My brother, sister, and I all saw Twisters together. It was a choice rooted in the warm haze of nostalgia. Every summer of our childhood, the three of us were shipped off to our maternal grandmother’s cottage on the Michigan-Indiana border. It was so deep in the dunes that it didn’t even have a mailbox, much less cable. We managed with a handful of VHS tapes: Rescue Rangers, the 1994 live-action Jungle Book, and…1996’s Twister. We watched them on repeat while drinking fountain Cherry Cokes we’d bought barefoot at the counter-service shack down the road.
So two decades and an inescapable marketing campaign later, my siblings and I settled into our seats at the Lincoln Square AMC with the sodas that we now paid for with AmExes instead of quarters.
When the lights came up two hours later, we all eagerly agreed: That was great! Better than the original!
My brother had several reasons for this. For starters, the special effects. “It’s amazing,” he said, “the way technology has advanced. You felt like you were in the tornadoes.”
“Totally,” my sister responded. “Also, Glen Powell.”
My brother nodded. “Yes, he’s a good actor. “
“And a maaaaan,” I added.
My brother attempted to segue into questions about the science, but it was too late. His sisters were on a roll: The scene of him in a T-shirt? The scene of him protecting Daisy Edgar-Jones’s Kate from a tornado? The scene of him protecting a mother and child from a tornado? The scene of him protecting an old lady from a tornado?
We said our goodbyes at the subway’s service entrance. Yet my sister and I kept texting. Why didn’t he and Kate kiss? How dare they not kiss? Do we think there’s going to be a sequel where they kiss?
The next day, as I sat thinking about Glen Powell I began to think about why I was still thinking about Glen Powell. I’d seen hundreds of my films with attractive leading men. Why was Twisters any different?
I scrolled back through my messages with my sister. One made me pause: “Glen Powell is so good at being manly, but also sensitive.”
In a strange way, it reminded me of something. Was Glen Powell…a male version of the manic pixie dream girl?
The term Manic Pixie Dream Girl was first coined by critic Nathan Rabin in 2005 to describe a certain type of one-dimensional female film character. Beautiful, quirky, but without any other meaningful character traits, they seem to only exist in the context of being the romantic interest of a man and helping reach his dreams. She has no needs of her own. The MPDG, wrote Rabin, "exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."
The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is now a common film trope with examples including Zooey Deschanel in (500) Days of Summer, Kirsten Dunst in Elizabethtown, Natalie Portman in Garden State, and Clare in season two of The Bear. Guys of this stripe tend to be few and far between, which follows given the stronghold of male-dominated writers rooms’ in Hollywood.
Enter Glen Powell’s Tyler Owens.
While Kate gets a thoroughly explained backstory and nuanced character arc, Tyler Owens is shrouded in easygoing, Levis-wearing mystery. We vaguely learn he’s from Arkansas…but that’s about it. Where did his encyclopedic knowledge about weather patterns, atmospheric properties, and meteorology come from? How is his Dodge Ram souped up with state-of-the-art technology? How does he have scientific modeling software on his laptop that no other storm chaser has…including the guys from the military? Who knows.
And who cares! He’s a cowboy-hatted bad boy with his heart on his sleeve. (He chases storms not because he’s an adrenaline junkie but because he’s afraid of them, and, as he tells Kate: “You don’t face your fears; you ride ‘em.”) He’s a wildly successful YouTuber with millions of followers, but he doesn’t care about the money. In fact, he gives it away to people whose livelihoods were destroyed by storms. He will also physically pull these people from the rubble with one muscular arm and then go rescue their dogs.
And, despite troubled Kate repeatedly pushing him away, he somehow knows she doesn’t want him to push him away. He waits outside her hotel room with pizza even after she moodily slams it in his face. When he shows up to her childhood home in Oklahoma as she hides there emotionally broken, it’s romantic and not creepy. (They never do explain how he got her address.)
Kate has all but abandoned her theory that throwing sodium polyacrylate beads into a tornado will reduce their intensity—it is too dangerous to test, too improbable. Yet Tyler somehow has exactly the right program on his computer to run her experiment safely. And when Kate decides she needs to fly back to New York to get funding for said project, Tyler leaves his truck behind (like, literally—it’s illegally parked at the airport’s departures entrance) and follows her there. “If you feel it, chase it,” whispers Kate as he stares into her eyes.
If the manic pixie dream girl is quirky, beautiful, and mysterious, the manic pixie dream guy is over six feet, masculine in a natural, not human-growth-hormone way, and has an emotional intelligence so sky high he can practically read your mind. He would—and could—do anything to save you but doesn’t imply that you need saving. (He knows you are a strong independent woman, but it’s okay to lean on him sometimes.) He provides for you, yet requires you to make no sacrifice in return. He tolerates all your moods and even thinks they’re cute. And, most of all, he will chase you to the ends of the earth to prove his devotion.
He also has no baggage. While Hollywood has given us our fair share of hunks, they’ve been flawed and tormented ones: Daniel Craig’s James Bond will always be haunted by the betrayal of Vysper Lynn, Christian Bale’s Bruce Wayne is consumed by a need to avenge the senseless murder of his parents. As a viewer, you can be fascinated by them…but you don’t fall in love with them. You can, however, fall in love with Glen Powell’s Tyler Owens. (“Glen Powell changed my stance on conventionally attractive muscular men, what if there was a tornado and my skinny emo b.f. flew away…he can’t protect me,” reads one recent viral tweet.)
Female characters without much basis in reality are a Hollywood fixture, and at some level, it’s fine. They’re living made-up stories on a made-up timeline, and to hold them to some prescribed standard would be a boring fool’s errand. Yet every time I see a girl on screen run in heels, dance in the rain, and revel in casual sex without commitment, I both roll my eyes and suppress my panic that real-life women might have to live up to their standards.
But as the saying goes—if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.
This weekend, I’m going to see Twisters again. I’m going to watch Glen Powell walk outside in a white T-shirt that gently gets soaked in rain. I’m going to watch him gaze upon Daisy Edgar-Jones with the utmost attention. I’m going to watch him do some science I don’t understand while flexing his biceps.
Afterwards, I’ll text my guy friends. I’ll ask them if they want to grab a drink. I’ll be vague about the place, but when they get there, it will be a natural wine bar that only serves small plates.
I’ll proceed to talk about things that have interested me lately: Halsey’s cover of Britney Spears’s “Lucky”, the U.S.A. women’s gymnastic team, Kamala Harris and the glass cliff, pilates. Finally, I will ask them if they’ve seen Twisters.
They will offer their commentary. Then: “Glen Powell,” I’ll say. “He’s just not like other boys.”
