‘Take Shelter’ and how we respond to the end of the world

By Jake Skubish

The Hollywood blockbuster is defined more than anything by a commitment to spectacle, and when the goal is to entertain audiences at the biggest scale possible few plot devices are as convenient as the end of the world flashing before our very eyes. Whether the catastrophe is wrought by extraterrestrial forces (The War of the Worlds), nature (Titanic), or man himself (Jurassic Park), disaster films have long been a stronghold in cinema. The dominant genre of the present, the superhero movie, is an iteration of the category, centered on a legion of heroes seeking to prevent the total annihilation of the planet.

But how compelling can a disaster movie be when the audience has already experienced calamity first-hand? We may not have aliens landing on Earth or dinosaurs on the loose, but in the ongoing wreckage of the COVID-19 pandemic we’ve all encountered something akin to a disaster film. Our tragedy has been messier than those portrayed on screen, no less deadly or catastrophic but far more disparate, isolating, and incomprehensible. The pandemic has somehow made cinematic spectacle meager by comparison. Can a CGI meteor hurtling toward Earth really instill terror when we’ve seen the reality of over-capacity ICUs?

The most interesting disaster films, though, have always shied away from reveling in the magnitude of disaster in favor of examining the human response to it, and interrogating how a cataclysmic event rearranges the tapestry of our daily lives in less obvious ways. United 93 and World Trade Center may be emotionally evocative, but the most effective 9/11 movie has always been 25th Hour, setting Spike Lee’s love-hate relationship with America against a dreary post-9/11 New York backdrop.

This genre subversion is the root of the success of another low-key disaster movie, released 10 years ago today: Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter. The film stars Michael Shannon and Jessica Chastain as a married couple in small town-Ohio. The family is working class, with Curtis (Shannon) working a construction job while Samantha (Chastain) spends her precious free time selling handmade goods to bring in extra cash. There is an idyllic quality to their meager life, though, because they have a foundation of love and living well. As Curtis’ friend Dewart (Shea Whigham) says of him early in the film, “I think that’s the best compliment you can give a man. Take a look at his life and say, that’s good. That guy’s doing something right.”

Jimmy Stewart in Harvey (1950)

But things begin to unravel when Curtis has a series of disturbing dreams. He sees an impending storm, bats swarming in the air, and people and animals attacking him and his family. The visions seep into his waking life, and Curtis decides he must take action: he begins constructing a storm bunker in his yard. His commitment to the project puts his family under financial strain and costs him his job—and his health insurance, which the family needed for their daughter’s cochlear implant surgery. We learn Curtis’ mother developed schizophrenia at Curtis’ age, and the tension of Take Shelter as the film hurtles toward its final act is whether Curtis is having a premonition others cannot see or whether he is simply losing his grip on reality. The premise recalls the 1950 Jimmy Stewart film Harvey, in which only Stewart’s Elwood P. Dowd can see a six foot-tall rabbit named Harvey. Elwood is far more affable than Curtis, and is content with the incredulity of others. “I've wrestled with reality for 35 years,” Elwood says, “And I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.” With each subsequent vision, meanwhile, Curtis is losing his own bout with reality.

Take Shelter was released just three weeks after Contagion, a film many turned to in the early days of the pandemic. Contagion is a clinical film in both subject matter and approach; its strength lies in its ability to accurately mirror the public health crisis that unfolded in the real world. But Take Shelter is the sort of apocalyptic harbinger I prefer: not an investigation of what it looks like when the world falls apart, but how that calamity alters our minds.

Shannon carries this descent into madness with a powerfully blank performance. It feels odd to describe a performance so commanding as blank, but it’s an apt description for his energy. Curtis is an all-American Anton Chigurh, a man with nothing in his mind beyond the task immediately in front of him. He is a fixer and a steady presence in all aspects of his life, from his construction job to his daughter’s surgery to his own mental health. He makes no judgement of his apparent mental disorder; he just wants to solve it quickly and quietly. Even as Curtis’ actions become more drastic, you get the sense Shannon’s heart rate never rises until he’s pushed to the edge. This control, combined with Shannon’s signature intense eyes, allows him to grace the screen like a walking omen. Curtis always looks like he knows something terrible is around the corner, and he will inevitably be the one to bring it. All that can be done is to prepare.

His restrained aura is a perfect match for director Jeff Nichols’ vision of American masculinity. Nichols has directed five major films, and the common thread is a figure like Curtis: a resolute, goal-driven white man living out a quiet existence in rural America until something massive comes along to throw him off course. (Nichols is set to direct A Quiet Place III, which should provide an appropriate canvas for his interests.) The interference often stems from an overbearing government: a convict runs from the law in Mud, a couple fights against discrimination in Loving, and a father and son evade the FBI in Midnight Special. Nichols men are individualists and reserved rebels. Their tranquil demeanor is always juxtaposed with something unsettling just below the surface.

Nichols’ approach is largely observational. He obviously empathizes with these troubled men, but meanders through their stories as if they are figures in historical footage, subjects of a snapshot of masculinity. His protagonists strive to make the world as it should be, not as it is, but they won’t make a fuss about it. What makes Curtis unique in this canon is that he is not raging against an outside oppressor; he is raging against himself.

Take Shelter (2011)

Despite the stoic nature of his leading men, Nichols always has a penchant for infusing a healthy dose of sentimentality into his films. This is where Chastain enters the frame, and she is an absolute force (and an obvious movie star) from the moment she first appears. Her disposition contrasts Curtis’: Samantha, too, is a practical decision-maker, but she acts with a passion he appears unable to muster. While Curtis’ world collapses in his mind, hers is crumbling in a more tangible way as a result of his actions. Yet Samantha approaches her husband’s struggles with a delicate compassion. The emotional crux of Take Shelter is Samantha’s nudging of Curtis toward confronting the incompatibility of what’s in his mind versus what everyone else sees. “I’m sorry,” Curtis tells her through tears, at once apologizing for his behavior and for his inability to change it. But she refuses to let him relinquish agency over his fate. “This is something you have to do,” she tells him in the film’s climax.

There’s a concept in psychology known as having an internal or external locus of control: those with an internal locus of control think their successes or failures are attributable to their own actions, while those with an external locus of control attribute these developments to uncontrollable outside forces. Despite the impending storm he forecasts, Curtis, and all of Nichols’ leading men, are decidedly in the internal locus camp. Everything Curtis does is an attempt to mitigate impending doom. But in these tense moments with Samantha he relinquishes some of that control to let in the people closest to him. For Nichols there is virtue in maintaining an internal locus of control, but also in emotional vulnerability.

Whether or not Curtis’ visions have any validity is ultimately unclear, and also beside the point. If he’s right, then he’s more prepared than anyone for the chaos to come. And if he’s not it’s OK, because he has found a way to let others in without abandoning his convictions. He has won out over reality, as Elwood P. Dowd might frame it, because no matter what his reality looks like, it’s going to include his loved ones. The storm may still be coming, but Curtis has averted the true disaster: facing it alone.