Who doesn’t love a good conspiracy theory? Don’t worry, we’re only talking movies here.
Whether it’s Jar Jar Binks being secretly a Sith Lord, John Mason in The Rock is actually 007, oreven, my personal favorite, Kevin McCalister grows up to be Jigsaw, we could fall down the rabbit hole for days. But what about the theory of Shutter Island being a secret government mind control facility? Have you heard this one yet? Edward “Teddy” Daniels sure has. However, the truth is much uglier, and it’s laid out before your very eyes in the first moments of the film, in subliminal clues you didn’t even catch.
In this article, we’re taking the ferry over to figure out exactly what’s going on. We’re decoding the hints you completely missed, discussing the harsh realities of one hell of a role-playing game, and explaining why the bleakest plot twist of the 2010s is NOT a cop out. All to arrive at one final, soul-crushing question:
“Which would be worse? To live as a monster, or to die as a good man?”
Let’s set the scene, shall we? The fog breaks to reveal a ferry. You hear the ominous pounding of the waves before you ever see them. A hopelessly seasick U.S. Marshal is staring into a grimy bathroom mirror, splashing water on his face to wash away a dream that, though he doesn’t know it, he’s already walking through. We know from the jump the moment Martin Scorsese sets us down on Shutter Island, that something is horribly, fundamentally wrong.
In the majority of thrillers, the key to the mystery is carefully concealed until the big reveal in the third act. The film tricks you into thinking you’re one step ahead before blindfolding you and pointing you in the direction of the nearest cliff. It’s like hiding an ace up a sleeve until the final act when they reveal it and then yell “gotcha, bitch!”. In Shutter Island, however, the ace is right in front of your eyes the entire time. The film shoves the brutal, heart-breaking truth right in front of our nose from the opening shot. It beats us into submission to the point that we’re locked inside this tortured mind, willing to do anything but see that magic trick revealed. We are shown all the pieces of the puzzle in the first 10 minutes. But, we’re too blind to see them.
When the flick hit theaters in early 2010, audiences expected some creepy asylum mystery which was tonally different from Scorsese’s previous film, The Departed. The film was released in theaters in 2010 as just another creepy asylum thriller. Sure, that’s what we got, but what people also received was a lesson in psychological horror. A puzzle of off-screen symbolism.
THE FEBRUARY DUMPING GROUND
Now let’s travel back to the beginning of 2010 and reality. Paramount Pictures had a big problem. At least, this is what the Hollywood trades knew for certain back then. Martin Scorsese’s hotly anticipated thriller, intended to be released in October 2009, in the heart of awards season, was being held over until February 2010.
We all follow the film business, right? It’s February. That’s the graveyard shift. The place where studios go to dump movies they can no longer spend money on advertising. Paramount made the claim that they didn’t have the money in the budget for 2009 to mount an Oscar campaign, but no one bought that. Everyone immediately assumed the worst. The speculation was that Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio had finally created a massive, expensive failure. The speculation was that it was going to be bloated and confusing.
But once the film actually hit theaters, it subverted all of those preconceptions. It wasn’t a watered down, awards-season drama. It was a brash, pulpy, grade-B genre film done to perfection. It showed the world that Scorsese could craft a chilling atmospheric horror film as easily as a crime saga. It grossed over $294 million dollars and featured one of the most stunning plot reveals of its time that altered how you viewed the entire picture the second time around.
THE GREATEST ROLE-PLAYING GAME EVER MASTERMINDED
So, let’s start with the biggest rumors. No, Shutter Island is not a government mind control facility and no, there are no evil doctors who get to U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and successfully brainwash him by the end of the film. The reality is much more painful and personal. DiCaprio’s Teddy Daniels is actually Andrew Laeddis: the very sick, extremely violent Patient 67, who murdered his wife after she had drowned their three little children in the lake behind their picturesque farmhouse.
How about Teddy’s lavish, hard-boiled investigation into the island’s dark secrets? Never actually happened. It was a game, a game of extreme, incredibly elaborate make-believe. And the entire thing was scripted by Dr. Cawley and Teddy’s partner Chuck, who is actually Teddy’s head psychiatrist, Dr. Sheehan. They believe, with enough radical empathy and boundary-pushing therapy, they can actually cure Andrew of his violent delusions. They’re putting their careers on the line to save his life, and quite honestly the most sympathetic characters in Andrew’s life.
