Facing the End of the World: Take Shelter as Horror Ecocinema

Abstract

in one of the most dramatic scenes in Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter (2011), a film about a construction worker who begins to have nightmares involving an impending storm, the protagonist angrily turns over a table during a community gathering and unleashes a dreadful prophecy: “There is a storm comin’ like nothing you have ever seen. And not a one of you is prepared for it . . . . Sleep well in your beds. ’Cause if this thing comes true, there ain't gonna be any more.” For E. Ann Kaplan, who analyzed Take Shelter in her 2015 study of “climate trauma” in dystopian film and fiction, the protagonist is traumatized by something that has not yet taken place, and in this respect, she argues, he embodies “the cultural unconscious about global warming” (41). Since then, Take Shelter has often been discussed as part of the “cautionary tales around climate change” (Brereton 157) and what has been dubbed “cli-fi” (Craps 81), a category of films, novels, and other cultural forms whose dystopian scenarios are said to convey our increasing anxiety about the disastrous effects of the anthropogenic impact on the planet (Leikam and Leyda; Weik von Mossner).Take Shelter seems to adhere to the well-known narrative of a male hero struggling to protect his family from the planetary-scale catastrophe—what Joanna Zylinska calls, in reference to the apocalyptic visions of the Anthropocene, “the Armageddon for the White Man” (38). However, the film's consistent engagement with the conventions of the horror genre opens up space for unpacking heroic action and male anxiety in “end of the world” scenarios in new ways. For Agnes Woolley, Nichols's film dramatizes “the imaginative impasse often engendered by the environmental crisis” and suggests “alternative ways of knowing our environment to the empirical modes within which contemporary discourses of climate change tend to operate” (176). Toward the end of her article, Woolley briefly points to the film's generic instability, suggesting that even though Take Shelter does not directly belong to ecocinema, it may be read as such, because it helps “to reorient the way we view nature by attending to its materiality and determining power through the populist codes of conventional cinema” (189).Taking Woolley's observation as a starting point, an observation that reveals her somewhat ambivalent attitude toward what she sees as “the populist codes of conventional cinema,” this article provides a more detailed examination of genre to contend that the conventions of the horror film play a crucial role in Take Shelter's ecological attentiveness. In this sense, my central argument is that the film can be understood as what I dub here “horror ecocinema,” bringing together both the scholarship on ecocinema (MacDonald; Willoquet-Maricondi) and horror studies (Creed; Shaviro; Aldana Reyes). While at first glance Take Shelter would seem to elude simple classification as an eco-film or a horror film, I show how it compellingly addresses pressing ecological issues through a heavy reliance on cinematic affect and fear narratives commonly explored in the horror genre. In dialogue with Rob Nixon's consideration of slow violence, and the new materialist concept of “weathering” (Neimanis and Walker), I read Take Shelter through horror eco-aesthetics to shift the focus from spectacular disasters to the process of noticing the unseen: the complex entanglements of humans and the more-than-human realm of the weather.Take Shelter participates in the dominant fear narratives of the climate emergency era, which often feature Western, heterosexual, cisgender men struggling to survive in the face of the apocalypse (Kaplan 22). In the paradigmatic The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich's 2004 cli-fi depicting extreme weather events that result from the disruption of the North Atlantic Ocean circulation, Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid), an American paleoclimatologist and father, stops at nothing to rescue humanity and reunite with his son. In Emmerich's later film 2012 (2009), which offers spectacles of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and a mega-tsunami that reaches the Himalayas, the protagonist, a struggling science fiction writer, manages to bring his family to safety by leading them to large ships called “Sister Arks.” The ships initially were accessible only for the evacuation of those able to pay one million dollars per seat, but in the end and in consonance with the ultimately utopian impulse of the film, the gates are opened for everyone. In the more recent Geostorm, a 2017 cli-fi by Dean Devlin, humans learn how to regulate the weather through a system of climate-controlling satellites. Satellite designer Jake Lawson (Gerard Butler) saves the world—and his daughter—from a storm of epic proportions, but not before we witness quite a few spectacular disasters, including tornadoes in Mumbai, a