Michael Shannon is that rare kind of leading actor wherein his distinctive physical presence and mysteriously skittish vibe could easily have limited his career prospects. A slender yet towering frame, a weathered, stony face, piercing eyes, and a soft-spoken southern drawl, the Kentucky-born actor could have effectively coasted through his career were he to have settled for being typecast as imposing roughnecks and eccentric henchmen haunting the margins of genre movies. Yet despite this immediate physical impression Shannon projects, his career has enjoyed an undeniable versatility in front of the camera thus far.
That being said, Shannon has undeniably displayed a flair for certain roles over others throughout his storied career. For example, who could forget his turn as the predatory and sadistic Richard Strickland in The Shape of Water whose only desire is to exert power over and destroy anything he finds to be an affront to God’s design? Or his heartless embodiment of notorious hitman Richard Kuklinski in The Iceman who seems to feel nothing resembling human emotion even as he slaughters his way through the New York criminal underworld? One only needs to experience the fierce, transfixing glare of his steely eyes to be convinced the actor has the acumen to make you believe he is hiding something sinister, something damaged under a precarious surface of normalcy. As the saying by Cicero goes, the face is a picture of the mind and the eyes are its interpreters, and Shannon’s spellbinding glare can tell a story of profound, unsettling depth all its own.
Now I approach this in the most complimentary way possible, Michael Shannon’s is a face of madness — a visage that feels like it harbors secrets beneath the lines and expressions of its form. A mysterious countenance that can be read many ways but never truly understood at a given moment. When the actor taps into this specific physicality to play a character racked by a kind of madness, you can never quite shake the suspicion one of these characters are barely holding together, teetering on the precipice of breaking down, and you are left overcome with a sense of empathy tinged with an acute sense of fear.
Across his expansive filmography, Shannon has harnessed his “reputation for intensity” several times to probe the “outer ranges of human behaviour” within multiple films. Three such films in particular, William Friedkin’s Bug (2006), Werner Herzog’s My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (2009), and Jeff Nichols Take Shelter (2011), sees the actor portraying characters who, either dramatically or subtly, slip the bonds of mental stability and absorb you into their struggle to maintain sanity.
Unlike most classical, stigmatizing portrayals of insanity where the method for actors was to “swing wildly from sentimentality to sensationalism,” Shannon’s varied approach to madness has always felt grounded and affecting despite how wildly each performance tends to differ from the last. The essence of each of these performances, which allows them to be so convincing and centered even when their approach to madness is distinct, is Shannon’s peculiar yet haunting physicality he brings to each role and his ability to provoke palpable empathy for his portrayals. No matter how off-putting or downright intimidating his characters may seem as they struggle desperately with their mental precarities, Shannon can always find a way to imbue them with a moving human center.
Bug: Peter Evans
Based on Tracy Letts’ one-set play of the same name, Bug is as claustrophobic as psychological horror can conceivably get. The film follows recent divorcee Agnes White (Ashley Judd) who lives a stagnant life in a dingy room (where the majority of the film takes place) in a rundown motel in desolate, rural Oklahoma. While accepting this low point in her life, her inability to achieve closure stemming from the mysterious disappearance of her son and the release of her abusive ex-husband from prison leaves her in a fragile, lonely, and agitated state. This is when the mysterious Peter Evans drifts his way into her life.
As played by Shannon, the soft-spoken and awkward Peter is, at first, presented as an unassuming and gentle oddball of a man who passively acts as the sympathetic ear to the spiralling Agnes. Good-natured, sensitive, and displaying a muted presence in every conversation the two share in their burgeoning romance, Shannon ingrains the enigmatic Peter with an endearing naive awkwardness. Uncertain and skittish around Agnes, his rigid posture, dejected eyes, and hangdog voice signal a desperate, cloying need for human contact.
Clearly harboring something traumatic from his past in the military that he broaches gingerly with Agnes, Shannon’s initial quiet, mousy performance as Peter overwhelms the audience with a powerful sympathy for this sad, broken man. His unassuming demeanor and pitiable uneasiness instill in us a hope that maybe these two damaged souls could mend one another.
Then, a switch is thrown. Peter starts casually dropping references to an unnamed and amorphous “they” threatening to control civilization and fears they are being monitored. This switch in his character is subtle, expressed both through Friedkin’s increased use of engrossing closeups on Peter, and Shannon’s ever-so-slight adjustments to his once pacifying performance. His eyes begin to bulge slightly and lose emotion, he begins to involuntarily fidget with his lanky frame, and his once shaky, muted voice is now stern and serious as he slowly reveals his deep-seated paranoias to Agnes as if to gauge a reaction.
