On Planning: Tremors (1990)

Reader’s Note: This essay contains plot details.

Keene Short

The tiny town of Perfection, Nevada, is populated by schemers, preppers, and dreamers. There’s not much happening, and not much to plan for. While some residents set their sights on Bixby, others burrow into the landscape, anticipating a long stay. The unexplained appearance of gigantic sandworms with mouthed tentacles-for-tongues, sensitive to vibrations and hungry for anything that runs, upends Perfection and how its residents view the future.

The film opens with Earl (Fred Ward) and Valentine (Kevin Bacon) chiding each other over the odd jobs they do to make ends meet—fencing, sewage, trash pickup. The two men seem eager to leave Perfection for anywhere with more prospects, but as Earl points out, Valentine is unwilling to commit to a particular plan. As Earl notes seconds before a septic tank explosion, “Not having a plan is what keeps us doing jobs like this.”

Instead, Valentine is a dreamer. This becomes even more apparent when the two encounter Rhonda LeBeck (Finn Carter), a grad student-in-residence studying seismology in the Sierra Nevadas. Before meeting Rhonda, Valentine lists his criteria for his idea of the perfect woman. Even his name, Valentine, suggests a hopeless romantic, dreaming of a future so specific he can’t achieve it, thus giving him an excuse to never pursue good opportunities (romantic, professional, or otherwise) when they fall into his lap. Rhonda does not meet his criteria, of course, but it is clear from Earl’s tired reaction that nobody ever will.

For her part, Rhonda is the only outsider to Perfection. As the scientist in training, her character is defined by her studiousness. She never makes a plan throughout the film, but instead observes her environment to gather data and, based on that data, retrofit short-term solutions to immediate problems. The film introduces her identifying seismic anomalies. When she, Earl, and Valentine finally encounter the sandworms (referred to briefly as “graboids”), Rhonda identifies rocky outcrops as safe havens from the creatures, and comes up with the idea to pole vault between rocks to avoid touching the sand where the graboids can snatch them. Later, she breaks a water tower to release enough water to create sufficiently loud vibrations to distract the graboids while Valentine runs to a Caterpillar.

Is planning the secret sauce that characters like Valentine are missing? The one weird trick that keeps people stuck in Perfection, Nevada?

If Valentine is static and Rhonda is a short-term improviser, Burt and Heather Gummer (Michael Gross and Reba McEntire) represent the opposite. The couple are meticulous planners, essentially doomsday preppers who have invested thousands of dollars into a bunker that has, in Burt’s words, “Food for five years, a thousand gallons of gas, air filtration, water filtration, a Geiger counter,” all in a heavily-secured underground bomb shelter. The Gummers’ years of planning hardly pays off, as the two did not anticipate underground monsters, one of whom infiltrates the interior bunker with considerable ease, catching Burt and Heather off-guard despite their heavy fortifications and well-stocked ammunition.

However, Heather and Burt are not exactly hindered by their lack of planning for a prehistoric sandworm brood. In fact, both characters prove to be the most instrumental in the community’s survival because of their long-term planning. What matters is the irony that despite planning for every conceivable catastrophe, they fail to expect the one kind of catastrophe that unfolds—beaked sandworms who can outpace most cars and sense vibrations from miles away.

Instead, what saves the Gummers is their ability to improvise with the environment they have created for themselves. Just as Rhonda makes use of her knowledge of geology, the Gummers sprint from firearm to firearm trying to kill the infiltrating graboid, testing out different degrees of firepower against an entirely unknown foe, eventually settling on a prized elephant gun paired with a well-aimed flare. Abandoning their well-planned but circumstantially useless bunker, the Gummers improvise an arsenal of explosives—“a few household chemicals in the proper proportions”—that help move the community of Perfection closer to the safety of the mountains. While long-term planning provides an array of options, short-term improvisation is what saves Burt and Heather, and everybody else for a short while.

Store-owner Walter Chang (Victor Wong) and local annoying teenager Melvin Plug (Bobby Jacoby) engage in short-term improv that is intended for short-sighted gains. Walter is only interested in finding quick ways to profit from the advent of the graboids, while Melvin wants to entertain himself by scaring the adults with fake worm attacks. Both characters mimic each other in the scope of their ability. They make creative uses of their environment, but like Valentine for most of the film, they lack the maturity to put their creative thinking to use beyond quick profit or cheap laughs. Walter’s death is sudden, and Melvin barely escapes a graboid himself.

Valentine survives on the coattails of Earl or Rhonda only until he begins to improvise himself.

Only once he begins proclaiming, “I have a plan,” does Valentine acclimate his creative thinking to the severity of the situation he faces, learning to think quickly, to adapt quickly as the situation unfolds. Valentine’s development matches that of only one other character: The most intelligent graboid, called not-so-lovingly Old Stumpy after one of its tongue-snake-tentacles is torn off in a rapid car escape.

Stumpy is a quick learner, presumably the smartest of the graboids because it survives the longest after learning that humans, likewise, are quick learners. Humans know to move to solid rock, so Stumpy learns to wait. Humans learn to drive armored vehicles to the mountains, so Stumpy leads the graboids in digging a trench around their perimeter to keep them away from the high ground. Humans learn to trick graboids into eating bombs, and Stumpy learns to spit them back out. In their final showdown, Valentine has to think like Rhonda by using his geologic surroundings to trick Stumpy into sprinting through the side of a narrow cliff. Stumpy’s death mirrors that of the great white in Jaws and the truck in Duel, intelligent monsters whose defeat is signaled by their dramatic descent from the surface, into a metaphorical Hell. Like the truck, like the shark, Stumpy is defeated not through the protagonists’ brute force but by their tactical adaptation, their ability to form a plan from thin air.

Burt and Heather are the most resourceful characters, while Rhonda enters the film already trained in observation and data-gathering. Rhonda has only so much knowledge to work with, and Burt and Heather’s planning only provides them with additional resources in the face (metaphorically speaking) of the graboids. Valentine learns to adapt to the situation as the graboids do, by gathering data (like Rhonda) but incorporating it into anticipated steps (like Burt and Heather). The one skill that Valentine brings to the situation that is entirely his own is his brazenness, which lends him the confidence to take the risks necessary to run across the desert with a graboid in tow, screaming triumphantly “I have a plan!” while the audience tries to figure out what that plan entails.

Tremors relies on a cast of distinct characters whose individual skills are challenged by the same coinciding conflict. Each character must confront a personalized form of humiliation, in the more literal sense of the word, by making room for humility in their lives. Those who succeed in recognizing their limits tend to learn from them, and learn how to navigate a world-altering conflict that makes the very surface of the earth itself unsafe to tread. What the final showdown between Valentine and Stumpy comes down to is not a competition between planners or fighters, but a willingness to learn from the world, and from one’s own mistakes.

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