heat wave in Moscow, and a mega-tsunami in Dubai. The film explicitly frames the extreme weather events as security threats and shares with other cli-fi texts its central premise: that environmental problems can be solved through the very same means that gave rise to them, such as the ideology of progress, unfettered capitalism, and technological and scientific developments.1Although significantly smaller in scale and produced within the context of US independent filmmaking, Take Shelter also addresses the male anxiety about what can be considered an environmental disaster: an incoming storm of monstrous proportions that threatens to destroy life on the planet.2 Curtis (Michael Shannon), a husband and a father, tries to save his family by means of technical-technological solutions, in this case by reconditioning an old tornado shelter in his backyard. Like other cli-fi heroes, he embodies the role of a Cassandra character, “a common cli-fi type usually portrayed as a scientist warning an ignorant public . . . in vain about the dangers of climate change” (Leyda, “Petropolitics” 96). In effect, Curtis's prophecy during the community gathering, treated as a sign of madness by his colleagues and his own family, echoes an early scene in The Day After Tomorrow, in which Jack, after presenting abundant evidence for a global weather shift to the US government, is dismissed by climate deniers and by the vice president himself, who values economic interests above tackling the environmental risks.3 Curtis is not a scientist, but as his speech during the community meeting makes clear, he might be the only one who is truly prepared for the incoming storm.4Yet there is a crucial aspect to Take Shelter that does not feature in other cli-fi films: the natural disaster seems to exist only in the protagonist's head. Throughout the film, he is plagued by visual and auditory hallucinations of menacing rain. He also sees swarms of ominous black birds, zombie-like figures, and a monstrous dog, and he has recurrent visions about being harmed by people close to him, his best friend from work and his wife. Curtis is deeply troubled due to the psychological history of his mother, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia that was diagnosed in her at about the same age that Curtis is now. In the end, there is indeed a strong, if completely manageable, tornado, but the viewers do not see it in the film as the camera remains with the family in the shelter. Once the tornado is over, Curtis agrees to start his treatment, but just when his life seems to be back on the track to normalcy, the film culminates with a more properly cli-fi scene: the megastorm Curtis dreamt about. Significantly, however, the film closes just before the storm's aftereffects on the planet are shown.In line with other films that engage with the Anthropocene imaginaries, Take Shelter offers a world that stands in stark contrast to the pastoral tradition of idealizing nature: “No longer a passive object of the human gaze, nature in its dying is now active, a negative force, a violent presence, oftentimes an actor in its own right” (Kaplan 40). In its use of horror conventions, Take Shelter departs from eco-horror films in which nature strikes back, be it animals or other nonhuman beings attacking humans in revenge.5 Further, Take Shelter does not seem to overtly engage with environmentalist agendas, nor does it rely on awe-inspiring spectacles of natural disasters that result from the anthropogenic climate change associated with cli-fi cinema. Yet the film does deal, at least implicitly, with the disastrous ecological consequences of human activity by aesthetically connecting that activity with the gigantic storm to come. For instance, Curtis's job in a sand-mining company is relevant. Like other industrial extractions, the extraction of sand is a direct cause of erosion and can profoundly impact wildlife. The yellowish palette of the sand-covered landscape extends into other scenes as well. Perhaps most significantly, the film creates a visual continuity6 between the sand mine and the yellow rain in Curtis's hallucinations, which he says is “like fresh motor oil,” thus drawing a connection with another extractive human activity that is having far-reaching effects on the planet.7In this sense, the film fits into a wider category of cli-fi, which according to Susanne Leikam and Julia Leyda distinguishes itself from earlier texts about the extreme weather “through its foregrounding of the human causation of climate change . . . and—especially and maybe most importantly—the less spectacular, but equally harmful, structural, social, and environmental injustices inherent in anthropogenic modifications of the global climate famously termed ‘slow violence’ by Rob Nixon” (109–10). Certainly, Nichols's refusal to graphically render catastrophic events at the end of the film and his subtle distribution of attention toward other injustices, to which I return later, are in keeping with Nixon's emphasis