(This is not a review. For an excellent one visit KDD on Shutter Island)
Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island is a timely movie. It’s reaching audiences at a time when the deep structure of collective (capitalist) disavowal is increasingly problematic. Scorsese’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane book is also a a tribute to the gothic, the b-movie and pulp fiction. Set in 1954, it is infested with the paranoid atmosphere of McCarthyism. Though the Red Scare itself is not a theme in the movie, it’s atmospheric import is backing the noire-ish cloak and dagger narrative nonetheless.
US Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo di Caprio) sets out to find an escaped and mentally insane convict, Rachel Solando, who has drowned her own children, from Shutter Island where psychiatrists, John Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and Jeremiah Naehring (Max von Sydow) run Ashcliffe, an experimental institution for the extremely dangerous, mentally insane. Cawley summarizes their work on Shutter Island almost in Foucauldian terms as ‘a moral fusion between law and order and clinical care’. From this very basic premise an intricate and intriguing multi-layered plot unravels which ends in a revealing finale.
At the heart of the movie there’s the concept of trauma which in the psycho-analytical sense refers to an event that overturns a person’s natural (normal) defense mechanisms into a state of durable psychic distress and disorganization well after the actual event. Sigmund Freud’s play on the German word ‘traum’ and the Greek word for wound ‘trauma’ is well-known (and etymological nonsense). In any case, it plays a pivotal role in Shutter Island. It is repeated by Doctor Naehring when he explains to Daniels his predicament. Daniels’ trauma consists of the murder of his three children by their mentally deranged mother after which Daniels kills her. This trauma is enhanced or triggered by a previous one which Scorsese masterfully weaves into main narrative. Images of WWII holocaust victims and the liberation of Dachau blend into Daniels surreal working through of his trauma.
The most surrealistic and haunting scene is Daniels vision of his wife. The first thing he asks when she appears is whether she is real, to which she replies she’s not. In an objective manner, this admonition of the subjective, fantasmic content of the vision/hallucination is already signalling what is to come. The vision is staged inside a burning lake house where she and her children will die as we learn later. As she turns from Daniels to view the lake we see a gaping wound in her lower back. A smoldering void conjuring up associations with the Lacanian manque. In a shot which could have been modeled after some Renaissance painting we finally watch her falling apart, turned to ashes, literally in Daniels’ arms. On a metaphysical level the scene is in another way admirable. Daniels’ hallucination constructs an ontological anomaly. Even though his wife is burning, she’s also soaking wet, a clear reference to the drowning drama that has occurred in actuality. The anomaly or paradox is visually stunning as it is intellectually fascinating.
The movie can be viewed as a paranoid Bildung through Daniels’ disavowal of the trauma inscribed in his mind by the events in Dachau and the lakehouse. What is of particular interest to me is the deep structure and inescapability of this disavowal. What Daniels has to come to terms with – through a process which is being forced by his doctors in the form of an elaborate role play that plays into Daniels paranoia (exposing the Rachel Solando narrative as part of Daniels’ hallucination) – is the fact that he killed his wife (a third trauma, if you’re keeping score).
After a dramatic confrontation, Daniels seems to have come to terms with his own delusions. In the very last scene we realize that Daniels has regressed yet again. Or has he? The pull of his original and fundamental fantasy turns out to be too great. Before it is suggested that Daniels has regressed, he asks his doctor ‘is it better to live like a monster, or die a good man?’ In other words, Daniels presents his ‘monstrosity’ as seemingly objective even though he now knows it does not seem so to him. Scorsese’s movie excels at showing us the tragedy of this objectively subjective disavowal. Like The Sixth Sense and The Others the suspense is kept until the very final seconds. What makes Shutter Island stand out is that unlike the brutal and raw encounter with the reality of disavowal in the two mentioned movies, here, Daniels willful regression is true to the tragedy at the core of disavowal.