This article examines questions of trust in cinema through the lens of Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010). With its self-referential allusion to the mechanical “eye” of a camera, a stage-managed fantasy embedded within its plot and image of a dark lighthouse, Shutter Island explores its spectators' and its own cinematic sense of suspicion. The plot revolves around a protagonist who has locked himself out of certain memories and into a fantasy world. The article links pathological and therapeutic aspects of trust with interpersonal and institutional trust issues in ways that blur distinctions between trusting others and trusting oneself, and shows how reliant each is on the other. Construing trust as a type of participant attitude and highlighting techniques used to render it cinematically, the article tracks its emergence and erosion, both in terms of the diegesis and its bearing on film spectatorship. As a post-classical commentary on film-making, Shutter Island is viewed as intricately exemplifying what Robert Sinnerbrink (2016) describes as an action-driven film with “a highly reflective consciousness of cinematic spectatorship” (p. 70), as well as what Thomas Elsaesser (2009) describes as a “mind-game film”. To make sense of its ending, which may strike viewers as baffling and unnerving, and show how the protagonist's seemingly irrational decision is part of its film-philosophical point, traumatic disturbances in subjectivity and “monstrosities” depicted in the film are linked to Jean Epstein's notion of “something monstrous” in cinematic imagery. The protagonist's deliberately chosen fate is interpreted as a reparative gesture, expressing a desire for psychological healing and a way of helping him to marshal and recover a semblance of moral order and integrity under demoralizing circumstances.
This article examines ethical and epistemic issues related to trust and truth as they are expressed, cinematically and philosophically, through the lens of Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010). Adapted from Dennis Lehane's (2003) novel, the action in Shutter Island takes place over four days in 1954 in and around a water-bound, maximum-security facility called Ashecliffe. Described by its chief psychiatrist, Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), as a moral fusion of law and order and clinical care, Ashecliffe houses psychiatric patients with delusional disorders, criminal histories, and a proclivity for violence. The plot revolves one of them, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), who has locked himself out of painful memories and into a fantasy world. For most of the film, hospital personnel and patients play along with Teddy's delusions in the hopes of disabusing him of them and luring him back into an acceptance of reality.
Until all of the circumstances are disclosed toward the end, spectators are epistemically aligned with the protagonist and share in his fantasy world. That is, we trust he is who he says he is and is treated by others as being, namely, a U.S. Marshal ferried onto the island with his new partner, Chuck Auld (Mark Ruffalo), on assignment to search for a child murderess named Rachel Solando, who has mysteriously managed to escape from a locked cell. The Marshal, as he is called, is also surreptitiously searching for a second missing person named Andrew Laeddis, a man he believes is hiding on the Island and describes as a “firebug” who “lit the match that caused the fire that killed” the Marshal's wife.
It turns out that the missing Rachel Solando, “a war widow who drowned her three children”, is an anagram for the Marshal's mentally ill wife, Dolores Chanal (Michelle Williams), who drowned their three children, including a daughter named Rachel, in the lake behind their home. We also eventually learn that “Teddy” the Marshal is Andrew Laeddis, a former U.S. marshal and World War II veteran who shot and killed Dolores after discovering in the water their dead children, toward whom he swims to retrieve but is too late to rescue. In my reading, the deluded, dissociated Laeddis is unable to acknowledge his share of responsibility for murders, at home and on the battlefield.
Because of his violent behavior and the military and law enforcement training that makes him “so good at it,” Teddy is “the most dangerous patient” on Shutter Island – especially when he is called, or called out, as Laeddis. Since the doctors cannot contain him, and unless he faces the truth, even those sympathetic to his plight will be unable to save him from the fate of being forcibly “incapacitated”, i.e. subjected to a trans-orbital lobotomy. Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow), a shady character who is not so sympathetic, is all ready to perform one on the Marshal.
An ideological subtext concerning institutional psychiatric practice in early 1950s America is expressed through his psychiatrist's fear, as the paradigm is shifting from old school psychosurgery to new school psychopharmacology, that these pharmaceuticals will only provide a more “publicly palatable veneer” to malpractice taking place. Dr. Cawley strives to improve the treatment of mentally ill patients by treating them morally and helping them to achieve an honest reckoning with themselves.
To facilitate this reckoning, Cawley stages an elaborate role play, all for the Marshal's benefit. He is propped up with a plastic pistol and badge, ferried back onto the island and given free run of it to see for himself that his missing persons search is just part of a play that he authored, one that ends with his reaching the Lighthouse on the island. The so-called moral treatment is to lead him there and press him to confront truths he “can't take knowing.” For the Lighthouse therapy to work, however, the Marshal must trust that his primary caretakers are being honest with him, and this is hard to do. In fact, a significant aspect of the main character's paranoia (and ours, apprehensively affiliated with it) is the belief that he and Chuck, the investigators, are themselves under scrutiny and that the Lighthouse is test ground for illegal surgery on the brain in order to control it. He contrives to leave the island – “to get off this rock,” as he frequently puts it – and return to the mainland to expose the malfeasance at Ashecliffe.