on violence that is not “immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space,” but rather “occurs gradually and out of sight . . . an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (2). Nixon writes about the representational challenges posed by the persistent concealment of slow violence: In a world permeated by insidious, yet unseen or imperceptible violence, imaginative writing can help make the unapparent appear . . . . Writing can challenge perceptual habits that downplay the damage slow violence inflicts and bring into imaginative focus apprehensions that elude sensory corroboration. The narrative imaginings of writer-activists may thus offer us a different kind of witnessing: of sights unseen. (15)In dialogue with Nixon's proposal, but transposing it to film studies, I suggest that reading Take Shelter as “horror ecocinema” is particularly fruitful for the discussions of the ecological, as it turns the focus from immediate disasters to the process of making “the unapparent appear”—in this case, both the changing climate and the human activities that lead to such changes. In particular, Nichols's film shifts perceptual habits through use of the popular codes of horror, by acting on viewers’ senses and evoking bodily affect that is in line with the appeal of the horror genre.8 In this respect, it exemplifies what I have called elsewhere (Paszkiewicz 9), drawing on Anna Tsing, ecocinema as belonging to “the arts of noticing,”9 where noticing makes reference to both accountability and the senses.In what follows, I show that such noticing is cultivated on several levels in Take Shelter. Through a unique combination of the strategies of ecocinema and horror, the film draws attention to the materiality of the weather, fostering cinematic affect that destabilizes the border between the (human) subject that is looking and the (nonhuman) object that is being looked at, thus challenging the viewers’ sense of separateness from the weather and the “natural” world. However, such affect is mediated through the film's heavy reliance on references to other horror films, which help construct the storm as a monster and, at the same time, contribute to the progressive undoing of the “extreme weather hero” (Leikam 29). In addition, through the dexterous intertwining of several fear narratives in the US context, Take Shelter makes audiences notice the relationship between the dire effects of the Anthropocene and the multiple forms of exploitation of humans and the rest of nature under neoliberal capitalism.Reading Take Shelter through ecocinematic optics might seem counterintuitive at first. Ecocinema traditionally has been associated with documentaries and experimental, durational filmmaking, as epitomized by James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, or Bill Viola. According to Paula Willoquet-Maricondi, ecocinema fosters ecocentric worldviews and sensibilities, often with “consciousness-raising and activist intentions” (45). Scott MacDonald, in turn, defines ecocinema as the sort of filmmaking that “provides an evocation of the experience of being immersed in the natural world” (“Toward an Eco-Cinema” 108). Ecocinematic scholarship tends to engage with Bazinian ontological realism (Pick) or Deleuzian time-image (McMahon), and it focuses attention on specific film strategies, such as the use of static camera and long takes.10 These strategies are meant to help audiences notice the natural world and feel both responsive to and responsible for it, evoking Haraway's hyphenated notion of “response-ability” (7).While not explicitly environmentalist or consciousness-raising, Take Shelter also appears to participate in this endeavor, and it does so by intertwining eco-aesthetics with the codes that are characteristic of the horror genre. A horror-ecocinematic looking at weather is evident from the very beginning of the film. Take Shelter opens with an image of a tree's jostling leaves, evocative of a strategy used in ecocinema often conceptualized as cultivating environmental “mindfulness” (MacDonald, “Toward an Eco-Cinema”). Yet the image is slightly slowed down, giving this opening shot an uncanny feeling, which is reinforced by a repeated bell sound. The film cuts to Curtis, standing awestruck in his driveway, his eyes locked on the sky. The next, over-the-shoulder shot, from a slightly low angle, shows that he is looking at a sky filled with menacing black and gray clouds, swirling into one another in strange ways. It looks like a storm cell is stretching out on the horizon. The clouds, with lightning beginning to appear, move fast over the protagonist's head, while his figure looks overwhelmed by the horizon. Now the soundtrack combines the noise of thunder, a loud bass instrument, and chimes, creating an eerie effect.A light rain begins to fall, and viewers see it dropping on Curtis's uniform shirt. He notices something bizarre: while holding his palm out flat in front of him, he realizes that the water is not rain, but an