To Tell, To Perplex: Shutter Island

Trailer to Shutter Island

Shutter Island is the story of a man nursing the wounds of war and his lost wife, working to change his deep guilt into a pursuit of justice against the insidious creep of legal and medical institutions into our lives and over the values he fought so hard in the War to preserve.

Until the climax, that is. Then we discover that Shutter Island is the story of a man nursing the wounds of war and wife who murdered their three children by creating an alternative reality that this institution is working hard to correct, using an experimental role-playing treatment that we happened to jump in on in its opening scenes.

Ugh. This film was maddening, which I suppose I must earn it some credit. It tries to do something special by applying and then breaking movie conventions. The trouble is that the use of a massive reveal (“I’m a cop. I’m a cop. Oh wait, I’m a patient here?”) makes it very difficult for us to continue sympathizing with the protagonist, if we ever did. Now, when I was watching, I tried to keep to a vision which saw the protagonist as correct – there is a conspiracy. So when I reached the reveal, I felt foolish, and cheated. The scene with the Rachel the Psychologist-turned-Patient hiding in the cave, for example, was only a delusion of the protagonist, and shame on me for not seeing that.

But more sophisticated viewers might well have doubted that whole scene the first time they saw it, in which case they would have been frustrated by the attempt to make them have some emotions that they could tell Scorsese was preparing to undermine later in the movie.

Either way, all of the pre-reveal scenes are made ambiguous or even paradoxical by the reveal. For example, is Dr. Cawley a good man or a bad man? Certainly he’s not quite as anti-lobotomy in the end as he implied in his expository entrance scene.

The story architects would probably say, “Exactly, dude. The scenes and the message of the movie turn out to be ambiguous because life is ambiguous. Mental institutions are creepy, but ultimately necessary. The kind of guilt and confusion that poor Teddy suffers from is real.”

Grrr… But, but…shouldn’t the movie give Teddy the power to overcome his guilt and confusion, to find meaning in his life again?

“It does! Teddy gets a glimpse of the real truth, but he just can’t deal with it, so he chooses to embrace his fantasy again, but this time with the knowledge that he will undergo a lobotomy. Hence his final line, ‘Which would be worse, to live as a monster, or die as a good man?’ He is taking charge of his life again by dying a good man.”

Hm. Okay. But I still think that the film suffered from slow pacing and overly forceful tone. To me this is more than a formal weakness, but an indication that the storytellers are more interested in the scenes as a clever intellectual game than they are about any serious comment on how the human mind actually makes and breaks its connections to the world.

“Oh really,” I can hear Scorsese say. “Well, pray tell, my young friend, what is your story, and what forms does it apply to make a ‘serious’ comment. Hm?”

Uhhhh….dammit, I don’t have one. I’ll write one then!

“Well, okay then. I look forward to it.”