While unnerving at first, Shannon always brings the character back from the edge through emotionally charged scenes such as when Peter breaks down into uncontrolled sobs while revealing his alluded past to Agnes. Believing himself to be a product of inhumane medical experiments, his compulsive fears and paranoia are firmly cast as tragic rather than frightening thanks to Shannon’s pronounced sense of fragility he implants in the character.
Of course, what Bug is probably best known for is what happens after these unexpected moments of grounded empathy. Peter begins a descent into the heart of his own delusions and they begin manifesting themselves in the form of swarms of insects only he can perceive, infesting every surface in the film’s cramped motel room set. This is also where Shannon’s performance takes another drastic turn and becomes physically frantic, over-the-top, and circles back to being emotionally uncomfortable.
Compulsively swatting at his skin, convulsing as if covered in predatory bugs, muttering in a somber tone about outlandish, evolving scenarios he believes are happening, and culminating in an uncomfortably visceral sequence where Peter forcibly removes a tooth with a set of pliers having convinced himself an aphid had burrowed itself in there. Through this dramatic portrayal of his unnamed psychosis, Shannon’s engrossing and committed physicality teases out empathy for the shattered loner that is Peter.
Much like Agnes, we are also drawn into Peter’s downward spiral due to Shannon’s ability to fill the frame with his premise. His frantic physicality and layered approach to the character of Peter ensure that, despite the inherent dementedness of his actions and words, we look on both out of horror and concern. Peter is a wounded animal thrashing against invisible enemies he cannot see and through Shannon’s visceral embodiment of the character, we believe we are fighting alongside him just like Agnes.
My Son My Son What Have Ye Done: Brad McCullam
It is undeniable that director Werner Herzog was operating at an exaggerated register from his already quirky baseline when shepherding the David Lynch-produced hostage drama My Son My Son What Have Ye Done. A hostage drama that weaves bizarre vignettes around a matricide committed by Shannon’s Brad McCullam, the film’s bewildering tone rightfully baffled audiences and critics alike when it was originally released. Using quirky flashbacks spotlighting Brad’s increasingly erratic behaviour in the lead-up to his shockingly violent act to hopefully tease out what finally sent him over the edge, one could easily mistake Herzog’s crime drama as a stealth black comedy under the right framing. To include scenes wherein Udo Kier futilely struggles with an ostrich over a pair of glasses, or where the hostages taken by Brad are revealed to by a pair of pet flamingos like a ludicrous punchline, we are all but forced to question how serious we are meant to take this.
But you would not know this if you were to solely pay attention to Shannon’s ambiguous performance as Brad McCullam. While introduced in the center of a volatile standoff with the police, over the course of the film Shannon finds ways to imbue Brad with that same threatening, fragile aura despite the character’s comically bizarre habits. Emotionally inscrutable and vacantly dour, Shannon’s deathly deadpan performance leaves us frozen out from Brad’s interiority even as the flashback structure attempts to reveal more about him. Brad cannot help but remain a mystifying figure whose actions only confound us.
Through Shannon’s embodiment of the character’s deteriorating mental state, however, we remain invested in the film’s ultimately ineffective attempts to probe the nature of his psychosis. At times Shannon portrays Brad like he is an innocent with a guileless, juvenile outlook on the world stemming from the influence of his overbearing mother and future victim (Grace Zabriskie). His behaviour at times can seem childlike, such as his tendency to throw tantrums marked by rigid repetitions of “So what?” when he is denied his way or the wide-eyed giddiness that crosses his stern face when he claims to hear the voice of God in a warbling recording of blues singer Washington Philips. In a memorable scene, Brad, his mother, and his fiance (Chloe Sevigny) sit down for a meal, and Brad’s feeble squeamishness as he kowtows to his mother’s belittling demands next to his bride-to-be is a particularly pathetic tableau that Shannon permeates with sympathy through the physically of his recoiling, shrinking presence.
What makes this particular portrait of mental illness so engaging is Shannon’s ability to leave Brad McCullam with an inherently abstruse quality. Due to his hardened, wooden performance and the unpredictability of his actions, the audience remains locked out of Brad’s tumultuous thinking as he inches closer and closer to matricide. Shannon’s illegible performance ultimately offers no roadmap to Brad’s psyche, positioning the audience as witnesses to a self-destructive spiraling that has no answers or logic. The film feebly throws out possible answers to the question of Brad (a religious epiphany in Peru, a childhood under an overbearing and hysteric mother, a nascent obsession with a play) but shows no real investment in pinpointing causality.