amber-colored, viscous substance, like oil. The camera shows, in an extreme close-up, how he rubs the water with his thumb and fingers and then smells it with disbelief. He looks to the sky again and closes his eyes as the rain pelts his face. The film cuts to Curtis holding his head under a running shower, the water now clean. This cuts to a close-up of a frying pan with scrambled eggs, which is followed by images of Curtis's family: his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), and his daughter, Hannah (Tova Stewart), are having breakfast while Curtis is getting ready for work. Samantha reminds Curtis about sending a deposit for the beach house, while in the background the radio newsreader is reporting about a harsh economic crisis and labor reform.This opening sequence is emblematic of what can be conceptualized as the film's horror eco-aesthetics. One of the key strategies in the film is a particular use of montage, which often confuses different realities and temporalities, aesthetically amplifying Curtis's desperate attempts to disentangle what is “real” from hallucination. As Kaplan observes in reference to other scenes, the “futurist climate fantasies” smoothly slide into Curtis's diegetic reality “in such a way that at first we are not sure if the violent storms and accompanying zombie figures and monstrous dogs are part of the film's narrative present, as in other zombie works” (41). Woolley also points to how Nichols bridges visuals and sound across what are supposed to be fiction and reality within the film's diegesis, dissolving the boundaries between the two: in the opening sequence, the sound of rain, transposed to the running shower and then the sizzling of eggs, destabilizes the defining lines between Curtis's apocalyptic dream world and mundane domesticity (186). In the process, Take Shelter also uncovers the uncanny continuity between monstrous weather and suburban life in the Anthropocene, in which almost every daily activity depends on resource extraction and cheap fossil fuels. In this respect, the film seems to stage, and confront, people's evasive relationship with the realities of the climate emergency, what Leyda conceptualizes as “the climate unconscious”: “a trace of meaning that points to climate change, which is not overtly signaled yet arguably informs significant structures of feeling in the early 21st century” (“Post-Air-Conditioning Futures” 101).11The codes of the horror film, such as the disquieting use of montage and soundtrack choices, are closely intertwined with strategies associated with ecocinema. It is significant that the film's establishing shot, which in classical cinema orients audiences in the story, feels so disorientating in Take Shelter and that what viewers see is the stormy landscape (or, one could argue, what they see is the weather itself). As Woolley explains, “we too scrutinize the rustling of leaves in the breeze for signs of danger and possible threat, or look up at the sky, attempting to read the gathering clouds for signs of things to come” (186). Woolley proposes that in contrast to how the weather (or “nature” more broadly) serves usually as a mere backdrop or metaphor for human dramas and emotions, Take Shelter emphasizes its materiality, and in doing so, it signals people's incapacity to read it—either because they lost this capacity when they moved to the cities or because their scientific explanations are now insufficient to grasp it due to its growing instability (186). The weatherly elements in Take Shelter do not simply move from the secondary to the primary position to become part of the plot, as in many natural disaster films; they exist in excess of their narrative or symbolic function.It could be further argued that the recurrent scenes that show Curtis's contemplation of the weather foster an aesthetic and affective attunement with the more-than-human realm, as postulated by ecocinema scholars. Such an attunement is, of course, not new, as it has accompanied cinema from its early years. One of the most repeated anecdotes in film history refers to how, during the first exhibitions of Louis Lumière's Le Repas de bébé (1895), audiences were more captivated by the distant leaves shaking in the wind than in the baby being fed in the foreground (Schonig 30–31). The legend was echoed in other famous remarks from Georges Méliès and D. W. Griffith, as well as in Siegfried Kracauer's reflection on the rustling foliage and moving clouds. Discussing their observations, Emil Leth Meilvang argues, “Through cinema's framing and creation of meteorology arises a potential for ecological and ethical commitment” (73).In the context of climate emergency, such cinematic rendering of weather acquires additional complexity. In their thought-provoking article on “weathering,” Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker challenge the usual distinction between climate (understood as distant patterns over time) and weather (seen as unpredictable and local and something that may or may