Shutter Island is Shudder Island. It has a creepy feel, creepy characters, creepy flashbacks. A remote, isolated setting, ominous clouds, a nighttime search through a cemetery, and a violent storm with hurricane force winds contribute to a felt sense of entrapment. We do not know whom or what to trust as we are invited onto this island to investigate the mysterious disappearance of a barefoot female patient from an ostensibly locked room. Noir lighting and deep ominous music that is not quite – three deep “notes” of a ferry's fog horn – set the tone, amplifying and book-ending a sense of foreboding and confinement at the beginning and the end of the film. While the Marshal is hiding the truth from himself through his envelopment in a fantasy, this “shuttered” island, with its vividly atmospheric air of uncertainty, also appears to be harboring secrets. A shush gesture, finger to closed lips enacted by a spooky-looking female patient, is an early, eerie clue of clandestine activity. Even as the ferry slowly pulls away from the island in the final scene, a lingering and apprehensive sense of being left “in the dark” remains.
With its allusion to the mechanical “eye” of a camera, Shutter Island self-referentially plays with both fleeting and sustained moments of exposure to the “light” of intolerable truths – often back-lighting characters who are speaking it – and to a spectator's and its own cinematic sense of reality. The ferry's arrival and departure to and away from the island parallels the situation of entering and exiting the theatre.
Shutter Island is an action-driven film with what Robert Sinnerbrink (2016) describes as a “highly reflective consciousness of cinematic spectatorship” (p. 70). In it, narrative conventions overlap with “resistance” to them contained in the narrative itself. The elaborate role-play depicted in the film concludes with the revelation of Cawley as its “director,” attempting to separate the protagonist from his immersion in a fantasy by demonstrating that his authorial “codes” are showing. Cawley's exposition of anagrammatic and inside “jokes” the Marshal is playing on himself, which inserts some aesthetic distance between his genuine and fabricated self-images, is analogous to anti-illusionist aspects of experimental films foregrounding the use of dissociative self-reflective techniques to capture their constructed nature.
As a “post-classical” film in Thomas Elsaesser's (2017) sense of “an excessive classicism, rather than as a rejection or absence of classicism” (p. 39), Shutter Island does not break with narrative structure so much as push its envelope. Classical elements giving the film its impression of unity and coherence include complex story-telling and characterization, a goal-directed protagonist conducting a “missing person” search, the use of couples, anchored in binary oppositions, as a dramatic unit, continuity editing, and a deadline structure. While spectators are attracted into the flow of an integrated, realistic-looking diegetic world, the film also draws attention to its own artifice by incorporating post-classical aesthetic devices and motifs such as multi-genre pastiche (of classical noir and 1930s and 1940s horror films [Scorsese in Brown, 2010]), self-conscious play acting, an ambiguous title, slippery wordplay (“Why you all wet, baby?”; the “chuckle” contained in Chuck Aule's name), inter-textuality (good cop/bad cop drivers reminiscent of the one portrayed in Taxi Driver [Martin Scorsese, 1976]), and self-reflexive citation. In short, the film presents audience members with a “spectacle”. It is not, however, a spectacle in the (visually/violently/technologically excessive) blockbuster sense (Scorsese says in a 2019 interview that he does not make blockbusters [Coyle]), or in the sense of being opposed to or overwhelming narration, but as a special kind of visual excess,
a special sort of awareness of the codes that govern classical representation and its genre conventions, along with a willingness to display this knowingness and making the audience share it, by letting it in on the game. (Elsaesser, 2017, p. 57)
Shutter Island “experiments” with audience address and spectator engagement, making cognitive demands beyond simply witnessing or observing. One of its changes to the “rules of the game” of “institution cinema” is to those that “favor pattern recognition […] and require cinematic images to be read as picture puzzles” (Elsaesser, 2009, p. 39). Spectators must “detect” and piece the fragments together, into a comprehensible whole.
For example, only after multiple viewings, which mind-game films invite and repay, did I notice the similar architectural pattern between the gazebo and the top of the Lighthouse, which are the sites where the “whole truth” is finally revealed. Noticing this helped me to forge links to the Marshal's stated desire to “blow the lid off the place” and his uncontrolled tendency to “blow his lid”. His explosive temperament then drew me into reflection on other “explosive” imagery and associations contained in the film. One, for example, literally “ties” him to his wife Dolores, and Dolores to their daughter Rachel. Other associations are dialogic, post-war references to atolls and the capacity of hydrogen bombs to “implode from the inside.” The spectator's meaning-making activity, which involves “constant retroactive revision, new reality checks, displacements, and reorganization” (Elsaesser, 2009, p. 21) mirrors the Marshal's attempts to constantly rework and refine the delicate architecture of his delusions, adapting it to the “real” world while holding that world at bay, as he tries to keep the walls of its intricate structure from closing or collapsing in.
As the film develops, the truth is revealed slowly, piece by piece, in a series of fragmented flashbacks, combining strands of memory, dreams, and hallucinations that spectators must piece together to make sense of the film. Viewers come to discern the logic of their various displacements and overlapping scenarios. The fantasy sequences that simultaneously reveal and distort the truth are typically and tightly “matched” with diegetic “day residue,” often accompanied by a ringing sound, the “notes” of a fog horn, white lighting, or music from “On the Nature of Daylight” (Richter, 2004). Some of the nightmarish recollections can be understood as fulfillments of a wish that his wife and daughter were still alive.
