We watched the movie shutter island
so we could try and evaluate it with a sociological outlook. The movie takes
place on an abandon island, which once had a war fort on it that was converted
and added onto to create a private in sane asylum. On this Island were many
insane men and women. They all were considered violent and a danger to society
so they were sent here to be helped.
The movie began with a ferry ride
across the ocean to shutter island where Teddy Daniels, a United States
Marshall, and his partner Chuck were coming to investigate the case of an escaped
patient that was loose on the island. They got to the island and the head
doctor got them situated in their rooms. Then the two marshals began their
investigation by talking to some of the patients and staff members at the
insane asylum. They were looking for a girl named Rachael Solondo. She was an
escaped patient at the hospital and the two marshals were brought in to help
search for this woman.
Rachael’s condition was of the
worst case but it shocked the workers on the island that she would do so much
as to try and escape the premises. So that is why they brought in the big dogs
for this specific incident. The reason Rachael was brought into the hospital
was because she drowned all of her kids in a lake. The reason she is considered
clinically insane is because she has no recollection of it and swears that she
would have never done such a thing.
So Teddy and Chuck continued their
search for Rachael and they found some leads that eventually ended up with a dead
end and they didn’t make sense. Throughout the movie though you may notice one
thing, Teddy has many different flashbacks and continues getting headaches that
he gets “aspirin” for from one of the doctors on the island. Eventually Teddy
finds this strange and he decides to stop taking the pills and he begins to
have more flashbacks that all eventually lead him to the lighthouse on the
island where we find out the real truth about exactly what is going on, on Shutter
Island.
When Teddy got to the lighthouse
his eyes were opened to something nobody watching the movie saw coming at the
time. He found out that he wasn’t just a United States marshal; he was much
more than that. Teddy Daniels was actually Andrew Laeddis, the guy he thought
burnt down his apartment building years ago. The woman named Rachael Solondo
was actually his wife Dolores Chanel. If you pay close attention to these names
they are the same letters just switched around into different names, seems like
this is something that an insane person would do, that’s because Teddy Daniels
was a patient at the hospital and he was the one living in his own little make
believe world where he was still a marshal and he was still doing work for the
nation he lived in when really he is the one that killed his wife Dolores. This
all happened after he came to their lake cabin after a week of work where he
found her outside next to the water on a swing and the three children face down
in the water dead. He then remembered that he shot his wife because of what she
had done to the kids.
The movie ends with a phrase that
Andrew said to his partner (psychiatrist). The phrase stated, “Hey Chuck, this
place has me wonderin, is it better to live a monster or die a hero?” this
tipped off Chuck about the fact that even after remembering that Andrew had
done these things he had pushed it out of his mind again and they were back to
square one. So Andrew was then taken to be lobotomized by the doctors. There is
one thing that Andrew did leave us to wonder about though. From what Andrew
said to chuck did he really not know who he was and what he had done, or did he
decide that it was better for him to only remember the good things and not the
bad even if that was going to get him killed.