Another Ahab at the Movies

When watching movies I sometimes entertain myself thinking like a Jungian. Especially if the movie is itself forgettable, I have mental resources to wonder to which deep collective images, archetypes if you will, the screenwriters might have thought they were making an appeal.

This was my reaction to the recent movie INTO THE STORM. It was marketed as a disaster movie about a big storm cell that generates a lot of tornadoes, some of them of unprecedented ferocity, devastating the town of Silverton, Oklahoma.

But my suspicion is that the screenwriters at some point thought they were making more of a human interest movie about the well-financed storm chasing team using a state-of-the-art vehicle called the TITUS, a modified tank, designed to let them get into the heart of the storm, get photos of the eye and inner wall, and get out unscathed.

The head of the team is a fellow named Pete -- I don't know if he gets a last name -- played by Matt Walsh. That's Walsh, in character, in the photo above.

Pete set off my archetype-recognition wetware. Pete is the captain of his ship, which happens to be a modified tank, and he is obsessed with getting the perfect shot within a white whale of a perfect tornado. He has given 20 years of his life to this -- it is vastly more important than, say, the safety of his crew. Indeed, one member of his crew dies a grisly death at one point and Pete is unfazed, with his eye on the prize.

Now I'm afraid that I can't carry the analogy through properly without spoilers.

If my hypothesis is right, and the movie was conceived of at one point as Pete's story above all -- or his team's story more generally -- the writers with that conception have a legitimate beef. Someone cluttered up their archetypal tale with irrelevant intersecting plots, giving us the day in the life of a town about to be flattened.

They have my sympathies, and this song from Melanie.

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