not follow the larger patterns) to diminish the distance between “the enormity of climate change and the immediacy of our own flesh” (562). Building on new materialist and posthumanist approaches (such as those proposed by Stacy Alaimo, Karen Barad, and Claire Colebrook), Neimanis and Walker conceptualize weathering “as a logic, a way of being/becoming, or a mode of affecting and differentiating that brings humans into relation with more-than-human weather” (560). Just as “nature” and “culture” cannot be thought of as separate categories, “humans” and “nonhuman weather” are not only interconnected but co-constitutive.12Curtis's desperate attempts to take shelter mirror the ways in which Western societies intend to keep the weather out (Neimanis and Walker 561).13 At the end of the day, the protagonist cannot control the weather, nor can he separate himself from it by fortifying his own haven. In this sense, the recurrent scenes when Curtis contemplates strange cloud formations—or green grasses and tree leaves blowing in the wind—are relevant, as they foster the kind of sensibility Neimanis and Walker are calling for: instead of framing the climate change imaginary as relying on either “neoliberal progress narratives of controlling the future” or “sustainability narratives of saving the past” (558), they propose “to cultivate a sensibility that attunes us not only to the ‘now’ of the weather, but toward ourselves and the world as weather bodies, mutually caught up in the whirlwind of a weather-world” (561). This proposal is also in line with the ecocinematic “pedagogy of worldly reciprocity” (Landreville), which involves “revivify(ing) our relationship with the world” (Ivakhiv x). In keeping with John Landreville's argument about Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011), Take Shelter does not offer, however, “a deeper form of seeing” that would “disclose an authentic and otherwise occulted, ‘Nature”’ (8)—as Scott MacDonald's (“Toward an Eco-Cinema”) definition of ecocinema would imply. Where Malick's film relies on the aesthetics of post-continuity, Take Shelters achieves “worldly reciprocity” by making the contemplative looking at the “natural” environment eerie—and thus delimiting rather than enhancing the protagonist's comprehension of the weather.Horror strategies not only participate but are crucial in the aesthetic and affective operation of creating such ecocinematic attunement, based here on what Woolley calls “epistemological uncertainty” (182). In effect, “epistemological uncertainty” is central to horror conventions more broadly (see Carroll; Tudor). Take Shelter draws on this convention in another sequence that appears later in the film: an unsettling sound bridge connects the scene in which Curtis teaches Hannah how to sign “sunshine” with the scene in which he drives through farmland while Samantha and Hannah sleep in the back of the car. Curtis suddenly notices through the passenger window streaks of lightning breaking across the night sky. He pulls the car over and climbs out as bolts continue to streak down. While other cars continue to pass by, Curtis asks in disbelief, “Is anyone else seeing this?” The fact that Curtis is the only person who sees the “monstrous” weather evokes the familiar horror film convention in which, initially, only the protagonist can perceive danger (which might also refer here to the now-hard-to-ignore rising global temperatures and more frequent disasters). Yet as suggested by the opening sequence—in which Curtis closes his eyes as he hears the ponderous thunder and then rubs the greasy yellow raindrops between fingers and smells them—the film activates senses other than sight. According to Nixon, “to apprehend . . . often imperceptible threats requires rendering them apprehensible to the senses” (14). The film's aesthetic strategies seem to materialize this claim, as they make the imperceptible perceptible in a sensuous, bodily, affective way, making use of the codes of horror.It might seem paradoxical that the affective, de-anthropocentric “worldly reciprocity” in Take Shelter is so hyper-individualized, psychologized, and focalized on Curtis. However, in line with the studies on cinematic affect and bodily sensations in the horror film (Williams, Creed, Shaviro), it could be argued that Take Shelter shatters the stability of the subject and, in the process, the viewers’ separateness from, and control of, the weather-world.Take Shelter articulates Curtis's attunement and responsivity to the more-than-human realm through horror eco-aesthetics, making quite literal his bodily inextricability from the changing weather. As the film progresses, Curtis's apocalyptic visions begin to imprint themselves physically on his body.14 At some point, Curtis watches a television program about a man whose wife and brother-in-law died in their home because of a chlorine spill. The newsreader reports: “The gas cloud spread across their six-acre property. The only way off their land was across the train