Twister.

• Author: Sharrett, Christopher

THE DISASTER FILM, a genre many associate with the turbulence and distrust of the post-Watergate 1970s, seems to have made a big comeback in the even more paranoid 1990s. "Twister," one of this summer's biggest blockbusters, has the cookie-cutter formula of the classic disaster picture, but with a few modifications that conform to a period actually extremely conservative, despite all the prattle about political correctness pervading mass culture.

Movies such as "Airport," "The Poseidon Adventure," "Earthquake," and "The Towering Inferno" showed a deep distrust for all of our basic institutions, particularly middle-class life. "Earthquake" begins with a long prelude detailing a troubled society, like Rome before the fall: police are unable to do their job; relationships are inauthentic; businessmen are liars and hucksters. The earthquake, like the screeching crows of Alfred Hitchcock's classic "The Birds," seems merely emblematic of the profound turbulence within human civilization. As he surveys the ruins of Los Angeles, disgruntled cop George Kennedy says, "This used to be one helluva town." The implication is that the city can not recuperate--nor should it.

The same situation applied in "The Towering Inferno," perhaps the slickest disaster film of the era, with two studios funding it and a raft of major stars. Corruption and general tawrdriness set the stage for the fire to end all fires, as the burning skyscraper seemed an apt symbol for the corporate state, a modern Tower of Babel. At the end, with the shards of the building smoldering in the background, architect Paul Newman muses, "Maybe we should let it just stand there, as a monument to all the [crap]." The honesty of these pictures, for all their soap-opera trappings, was their refusal to offer easy answers or to write off crime and human folly as aberrations.

"Twister," on the other hand, wants things both ways. By using a tornado as the Other, turning nature itself into a monster (the ads proclaim that "sometimes nature throws a psychotic fit"), the movie is close to the Godzilla series, although they placed responsibility with arrogant scientists (the builders of the A-bomb, who made nature revolt). "Twister" also makes the disaster primal and cosmic not based on the venality of cost-cutting developers and such, so there is the sense that the disaster is the visitation of God's wrath.

There also is the generic set-up, showing audiences an unstable relationship between a man and...