Shutter Island both exemplifies and parodies being in lockdown, perhaps in an ironic reference to the “prison house of movie thesis,” that is, “the view that classical film essentially restricts the epistemic situation of its viewer in a radical and deplorable fashion” (Wilson, 1995, pp. 50, 51). According to the hallucinated Rachel Solando, who turns up in an inverted Platonic cave setting to describe the hospital's nefarious activities, the only way out of its locked ward is through brain surgery conducted in the Lighthouse, an operation that turns people into “ghosts.”
The looming threat of lobotomized “zombification” calls ideological structures inside and outside of cinematic contexts to mind, along with experimental efforts to counter them by uncovering hidden agendas with the power to subjugate others by rendering them “tractable” and compliant. The suspenseful dread of this sort of manipulated passivity persists throughout the film and lingers after its viewing. Cawley wants to unshackle patients in the locked ward before the hurricane hits; Naehring would rather keep them chained in their cells.
A refusal to see the truth implies some resistance to knowing it, which suggests, in turn, a nebulous connection to knowledge. Electric lights knocked out during the storm come back on in liquid cracks, much as the Marshal's nightmares and repressed memories slowly and horrifically seep through, like the blood oozing through Dolores's wet, flowery dress, for example, after the crack of his gunshot into her belly. Dreams, like water, are slippery; what the Marshal wants most but cannot hold onto is Dolores.
A symbolic beacon of truth, the out-of-service Lighthouse that figures so prominently in the plot is (ironically or figuratively) described as a septic processing or sewage treatment facility. After needing to swim through a high tide around it in one of the final scenes, the Marshal washes up there to be treated with “the shit he saw,” truth he insists is “bullshit.”
In stark contrast with Ashecliffe's hazy air of uncertainty, which is cleared away by the storm, the terrible truth is revealed in a recovered memory of a sunny, verdant lakeshore, complete with a gazebo looking out on a wide open view that is simultaneously bucolic and horrendous. The camera circling around the protagonist echoes a sense of instability and entrapment in a movement mirroring his climb up the lighthouse's spiral staircase that leads him, and us, to the truth and signals us to the cause of his own downward spiral into a delusional psychosis. The vertigo also recalls the motion sickness the Marshal suffers in the opening scene, a nauseous sea-sickness he tries to assuage with a reminder that “it's only water.” After realizing that the lake is not only water and retrieving his dead children who are floating, like logs, upon it, he finally realizes how unquestionably dangerous and mentally unstable Dolores really is and how horrific a mistake entrusting her with their children was. This scene, which contains back-lighting and a rim-lit close-up of husband and wife, has more of a three-dimensional aspect to it than other shots in the film. Some truths too painful for Teddy to fully absorb are announced in the film by over-exposures that wash him in light. His recovered memory is also triggered by a certain photo-sensitivity: a snapshot of his (dead) daughter, Rachel, who has been taunting/haunting him in nightmarish hallucinations of a little girl in a death camp with an open, outstretched hand and who “says over and over that” he “should have saved her, saved them all.”
Failures to rescue vulnerable individuals in time by helping them escape from – or via – mental illness or horrendous institutional custodies is a theme that runs throughout Shutter Island. These failures to save are linked to failures to see. Before the protagonist can “process” “the shit he saw,” he must attend to what he “can't take” seeing: that by misplacing trust in his wife's competence to care for their children, he shares in the responsibility for their murder.
Where's the harm in a little arbitrary faith? That's all I'm saying, boss.
(Lehane, 2003, p. 20)Shutter Island features significant types and aspects of trust. Trust, both warranted and misplaced, therapeutic and pathological, plays dynamic roles. The film may appear to be a strange place for an investigation of trust since it is, after all, quite deliberately untrustworthy and untruthful in much of its telling and presentation; appearing, on the surface, to breech the “trusting relationship” between film and spectator. However, as Elsaesser (2009) has noted, the stakes in a mind-game film may pertain as frequently to matters of skepticism and doubt as they do to “their obverse: belief and trust” (p. 19). Despite its seemingly unreliable narration and as discussed above, the cognitive demands placed on its audience do not violate the trust between filmmaker and audience so much as create a different sort of pact between them. Spectators who go along for the ride that this psychological thriller offers may choose to trust, as they embark, that their active engagements with the film and reliance on its director's relatively solid reputation will pay off, in the end.1
The Marshal is both trustor and trusted, albeit in different settings and under different circumstances. Because the situation seems to be epistemically and ethically clear and the reason for his delusions, I will begin with his misplaced trust in his wife and contrast it with the vacillations of trust between him and Chuck, before moving onto to consider some of its therapeutic and pathological forms.
According to Annette Baier's (1986) influential definition, “trust is letting other persons (natural or artificial, such as firms, nations, etc.) take care of something the trustor cares about, where such ‘caring for’ involves some exercise of discretionary powers” (p. 240). Karen Jones (1996) inserts trustee competence into her definition, according to which “trust is an attitude of optimism that the goodwill and competence of another will extend to cover the domain of our interaction with her” (p. 4).
What is “important” about his wife's death, the Marshal stresses to Chuck on the ferry, is that “it was the smoke – and not the fire – that killed her.” (It becomes clearer over time that smoke functions in the film to both signal and obscure truth.) Because he was repeatedly warned that Dolores was mentally ill and a danger to herself and their children, the Marshal's trust in her ability to care for them when she was incompetent to do so seems obviously unwarranted. Although it was she who had previously set fire to their apartment, it is he, Laeddis the “firebug,” who feels responsible for “lighting the match” and setting off the tragic chain of events by so blatantly ignoring signs of her increasingly impaired reality contact, until it was far too late.
