MK Themes in Shutter Island?

[JackRiddler]

I'm loving all these comments! Thank you!

I think most people would choose Door #1 ("Andrew is Shutter Island inmate #67.")

Door #1, yes. And yes to your parenthetical, except that it's not incompatible with Door #2, i.e. "This is the mess they made of Teddy after two years as Shutter Island inmate #67." (And now they're not sending him to a lobotomy but to massacre three men in a bar?)

But both readings break down fatally for me. The straight reading fails, among other reasons, because it suggests that the staff - not to mention a bunch of criminally insane inmates - choreographed the charade that perfectly, and that the good doctors managed to script in a hurricane - arriving at the proper time and inflicting just the right amount of damage.

Yes yes.

As for the alt reading, consider this bit of dialog when Teddy bursts in on Dr. Cawley in the lighthouse (paraphrased):
Dr. Cawley: "Why are you all wet, baby?"
Teddy: "What did you say?"
D.C.: "You heard what I said."
Teddy asked Dolores the exact same question when he got home and found her soaking wet, after she drowned the children. How would Dr. Cawley have known about that unless Andrew had told him?

Because he was reinforcing the false memory they've been causing Teddy to construct under drugs and hypnosis for the last two years?

Our protagonist can neither be Teddy nor Andrew; I rather like it that way. And I agree wholeheartedly with the comments about the cinematography and Robbie Robertson's brilliant soundtrack, which is worth getting to hear the full pieces, not just the snippets used in the film.

So have I also decided.

Shutter to me felt like an MK kind of work in and of itself, it toyed and teased us becoming a kind of prince of neucleotides of the mind but almost seemed, at the end, to say....okay okay we're just a movie, you knew we couldn't go there, all the way, right?...and pushes you back out into the sunshine and rain with a circus barker's poignant remindance, however obviously hollow, "back to the real world, back to life, back to sanity!"

Yup. Exploitation movie for paranoid intellectuals who may have dabbled in hallucinogenics.

Those tarot cards, true. This time I was very pleased with how it started completely white and then the ship emerged from the fog.

At that point I had to scream at myself just shut up and watch the damned movie! I was okay until Leo/Teddy got in the jeep with Ted Levine.

I liked that scene this time. Andrew or Teddy, I think the dialogue wasn't hallucinated either way.

Except insofar as a movie is always a hallucination, etc.

it does not matter what you think you know or what you believe you think.

I have to disagree. It doesn't matter what "Shutter Island" thinks it knows or believes I think. I get to do that.

[The Consul]

So which is worse then, to live as a monster or die as a good man?

[JackRiddler]

Die a good man, live a monster?

Well that was another thing. Even in the straight reading, I have trouble seeing him as a monster. Another creepy aspect of the movie is that the doctors seem to agree that he is a monster, not just a man gone mad from trauma. The worst thing Andrew did was to indulge his depression and alcoholism and deny to himself that his wife was crazy. Narcissism, meatheaded negligence, but not exactly monstrosity. He even loved her, he just didn't care any more. He was asleep. Shooting her in the immediate aftermath of finding out she drowned the children also is not monstrous. It's not what he should do, but one can understand if the horror of the moment overwhelmed him. What if we take the straight reading and acknowledge that the all the supposed treatment is only fucking the subject up further? They're the ones attaching the moral label of a monster just as much as he is. So in this way the two readings start to merge. Even if he is Andrew, Teddy's right to think the doctors are fucking up his brain.

Anyway, perhaps the question is a false dichotomy, although one that a real person might indeed see as the choice before him.

[jfshade]

I'm loving all these comments! Thank you!

As for the alt reading, consider this bit of dialog when Teddy bursts in on Dr. Cawley in the lighthouse (paraphrased):
Dr. Cawley: "Why are you all wet, baby?"
Teddy: "What did you say?"
D.C.: "You heard what I said."
Teddy asked Dolores the exact same question when he got home and found her soaking wet, after she drowned the children. How would Dr. Cawley have known about that unless Andrew had told him?

Because he was reinforcing the false memory they've been causing Teddy to construct under drugs and hypnosis for the last two years?

Very likely yes. The scene between Cawley and Teddy utterly demolishes Teddy's credibility as a narrator. That edifice was badly cracked already, but now we know that Teddy and Cawley share the knowledge of the competing narrative of Dolores's death: Teddy says she died in a fire of smoke inhalation, but he and Cawley both know the story of the drowned children.

From this point forward, the film hands over narrative authority to the doctors. All the way through to the end. It's as if Scorcese is saying, "Sure the doctors' story doesn't hold up to even cursory scrutiny, but you people will be too credulous and dim to notice. Government mind control programs are just figments of diseased imaginations. Have Dinah sing "This Bitter Earth," and bring up the houselights."