On the other side of the coin, we have the Warden and Dr. Naehring. They think that men like Andrew are too far gone and should be gotten rid of. They’re like the new-old school of psychiatry. They want to tie up the violent ones and to drug them until they become zombies. And if that doesn’t work, they would much rather shove an ice pick through their eye sockets and call it a day. The board of overseers is on Cawley’s back because they want Andrew lobotomized. He’s too much of a risk to have around the other employees.
All of this is a high-stakes game of the emperor’s new clothes, if you will, for Cawley and Sheehan. They have to allow Andrew to live out his fantasy of being a federal marshal until it implodes in on itself. They have to allow him to follow through on his crackpot theories until he comes to a literal brick wall. There’s no other way to get him to confront the nightmare of his situation.
THE MARK RUFFALO MASTERCLASS IN DECEPTION
Once you know the rules of the game, it’s an absolute must that you rewatch Mark Ruffalo’s performance as Chuck. Initially, he’s a generic, slightly awkward cop sidekick. On the second go round, you realize he’s delivering one of the most incredible, understated performances of his career.
Look at him in the initial scenes. They have to give their guns to the deputy warden and he can’t even get his out of the holster. He’s inept. Even Teddy gives him an odd look. Why would a federal marshal not be able to unholster his gun? Because the dude most likely has never held one before.
Every word Chuck speaks to Teddy is scripted. He asks loaded questions. He questions Teddy’s reactions to specific evidence. When Teddy breaks into a paranoid tirade about Nazi experimentation and mind control, Chuck does not tell him that he is insane. He encourages the madness. He tells Teddy that his conclusions are sound. He is gently nudging his patient through the labyrinth. Ruffalo manages to play a cop impersonator while conveying the authentic worry of a doctor witnessing his most cherished patient descend into madness. It’s phenomenal acting masquerading right there in the open.
FIRE, WATER, AND THE INVISIBLE CLUES
Scorsese filled the film with subtle, almost subliminal visual reminders that you’re seeing the world from a diseased brain. Here’s an interesting little tidbit. This was actually going to be directed by David Fincher with Brad Pitt as the lead at one time before Scorsese was brought on board. But it’s hard to imagine anyone but Scorsese dealing with the sheer psycho visual burden. Along with his ace cinematographer Robert Richardson, Scorsese also shows you that even the weather itself is deceiving you.
The most overt visual clue in the film is the contrast between fire and water. Fire is the absolute visualization of Andrew’s delusion. Whenever Teddy is around fire, he has a grand hallucination. This includes lighting matches in the dark cellblock, or even sitting by the warm fire in the sea cave with the imposter Rachel Solando. This even includes the time he blows up Dr. Cawley’s car to create a diversion. Fire fuels his delusion and gives him visions of his deceased wife Dolores. The flames make him feel like a hero.
Water, however, is the truth. The undeniable truth. Water is what his ailing wife used to kill his children. It makes Andrew physically ill, uncomfortable and wildly anxious throughout the movie. The film opens with him arrives on the island in the middle of a massive storm. You could say his trauma is literally raining on him. It rains when the truth gets too real.
Scorsese loads the movie with intentional continuity mistakes to demonstrate that Teddy’s sense of reality is totally screwed. There’s a genius and now famous moment where Teddy is questioning a female patient in the cafeteria. She wants a glass of water. In one shot she brings a totally empty hand to her mouth and drinks from a nonexistent glass. In the next shot, there’s a real glass on the table in front of her. We don’t notice it the first time because we’re just as insane as Teddy is at that moment. Andrew’s subconscious excluded the glass of water from his sight because water is his greatest trauma. His brain simply refuses to see it.
There are many other visual clues pointing towards Andrew’s truth hiding in plain sight. We already discussed the ferry ride in the opening, but also in this scene, Andrew, or rather, Teddy seems to have misplaced his cigarettes. He is then given one by Chuck. It’s subtle, but just shows he is indeed a patient and wouldn’t have access to a pack of smokes.
There are other scenes where guards appear to be nervous around him, and even some who appear to be uninterested in finding this Rachel Solando chick he made up. Hell, even in scenes when Teddy and Chuck are interviewing the patients, we see guards in the background and out of focus. In that same scene, they interview Bridget Kearns, a woman who killed her husband with an axe…the very woman drinking the invisible glass. When asked about Dr. Sheehan, she freezes, takes a quick glance, and responds with “he’s nice and not hard on the eyes, as my mother would say.” Chuck gives a slight smirk. While the reaction initially hints at something she doesn’t want to reveal, the reality is that she’s flirting with Chuck, aka, Dr. Sheehan right to his face.