In the Marshal's fantasized image of him(self), Laeddis has a damaged eye. His problem with seeing is underscored in the film. He does not want to see the intake form of Andrew Laeddis, for whom he is apparently searching, when Chuck tries to show it to him. He also fails to see the “side” of Dolores that is capable of burning down their apartment with the children inside, at least until the spectacle of her burnt backside appears in one of his hallucinations. His reason (or rationalization) for killing his wife also involves an inability to visualize: he sets her “free” when she requests this because he does not want to see her in a psychiatric prison cell. Before she can be locked into one, he proactively rescues her by helping her to “escape,” as he imagines the fictitious Rachel Solando doing.
Trust is an attitude, a combination of beliefs and emotions. As an attitude, trust can be thought as a filter for our feelings or an affective lens influencing how we will tend to perceive people, places, and situations. According to Jones (1996, pp. 12, 16), trust functions like “blinkered vision,” restricting our interpretations of another's good will toward us. I will see you in different “lights,” depending upon whether I trust or distrust you.
Formations and reformations of partnerships portrayed in the film illuminate how trust's emergence and erosion can be cinematically depicted. While suspicious of the setting, viewers may tend to trust Chuck because he convincingly acts as though he genuinely cares about the Marshal. The trust developing between them is evoked by their close proximity in most shots, with Chuck lighting his cigarettes, repeatedly asking, “You all right, Boss?” and invariably responding, “You tell me” when asked what their next move is. Seeking shelter during the storm in a mausoleum with stained glass windows, which lends a confessional air to the scene, Teddy shares intimate reminiscences and painful wartime memories with his partner, sealing their budding friendship. (It is here where we learn through a flashback of his participation as an American soldier in a massacre of captured German guards at Dachau.) Chuck covers for Teddy after one of his violent attacks, and Teddy climbs down a dangerous cliff where he believes Chuck has fallen.
The stage is literally set for distrust to enter into their relationship when they become separated in the match-lit scene in locked Ward C when a patient, who knows the truth and tries to convey it to Teddy, asks him if he has “ever been alone” – completely alone – “since this whole thing started?” Responding that he has been with his partner the whole time, he states, “I know this guy. I trust him.” But when asked about the basis for this trust, the Marshal comes up short and begins to question if his trust in Chuck is warranted.
This questioning can take spectators back to an earlier scene I regard as prototypical of the way mistrust is cinematically depicted in Shutter Island. It takes place before Chuck and the Marshal enter the hospital grounds, when they are required to hand over their “guns.” The Marshal's quick, effortless movement as he unsnaps the holster and hands over his gun is in sharp contrast with Chuck's relatively protracted fumbling with his holster snap and gun. The camera focuses in with a close up view of Chuck's clumsy handling of his firearm and then shifts to the Marshal shooting him a leery, critical glance.
There are times, as Jones (1996, p. 24) observes, when we cannot help viewing someone with suspicion. One of these irrupts in the film when Cawley, a sympathetic character up to that point in the film, tells the Marshal that he does not have a partner, that he came there alone. Smoke is important, remember; and Cawley is “blowing smoke” as he says this. (So is the Ward C inmate when he tries to tell the Marshal the truth.) Because we have been accustomed to perceiving the surroundings through Teddy's affective lens, spectators' trust in Cawley is considerably shaken by this apparently false statement, and Teddy, worried that Chuck has been kidnapped and will suffer some experimental operation as part of Ashecliffe's nefarious activities, sets out for the Lighthouse to rescue him.
When Chuck appears, unharmed, at the door of the Lighthouse, and crosses over, physically, to take his place on Cawley's side (the film uses “sidedness” very effectively to depict various and shifting alignments of who is on which), Teddy asks, in a hurt but still confidentially lowered voice, “What the fuck is going on here? You working for him?” On learning that Chuck is not a detective, but his primary psychiatrist, Lester Sheehan, Teddy, perceptibly let down, expresses his felt sense of betrayal through reminders of their shared intimacies and the risks he took to rescue him. “I trusted you,” he says, using the past tense.
Trust is such an essential aspect of our lives that we typically take its feeling or lived experience for granted. It is, as Baier (1995) has observed, “most easily acknowledged when it is missed” (p. 132). In her discussion of its pre-reflexive aspects and affective resonances, Fiona Utley (2014) elaborates:
Much of my lived awareness of trust comes in moments when its “presence” is questioned, often through […] some form of breach that shatters my sense of having a shared world with an other or others, and disrupts my sense of self. In such times […] my trust “being in question” creates a lived tension that punctuates my meaningful experience. I am dislodged from the meaning of my world and from the smooth flow of time. (pp. 194–195)
It is easier to trust in a climate of trust and the suspenseful atmosphere of Shutter Island is anything but. In ways resembling Chuck's fumble with his holster, its settings and timings are “off.” There are defects in the acting, displays of funny looks, and incongruous gestures. Although everyone in the film is supposed to be playing along with Teddy's delusions, certain characters either act like they are acting, act out of character, or do not appear to be playing their part – e.g., patients answer interview questions in ways that seem coached; a doctor at a staff meeting makes mocking fun of the Marshal; Dolores responds with a sick smile when asked, by the lake, where their children are. Bad actors are untrustworthy; their inappropriate behavior helps to construct the climate of suspicion pervading the institutional milieu. The scene where guards loll about when they are supposed to be searching is another case in point. Their inaction, so overtly “off key” but “truthful” in a sense (since no one is missing), is especially interesting in being coupled and contrasted with a powerful and invisibly deceptive shot of the Marshal, Chuck, and Deputy Marshal standing on a bluff and overseeing the “search.” The low, up-tilted camera angle, making all three appear larger than life, lends credence to a spectator's belief in Teddy and Chuck's law-enforcement authority.
