Curtis fears that he may be becoming mentally ill. He can’t sleep, and when he does, he has terrible nightmares of a thunderstorm, dying birds, and of his family turning against him. He starts to experience these dreams while awake as hallucinations; or perhaps he is just falling asleep and dreaming during the day? Or perhaps, as he comes to suspect, his visions are literal premonitions of a terrible apocalyse that only he can prevent?
There are lots of ways of interpreting Take Shelter, probably all of which are intended by the writer and director. Many reviewers focus on the economic precariousness of life after the financial crisis, which the film constantly reminds us of. But the film also constantly reminds us how financially secure Curtis is; his family home is (at the start of the film) mortgage free; he has a secure position at work; and a good health insurance plan that completely covers the treatment costs of his daughter’s deafness (the result of a childhood infection).
I’m struck by how irrational Curtis’s fear of losing his health is. He believes that he may be schizophrenic - he self-diagnoses using library books, and asks his mother, who suffers from schizophrenia, about whether she had nightmares like his - but even by his count, he has only 5 out of 12 symptoms required, and his mother says that she doesn’t recall anything like his nightmares. (Speaking of Curtis’s mother, she abandoned him and his brother during a psychotic episode - might this have something to do with the supernatural effects of the storm on Curtis’s family in his visions?) He ignores this evidence, and avoids useful help, refusing to see a psychiatrist and instead taking increasing doses of unnamed “sedatives” reluctantly prescribed by his family doctor. Curtis is clearly not schizophrenic. If he is mentally ill, he is suffering from something more like generalised anxiety or OCD - that fits with his insomnia, hypocondria, and obsession with storm defence.
All three of Curtis’s fears: of the storm, of mental illness, of losing his livelihood are equally irrational, from a third-person standpoint. But he can’t quite free himself from any one of them without giving in to the others. He thinks that, if he isn’t schizophrenic, then, the storm must be real, and vice versa; if he seeks treatment for his visions, then he will be bankrupted by the cost. Tragically, all three will come to pass, but (in the latter two cases at least) only because Curtis fears them. Any one of the three can be taken as a metaphor for the others.
The more I think about this film, the more I wonder how much of what we see is really happening. Obviously Curtis’s visions aren’t really happening (other people can’t see or hear them), but other things don’t add up either. If Curtis’s insurance is so good, why do the “sedatives” cost so much? If the doctor only gave him “a small number”, how is he able to take so many of them, night after night, until the point where they cause a seizure? (The doctor’s description of what he is prescribing matches a drug like Zopiclone, but the cost and effects do not, and the the film is careful to hide any other description of what exactly Curtis is taking.) If Curtis told his family at dinner that he was going to “work on the old storm shelter”, why did they all ignore him, when his wife is already upset by his obsession with it? Like David Lynch’s Lost Highway, this is a portrait of a man trying to convince himself that something he is ashamed of isn’t real; but because we see things from the protagonist’s point of view, we can’t quite tell what’s real either.
Philosophical themes: appearance and reality, rationality
Filmic awesomeness: unreliable narration
Until September 2016 I am a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College and an Associate Professor in the Oxford Philosophy Faculty. From then on, I'll be a Senior Adviser at the New Zealand Ministry of Transport.
My intellectual interests are mainly in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ethics, and of course transport policy.
