Shutter Island

The movie we watched in class, Shutter Island, started out making us think we were watching a movie that involved solving a mystery. We thought we were following the adventures of the federal marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner as they searched for a missing patient and attempted to uncover the secrets behind the mysterious mental facility island that Teddy suspected were doing bad things.

Toward the end we actually discover that everything we had been following and watching was a lie. We reveal that the whole thing is a set up by his doctors. They invented a role playing game in attempt to get Teddy to accept his reality and be cured. It was his doctor’s last chance to prove that he could be cured and wouldn’t have to be lobotomized.

Although you suspect nothing of it while you are watching it, if you think back or watch the movie again, there are hints the entire time that help reveal the ending. If you watch the guards you can tell that they get a lot more on edge when Teddy comes around because they know he is a highly dangerous patient. In the beginning of the movie when they are out supposed to be looking for the missing patient, all the guards are sitting around on the rocks with no ambition to look, obviously because they have been instructed to play along with this game and are a little less than enthused to over achieve and act it out. One scene that really stuck out to me was when Teddy was conducting the interviews with the nurses. You could tell they all took it as a joke and weren’t happy about being forced to play along and be a part of the experiment. You can see how much Dr. Sheehan (Chuck) pushes the nurses to answer the questions. One of the nurses even makes an ironic joke about how strange their jobs are, obviously pointing at the whole little time wasting game they were getting pulled into. Another thing I noticed was how very obviously coached the patients were when Teddy was trying to interview them about Rachel and Andrew, he even points it out at one point. This is because pretty much the whole island has been informed on the situation and instructed to play along.

In the end we see Teddy now accept his fate as Andrew Laeddis. He accepts that he killed his mentally ill wife for killing his three children. The thing causing him to create his made up scenarios is guilt. His brain can’t accept the immense guilt he feels because he knows it was his drinking problem and absence that caused his wife’s illness and then caused her to kill their children. We see clues to his guilt throughout the film when he sees his wife and a little girl saying “why didn’t you save me?” Later we come to find that little girl is actually his daughter. Guilt is also the thing that kills him at the end of the movie, although he is cured, he cannot live with the burden of his past so he pretends a relapse so they lobotomize him.