As a result of the devastating consequences of misplaced trust in his wife and a shattered sense of their shared world, the Marshal can be diagnosed as suffering what Baier (1991) has called the “worst pathology” of trust, that is, “a life-poisoning reaction to any betrayal of trust.” “There are few fates worse,” she says, “than sustained, self-protective, self-paralyzing, generalized distrust of one's human environment” (p. 129). Betrayed by others, we can lose trust in ourselves.
Conversely, as Trudy Govier (1998) has argued, “trust in others can support and enhance trust in ourselves, and trust in ourselves can support and enhance trust in others” (p. 118). Therapeutic trust, “the ability of trust to create trustworthiness” (Lahno, 2001, p. 183), is enacted in the film as well. This type of trust involves acting on the recognition that signaling trust in persons whom you do not necessarily believe to be trustworthy can be a way of inspiring them to become so. Self-trust and trust in others are not opposed attitudes (Govier, 1998, p. 105).
As an attitude of optimism concerning another person's actions, all trust entails risk; in therapeutic trust, the risks increase. Owing to their autonomy, we can never be sure how others will act. If we could predict their actions, trust would be uncalled-for. But without the self-trust that other people's encouraging confidence in us might inspire, autonomy is compromised.
Therapeutic trusting offers moral support to someone in need of it. I regard the psychiatrists' motive for therapeutically trusting the Marshal to courageously face and handle the truth as based on good will, i.e., I consider their trust warranted. Addressing his pathology in this way, they make a last-ditch effort to save him along with the reputation of their institution as a place that successfully applies moral treatment to its residents.2 By reenacting his delusion as supporting characters within it, they succeed in making him aware of its imaginary construction. While the upshot of the “reality effect” they produce is hardly the one they hoped for, his non-conformance with their expectations may be viewed as an achievement of trust in his own competence to judge behavior, consider his options, and make decisions.
Viewed as a “participant attitude” (a practical versus a more distanced stance), trust involves a sort of pretense, an acting-as-if one believes others will “pull through” for us; it also entails a readiness to feel reactive and proto-typically moral emotions such as gratitude or betrayal (Holton, 1994). To invest trust in the Marshal's ability to handle the truth is to be primed to feel relief or disappointment when we discover whether or not he can. In a mind-game film, spectators may be “psyched” to feel these emotions more keenly. Trust shares with literary and cinematic arts of suspense a structure of anticipation concerning the fate of pseudo-human characters. Intrinsically suspenseful, trust as a participant stance can be connected to film spectatorship, as the master of suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, has pointed out:
The art of creating suspense is also the art of involving the audience, so that the viewer is actually a participant in the film. In this area of the spectacle, film making is not a dual interplay between the director and his (sic) picture, but a three way game in which the audience, too, is required to play. (Hitchcock in Truffaut, 1983, p. 16)
During the Lighthouse scene, Chuck (unmasked as Dr. Sheehan) says, in a soft voice, “Andrew, listen to me. If we fail with you, then everything we've tried to do here will be discredited.” Cawley likens the Marshal's situation to being “on the front line of a war here, old boy, and now it all comes down to you.” Their appeal to Andrew's moral desire to be the hero he fancies himself to be and save the reputation they risked for his benefit sheds light on another aspect of holding a trusting attitude, namely perceiving our partners in trust as connected to us by shared aims or values. Hoping in their experiment to cure the Marshal of his delusions and prevent him and other patients from suffering lobotomies or adverse effects of the “new” pharmaceuticals, his doctors assume that he cares about saving Ashecliffe's reputation as much as they do. But the Marshal is much more concerned with his own, and has devised his own method of preserving it.
Spectators immersed in the final suspenseful scene and expecting some resolution find that we are torn between a desire to trust that the Marshal will pull through and a skeptical fear that he may not. Given our placements of trust in Teddy and his team (we want, after all, the good guys to win), viewers may feel “blind-sided” by the ending, which manages to be both stupefying and intelligible. Building up to its moment of truth, the film reminds us (literally, with a sign) that we are in a Restricted Area. The compressed time period and the introduction of a clear deadline seem to narrow the focus of possible outcomes down to two paths leading in opposite directions: Andrew will regress back into Teddy and suffer a lobotomy, or Andrew will “accept reality” and be saved from one. Anticipating the ending of this game, the remaining possibility, that Teddy does not regress but will pretend to do so in order to undergo a lobotomy, is an outcome that seems, despite its overlooked logical possibility, inconceivable.
