by Herbert H. Stein
Each generation chooses its favorite myths and images. Listening to patients and acquaintances and following the news, I have the sense that our own culture and folklore includes a fascination with apocalyptic predictions and prophecies. This year we had the “rapture” prediction in the spring and we all await the end of the Mayan calendar some time in December. (I personally was not planning to use a Mayan calendar.)
I am not going to attempt to explain this phenomenon here, but would like to point your attention to two films that came out in 2011, Take Shelter and Melancholia, which both partake in this fascination with apocalyptic visions. Not surprisingly, they also allow us to vicariously enter into a psychotic depression.
In Take Shelter, we enter into it with Curtis, a loving husband and father and a good, reliable worker. As the film develops, everything falls apart as he becomes preoccupied with terrible visions.
As the film opens, Curtis is standing outside his house on a sunny day. We see the trees swaying in the wind. We see him staring into the sky, and with him we see an ominous, seemingly portentous set of black and grey clouds. They look menacing. It begins to rain, but as we watch with Curtis, we see that the rain is making dark patches where it hits. It’s oily. In the next scene, we see Curtis trying to wash the oily rain off his body.
This is the first of a series of ominous, frightening images. We see terrible storm cells approaching, birds forming strange patterns in the sky and even falling from the sky. Zombie- like people attack Curtis and his daughter, Hannah. His dog, Red, attacks him, biting him on the arm. His wife, Samantha, picks up a kitchen knife in a threatening manner. Most of these scenes end with Curtis waking up in his bead in a sweat, screaming, but some appear as visions rather than dreams, and when we are inside them, they have the reality that we experience when we are dreaming. With continuing images like these, we are drawn into a world of horror and portent. Curtis is increasingly drawn into a depression. As we watch horrified, he loses his job, his friends and nearly his marriage. The loss of his job means that he loses his health insurance and the wherewithal to pay for a cochlear implant for Hannah, who is deaf. In the final scene, after he has agreed to get psychiatric help, he is at the beach with his wife and daughter on a planned vacation when suddenly the storm is approaching.
The central character in Melancholia, Justine, also suffers from depression. It becomes increasingly apparent in the opening act, which shows her on her wedding night, slowly unraveling. In this film, we experience the apocalypse directly in the second act of the film as a strange large blue planet approaches a collision with Earth. Here, too, we can feel the growing sense of depression and hopelessness as all life enters its final hours.
We never enter into Justine’s mind or specifically see the world through her eyes as we do with Curtis, but the entire film reflects her mood. The film begins with a series of still pictures that set the tone, depicting aspects of the story with a dark, portentous mood and accompanying orchestral arrangement. Here, too, we see birds falling from the sky. We see Justine with lightning coming from her finger- tips. Above all, we see two planets approaching a collision. Particularly in the second half of the film a stormy, melancholy score accompanies a plot in which the characters become increasingly tense under the pressure of the oncoming collision.
In both films we will spot some familiar themes, most notably the increasing withdrawal from the world and valued people, much as Freud (1917) described in “Mourning and Melancholia.” After suffering disturbing dreams about them, Curtis separates himself from his dog, his best friend and co-worker, Dewart, and nearly his wife. He scares the entire community at a dinner gathering, provoked into a fight with Dewart and then standing up to warn everyone in the tones of a latter- day prophet that a terrible storm is coming. By the end of the film, he has only his wife, Samantha, and his daughter.
In Melancholia, we first see Justine at her wedding reception. She appears to be enjoying herself and attached to her groom, Michael. There is tension because they arrive very late, keeping their guests waiting. As the party begins, the characters begin to expose their ugliness. Justine’s boss, who is also Michael’s friend and best man, appears to be narcissistic and controlling. Her brother-in-law, John, is similarly full of himself and his money, reminding Justine of how much the party is costing him. Justine’s father is frivolous and irresponsible, her mother bitter. Together they justify, or reflect Justine’s depressive view of the world as evil.
As the party develops, Justine drives them all away, insulting the boss (although correctly so) and abandoning her groom to have sex with a stranger, her boss’s cousin, in an open field, to discard him as well. Her parents essentially abandon her. The party ends as everyone goes off in their cars. By the second part of the film, only Justine, her sister, Claire and Claire’s household remain. The servants leave a bit mysteriously, with some speculation that they want to be with their families as the planet approaches. Then, John, Claire’s husband, disappears as well, eventually found dead by Claire. By the last scene, only Justine, Claire and Claire’s latency-age son, Leo, remain to face the oncoming planetary collision.
Freud wrote about the melancholic’s attacks upon himself as an expression of his rage at an abandoned loved one who has been internalized. In these films, through the apocalyptic visions, we easily sense that rage directed at the world and at the self and loved ones. Curtis’s dreams are violent and portentous of violence. The dog attacks, the zombies attack, the skies threaten. It is only when confronted by Dewart that he finally lashes out, kicking Dewart in the knee and then standing up to shout out to the entire community,
“You think I’m crazy? Well, listen up. There’s a storm coming like nothing you’ve ever seen, and not a one of you is prepared for it.”
Justine’s anger comes out at times in sarcasm, but mostly in her abrupt turning on people at the wedding. Like Curtis, she identifies with the oncoming destruction, telling her sister, “The Earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it.”