While continuing their investigation, we meet up with Dr. Nahering, played by the wonderful Max von Sydow. He mentions how men like him are his specialty and even notes his “outstanding defense mechanisms.” It’s not just a throwaway line, but a wider meaning to the film itself. Throughout the course, everyone is trying to bring him back to reality, yet he refuses to let go of his character. Everyone knows who Teddy actually is, but he believes Andrew Laeddis is a separate patient who killed his wife, Dolores, in a fire. At the end of the second act, Chuck says he found the intake file on Laeddis, yet Teddy refuses to look at it. Subconsciously, this file would show his true identity and shatter his delusion.
And what would a great role-playing game be without costumes. Ever notice Teddy’s trench coat? It’s a little too big, wouldn’t you say? That’s because it was never his to begin with, just another prop for his character. However, he is provided a hospital gown half-way through, where he wears it for the remainder of the film.
THE GHOSTS OF DACHAU AND THE BURDEN OF HISTORY
You simply cannot discuss Shutter Island without discussing the long shadow of World War II. Andrew is a veteran who participated in the liberation of the Dachau death camp. The flashbacks of the war are some of the most ghastly, graphic scenes Scorsese has ever committed to celluloid. We see bodies frozen in the snow. We see the shocking moment when the American soldiers line up the German guards and shoot them in cold blood.
These are real memories. Andrew actually is a veteran with PTSD. It’s just that his PTSD causes him to lose himself in the trauma of the Holocaust, in order to distract himself from his personal trauma at home. It’s easier for him to get lost in a holocaust than in the fact that he failed to save his own kids from his bipolar wife.
Those bodies in Dachau? When he dreams about them, there’s a little girl. She looks up at him and asks him why he did not save her. The little girl isn’t a random victim of the Holocaust. She’s his daughter, Rachel. His mind is inserting the image of his dead daughter into his war memories because he can’t cope with what happened at the lake house. He tells himself he’s a bad person because he shot German soldiers. He uses that historical guilt to cover up the unbearable guilt of ignoring his wife’s severe mental illness until it was too late.
THE WARD C DESCENT AND THE GEORGE NOYCE REALITY CHECK
As Teddy breaks into Ward C, the film moves from a gothic whodunit to psychological horror. Ward C is where the more violent, brutal offenders are kept. Scorsese films this segment as an actual journey into hell. Teddy moves down an ominous, decaying stone staircase into a dungeon illuminated by matches. He is literally moving down into the darkest recesses of his own mind.
This is when he encounters George Noyce. Noyce is a paranoid, battered inmate in a cell who Teddy is convinced is a victim of the island’s illicit lobotomies. He is completely oblivious to the gaping plot hole staring him right in the face. If Noyce was actually a high-profile victim of a huge government conspiracy, the sinister doctors wouldn’t just leave him in an ordinary cell where a meddling U.S. Marshall could so easily gain access to him.
Noyce is real. However, Teddy’s paranoid delusions cause him to interpret everything the man says in the worst possible way. Noyce is trying to tell Teddy that the doctors are playing along with his delusion to help him heal. He is telling Teddy that the entire play is staged for his benefit. Noyce is in Ward C because a few weeks ago Teddy nearly killed him for calling him Andrew. Noyce knows what’s going on. But Teddy’s delusion is so paranoid and so strong that he interprets a blatant attempt at warning by a terrified fellow inmate as proof of a conspiracy against him. Noyce tells him that he is in a maze, and Teddy assumes that he is talking about a government conspiracy.
THE SEA CAVE AND THE FAKE DOCTOR
Teddy finally manages to break out of the hospital’s campus and makes his way down the rocky shores, where he takes refuge in a sea cave. Here he encounters a woman who says she is the real Rachel Solando, and Patricia Clarkson phenomenal here. She says everything Teddy longs to hear. She confirms his paranoia. She says the psychotropic medication is in the food. She says the doctors are making people into ghosts for the Cold War.
This is the final gauntlet thrown to the audience. The Patricia Clarkson character is completely imaginary. A fabrication of Andrew’s starving, sleep deprived, and withdrawing from drugs and alcohol brain. She is sitting in front of a giant fire, which we have learned is the spark for his hallucinations. She is there to confirm his biases. His brain invents an off the rails doctor to nudge him over the edge and attack the lighthouse. His illness is pushing back against the treatment. His “outstanding defense mechanisms” are doing everything in their power to preserve the fantasy.
