Is it really possible to be confined in a world of your own, where everything happening is your own thread and every person is attached to that?
I watched Shutter Island in the deep of the night, after reading Brave New World (the powerful, mind-boggling futuristic classic by Aldous Huxley). Directed by Martin Scorsese and based upon the complex genius of author Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, The Given Day) of the same title, this movie steps forward with A-List actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Rufallo, and Ben Kingsley.
It is the year 1945 and US Marshall Edward “Teddy” Daniels (DiCaprio) and newly assigned partner Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) are placed to investigate the escape of a Rachel Solando, a patient/inmate at the Ashecliff Hospital in Shutter Island. Inmates (or patients, as the doctors would prefer to call them) here are the criminally insane and it is said to be the one of its kind in the world.
As their investigation sets on a tragic trance and Daniels starts to have unpleasant flashbacks, he also revels in his personal cause of revenging his wife who was killed by another inmate in the island, Andrew Laeddis.
As his personal complexities and the island seem to bare its true colors, Daniels realize that he is in an impasse where all the people around him—doctors and nurses and patients included—are against him. He finds out a medical scheme within the shores: of patients getting harsh and inhumane operations, and the real Rachel Solando—not a patient, but a doctor who also finds out this plan.
Daniels race to save himself and his partner from this tragedy but he is confronted by the island’s doctor (Kingsley) that he has no partner. Daniels was confronted by the doctor of being a patient in the island himself for two years, a once Marshall who killed his wife after she killed their three children. In fact, Andrew Laeddis is the anagram of Edward Daniels; and Chuck Aule is really a Dr. Sheehan, his psychiatrist. The doctor explained their “role-playing” as a way to help Daniels realize (lobotomy is the last resort) the reality and to make them achieve his cure—being the most dangerous patient in the island.
He accepted this although the next day, he fell back to his usual trance and called Dr. Sheehan as Chuck. The movie ends with Daniels being led for the lobotomy.
What struck me odd is this—is the mind really so weak and powerful all at the same time to not accept its sores, yet he can manage to set up his own version of things? I did not really understand the command to which Daniels bear, not until the end when the truth is rushing down on his character. I think it takes a real man to accept his defeat and accept the way things go. As it turned out, Daniels is a bigger man who has to erase the failure of a supposed-to-be good family and honest-to-goodness career. Would it really look good for a US Marshall to have a psycho-wife who killed her family? What dad would not turn mad when in his return to his home, he found out that his wife killed their children?
I think what scares the viewers of this movie is not about how the character of Daniels, the smart, ungiving Marshall, turned out to be psycho. There is a relief actually in the fact that even the most brilliant among us have issues to go on through. The real score is that insanity is not really an option of life—it is borderline. It is something that we also experience, something we revel to. Insanity, in my opinion, is not a sickness. It is a defense mechanism where we give our real selves up to find your real “you.” What sets us apart only is how much this insanity is left on everyone of us, and how dangerous it could be.
As the DVD ended that evening I watched it, I thought about how Daniels would be after the lobotomy. Will he really be happy to be back in the cruel chasms of reality—or will he be suffering more for those memories? Think about it.
I read in a book before that insanity is something people condemn, not because it’s dangerous or scary. It is because everyone of us knows that there is an insane part of us, a tiger waiting to be uncaged. It’s just something we are afraid to set loose.
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