Shutter Island is an open-ended movie. Its point of view is different from the conventional cognition of people in the general sense. He unfolds the whole story from the perspective of the male protagonist Teddy.
Teddy, on the other hand, is a mental patient who lives in his self-imagination, longing to save himself, get out of his mental fantasy and return to the real world.
Everything from the beginning of the film, until the end of the hero's recovery of the real memory of the scene of his wife's death and the death of his child, is depicting the hero's self-help road trapped in hallucinatory consciousness and trying to get out. The surrounding doctors and patients, including the female patient who wrote RUN and the attending doctor who kept calling him BOSS, were actually helping him find a way back to the real world in the world he constructed.
Luckily for Teddy, after the shooting of his wife Dolores, the doctors on Shutter Island spent two full years helping him get back to reality, even though he's been living in a split cognition. Everyone Teddy met during the storm was telling him: Get off the Shutter Island. This is actually a psychological hint, suggesting that he leaves the island in his heart and returns to the real world to discover his true self. The island that drives him crazy is the murderer that Teddy split up to kill Dolores. In fact, it is Teddy himself, but in the reality constructed by Teddy, he splits the murderer from himself. Teddy regarded his trip to the Shutter Island in his consciousness as a war to find the murderer, complete his revenge and then return to his original life. At the same time, he subconsciously replaced everything on the Shutter Island as a medical conspiracy/ The Nazi conspiracy, to which he attributed all the dilemmas encountered in the process of "finding the murderer", created an image of the Shutter Island opposed to the righteous actions of "Teddy".
All the clues about the murderer in Teddy's consciousness were actually his own experiences on the Shutter Island. The most exciting content in the movie is Teddy's attitude towards the "lighthouse". Teddy believes that the murderer was brought to the lighthouse by the doctor for "surgery", so he wants to stop it at all costs. Because Teddy believes that surgery is a Nazi-style immoral human experiment, in Teddy's mind, it is an evil that is opposed to a free and democratic American-style democracy, and performing this operation on the murderer has two meanings for Teddy: 1. The existence of surgery will turn the murderer's crime into a diseased part of the brain. After the diseased brain is removed, the murderer may be legally acquitted. Teddy thinks this is unacceptable; 2. The human experiment is beyond Thailand. Teddy tolerates social justice, while the murderer is just for Teddy's own interests. Teddy always believes that the value of social justice is greater than personal justice in front of the two, so he would rather save the murderer from being maimed by surgery.
Teddy put the fantasy human experiment in the special building of "lighthouse", and its meaning is intriguing. After Teddy climbed up the lighthouse, he did not find the legendary operating room, but met Chuck and the Dean who had been waiting for him. The Dean found the murderer for Teddy, including the truth of the name "Rachel" . Chuck told Teddy that he hoped that Teddy could give up the fantasy of "the existence of the murderer" and take the initiative to leave the confinement island, or finally find out who the murderer was and sober up, so he stayed with him as his partner. Unable to accept the sudden memory and pain, Teddy remembered everything but refused to face his name.
If subconsciously, Teddy can abandon his guilt and all evil thoughts about the murderer, he can come out of his own sins and his guilt towards his wife, and finally get sober. However, getting out of madness and getting sober means Teddy has to let go of the guilt over his wife's death and forgive himself for all the wrongs he's made in the past. He had tried to forgive himself. The images of the concentration camps that were constantly interspersed in the film were actually Teddy wanting to forgive himself, and he created a self-construction of reality to justify his becoming a murderer: the murder was caused by the atrocities of others. Revenge, is the too terrifying reality that overwhelms oneself and makes oneself a man with a gun. Teddy had tried to get out this way, but his guilt over his failure to help his wife hit him hard when he vividly recalled in the lighthouse the desperation Dolores might have faced when she killed the child. The scene of Teddy crying with the youngest child in his memory overlapped with the face of the child who died under the ice and snow in the concentration camp, silently shouting the deepest regret in Teddy's heart, "It's too late". Yes, the most painful thing for Teddy is not that death is not forced to kill, but that the living life missed the chance to survive because of its own reasons. Including the war in which he dedicated his youth and blood, the just war in which countless people believed that the United States saved the world, the war of peace, freedom, and democracy that Teddy was proud of, in the concentration camps of dead children and women Above the mountain of corpses, it is actually a late justice.
In the end, did Teddy find out that he was the murderer? No, out of love for his wife, the sober Teddy would not be willing to forgive himself, nor would he easily excuse his crimes. What really makes Teddy unable to face is that while he thinks he is protecting freedom, democracy, and everything beautiful, there is also the evil that he cannot stop, which will always exist, constantly murdering innocent children and women... That This kind of evil is both the murderous Nazi in the concentration camp, Dolores who "has a worm in his head", and even himself who killed his insane wife. In this realization, Teddy was completely desperate. Through high-profile love, morality, and faith, Teddy faced the darkest human nature. He found that the most painful thing was to face evil, and good and righteous people would inevitably use harm to others to replace their own harm. What Teddy can't forgive in the end is not the one who killed Dolores, but the one who killed the concentration camp guard who had surrendered, the noble self who kept saying saving the world, freedom, democracy, justice, and love and faith. The blood of innocent prisoners of war.
Teddy was ultimately unable to fight his fundamental beliefs and a strong hatred of his own past actions. The righteous Teddy and the Teddy who killed the prisoner of war are intertwined with Dolores' love and the pain of losing a child, forming an upside-down world in Teddy's heart. The Nazis, the concentration camps, and the mountain of corpses symbolize Teddy's deep-seated remorse for the crimes committed by prisoners of war, a side Teddy doesn't want and can't face. Teddy simplifies the road of self-help to saving Rachel, thinking that only killing the murderer can liberate his love for his wife, but at the moment when Teddy finally wakes up, he still has to face himself and there is nothing he can do.
He wants to live with the love for his wife and the nostalgia for his children, or he thinks that to live, he must keep all the memories of his wife and children, but this memory is tied to himself that he hates, which will make him He's crazy about everything. So in the end, he chose "surgery" instead of self-redemption. He would rather be a person with no memory, with his wife murder and other unknown sins, to live on the confinement island to accept the rest of the punishment, rather than allow himself to forgive himself and find self-redemption. to get awake.
In other words, he knew that he couldn't be at ease, that he couldn't justify giving up his hatred for the murderer in order to get rid of madness, and he couldn't choose to continue to live in the fantasy of innocence. So he accepts the identity of the murderer in reality and lives like a real murderer and sinner.
This is the way he chose, the last way to be strong and save himself. It was also Teddy who faced the faith and justice he had dedicated to, and finally chose to face his own crimes under justice. The social consciousness obtained from the state machine and war machine returned to human nature itself, and finally chose to face it bravely.
Shutter Island is a psychological film of war ethics and morality that can’t be said and can’t be said clearly. If I had to choose between psychological films and war films, I would choose human nature.
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