THE WARDEN’S DARK TRUTH
The last time Teddy is driven to the lighthouse, he is in a Jeep with the Warden, played by Ted Levine with a growling, menacing presence that is fear-inducing. The sequence in the car between Teddy and the Warden is the pivotal moment of the whole film. In the car, the Warden delivers a frightening monologue, in which he declares that “God likes violence” and that if Teddy bit out his eye, he would “squish your head in the fuckin’ pavement.”
The Warden isn’t speaking to U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels. The Warden is speaking to the violent, murderous Patient 67. The Warden knows Andrew is a killer. He knows Andrew is highly trained and incredibly dangerous. He is basically daring Andrew to drop the act and show his true colors. The Warden represents the harsh, unforgiving reality of Andrew’s violent nature. It is a reality that Andrew is desperately trying to outrun by pretending to be a noble hero of the law.
THE LIGHTHOUSE CONFRONTATION
And so, after all that clever setup, we get to the lighthouse. The place Teddy thinks they’re illegally performing the lobotomies. He swims through icy waters, knocks out a guard, takes his rifle, and kicks down the door. But there are no gurneys. There are no Nazi doctors. There’s just Dr. Cawley, sitting quietly at a desk, waiting for him. And when Dr. Cawley pulls out the whiteboard and starts doing the anagrams, the movie takes away the safety net entirely. He demonstrates that Edward Daniels is an exact anagram for Andrew Laeddis. He demonstrates that Rachel Solando is an exact anagram for Dolores Chanal, his wife’s maiden name.
This destroys Andrew’s delusion in the moment. The experiment succeeds. Cawley makes him look at pictures of his dead children. He makes Andrew remember the lake. He makes Andrew remember dragging their corpses out of the water and laying them down on the grass. He makes Andrew remember his sick wife asking him to liberate her. He makes him remember putting the barrel into her stomach and pulling the trigger. The dam breaks. The agony flows. Andrew utterly disintegrates into the weight of his now returned memory. The therapy completely succeeds.
CHOOSING TO DIE A GOOD MAN
The tragedy of the film is revealed the next morning, as this is the sequence which generates the arguments. Andrew is calmly sitting on the stone steps of the hospital grounds with Dr. Sheehan. He smokes a cigarette. He calls his doctor Chuck. He says they have to get off this rock before the doctors get to them. He sounds like Teddy Daniels again.
Dr. Sheehan looks utterly defeated. He shoots a devastatingly sad non-verbal acknowledgement to Dr. Cawley across the courtyard. The doctors know that the experiment didn’t work. Andrew retreated back into his fantasy world. The board of overseers has won. The orderlies come to take him to get the ice pick lobotomy. But, Andrew isn’t done yet. He has one last, most devastating, blow of the entire film. He calmly looks at Dr. Sheehan and asks, “Which would be worse? To live as a monster, or to die as a good man?”
That didn’t happen. The treatment worked. Andrew’s mind is perfectly clear. He has full understanding of who he is. He has full understanding of what he has done to his wife. He has full understanding that his children are gone forever because of his own negligence. But he can’t live with that guilt. He cannot live with the thought of spending the rest of his life haunted by the memory of his murdered children and the wife he failed to save.
Rather than spend the rest of his days bearing the indelible stains of Andrew Laeddis, he decided to end it. He chose to make believe. He chose to make believe he was Teddy Daniels once more, knowing the result would be his own lobotomy. He chose to give up his mind. He chose to let the surgical instruments scrub out the inside of his head. He chose to do so because he’d rather be dead in his mind as a hero, a federal marshal, than spend the rest of his life knowing he was a villain. He stood up. He walked out with the orderlies. He didn’t resist. He walked willingly to his own lobotomy.
This is absolutely not a film about an eerie mental institution or government experiments in mind control. Like the greatest thrillers of the ’50s, it is a layered, shattering exploration of grief and trauma, posing a deeply human and deeply terrifying question: How far will the human mind go in attempting to numb itself from the painful truth?
Andrew Laeddis was a smart, competent man, and he constructed a brilliant, complex mental prison to keep himself from his own horrific inadequacies. He created a whole universe where he was the hero trying to solve a murder, not the villain who committed one. The real tragedy of the film isn’t that the sinister doctors finally got him. The tragedy is that he finally saw the full truth, and decided that the darkness of complete delusion was preferable to the blinding, painful glare of the real world.
It is Scorsese at the very height of his psychological game. He takes one of the greatest narrative swipes of the rug from under your feet ever, one that isn’t just designed to shock for the sake of shocking, but one that emotionally guts you and leaves you feeling hollow.