The notion that choosing a lobotomy might provide a way of accepting reality may create a jarring disconnect – not only between the brain and a part of itself, but also between the audience and the action. A shift in a spectator's positioning may take place into one that is something besides or beyond active, playful engagement or passive, distanced observation. We may find ourselves, totally and uncomfortably at a loss; left on our own and responsible for figuring out how to think and feel about this unanticipated “move” on the Marshal's part as well as the “line” he offers to explain it (discussed below). Why would anyone in their “right mind,” which the Marshal now is, choose to have a lobotomy, which he now does?
I believe there are ways of understanding this radical gesture as healing or emancipatory if it is considered in the context of an attempt to preserve his (psychological and moral) integrity. To salvage what is left of it, now that he knows how compromised it has been, he makes the confounding choice he does in an irrevocable attempt to become the heroic redeemer of a certain “moral order.” Before showing how the protagonist's seemingly absurd decision-making may be part of its film-philosophical point, some “monstrosities” need to be brought into the picture. As explained in the next section, its apparent irrationality makes cinematic sense if considered as a manner of both signifying and subverting a certain crisis of meaning.
A disturbing exchange takes place midway through the film between Teddy and the Warden (Ted Levine), who describes humans as innately violent and violence as “God's gift,” a “divine hand” reaching out to create devastation. According to the Warden, “There is no moral order as pure as this storm. There's no moral order at all. There is only this – can my violence conquer yours?” To Teddy's feeble protest that he is not violent, the Warden responds, “You're as violent as they come. I know this because I'm as violent as they come.”
But is the Marshal as violent as the Warden? Scorsese has described recurrent themes in his films as “the struggle to find morality in an immoral world, male camaraderie, what a life of violence can do to a man” (Scorsese in Brown, 2010). The film's distinction between men of violence and violent men needs to be drawn into this question and its impactful ending. The film, unlike the novel, contains explicit scenes and themes of monstrosity. Monstrous identifications are constructed compositionally through a series of matching techniques. One connects the monstrously looking Laeddis (in Teddy's hallucinatory imagination) to Dr. Naehring by having him sit in a red wing chair occupied earlier in the film by Naehring. In another, it is Naehring, a German, who is “matched” through fireplace, phonograph, and sound imagery (a string quartet by Mahler, which matches up with the enigmatic “Law of Four”) to the office of a monstrously disfigured Nazi death camp sub-commandant and to a scene in the apartment that the Marshal and his family shared and which Dolores burned down. Both of the latter settings involve failed suicide attempts, and they too are matched: falling ashes in their home (and his wife's burnt backside) correspond both to paper scattering inside the office (and the officer's wounded face) and to snow falling on corpses (including those of a mother and daughter) in a camp liberated by American soldiers, the Marshal among them. There are of course the match lights that flicker between Teddy and Chuck, and between Teddy and the Ward C inmate when he strikes on the truth that the Marshal is Laeddis.
During a surprise encounter that takes place in an isolated part of the hospital, Dr. Naehring and the Marshal each views the other in a monstrous light. The Marshal, noticing the doctor reaching for a syringe in his pocket, grabs it and pushes Naehring against the wall, holding the syringe to his neck.
[Some smiling and laughter on the part of the doctor]
DR NAEHRING: What are you going to do? Kill me? Marshal.
MARSHAL: Do you think you deserve it?
[The Marshal releases the doctor]
DR NAEHRING: For what? Provoking you? Forgive me, what doesn't provoke you? Remarks, words…
MARSHAL: Nazis.
DR NAEHRING: Well, that too. And of course memories, dreams. Did you know the word “trauma” comes from the Greek for wound? […] Wounds can create monsters and you…you are wounded, Marshal. And wouldn't you agree? When you see a monster, you must stop it?
MARSHAL: I agree.
[The Marshal violently injects the syringe into the doctor's arm]
“To live with reality means to receive bad feelings,” integrating them into the self and relationships (Shapiro & Ryglewicz, 1976, p. 56). Bad feelings can be felt as monsters and these monstrous aspects can be projected onto others. “No one can remain where he feels at the mercy of monsters; the only recourse is flight” (Shapiro & Ryglewicz, 1976, p. 56). Becoming Teddy Daniels during his two-year stay at Ashecliffe, the Marshal was able to safeguard his integrity by cutting off contact with Andrew Laeddis's intolerable feelings of guilt. Accepting the truth and honestly reckoning with his past means grappling with these feelings and finding a way to incorporate them into his present understanding of his self and situation.
Faced with equally undesirable alternatives at the film's ending, the Marshal poses one himself: “Which is worse?,” he asks “Chuck”, “To live as a monster or to die as a good man?” Because of this line, we know (in the film but not in the novel because it does not appear there) that he is consciously faking it, pretending he is not Andrew Laeddis while signaling to his psychiatrist confidante in a last, intimate sharing of a secret that he knows he is.
This last line of the film relates to the first, which is also concerned with his integrity: “Pull yourself together, Teddy,” he says (twice) in the opening scene, looking into a mirror over a toilet after vomiting (“it's just water”) on the ferryboat. Once he has confronted himself as Laeddis, pulling Teddy (back) together is a struggle. Nevertheless, he tries. So Teddy can “die” with a vestige of unfeigned goodness intact, his closing act “in character” is a conscious enactment of it, a moral treatment modelled after his caretakers' experimental undertakings.