tracks, which were blocked by wreckage . . . Jacobs survived despite enduring eleven hours of exposure to the gas cloud before finally being flown out by helicopter.” The news references a real 2005 train crash that spread a toxic plume of chlorine gas through the small town of Graniteville. The accident killed 9 people and injured more than 850, some of whom suffered severe lung damage. It forced an estimated 5,400 residents to abandon their homes for weeks due to toxic contamination.15 In consonance with the broader pattern of continuity that characterizes Take Shelter, the scene that follows transposes the horror-like idea of being trapped in a dangerous house, here intertwined with an ecological disaster, to Curtis's diegetic reality. The film cuts to a close-up on a window. It is daytime, but the house feels dark because of the storm outside, with thick rain smearing down the glass. The sound of rain pelts the window, and thunder strikes. The color palette, a dull yellow-orange glow from the lamps and from the window, is eerie and immediately evokes both the oily rain and the gas cloud from the news. Curtis, dressed for work, finds his daughter sitting on the couch with her back to him, looking out one of the window. He calls her, but Hannah does not move; she simply continues staring out the window. He reaches for her but then flinches when he sees a man outside. (Hannah and the man have been staring at one another.) The man, who is extremely pale and resembles a zombie, finally moves out of sight. The wind picks up, and the sound of the storm is louder. The front door rattles, as if someone is trying to get in. Suddenly, all the furniture in the living room lifts off the ground and hangs in the air, floating for a moment with a deafening sound, like that of an explosion. Curtis himself seems almost suctioned by the wind. The furniture comes down, crashing on the floor. Viewers hear a snarling noise from outside as Curtis holds Hannah and sits on the floor, bracing himself for the worst. The next cut is to Curtis gasping for air in his bed. The cut connects the last two images via the sound of Curtis suffocating and, visually, through the focus on his open mouth. When he wakes up, he realizes that his mattress is soaked in yellow urine.Take Shelter's affective appeal is in keeping with the appeal of the horror genre, in that it is realized, in part, through the protagonist's trajectory toward the state of abjection, associated with bodily fluids, such as the urine in the aforementioned scene or sweat, blood, and vomit in other scenes. Although, as Woolley asserts, such moments clearly point to “Curtis's unfolding crisis of masculinity—his lack of control over his family's financial and emotional security” (185), they also gesture to the ways in which the horror genre, and in particular its engagement with abjection, works to threaten the fully constituted rational subject. For Kristeva, and for Barbara Creed, who famously adapts this idea to horror cinema, the abject is a “place where meaning collapses,” where “I am not” (Kristeva 2). It “does not respect borders, positions, rules,” disturbing “identity, system, order,” for which it must be expelled (4). As Creed argues, popular horror films tend toward an annihilation of the threat to nuclear family and a repression of the abject, so that the boundaries of normality can be restored (14). However, Take Shelter stages a collapse of the symbolic order, concluding with images of a potential annihilation. The monstrous element, the storm, is not ejected. On the contrary, the film suggests that monstrous weather is a phenomenon that must be lived with—or even that it is part of humans in many ways. In this sense, Take Shelter seems to respond, in a horror-like fashion, to the new materialist project of “bringing climate change home” (Neimanis and Walker 572). Neimanis and Walker explain: To bring climate change home . . . entails reconfiguring our spatial and temporal relations to the weather-world and cultivating an imaginary where our bodies are makers, transfer points, and sensors of the “climate change” from which we might otherwise feel too distant, or that may seem to us too abstract to get a bodily grip on. We propose [to] reimagine “climate change” and the fleshy, damp immediacy of our own embodied existences as intimately imbricated and begin to understand that the weather and the climate are not phenomena “in” which we live at all—where climate would be some natural backdrop to our separate human dramas—but are rather of us, in us, through us. (559)Curtis's body becomes, metaphorically and materially, the “sensor of the climate change,” as despite all his futile attempts to keep the extreme weather out, he incorporates it in a fleshy, visceral way.As a “body genre,” the horror film does not rely on the pleasures of safe, distanced looking (Williams); instead, it often creates a corporeal rapport between film and viewer. Arguably, the somatic affect that Curtis's visceral hallucinations prod