Tag Archives: financial crisis

Gimme shelter

Survival guides always sell well in the USA. Perhaps it is part of the frontier mentality: one man, possibly holding a gun, protecting his family and his patch of soil. Or perhaps it is the Protestant obsession with linear narratives that end in a day of reckoning. Whatever it is, the idea that an honest US citizen might one day have to fend for himself, abandoned to the forces of nature immediately and without warning, is a persistent one.

In case you missed it, the current global financial crisis has repeatedly been referred to as a “perfect storm.” The storm metaphor is also evoked when talking about troubling mental disorders, as in the expression “black clouds,” used to describe depression. Put the three together, and you’ve got an American blockbuster movie.

In Take Shelter, one honest US citizen, who may or may not be mentally ill, is worrying about money, and about whether a massive storm is going to come and wipe out his family. The storm may be literal or metaphorical, the manifestation of a mental illness or a terrifying act of God. To hear the conceit, you could be forgiven for thinking that the film was going to be a bit trite, like one of those big-budget apocalypse films where New York taxis are flung into the Hudson and improbably strong children cling to lampposts. But, from the trailer, the film looked more pensive and brooding than all that, so I sat back and waited to be convinced.

In the first shot, Curtis (Michael Shannon) stares out at a gathering storm. It looks like a real bastard of a storm: grey, sullen, unpredictable. The rain starts up heavily, lashing his face. We jump cut to Curtis in the shower. From that moment on, this is the theatre of battle. We are definitely watching a storm, and we don’t know whether it is Curtis turning on the tap. It’s a tension that plays out quietly, in unsettling increments.

Curtis is having terrible nightmares, but he doesn’t want to alarm his wife or daughter—his mother was diagnosed with paranoia at around the same age, and perhaps it really is nothing. Soon, the nightmares are troubling him deeply, affecting his work and home life, and his obsession with renovating the storm shelter out back is taking up ever more time and money. The heartbreaking paradox is that we don’t know whether, in trying to protect his family, he is really harming them further.

This is not a dialogue-heavy screenplay, but there’s enough talk to bring out some remarkable acting. Michael Shannon can glare in a way I haven’t seen since Ray Liotta, but he uses his arsenal sparingly, giving us a Curtis that is occasionally menacing, but often all too human, agonised, conscientious, trying his utmost to be self-contained. Jessica Chastain’s performance is assured, and their relationship with each other becomes very moving as you are drawn into their situation and the film builds towards its climax.

Take Shelter has been widely praised in the US, where it is already being hailed as a masterpiece. The film has failed to impress critics in the same way in the UK, but this is a very American film, tied up with concerns and a frame of reference that are American. We don’t live in a place where we lose our healthcare if we lose our job, and none of us (except the truly unhinged?) have even considered owning a storm shelter. But, on its own terms, it is a quietly affecting film that avoids blockbuster cliché and carefully builds to a powerful conclusion.

Some riots, in Brixton

I wandered back from my friend’s house at around 8pm on Sunday, through Brixton town centre, where people were still milling about on the streets and packing away equipment from the annual Splash festival, which celebrates the community’s diversity. I got a Chinese takeaway, went home, ate it, and if I owned pyjamas, this is the point at which I would have put them on. It was also at this point that a police helicopter searchlight flickered briefly through my window as it flew overhead, and some riot police gathered to make a line in my road.

Then texts started coming through asking if I was safe. It’s the kind of question that makes you wonder whether you know the answer yourself. But as I started searching for news on media sites and twitter, I quickly compiled a pretty coherent picture of what was going on, in Brixton at least. These were not the “Brixton Riots,” these were just some riots in Brixton. Young people had been out all day drinking at the festival, someone had mentioned that people had got away with looting in Tottenham the night before, they were bored on their summer holidays and they’d obviously decided that they wanted some new trainers (Footlocker) and phones (Vodafone), and needed bikes to make their getaway (Halford’s).

There are a lot of questions still to be answered, and opinions differ on who is most to blame. There is uncertainty as to the exact sequence of events surrounding Mark Duggan’s killing, and what the implications are; the police do not have a commissioner; perhaps unsurprisingly, communication devices were widely used when looters wanted to communicate with each other; the youth is widely implicated. Most people are in agreement that the current rioting, which has even spread to Birmingham and Liverpool, is not ideologically motivated so much as opportunistic burglary. What I wonder—and it is a horrible question to have to pose—is whether any riot ever consists wholly of like-minded, ideologically motivated people with a desire to make themselves heard through civil disobedience?

Most people seem to believe that the violence in their area is coming from people who are not from the area, and that therefore the looting is indiscriminate. But if all they want to do is loot, and if they are happy to travel, why aren’t they all meeting in Mayfair? It could be that although their actions are poorly targeted, often at local businesses, these incidents are happening in areas where a lot of young people are unemployed, where there is poverty and people do not feel that they’re being well represented by their government. Not that that really explains riots in Ealing.

Yet despite the nihilistic nature of these riots, they remain symptoms of disaffection and inequality. Riots don’t tend to happen in affluent areas: they tend to happen where there is deprivation, where there is no trust in government or its policing methods, or where the perceived gap between rich and poor seems to be widening. Doubtless, many of the rioters couldn’t give you a reason why they’re looting and setting fire to buildings, but that’s not to say there aren’t reasons why this is happening here, and now.