When Chuck suggested to Teddy earlier in the film that Ashecliffe might know that he is searching for Laeddis, the Marshal claims there is no connection between Teddy and Laeddis because Laeddis “wasn't convicted”. Although he is genuinely faking his deluded persona right before the film's climactic “cut,” his striking final gesture is a conviction – in both senses: of a truth and a finding of guilt. Now that his “monstrous” (and presumably unforgettable) past is exposed and blocking the path of regression back into a delusory state, one way to try to recover a sense of moral integrity is to create another mode of separation from Laeddis. This he does by shifting temporarily back into U.S. Marshal (man of violence) mode, consciously pretending still to be Teddy, and delivering Laeddis (the violent man), whom he has indeed found and with whom he now cannot help but identify, over to the authorities. He voluntarily submits to the precautionary measures they are ready to take to ensure that he, Laeddis, never hurts anyone again. Once Laeddis is “convicted,” the Marshal's work is done. Truth acquired in the Lighthouse becomes “the end” of Teddy, as hallucinatory Dolores repeatedly forewarned.
At its peak during the historical time framing of the story (the 1940s and early 1950s), many thousands of lobotomies were performed in the United States. Included among those receiving lobotomies were two thousand World War II veterans in VA hospitals suffering post-traumatic stress (Phillips, 2013). Since the frontal lobes of the brain “gives us consciousness of the self, that allow us […] to project ourselves into the past, present, and future” (Whitaker, 2002, p. 126), disconnecting the frontal lobes was viewed, by two of its prolific practitioners, as freeing mentally ill sufferers from “disagreeable self-consciousness” (Freeman & Watts in Whitaker, 2002, p. 127): “The lobotomized person, unable to form a mental picture of the ‘self,’ would no longer worry about past and future” (Whitaker, 2002, p. 127).
“Monstrous” Laeddis's damaged eye symbolizes his past refusals to see, the present pain involved in seeing and, insofar as lobotomies were performed through orbits of the eye, a fitting punishment for these failings. While choosing a lobotomy is also choosing to avoid terrible truths by forgetting them, the protagonist's decision is nevertheless a clear-sighted admission of his share of responsibility for murderous actions, crimes that warrant punishment in his view. The punitive and permanent measure he is willing to undergo signifies not only that he has faced reality but also, sadly, that the reality he has faced is no longer one he wishes to inhabit.
Before the protagonist's fateful move, Sheehan and Laeddis, psychiatrist and patient, are shown sitting together on porch steps, conversing, smoking cigarettes, and considering their “next move” one last time. In the course of the scene, it dawns on Sheehan, whom Laeddis in the moments prior has misleadingly called “Chuck,” that Laeddis is consciously faking it. But this realization comes only after Sheehan has already signaled to other staff members that he had indeed regressed again and was still delusional. Sheehan calls, though he does not go after “Teddy.” Sheehan is still, in a way, sticking by him. By not divulging his secret signal, his psychiatrist does for Laeddis what Laeddis did for Dolores when she asked to be set free from her mental suffering in the moments before he shot her: he assists an individual trapped in misery “to get off this rock,” providing a different form of “moral treatment” by respecting his autonomy and desire to escape from the “locked ward” of a painfully unalterable past.
During this crucial scene, an unanticipated path opens up, and the Marshal is shown walking down it as orderlies, carrying a straightjacket, advance toward him. He appears to be siding with the disreputable Dr. Naehring that “when you see a monster, you must stop him” and taking seriously, if not literally, Dolores's advice that when he finds Laeddis, he should “kill him dead.” While he also appears to be “turning himself in” to the warden, an “ex-military prick” who is “as violent as they come,” he is distinguishable from him in attempting to maintain some semblance of moral order, perhaps all that is available to him under the circumstances. Such a decision may itself seem monstrous; even cowardly. At the risk of shining a positive light on lobotomy, it is possible to read the Marshal's deliberately chosen ending, psychoanalytically, as a healing, reparative gesture – an attempt to restore wholeness to that which is lost, even if the attempt is flawed or incomplete (Quinlivan, 2015). His wish to be treated with what has been described as a “partial euthanasia” can be viewed as a merciful closure or release from a trauma; an expression of a desire “to heal, psychologically through the destruction of the body” (Quinlivan, 2015, p. 34), facilitating a permanent disconnection between himself and his memories so that the “wound” that would not scar over finally can.
Although the two faces of Teddy and Laeddis look nothing alike, they are both, more or less and visibly, scarred. One runs all the way across and diagonally divides the face of the hallucinated version of Laeddis in two. A much smaller one appears on the Marshal's forehead throughout most of the film. It is hidden under a bandage until his very last scene, by which time the wound is presumably healed enough for it to be removed.
The protagonist's fateful decision, used as a means to simultaneously incorporate and redeem “monstrous” aspects of his identity, can also be linked to Jean Epstein's (1977) discussion of “something monstrous” in cinematic imagery, described as a demolition of the opposition between continuity and discontinuity and the transformations of one into the other, exposing the unreality of both and the “terrible underside of things” (p. 21). Cinema produces continuity from discontinuous images and discontinuity – through the pretense of a film's subjective continuity – from that continuous and mobile aspect of nature which assumes the role of a fundamental reality (Epstein, 1977, p. 24). This dynamic is reflected within Shutter Island by the manner in which it simultaneously stages and calls subjective continuity into question. An analogous pretense of consistency might also be viewed as problematically bearing on the very notion of (a) moral character, a dispositional consistency that trusting attitudes and behaviors assume and rely upon, but which nonetheless may not be rationally well-grounded (D'Cruz, 2015, pp. 476ff). Images “taken from the perpetually moving spectacle of the world: a spectacle which is fragmented, cut into brief slices, by a shutter” (Epstein, 1977, p. 24) contain, in Epstein's view, a “subtle venom which could corrupt the entire rational order” (p. 21). Predicated on the illusion of a global sort of good will that is able to cross over from one situational slice of life to another, disavowals of confidence in character or denials that individuals can be consistently trustworthy over time and through changes in their situation might have an analogously toxic effect on the moral order.