Herzog himself maintains even though his film was based on a real case of matricide occurring in San Diego, “70% of his script is false.” There is no reason for Brad’s behaviour, no adequate throughline that could reveal why he is the way he is and why he did the thing he did. Through Shannon’s intriguing performance as the enigmatic Brad, however, we are given reason to keep probing into his unknowable mind and are left with a desire to understand him.
Take Shelter: Curtis LaForche
Unlike the other films in this makeshift canon of Shannon’s unique approach to portraying madness, Take Shelter grants us acces of the precarious mental state of everyman Curtis LaForche before he begins to deteriorate. Presented as a humbled and caring blue-collar worker, a classical portrait of the breadwinner for his loving wife and disabled daughter, Jeff Nichols’ film allows us to know the man behind the burgeoning madness, making his descent all the more tragic. Shannon’s subdued and mundane charms gives Curtis a benign stability at the onset; he’s a genial joe blow and salt of the earth member of the LaGrange community who would rarely, if ever, stick out in a crowd. Despite Shannon’s normally uneasy presence, Curtis LaForche is as unassuming as lower-middle class americana can be.
Even so, Curtis’ story is one of a brewing storm beneath a precarious surface of normalcy. Plagued by invasive hallucinations, vivid nightmares, and a growing, all-consuming paranoia over an apocalyptic disaster and the people who appear in his visions, the film follows his desperate struggle to keep up a normal facade for his loved ones even as he gives further and further into his debilitating delusions. With a family dependent on him to maintain for the sake of their livelihood, he suffers in silence attempting to understand and quell his growing mental affliction. With every action Curtis does to supposedly protect his family from this storm, the further he pushes them away, the more he puts said livelihood at risk, the more he sinks into despair and shame over his failure to be the provider he once was.
Shannon plays this descent with a striking fragility. The desperation that crosses his face whenever he is tasked with concealing his deteriorating mental state from his wife (Jessica Chastain), the sadness that fills his normally stern eyes when he can’t help but give in to his irrational compulsion to doomsday prep, Curtis is barely holding it together, thrashing against the tide of his psychosis and unlike the previous films, we are placed right alongside him as he slips away. As we see him vibrate with anxiety trying to hold back the dam of his mounting emotional turmoil, we anticipate an oncoming breaking point with lament. Shannon’s pained performance gives the impression of a man with an unyielding storm brewing at his very core who is doing everything in his power to keep it from breaking to the surface.
Shannon’s performance is probably best remembered for the point where the facade of normalcy finally breaks down in front of the community at a public gathering. Curtis’ internal turmoil finally bubbles over after being pushed over the edge by a friend accusing him of going crazy and Shannon becomes like a fire and brimstone preacher, using his booming voice, severe eyes, and frantic physicality to proclaim the coming of an almighty storm with terrifying intensity. A whirlwind of fear and fury, we witness a man who cannot stand to bottle it up any longer and is forced to explode in a fierce display of indignation for a community that cannot see or comprehend what he has been going through. It is a crowning achievement of Shannon’s nuanced approach to portraying madness that even as he produces this frightening spectacle, we are still moved to empathy by his clear desperation to be heard and believed.
The film concludes with a disquieting moment when Curtis’ apocalyptic visions (somewhat) come true and a violent storm forces him and his family into the storm shelter he had been building over the course of the film. Once the storm effectively passes, Curtis is tasked with opening this door once again and, at the mercy of his paranoias, cannot bring himself to do it. Shannon grants this moment a quiet, tangible desperation as Curtis tries to claw his way out of his delusions and face reality once again through the support of his wife. Acknowledging he has been suffering in isolation and wants nothing more than to be better, Shannon’s soul-stirring vulnerability as he shrinks in terror and crumbles at the benign task of opening a door is possibly the most accomplished piece of acting he has ever committed to film. It is not so much a happy ending as it is a sobering reminder that the internal struggle of mental health only worsens when suffered in silence and healing is an arduous process that can be more debilitating than anything the world could throw down upon you.
All three films discussed offered distinctly different approaches when it came to portraying madness. Be they visceral and frightening, odd and comical, or sobering and palpable, they all succeed in their own ways in getting you to empathize with their eroding protagonists. Each film works despite the ever-touchy subject of portraying mental illness, and this is all very much due to Shannon’s nuanced and varied approach to his various performances. His incredible skill as a performer to harness his unique talents and physical qualities to give these characters depth beyond their unnamed mental afflictions makes these films unforgettable.
