Alexandra Marple

PHL-421-02
24 April 2015

Film Response Take Shelter

The film Take Shelter left me struggling to distinguish reality from fantasy from the beginning to
the final scene. Throughout the film, the audience follows the experiences of the protagonist
named Curtis, and his family after Curtis begins to have terrible nightmares and visions of
storms. In the beginning of the film, we are able to see things from Curtiss perspective, but as
his visions become increasingly intense and surreal we begin to realize that the visions cannot be
reality and we see the perspective of the film shift to that of his peers. The audience determines
that these unreal projections must involve either madness or premonition.

This film makes great use of obscure time-images and forces the audience to respond. There are
many instances where something is too powerful, too painful, or too beautiful to be
incorporated in the movement-image circuit and our habitual understanding of things. For
instance, at the peak of our perspective of Curtiss visions, he dreams of someone trying to break
into his house during a storm and suddenly the furniture floats upward as if the house has been
lifted into the air by the storm. The audience does not know for sure that it is a dream until the
image of Curtis waking up comes into the screen, but even though the dream has some feasible
elements, it becomes obvious during the vision that it cant be reality; it is simply too powerful.
This shows the break of the movement-image.

Both of the basic interdependent axes through which the time-image breaks the movement-image
can be seen in Take Shelter. As I mentioned earlier, when the film begins the audience sees
everything from Curtiss perspective. We see the storm clouds and lightening and we hear the
thunder which seems to loom over his town. The storm is certainly impressive but it doesnt
necessarily break from reality. But then the storms he experiences become increasingly intense,
and he begins having terrifying nightmares and odd visions of flocks of birds. Although we hope
that Curtis is not going crazy, we recognize that the things he is seeing and experiencing are
simply not of this world.

There is a break in the movement-image each time Curtis sees or hears something that the rest of
the cast does not experience. For example, at one point Curtis is sure that he hears thunder but
those around him hear nothing and we see that the sky is clear blue. The audience hears the
thunder, and if it werent for the reaction of the other characters, we would believe that the
thunder took place in reality. Curtiss version of reality progressively breaks from that of the
rest of the characters. Breaks such as this could be seen as either Bergsonian or Blanchotian.
For instance, they can be Bergsonian breaks in that Curtiss version of reality differs from the
reality of the rest of the cast. The projections are very real to him, but are very unreal to the rest
of the cast. This gives the audience multiple versions of reality for a time until we are able to
determine that Curtiss visions are not reality. These breaks could also be viewed as Blanchotian
because what the audience sees and what is being said do not correspond. What we know
is challenged by what we cannot know (the obscure). We know that the visions which Curtis is
having are not normal in our own reality, but we cannot know what they mean in the reality of
the movie.

The ending of the film is certainly a Blanchotian break in the movement-image. Everything
which we had come to know in the movie is challenged. Suddenly, the entire family is on the
same page. His wife and daughter can see the powerful storm, hear the thunder, and feel the oily
rain. At this point the audience loses their ability to say that Curtis has effectively gone crazy,
and yet we cannot say for sure that it was all a premonition of this super storm. All-in-all, these
obscure time-images force the audience to question all that they think they know of the reality of
the movie.