What’s up guys, Helen here.
At Wisecrack there’s nothing we like more than having our minds bent by movies.
Whether we’re wrapping our brains around multiple layers of dreamland faux-reality,
witnessing a ballerina totally losing her shit, or watching a dude explore the intricacies
of indoor plumbing, we tend to absolutely love it when our movies turn our brains into
jello.
And arguably, few films are quite as mind-bendy as Martin Scorcese’s 2010 thriller, Shutter
Island.
The film has more twists and turns than a Chuck-E-Cheese playground slide, but we’ve
always found the reveal at the end to be more than vaguely predictable.
In the late 90s and early 2000s a lot of movies featured a twist revealing our protagonist’s
warped perspective: Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind, The Machinist, Identity, etc.
Coming out in 2010, it seemed like Shutter Island was a little late to the party, leaving
us at Wisecrack wondering...
Is that all there is to it?
Is this movie as smart as you’d expect from one of America's most celebrated filmmakers?
Is there something deeper going on?
Let’s find out in this Wisecrack Edition on Shutter Island: Deep
or Dumb?
Oh and for the second time - spoilers ahead.
Alright guys let’s do a little recap: Shutter Island places us in a creepy mental institution
made creepier by its convenient isolation from society vis-a-vis a shit-ton of water.
Leo plays ugly-tie-wearing Teddy, a US Marshall investigating the disappearance of Rachel
Solando, one of the island’s dangerous criminal inmates whose favorite hobbies include drowning
her children and then blacking out.
Soon, we meet the requisite sketchy psychiatrists, including one who’s definitely Nazi-curious.
When head shrink Dr. Cawley proves shady and doesn’t cooperate with the investigation,
things seem increasingly more sinister.
All the while, Teddy has a ton of trippy flashbacks, reliving the various traumas of his life ranging
from liberating the Dachau concentration camp to losing his wife to a fire.
Also, turns out that the guy who started said fire, Andrew Leidis, is at this mental institution
and Teddy wants to track him down.
This whole mission culminates in him “discovering” the “real” Rachel Solando hanging out
by an international rat convention, claiming to be a psychiatrist who discovered that the
doctors are using lobotomies and experiments as part of a top-secret government program
to develop mind control techniques.
Yikes!
Only things are about to get wilder: we find out that Teddy is actually Andrew, who became
psychotic after killing his wife because she killed their three children.
On top of that, his entire investigation was actually just an elaborate LARPing experiment
conducted by the asylum to help rid Teddy -- I mean Andrew… um, I’m just gonna call
him Teddy, okay?-- of his illusions as a slightly-demented form of role-play therapy while presumably
also giving this doctor & patient amateur acting troupe a chance to show off their chops.
Oh also, unless Leo acknowledges the truth about his past, and accepts the totality of
his identity, he’s going to be lobotomized.
He’s like “hard pass” and heads up to the creepy lighthouse to go get his brain
jiggled by chopsticks.
The end!
Even if you’ve seen Shutter Island, that synopsis might read like your most ADHD friend
trying to get through a campfire story.
It’s helpful here to contextualize this movie as an homage to high and lowbrow film
noir traditions.
Film noir was the catch-all phrase for this special brand of film that particularly flourished
post World-War 2.
It featured dark shadows, unreliable narrators, weird-angled shots, and perhaps most iconically:
plots that involve plenty of unexpected twists and dramatic reveals, but maybe aren’t 100%
airtight.
All of the above could just as easily describe Shutter Island.
Indeed, this film is almost pulpy in the way it purely revels in every noir trope - from
the creepy cemetery to the fantastical dream sequences to the narrator with the slowly-revealed
“dark past,” especially one rooted in World War II.
With mental asylums, a looming tall building - in this case a lighthouse, creepy staircases,
casual semi-Nazis, and more, the film almost reads like a grab-bag of noir traditions.
That Scorcese was deliberately evoking noir is important in parsing the film.
That’s because, in general, noir films are less concerned with narrative coherence than
they are with mood, atmosphere, and conveying the psychological condition, usually suffering,
of their protagonist.
We’re going to treat Shutter Island like a noir and say upfront: The narrative plot
has a lot of turns and arguably doesn’t add up.
But that’s almost literally irrelevant.
What’s more interesting is whether the film compellingly depicts Teddy’s psychological
condition, and in the process, reveals anything about us slash humanity at large.
So with that caveat, let’s dive in.
At its core, Shutter Island is about a man who refuses to acknowledge large swaths of
his inner self and so he creates an alternate reality.
Scholar Stella Bruzzi actually compares it to Inception when she writes that:
Indeed, Teddy’s closed himself off from the traumas of his past, and can only reckon
with those memories by dreaming them or projecting them onto other people’s lives - hence conjuring
Rachel Solando and Leidis.
He’s living in a fantasy world lurking with sinister, presumably imagined, threats.