Epstein's notion of cinema's production of an “absurd, irrational synthesis” between continuity and discontinuity can be read into the ending of Shutter Island along different story lines. In the protagonist's character, for example, we see a severing of connections that establishes continuity as well as the discontinuity between its different sides allowing him to “pull himself together” and achieve some integrity. His continuity as Teddy depends on his discontinuity with Laeddis. Only when he discontinues the pretense, by speaking a line that marks its and Teddy's ending, can we continue to see the pretense for what it was, all along. His (non-delusional) continuance of the pretense of being Teddy disconnects him from Laeddis through the role it enables him to play in turning him(self) over to the authorities. Turning him(self) into the authorities by bringing the monstrous Laeddis to justice, he inconspicuously turns him(self) back into Teddy, a marshal performing his duty; that is, his role becomes his “reality.” By acting (his character) out in a morally worthy manner, he solidifies his image of himself as a “good man.” That we cannot tell by the end of the novel whether or not the protagonist is “faking” mental illness both dramatizes and deepens our understanding of the film, where we can. Spectators bearing witness to his undercover performance are left on their own to grapple with its morality and meaning.
In this process of “honest reckoning” and in filmmaking, “the discontinuous reality of an unreal continuity” is produced, but “only after it has made its way in the spectator” (Epstein, 1977, p. 23) through interpretations and sensory impressions which, according to Epstein, are phantom-like illusions. Epstein's “spectres,” the Marshal's delusions, and the “ghosts” created through brain operations are all caused by “bad eyesight.” Perceptual deficiencies are center stage in Shutter Island, particularly as they pertain to lapses of moral responsibilities in care-giving and care-taking. As George M. Wilson (1995) points out in his discussion of film spectatorship, “the morals that can be found about perceptual malfunction and misalignment within the boundaries of the film also effectively double back on the viewers themselves” (p. 49).
Shutter Island, in my view, is about failures to save due to failures to see in institutional settings and between people where relations of trust are highly significant and instances of its betrayal are devastatingly injurious. This theme both encompasses and exposes the reality of duplicities and denials used to avoid acknowledging the roles that neglect and willful ignorance play in the suffering and oppression of others. Less obvious perhaps is its demonstration of the arguably commendable roles duplicity and denial can play in alleviating pain as well. The protagonist's intentional subterfuge serves as a scrupulously honest reckoning. The therapeutic trusting and honest reckonings that occur in the film hinge on deceptive manipulations of others and deliberate maskings of knowledge.
Whatever moral agency and perceptual clear-sightedness the protagonist exhibits at the end of the film is made possible by a certain (and now defensible) self-trust. This self-trust owes its emergence to the moral support he received through his caretaker's therapeutic trust in him. Despite the somber nature of the ending, there is saving grace in realizing that the Marshal sees this too. Notwithstanding Gilles Deleuze's (1989, pp. 207–209) critique of Scorsese, the “moves” of this self-reflective action film manage to incorporate both loss and restoration of “reasons to believe in this world” (Deleuze, 1986, p. 172).
Shutters keep light out but also let light in. As noted earlier, “On the Nature of Daylight” plays in the background when characters in Shutter Island speak the truth. At the end of the film, it becomes background music to a rendition of “This Bitter Earth” (Washington & Richter, 2010). The melancholy mashup poignantly resonates with the Marshal's accomplishing his frequently stated goal of getting himself off “this rock” to “a measure of calm” and serves as an expression of gratitude to the doctors who cared enough to “come after” and “keep him safe” when he was in a delusional, isolated state. “This bitter earth may not be so bitter after all,” the lyrics go, if “someone” responds when a “voice within me cries.” Perhaps it is not too far-fetched to think of the Marshal finally at peace and gratified, not only because others responded to his cry (he makes a point of realizing and appreciating this in the second “confessional” scene), but also because he responded to “Chuck's,” “risking everything” to save him when he believed his life was on the line. The protagonist, thanks to his caretakers, was enabled to swim toward sanity and arrive at an arduous, but honest, self-reckoning. He made it to the Lighthouse after all. And for that feat, I think that he and his innovative custodians deserve applause.
1. Coming from a world “very much based on loyalty and trust,” it seems that betrayals, in particular, are especially interesting to Scorsese: “When a person does ‘betray’ the other – he or she – why does that happen? What puts that person very often in a place where they have no choice, they couldn't do otherwise – and where the decision is not good either way?” (Scorsese in Brown, 2010).
2. While beyond the scope of this article to consider, one may question whether Shutter Island successfully applies moral treatment to its portrayal of mental illness. The question is apt, particularly given the film's self-reflectivity and this aspect of its content.
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