But there is also a pull for comfort and safety, expressed directly in Take Shelter, as suggested by the title, more subtly in Melancholia. Even as he is destroying his life and his family’s hopes, losing his job and destroying their attachments to friend and community, Curtis is continually bent on providing shelter. In fact, it is that very obsession with shelter that fuels his self-destruction. He builds an elaborate storm shelter, sacrificing his savings and his job. When a storm does hit, he brings his wife, Samantha, and Hannah down there, then is reluctant to leave, finally being coaxed out by his wife, who sees it as a step towards his mental health that he be the one to open the door.
Justine appears to welcome the oncoming disaster, but there is a subtle hint of shelter. Early in the film, she talks with her nephew, Leo, about building caves. Indeed, at the end of the film, they build a “magic cave,” made primarily of a transparent tent in which she, Claire and Leo sit, holding hands as they await the collision.
These suggestions of a fantasy of a return to the womb are reflected in one of the few analytic papers on apocalyptic fantasies by Mortimer Ostow (1986). He talks about fantasies of destruction followed by rebirth and of intrauterine fantasies in some of his patients. “The yearning to enter mother’s body again and to be protected by her is precipitated by anxiety caused by the destructive wishes.” (p. 313)
These films give us little hope of a remnant surviving, although that does appear to be Curtis’s purpose in Take Shelter. We might see an element of a rebirth fantasy when Curtis timidly opens the door to his storm shelter, sees the light of the sky coming in and slowly exits to get back into the world.
This tiny hope of protection in the womb may also point us to the source of the rage and hopelessness that fuels the apocalypse. Each film provides us with some evidence of parental abandonment. We learn that Curtis’s mother suffered a schizophrenic breakdown when he was a child, essentially abandoning her family. Curtis is concerned that he may be going through something similar, and, in fact, his own withdrawal into a psychotic depression threatens to remove him as a loving presence to his own daughter even as he is attempting to create a womb-like shelter for her. In his dreams, Hannah is under attack, from the dog and later from the zombie like figures. His wife, a remarkably constant loving person in his life, is depicted as becoming a threatening zombie in one of his dreams.
His primary motive throughout is to protect his immediate family, even as he is the primary agent for endangering it. At the end of the film, they face the coming cataclysm together. We see them at the shore on a vacation. At first it is innocent, Curtis helping Hannah build a sand castle while Samantha works in the kitchen. But one by one, they become aware of the coming ominous storm clouds, moving in over the ocean. As they watch them, Samantha lets him know that now she sees it, too, and at this moment in which we are either recognizing that Curtis has prophetic powers or is lost again in one of his apocalyptic dreams, the screen goes dark and the credits begin.
Melancholia gives us a glimpse of a very disturbed family. It appears that Justine and her sister have no anchor. Her father is a flighty, somewhat annoying, but amiable jokester. We see him annoying the waiter, by pocketing spoons in an obvious way and then requesting more spoons. In his speech to Justine, he begins by telling her, “I’ve never seen you look so happy.” But, he goes on,
“So, what can I say … without talking about your mother, my wife of yesteryear, which is exactly what I don’t want to do. But I don’t think I am revealing any secrets if I were to say she can be rather domineering at times.”
This, of course, provokes Justine’s mother. She stands up to answer the accusation.
“Domineering. What a load of crap. For those who do not know me, I am Justine and Claire’s mother. Justine, if you have any ambition at all, it certainly doesn’t come from your father’s side of the family. Yes, I wasn’t at the church. I don’t believe in marriage. Claire, who I’ve always taken for a sensible girl, you arranged a spectacular party. Till death do us part and for- ever and ever Justine and Michael. I just have one thing to say. Enjoy it while it lasts! I myself hate marriages, especially when they involve some of my closest family members.”
It is very clear at the outset that Justine’s parents are far too narcissistic to be concerned about their children. There is no reason to think that they were any better in Justine’s childhood. When the mother refuses to rejoin the party for the cutting of the cake, she replies from her bathtub,
“When Justine took her first crap on the potty, I wasn’t there. When she had her first sexual intercourse, I wasn’t there. So give me a break, please, with all your fucking rituals.”
Later, in the course of the evening, as Justine’s depression breaks through, she approaches both her parents, trying to talk to her mother about her fears and being told to leave, then asking her father to stay the night so that she can talk to him, but discovering that he has left nonetheless.
In each film, we are presented with a sense of parental instability and unreliability. In each, the film ends with a family trio, in one a father, mother and daughter, in the other a mother, son and aunt, face complete destruction together. I issued no “spoiler” warning at the beginning of this article, but I will issue a warning to those who have not seen these films and are thinking of doing so: you will be entering into a state of depression, a world in which attachments are fragile and fraught with danger, in which anger cannot be controlled and in which we move towards death and destruction of ourselves and anything we continue to love. The two central characters state this mood clearly and eloquently:
Curtis: “Well, listen up! 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.”
Justine (in a dialogue with Claire): “The earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it. … Nobody will miss it. … All I know is, life on earth is evil. … I know things and when I say we’re alone, we’re alone. Life is only on earth, and not for long. “
Freud, Sigmund (1917) Mourning and melancholia. S.E.16: 237-258.
Ostow, Mortimer (1986) Archetypes of apocalypse in dreams and fantasies, and in religious scripture. American Imago 43:307-334.
Original Publication in the PANY Bulletin summer, 2012 issue.