His disconnection with his own identity is almost immediately established in one of the
first shots - when we see Teddy examining his own face in a shaky mirror.
He’s just puked his guts out, suggesting an inner discordance and inability to orient
himself.
The mirror perhaps indicates the duplicity inherent to his character.
As scholar Annette Wernblad puts it:
From there, Scorcese uses every tool in his cinematic toolbox to convey this warped reality.
Most literally, the film employs an estimated 650 special effects including blue screen
mattes, digital painting, 3D computer effects and even digital miniatures.
While plenty of movies use a crap ton of special effects, they’re generally employed to achieve
visual believability.
Here, all of the special effects work to create a slightly artificial reality.
This is fitting for a movie in which 90% of the action takes place inside a giant, performative
charade undertaken by the world’s most dramatically talented shrinks.
It’s even more fitting for a narrative viewed entirely through the eyes of a man literally
living in a fantasy world.
Examples of this artificiality include the rear projection inspired of the ocean and
sky behind the boat when the men arrive at Shutter Island, the artificial lushishness
of this gazebo setting, and the almost absurdly-thick, dream-like layer of fog in the movie’s opening
shot.
At the same time, the perspective is purposefully disjointed, with instances of almost deliberately
sloppy editing, like in the boat sequence when Teddy’s partner’s mouth is out of
sync with his words until it cuts to a reverse shot, at which point it’s suddenly in sync:
“How long you been with the marshalls?”
“4 Years” “So you know how small it is?”
“Sure.”
“How ‘bout you?
You got a girl?”
A similar effect is achieved in the first flashback, when Teddy’s wife starts talking
before we see her mouth move, followed by another jarring cut:
“Remember when we stayed in the cabin in the summer, Teddy?”
“We were so happy.”
“She’s here, you can’t leave.”
Here, the contrasting use of jarring angles in succession, along with inaccurate sound
synching, serves to diorient us and rattle our perspective, an imitation of Teddy’s
rattled psyche.
In another instance, when the men are being introduced to the buildings on the island
- there’s a whip pan which sloppily hides an editing cut, as if Teddy hesitates for
a moment in keeping up the charade while staring at familiar buildings.
All of these interruptions are entirely intentional - meant to jolt us, just as Teddy’s psyche
is being jolted with memories.
The sound-design also reflects Teddy's heightened sense of fear and paranoia.
Sometimes, the sound is too loud, as with the initial over-the-top ship noises that
don’t coincide with the actual waves, creating a sense of hyperreality fitting for a character
with no grasp on the truth.
Other times the sound is unnaturally quiet, as when they’re entering Ward C, and we
see a lot more rain than we can hear.
Throughout, during moments of high tension, sounds and music are ramped up beyond mere
dramatics - from the extreme introduction to the island to the thunderstorm that booms
after Teddy gets a disturbing note from one of the patients.
Other visual elements help situate us in Teddy’s mind.
As the film’s director of photography, Robert Richardson, put it:
Colors in particular play an important role from the very beginning.
Teddy’s false reality on Shutter Island is desaturated and vaguely dismal.
These segments are far less vivid than his fantasies and dreams, which take place in
hyper-saturated hues inspired by 1950s-era Kodachrome film.
That they feel hyperreal suggests that Teddy’s dreamworld is more palpable to him than the
world around him, and helps us understand just how vivid his delusions really are.
While much of the present-day scenes are filled with gloomy grays and blues, it doesn’t
stay this way the entire movie - The colors become increasingly brighter, almost blinding,
in moments when Teddy comes close to discovering the truth or has an encounter that jiggles
his memory - crescendoing in this scene, which is filled with flashes of light, perhaps literally
representing the way the truth will “shine a light” on Teddy’s delusions.
In fact, Teddy even walks right into the light as his doctor delivers the final blow of reality,
showing him photos of his dead children,and he falls into a halo of brightness and collapses
after remembering these painful experiences.
In the final scene, the grounds of the asylum are nearly as saturated as his fantasies,
suggesting that he is fully, or at least more so, present in reality.
Scrocese doesn’t only rely on the strength of his own movie to convey this theme.
See, Scorcese is a Grade-A film nerd, and that nerdiness is on full display in Shutter
Island: The film is littered with references to other movies, especially film noirs, but
also other classics about madness and psychosis like Suspiria and Shock Corridor.
His clearest influence, though, is Alfred Hitchcok, who popularized the modern use of
the “psychological subjectivity via an unreliable narrator” trope.
Scorcese even had his crew watch Hitchcock’s “The Wrong Man” in preparation for shooting
Shutter Island.
As the eagle-eyed Guardian writer Andrew Pulver notes, these homages range from a shower head
spouting water like in Psycho, to climbing a narrow stairway like in Vertigo, to hanging
off of a cliff like Cary Grant, in North by Northwest, to this creative shot of a gun
like in Spellbound, to this tree flying through a wall like in Marnie.
