“Shutter Island: Questioning the Insane” (Spoiler Alert)
A few weekends ago, a couple of friends and I went to see Martin Scorcese’s Shutter Island. From watching the trailers, I thought it was going to be another scary, sci-fi movie, but it turns out I was wrong. The movie involved a detective investigating a case with his partner at an island institution where they imprisoned the mentally insane who were dangerous to society. By the end I was very confused because although the main character “saw” his partner jump off a cliff and die, he never found his body. When he went back to the institution asking for him, the head of the institution responded with: “What partner, you never came with a partner”. Then they began telling him that he had gone insane a couple of years back after murdering his wife.
From my point of view, my emotions tell me he was not insane when he got to the island. While my friends believe differently, I believe they changed his memory, rewriting everything he could remember. But is it possible to really do that? In his case, he had no option, if he didn’t agree that what they were stating was the truth about his insanity, he would never be set free.
The film made me wonder if we can really trust anything around us? What if what I’m living now is all a big lie. How can we trust our emotions and logic?
I believe that the main character’s madness started with paranoia. As the doctors kept trying to convince him of what “really” happened, his memory and the “memory” that they were trying to impose upon him sort of crashed. I also believe that this kind of manipulation could happen in real life. For example, some people deny the Holocaust, but we have testimonials from others who lived through it, and we know it really happened. In Shutter Island, they changed his memory just like the people who tried to rewrite history by denying the Holocaust.
by Luz T.
