I. Introduction

“If you really wanna fly, learn to befriend the winds.” ― Curtis Tyrone Jones

Tornados are both terrifying and captivating. That is why so many movies, television programs, streaming documentaries, and magazine articles are devoted to them and the humans who survive them. An example: In 2011, Esquire magazine published “What It Feels Like…to Be Carried by a Tornado.” The short story is about 39-year-old Rick Boland, a tree trimmer that got “lifted about a hundred yards by a twister that leveled his St. Mary, Missouri” home. He speaks about how the wind howled, how his house started to shimmy, how stuff “was flying off the deck.” He, his son, and his son’s girlfriend made it to the bathroom on the top floor of his house, to get into a bathtub for safety. It was at that time the power went out and he “heard windows blowing out, stuff smacking” and then “the loudest thing [he] ever heard in [his] life, like three 747’s right above your head.” With that came a stillness and then absolute chaos: the “house disintegrated.” He kept his eyes closed; he just wanted to keep “the wind and debris from getting in.” He was in “deep pain,” took “a blow to the head”; he started literally spinning and he eventually hit the ground hard, but had enough strength to look up and see “the tail up in the sky.” It was the first tornado he ever saw. The aftermath: he had thirty pieces of wood in him of various sizes, and his son had “a punctured lung, three cracked ribs, a broken shoulder blade, and his ear was just barely hanging on.” A harrowing experience; and we, as readers and viewers, are compelled to read about it and see it, whether physically or in our mind’s eye.¹

According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, the so-called 2011 Tornado Super Outbreak had a confirmed 362 tornadoes in April alone, causing millions of dollars in damage and hundreds of deaths, while also producing countless personal narratives of survival and strength.² These individuals overpowered the sheer force of the wind that swept them away from their residences, and they endured enough heartache to present their accounts in cinematic detail. As chance would have it, earlier that same year, prior to the rash of twisters that spring, the film Take Shelter found its way into theaters. The movie shows how one can become so obsessed with funnel clouds to the point of panic and mental breakdowns. Michael Shannon plays Curtis, whose visions of the apocalypse compel him to fix the storm shelter in his backyard to save himself, his wife and their deaf daughter. For Curtis, the apocalypse comes in the form of tornados and intense storms, which I read here as of Biblical proportions. I will analyze Take Shelter in the light of the climate crisis, focusing on its use of religious imagery of the apocalypse and of wind as a spiritual entity. Take Shelter offers a relevant study of the relation with extreme weather events and their impact and connections to the psyche and imagination; and on science and religion in North-American society and its common individuals, here represented by Curtis. This short essay will be a textual analysis of Take Shelter, a lesser-known film that is significant as it pertains to psychology, theology, and human ecology.

II. Psychology

Most of the film has Curtis, who has a familial history of mental illness (his mother has schizophrenia), on edge and fragmented. He attempts to live his blue-collar, all-American (White? Patriarchal?) lifestyle while experiencing debilitating nightmares and visions. Just prior to the shot above, he is having dinner with his wife and child at a local lodge when he gets into a violent physical altercation with a former friend. He screams at the shocked dinner patrons that a storm is coming and none of the community members are ready for it. Though the town considers his visions crazy, he decides to rigorously repurpose an old storm shelter rotting away in his backyard. He also unsuccessfully goes to doctors to get help for his madness. In one of his nightmares, his daughter runs into the middle of the road and Curtis must save her. He picks her up, hugs her tight, and looks to the sky. In front of him are hundreds of birds in formation, flying back and forth, while behind him black clouds and torrential winds come perilously close. Without warning, the birds swoop down and attack Curtis and his daughter; a powerful gust comes from the flapping birds’ wings and they cause Curtis apparent harm and confusion. The birds travel back to the sky, though one immediately falls to the ground, dead. The tornado sirens start wailing as more birds fall, dropping like bombs until both he and his wife are startled awake by the sound of those same sirens. His dream, he believes, is becoming a reality and it leads all three to seek shelter in the storm cellar. Curtis believes it is the end of the world; instead, it is only a strong storm that left calm and sunny skies in its wake along with some downed power lines and tree branches. With that said, Bos et al. claim wind patterns and directions can affect the mental health of humans a time-series analysis “can give a detailed and patient-specific account of symptom dynamics and can reveal subtle environmental influences on psychopathology.”³ Are Curtis’s personality shifts going through these influences? Tornados are similar in their behavior patterns: they shift from place to place without rhyme or reason. In a way, they have personalities, some are not overly dangerous, benignly hitting the ground and going back up into the clouds within seconds, while some are angry and murderous, killing anything and anyone in its path. Curtis here is scared and helpless until he awakes and “saves” his family’s life.