What’s more, the use of bluescreen matte paintings is reminiscent of the technology
Hitchcock would use when situating his characters in unfilmable backgrounds.
As the film’s special effects master Rob Legato put it:
Another famous director, Stanley Kubrick, gets a shoutout too.
The looming tracking shots that put us directly in Teddy’s physical movements deliberately
evoke a similar technique that Kubrick innovatively employed in The Shining as a means of more
accurately conveying subjectivity through cinematography.
Similarly, the choice to use music by one of Kubrick’s favored composers, György
Liget also evokes the master’s work.
We could spend ages parsing the film for every reference, but we think you get the point.
Scorcese is infusing his film with all the major cinematic trappings of subjectivity
and unreliable narration to put us directly in Teddy’s shoes.
So Scorcese is certainly using a lot of cool techniques to make the movie more effective,
but does that mean that there's anything deep there?
Well, we think so, and yep- we're going meta.
All of these devices are actually reinforcing a major theme of the film: that we need to
empathize with people experiencing mental illness, rather than writing them off as crazy
or untreatable.
This is Dr Cawley’s position to begin with, that you should treat patients like human
beings and see them as capable of growth and improvement, even if they’ve committed violent
crimes.
Just as Kinglsey sees them as sympathetic, saying:
“My job is to treat my patients, not their victims.
I’m not here to judge.”
We too learn to view them as sympathetic by seeing the world through an actual patient’s
perspective.
At the beginning, these patients are regarded by the camera as freaks and spectacles, to
be viewed from afar and nervously ignored.
By the end, we’ve engaged with many of them as human beings, and most importantly, we’ve
been thrust into Teddy’s subjectivity.
We’ve seen his struggle firsthand, thereby making us recognize his unmistakable humanity.
As a result, we know that, despite the whole killing his wife thing, Teddy’s a pretty
caring dude with some genuinely good qualities.
If we had met Teddy as an inmate early on, we would have regarded him as merely insane,
not unlike Teddy does when he first surveys the island’s patients.
The film seems to rather blatantly articulate its thesis statement via this written plaque
at the beginning of the film, which reads:
We’re forced by nature of the cinematic experience to sympathize with people whom
society typically ignores or overlooks.
Cinema’s one of the only art forms that can so palpably immerse us in someone else’s
experience, and we think that makes it a pretty powerful thing, and Shutter Island a pretty
powerful film.
But all of this is in the service of the central question being posed by the film: Can you
rehabilitate evil, and should you even try?
Throughout the film, Teddy makes his position very clear: Evil is black and white to him.
He doesn’t see the inmates at Shutter Island as worthy of reformation because they've committed
violent crimes.
“He’s… defenders, right?
They’ve hurt people, murdered them in some cases.”
“In almost all cases, yes.”
“And personally, doctor, I’d have to say screw their sense of calm.”
He also refuses to give a dying Nazi a gun so he can end the pain, and he’s the first
soldier to start shooting at the Nazis after the Allies have raided the camp.
In contrast, Dr. Cawley makes clear his opposing view - that no person is beyond redemption
or rehabilitation.
These two opposing views are complicated when we learn that Teddy is in fact an inmate whom
Cawley is currently attempting to rehabilitate.
The film addresses this question most compellingly, though, through its use of flashbacks to memories
that Teddy can’t process without dissociating from.
What the film seems to argue is that what we consider “evil” is really just the
sum result of trauma mixed with mental instability.
We can recognize that Teddy isn’t evil, and in doing so, have to question whether
anybody really is.
Except… hold the phone.. what about Nazis??
Well, what makes this film so interesting is that it isn’t so one-sided on the issue
of evil - it leaves us to decide for ourselves.
Teddy doesn’t reconcile his trauma and suddenly believe that people can be rehabilitated.
Quite the opposite.
Instead, it seems like he chooses to be taken to the lighthouse to be lobotomized.
“Which would be worse?
To live as a monster or die as a good man?”
Here, he seems to be explaining his two choices: Live with the knowledge of what he’s done
or metaphorically “die” vis a vis a stick in his brain while still under the illusion
that he is a good guy.
Here, we see Teddy appearing to affirm his belief stated throughout the movie - that
the violently criminal cannot be reformed, that he is not capable of change or growing
past his mistakes.
Upon close analysis, it becomes pretty clear that every cinematic element - from lighting
to coloring to production design to cinematography to music cues - was carefully chosen in order
to serve the higher themes at work - with those being the subjectivity of film, the
nature of insanity, the redemptive potential of the criminal and the very nature of evil.
So we’re going to have to call this film deep, and at least deeper than the deep end
of your community swimming pool.
But what do you guys think?
Is Shutter Island a Scorcesian masterpiece?
Or did dude get a little too caught up in faking hurricanes and generally fail to impress
with his “big twist” ending?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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