Murderers and Madmen

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Warning: Contains major plot spoilers

A year before he starred in a mind-bending blockbuster that played with ideas of sanity and reality, Leonardo DiCaprio made Shutter Island - a film which could easily be served by the same description. Many critics have commented on the similarity between the actor's role as Cobb in Inception and as the troubled Teddy Daniels in this Scorsese horror. Both are men haunted by the loss of loved ones, driven to the edge of sanity by their guilt. Both, in their way, have retreated into complex dream-worlds to avoid their pain.

We meet U.S. Marshal Daniels and his new partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) as their ferry emerges from the gloomy fog en-route to a hospital for the criminally insane. Located on the remote and storm-tossed Shutter Island, the asylum has recently been the site of an inexplicable mystery. Convicted murderess Rachel Solando (Emily Mortimer) has vanished from her cell without a trace, leaving behind only a cryptic note which reads 'Who is 67?'

As he investigates, Teddy grows increasingly suspicious. The institution's leading doctor, Crawley (Ben Kingsley), though to all appearances helpful and well-meaning, seems to have something to hide. And as a hurricane grips the island, isolating them all from the mainland, Teddy finds that his own sanity is slipping. Why is he haunted by terrible visions of his wartime experiences and of his dead wife? What sinister secrets are being hidden in the lighthouse? Should he trust the doctors, the inmates, his partner, or even himself?

Unashamedly pulpy and over-the-top, Shutter Island is a B-movie made by A-listers, a triumph of style over cliché. Stuffed with ridiculous plot elements - Nazis, an anti-communist conspiracy, gruesome brain surgery - not to mention a ludicrous final-hour twist, the film is nevertheless solidly entertaining, albeit nastily so. (Though erring more towards atmospherics than blood-and-guts horror, some of the film's images, particularly in the flashback scenes concerning the Holocaust, are in questionable taste.)  All in all, Shutter Island is best taken with a pinch of salt, a Hitchcockian homage to 50s horror thrillers.

A tension is quickly established between Dr. Crawley, who asserts that each inmate is a 'patient' to be treated with care, and Teddy, who can summon little compassion for the prisoners who have hurt and killed others. 'We treat them,' insists Crawley, who prides himself on having moved on from old, barbaric methods of restraining the mentally disturbed. 'Try to heal, try to cure. And if that fails, we at least try to provide them with a measure of comfort in their lives; calm.' Teddy, still inwardly raging against his wife's killer and the concentration camp guards he encountered at Dachau, cannot comprehend such a response. 'Personally, doctor,' he retorts, 'I'd have to say screw their sense of calm.'

Disturbing questions of what justice a murderer deserves - and who ought to mete it out - lie at the heart of the film. Central to Teddy's holocaust memories is a nightmarish confession: that he and his fellow soldiers lined up the SS guards, once they had surrendered, and gunned them all down. Though he witnessed firsthand the unthinkable crimes that these men were responsible for, Teddy cannot shake off the feeling that what he did 'wasn't warfare. It was murder.' His gut response to evil insists that perpetrators must be punished, and yet shooting the guards has righted no wrongs. Furthermore, it has made him a murderer as well, dragging him into the cycle of violence and culpability. Suspecting that the world is a murky madhouse devoid of ultimate justice, Teddy can barely muster the moral clarity to pursue truth rather than his own agenda of revenge.

Like so many other examinations of insanity, from Shakespeare's King Lear onwards, Shutter Island raises the question of whether madmen are actually any madder than the world they inhabit. The horrifying flashbacks to the liberation of Dachau serve as a reminder of the worst that humanity is capable of, and in the light of such scenes, our ideas of what constitutes 'normal' human behaviour are drastically challenged. Suddenly the inmates of the asylum no longer look like deranged exceptions to a moral, civilised norm. 'Why would we want to leave here?' asks one prisoner, baffled, citing the workings of the H-bomb as evidence that madness is far more prevalent outside the asylum walls. As Shutter Island darkly alludes, history has proven the Bible's diagnosis of human nature to be accurate:

     They rush to commit murder.
        Destruction and misery always follow them.
      They don't know where to find peace.
       They have no fear of God at all.
     (Romans 3:15-18)

The Bible asserts that the human race, though made by God and loved by him, has rebelled against him, and so become violent by default. Without 'fear of God' - a recognition that we are not the ultimate moral authority in the universe - there are no depths to which we are not capable of sinking. In one of Shutter Island's most intriguing scenes, the Chief Warden misdiagnoses the violence he sees in the world as the result of a corrupt deity: 'God loves violence,' he insists. When Teddy muses that he thought God gave moral order, the Warden responds, 'There's no moral order as pure as this storm. There's no moral order at all. There's just this: can my violence conquer yours?'

In a universe without God - or without a morally upright God - there is no logical reason not to take the Warden's statement as a basis for living. Can my violence conquer yours? is the only question that need govern our behaviour if we are not accountable to any authority greater than ourselves. And yet, when we see this philosophy put into practice, we instinctively cry out against it. We condemn violence where it is perpetrated by others, and as Shutter Island emphasises with its final twist, are abhorred when we truly recognise it in ourselves. The world that Teddy has constructed around him is a fantasy to help him avoid the terrible truth - as the doctor tells him, 'You've created a story in which you're not a murderer - you're a hero.' And though the film leaves hints of ambiguity as to whose reality we are supposed to believe in, the most plausible conclusion is that the entire plot is a ruse designed by Dr. Crawley to lead Teddy back to himself.

As Crawley says of another patient, 'The greatest obstacle to her recovery was her refusal to face what she had done.' Teddy's only hope of healing is to face up to his crimes, and the innate capacity for violence that these crimes reveal. Though Shutter Island's macabre world of murderers and madmen may seem far removed from everyday life, the inmates are right to recognise that the world outside the asylum is far from perfect. None of us, according to the Bible, has a moral record which can stand up to God's pure, penetrating justice. If we refuse to acknowledge the guilt in our lives and, ultimately, our deeply corrupt nature, we remain in denial, and subject to judgement. But when we bring our confessions to God, 'he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all wickedness' (1 John 1:9).

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