Two central themes present themselves in “Take Shelter.” The first is the link between dreams and insanity. The second is the connection between the prophet of apocalypse and social ostracism.

Dream emotions are felt strongly even though objectively speaking nothing is happening to cause them. Rather, the emotions are caused by the mind at work – the mind projecting hallucinatory images that are accepted as concrete. In “Take Shelter,” the dominant emotional responses are fear and anxiety. As dreams, they are disturbing but not necessarily out of the ordinary. What makes Curtis’ situation bizarre is that the dream world does not remain confined to the period of sleep, rather the borders between sleep and dream become murky or cease to exist altogether. It is this lack of separation of states that provokes Curtis and others to think he is experiencing the onset of mental illness, perhaps a form of paranoid schizophrenia, which Curtis’ mother also developed at a similar age. Dreams, then, are a window into the world of madness.

Curtis becomes a self-understood prophet of the coming apocalypse but at the same time a social outcast. Slowly but surely, his social fabric is torn apart. He loses his job, his best friend, his standing as an upright father, husband and member of the community. Only his wife stands by him, not because she believes in the message of doom, but out of love and loyalty to him and the family unit. The notion of the prophet as pariah has a long history – dating back to the biblical world where we see the likes of Jeremiah and Daniel punished for reporting visions of doom. The history of religious movements is full of such characters – including some of the most important like Jesus Christ and Muhammad. Dreams and visions are important components to the prophecy and the revelation of information within these otherwise inaccessible forms separates the prophetic figure from others in society not privy to such information. Such is the case with Curtis, who sees the people around him as helpless, ignorant dupes who go about their ordinary quotidian business instead of readying themselves for the storm.

At the end of the film, Curtis is vacationing on Myrtle Beach. He is playing in the sand with Hannah when all of a sudden the girl points out an enormous storm gathering offshore. The storm is exactly like the one in his dreams and visions, perhaps even larger. As Curtis gazes at it, Samantha comes out of the house and she, too, sees the storm. This storm is either one of two things, a shared family delusion (which seems improbable) or the real thing. The thick, oily rain starts to fall. The water begins to draw back from the beach, implying a coming tsunami. It seems that Curtis, though perhaps psychotic, is also prophetic – disaster was coming and he foresaw it. His dreams, fearful and anxious, were portentous after all. Has our rush to diagnose and medicalize mental disturbance, the film seems to ask, precluded other options, like that the dreaming mind, while perhaps insane, might be a gateway into a realm of higher knowledge and in touch with cosmic forces which cannot be perceived but only felt and intuited?

Nichols’ “Take Shelter” hones in on middle American, middle/working class economic anxiety. In this sense, it is a deeply pessimistic film, reflective of a post-financial crisis (2008) American narrative of economic and social decline. The typical pressure points are emphasized: job insecurity, mortgage burdens, the variability of bank loans, losing health insurance, the price of prescription drugs, the price of gas, the ability to afford a vacation. These pressure points are made more acute with the addition, for Curtis and Samantha, of Hannah’s deafness, which makes the balancing of economic and life factors seem exceedingly precarious. The worst-case scenario now shifts from a terrain of personal failure to the nightmarish notion of failure to provide adequately for one’s child. Curtis’ competence becomes linked to Hannah’s health and future – a burden that increases the pressure and deepens the intensity of the dreams and resulting madness. The intensity of this middle or working class crisis provokes the apocalyptic visions – transforming Curtis, the average American small town, working class guy, into a prophet of doom. Others reject Curtis, as we have said, because he seems violent and insane, but at the end of the film we get a sense that maybe he is right. Is Nichol’s saying that the decline of the small-town American life, the simple life comprised of family, community and church, presages a larger, immanent disaster? Will true prophecy come from the inhabitants of America’s heartland – those threatened most acutely by global forces far beyond their control? Or is such “prophecy” a symptom of insanity, an individual or collective insanity caused by the slow breakdown of social and communal traditions?