storm chasing team has different motives, financial or otherwise, and that they each fall short in their own ways, yet are able to see past these differences and work together.
And when the storms come–and they certainly did in this film–it was about putting the differences aside to keep the people safe.
In this film, where there wasn’t a true bad guy in the way of characters, I walked away thinking of one obvious antagonist: the storm itself. The giant funnel of swirling destruction is who we’re all ultimately fighting. Whether it’s our own troubles or a political ideology, it’s always coming for us, and we can either tame it, or run for cover. Either way, it will always pass, and sometimes it does in the blink of an eye.
On the other side is something glorious. The calm after the storm. I know I can’t wait for that.
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Photo by Greg Johnson on Unsplash
