The "Wizard of Oz," "Twisters" and my lifelong fascination with tornadoes

On a recent weekend afternoon, stuck in the doldrums of midsummer’s haziness, I turned to a familiar pastime activity and began to sift through bins of old photographs. After grabbing an arbitrary stack from a plastic bin in my parent’s basement, I found myself smiling at images of my family trick-or-treating during some early 2000s Halloween. My parents — my dad as an ancient Roman gladiator and my mom as a court jester — exuded all the jauntiness of young parents from where they stood, frozen in time, on opposite ends of a plastic Little Tykes wagon they used to lug us around for such occasions.

I was dressed as Dorothy, the young Kansan and main character of “The Wizard of Oz,” the 1939 film starring Judy Garland adapted from L. Frank Baum’s book of the same name. My mom had set my dark hair in braids, my dad had spray painted a pair of old tap shoes ruby red, and my dog, Buzz, was coincidentally a Cairn terrier, the same breed as Dorothy’s canine companion, Toto. I was a “Wizard of Oz” devotee as a child. Like the color purple and chicken noodle soup, it was one of my uncontested favorites as a child. But not for any of the reasons you’d think.

As I reflect on that Halloween and “The Wizard of Oz,” which turns 85 this month, I realize a more accurate representation of my love for that film would have been to dress up, not as Dorothy, but as a tornado.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been obsessed with tornadoes. For some people, it’s UFOs or scarab beetles or landing a spot as a guest on a talk show. For me, it was swirling funnels of clouds and debris.

The full-fledged fascination took off sometime around the age of 10 or 11 after my mom returned from a business trip in Texas with a special souvenir for me: a tornado in a bottle. Set against a backdrop of violet lightning and rolling green hills, white particles contained in a small plastic tube transformed into a miniature twister when shaken in a clockwise motion. But before that, I had always been entranced by the sepia-toned footage of a twister snaking its way toward Uncle Henry and Aunt Em’s farm. While I loved the bright, velvety colors of the Lollipop Guild, Glinda’s bubblegum gown, and the quiet field of poppies Dorothy and her friends stumble upon before reaching Emerald City, what my still-toddling mind really cared about was the tornado. I was perfectly content to rewind the VHS tape for footage of it rather than watch the rest of the movie.

A voracious reader from an early age, I spent much of my free time during holidays and summer vacations in the weather section at my local library, a stack of books about tornadoes at my side. As I grew older and was introduced to the internet, I began consuming clips and documentaries produced by storm chasers and meteorologists. Tornadoes have long occupied a consistent spot among the varied YouTube content I’ve binged over my adult life.

My preoccupation with them even stoked interest in disaster-related subgenres for me to explore. I’ve also sought out information about and cultural portrayals of earthquakes, tsunamis and the infamous 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic. While teenaged me was a huge fan of '90s-era Leo DiCaprio, his portrayal of Jack Dawson in James Cameron’s “Titanic” was hardly the only reason I return to that movie year after year. One of my favorite New York trivia tidbits is that the Jane Hotel in Manhattan’s meatpacking district — which formerly housed a now-shuttered nightclub that was once a late-night haunt during my college days — housed survivors of the Titanic until the end of the American Inquiry into the ocean liner’s sinking.

Perhaps even more intriguing than my deep interest in tornadoes is my equally pervasive fear of them. They frequently plague my nightmares. Staggeringly high, bluish-black columns of force, touching down in droves in an abstract town or city my subconscious mind has created. I recognize that tornadoes and the like are situations steeped in death and tragedy. That’s certainly not why I find myself drawn to them.

I found solace in the fact that there are people out there who are as beguiled by tornadoes as I am. A Reddit thread I found affirmed that “there are literally dozens of us.” I suspect the number is even larger, and that there are more bashful tornado-obsessed folks hiding in the shadows of their peculiar hyperfixation. Still others, like me, shared their yearslong tornado-themed dreams. ”I’ve had nearly weekly tornado dreams since I was really, really young,” one user wrote. “I seek out tornado videos every chance I get. I'd love to see one up close, if I knew I could be safe.” Regarding that last observation, I’ve always felt the same; but it’s a sentiment saturated with guilt.

Part of the hesitation around bringing something like a prolonged and intense interest in something like tornadoes has to do with its broader ethical implications. Are we bad people for being so enamored with tornadoes? Unlike those directly affected by their destructive nature, we storm-seek from behind a screen, safe to watch these bruise-colored beauties unfurl across the Great Plains at a distance, after they’ve already wreaked havoc on communities. Our engagement with them is largely retroactive when they’ve been chronicled by a journalist or scientist for how many lives they claimed and how many homes they razed. A similar framework applies to series and cinematic depictions of serial killers.

At a fundamental level, tornadoes — and seismic storms more broadly — are transfixing visual phenomena. Be it divinely ordained or spurred by science, it’s hard to avert our gaze from these natural disasters because of their sheer magnitude.

However, as is often the case, there’s a seeming psychological explanation for why we can’t turn away from tragedy. Dr. John Mayer, a clinical psychologist at Doctor on Demand, told NBC in 2017 that part of the reason can be attributed to humans’ innate survival instincts, which “act as a preventive mechanism to give us information on the dangers to avoid and to flee from.

"Witnessing violence and destruction, whether it is in a novel, a movie, on TV or a real life scene playing out in front of us in real time, gives us the opportunity to confront our fears of death, pain, despair, degradation and annihilation while still feeling some level of safety," Mayer continued. Once we know we are safe from harm, we continue engaging with a disaster or dangerous situation “as a way to face our fears.”

It’s part of why some women find true crime to be both binge-worthy and comforting — as psychiatrist Dr. Jean Kim told Cosmopolitan in August of last year, women may view consuming true crime as a way to confront their own fears. “Maybe there's something about trying to see what's going on and prevent it from happening to us,” she says. “There’s this kind of vicarious participation too, in something that's kind of horrifying and forbidden, and maybe for some reason — I'm not sure why — we're drawn to watching and participating in that, for better or worse.” As writer Kate Tuttle explained in a 2019 op-ed for the New York Times, “When women are connected to crime, we’re much more likely to be victims or survivors. Perhaps our fascination with these stories stems in part from wanting to learn from them. If a woman escaped her attacker in this particular way, we think, perhaps I could too.”

According to other experts, it’s not merely our sense of fight-or-flight that finds us engrossed by danger. Thomas Henricks, Ph.D., a Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Elon University, wrote in a 2022 article for Psychology Today that our fascination with televised catastrophes could assist in emotional processing, foster a sense of solidarity and community, and grant us permission to revel in “the splendor of production,” i.e., provide us with a scintillating story.

Though I find that final point somewhat reductive, I also see its merit. It gives credence to why I was so eager to see Lee Isaac Chung’s recently released film, “Twisters,” starring Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones. I suspected that the acting would be serviceable (it was). But I knew the tornadoes would be epic (they were). Each vortex had its own disposition and energy, starting and ending with two variations of the most deadly and destructive types of tornadoes, EF5's.

“Each of the six tornadoes in the film has its own sonic personality,” wrote The Washington Post’s Sonia Rao in an explainer published earlier this month. “The first and final storms are presented as killers, and the team layered a low, throbbing pulse onto the audio track to contribute a sense of menace.”

While the inherent desire to learn about entities deemed conventionally dangerous seems to have much to do with our ability to engage in the danger without actually experiencing it, I’d still relish the opportunity to safely witness a tornado first-hand, as morbid or insane as that might sound. If that doesn’t pan out, however, I know my curiosity will remain satiated by continuing to get my fill of EF 1-5’s from the comfort of my bedroom or the silver screen.