But we know their narrative is as untenable as Teddy's. Do we have a narrator we can trust? Perhaps we have two. Dr. Solando lays out the purpose and methods of the facility in some detail when Teddy confronts her in the cave. And the Warden succinctly summarizes the philosophy informing such an institution, saying something to the effect of, "There is no moral order. There's only this: Can my violence conquer yours?"

Could this possibly be Scorcese's intention, as various people in the thread have suggested, to lead us by means of implication and indirection to see Shutter Island as an MK facility, despite the surface narrative's affirmation of the contrary? I wonder what he would think of this interpretation.

[jfshade]

Die a good man, live a monster?
...
Shooting her in the immediate aftermath of finding out she drowned the children also is not monstrous. It's not what he should do, but one can understand if the horror of the moment overwhelmed him.

Just because we might understand it doesn't mean Teddy can live with it. At the end, for him, it's the only pertinent question.

[filedactivity]

I've argued about the ending of that movie with my friends who watched it with me.
They all seem to believe that he WAS an patient in the ward and killed his wife and whatnot.

I believe the opposite. That man was onto them, so they set him up to stay at that ward forever as a patient. So he decided he would rather die than live a lie (a monster).

[JackRiddler]

Die a good man, live a monster?
...
Shooting her in the immediate aftermath of finding out she drowned the children also is not monstrous. It's not what he should do, but one can understand if the horror of the moment overwhelmed him.

Just because we might understand it doesn't mean Teddy can live with it. At the end, for him, it's the only pertinent question.

Well he thinks so but my point is about the doctors. They don't counteract but reinforce the view that he is a monster and needs to accept it if he is to embark on their idea of "healing."

In my mind the MK version and the straight narrative have merged. In the straight version, the SI facility is on the same continuum of thought that produced MK.

[filedactivity]

Well he thinks so but my point is about the doctors. They don't counteract but reinforce the view that he is a monster and needs to accept it if he is to embark on their idea of "healing."

In my mind the MK version and the straight narrative have merged. In the straight version, the SI facility is on the same continuum of thought that produced MK.

I agree 100%.

[Alaya]

I was back and forth during the movie but at the end I believed that Teddy really was an inmate because of the crimes that he committed.

It was a few days later when I knew that didn't feel right. The point of the movie for me was just how convincing that kind of mind fuckery can be. What if Teddy was already a subject before the incidents with his wife and children. I had a real 'yeah but' feeling that things are not even close to what they seemed to be.

[IanEye]

[Luther Blissett]

Stacy Keach would be a great RI subject.

[IanEye]

L'œil suis le fromage.

Spoiler:Adam Farmer's real name is Paul Delmonte. His father had been an investigative reporter who uncovered a large conspiracy and testified against it. After several attempts on his life, he and his family entered the Department of Re-identification. Adam had not been told about his past for his entire life.
Later, they received a phone call from their protector, Mr. Grey, saying that they may have been discovered. They go on "vacation" to hide. One day while on vacation, their "protection" attacked them, killing Adam's mother instantly. Adam survived, and heard that his father was being pursued, but was not sure he had been found and killed at first. He was placed in a hospital where he is interrogated every year by a doctor named Brint. Each time he ends up forgetting everything and begins the journey again.
Adam is not biking to Rutterberg at all; he is in fact going in circles in a mental health facility and all the people he encounters on the way to Rutterberg are actually the patients and workers there. The sessions with Brint in the novel represent the third time he has been questioned. The final interview ends with a list of several possible outcomes, but none bode well for Adam: questioning him until he dies or terminating him.

[Handsome B. Wonderful]

I just saw this movie. It reminded me of the book 'Drood' by Dan Simmons. Both have anti-climatic endings.

[The Consul]

Die a good man, live a monster?

Well that was another thing. Even in the straight reading, I have trouble seeing him as a monster. Another creepy aspect of the movie is that the doctors seem to agree that he is a monster, not just a man gone mad from trauma. The worst thing Andrew did was to indulge his depression and alcoholism and deny to himself that his wife was crazy. Narcissism, meatheaded negligence, but not exactly monstrosity. He even loved her, he just didn't care any more. He was asleep. Shooting her in the immediate aftermath of finding out she drowned the children also is not monstrous. It's not what he should do, but one can understand if the horror of the moment overwhelmed him. What if we take the straight reading and acknowledge that the all the supposed treatment is only fucking the subject up further? They're the ones attaching the moral label of a monster just as much as he is. So in this way the two readings start to merge. Even if he is Andrew, Teddy's right to think the doctors are fucking up his brain.

Anyway, perhaps the question is a false dichotomy, although one that a real person might indeed see as the choice before him.

The madness of those who have snapped is different than those who have not.

[Crow]

This movie gave me deja vu, as if it were a remake of a movie I'd already seen before. Anyone else have a similar feeling?