Blog #10

Shutter Island (2010)

Directed by Martin Scorsese

The film, Shutter Island, directed by Martin Scorsese, tells the story of US Marshall, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his journey solving a missing person case in an Insane Asylum Hospital. This film utilized many flashback moments. These were crucial to understanding Teddy as a character and his narrative better. These flashbacks varied between his experiences during World War II and his family. Like Tarantino, Scorsese does an excellence job inviting the audience to understand these characters through their past experiences.

Teddy’s time in WWII seemed extremely traumatic, as he was in charge of liberating the Dachau death camp in Germany. These vivid memories he has, involved many dead bodies, corpses and his own part in assassinating the Nazis. This is extremely crucial to the story because, in the beginning of the movie, the audience sees this hospital as a dark place with a sketchy record. We’re on Teddy’s side of the film because his questions about the hospital made sense. The disappearance of Rachel Solando, thinking the whole time they either killed her or she was subject to lobotomy surgeries, was an accurate concern. The hospital resembles a death camp in many ways and Teddy associates a lot of the characters as victims of potential abuse. When he interviewed a few patients, one of them said “they should all be gassed” which is what happened in the death camps in the Holocaust.

The audience was seeing Teddy’s point of view the entire film until the end where we get the psychiatrist’s POV and the Teddy’s “partner” Aule. When they told him that he dreamt all of these hallucinations up, he went into a psychotic break. The end of the film, I kind of saw coming after the first hour into the plot. The reason when I started to tell he was going mad, was when his uniform changed to the white outfit and Rachel Solando was found. Why was he still there when Rachel had already bee found? It all makes sense in the end, but a lot of the film I kept getting confused between distortion and reality. I really enjoyed this film because it also showed a lot of societal issues too. In the old days psychiatric institutions were not always controlled the most ethically, and this has a perfect correlation to how victims were handled during the Holocaust.