III. Theology

According to Walter Gulik’s “The Bible and Ecological Spirituality,” ecological spirituality has four components: we must recognize all things are interconnected and interdependent; recognition leads to an understanding of nature’s fragility; commitment to nature’s protection must be “grounded in an appreciative affirmation” of life and the cosmos; and, there must be a powerful moral commitment as well as a physical one to take care of nature.⁴ In Take Shelter, the dream sequence is a physical manifestation of ecological spirituality. Curtis sees the birds, a common motif throughout the film mentioned earlier, for the first time. Here there is no wind; the air is stagnant. He is in the foreground looking up, but he is not separated from the birds. He is, on the same level, one with the formation, an extension of it. And yet, he is standing firmly on the ground. He sees that humans connect with nature; and the environment, like the human mind, is fragile, fragmented, and sometimes chaotic. The birds in this case, however, are organized, strong, and united. The air and the atmosphere are calm; the clouds are not moving. Human beings are fragile in mind, in body, and in spirit. Curtis represents that fragility. He has a great deal of respect for what nature can bring while those around him do not, including his former friend who drills the land and steals its resources while Curtis stares at the formation, the clouds, the grass, and the trees. Although not good or bad, virtuous or unethical, he is chastised and vilified for his connectedness with the Earth, with the visions he is given, and with the One that gives him those visions, visions we later learn have validity. By refurbishing the storm cellar, he affirms the power of his natural surroundings, over which humans have no power, and takes a moral stance by performing this task not only for himself but for his wife and child. By protecting his immediate family, Curtis, the worker, the builder, the patriarch, is protecting those he loves. Curtis has what Gulik calls a “self-God relationship” as well as a “covenant” that provides Curtis with “a platform upon which to stand in judgment of all else, including nature.”⁵ It is his interconnectedness that earns him the right to be the one who judges, even if those around him do not agree.

IV. Human Ecology

Unlike the peacefulness described in the previous photograph, above we see the livid movement of the clouds in the distance. A funnel is forming; the air is spinning and making one of the most dangerous weather events humans can encounter. The climate can and will attack, sometimes unprovoked and sometimes provoked by human action or inaction. Oftentimes these types of phenomena can be predicted. There is a science behind the weather; and, there is science behind how humans relate to the environment: human ecology. As defined by the Environmental Encyclopedia, human ecology “may be defined as the branch of knowledge concerned with relationships between human beings and their environment,” is interdisciplinary, and speaks more so about the problems surrounding “human problems and the human condition.”⁶ The atmosphere is made up of gasses, and those gasses make up the air we breathe, the clouds we see, the rain that falls, and the tornados that obliterate. In the scene pictured above, Curtis clears some of the debris by the cellar and it starts to rain. The rain is viscous; it is not seemingly made of water, but of another-worldly gelatinous brown substance. Curtis stares into the sky as lightning hits the ground but a few feet in front of him. A dog is barking, and his daughter, who is with him once again, is watching all of this unfold. The wind is picking up and it starts to circulate, the gray cumulonimbus clouds swirl only a few miles away. Another funnel forms, and the dog breaks away from its chain, then viciously bites Curtis in the arm. Curtis wakes up with a scream; it is another nightmare. In this case, the moment is about trying to squelch danger but being unable to fight nature. Yes, he can take a piece of wood with a nail in it and throw it onto his wagon so his daughter does not impale herself; however, he cannot stop the atmosphere, he cannot stop the twisters, he cannot stop the rain and the wind, and he cannot stop his dog from doing what it instinctually wants to do, needs to do. He has no control until he does, not over the air but over his and his family’s own destiny. All he needs to do is listen, to be a biological being on a planet where all forms of weather, all forms of wind, can be scientifically explained.

V. Conclusion

Take Shelter is about connectedness: with the self, others, nature, your spirit; with science and religion and the mind. Oftentimes, human beings place emphasis only on psychology, only on theology, only on meteorology. Is there a God? God does exist. There is no God. Science is real. Science is fake and subjective. I don’t believe in science. I am perfectly fine. I don’t have to understand myself more. I am more privileged than the ant I just stepped on, the deer I just shot, the other person I just hurt. I am more important than the rock, the sand, the tree, the water, the air, the wind. Absolutes. We take these things, things that keep us alive and can kill us in seconds, and become apathetic and indifferent toward them, which can be equated to turning your back while on railroad tracks, thinking that the train, which is only twenty feet away, will not hit you. In essence, we need to befriend the winds and then, like Curtis, listen to them when they speak to us.