Shutter Island

Just to reassure you all, I don’t spend all my time thinking about the tragedy of Slipknot or the existential situation of being on a boat. One thing I’m thinking, more and more, is that Scorsese is a director worth examining more in a personal attempt to address in what way film relates to art. I am trying to avoid the problem Walter Benjamin articulates; namely, that “commentators had earlier expended much fruitless ingenuity on the question of whether photography was an art–without asking the more fundamental question of whether the invention of photography had not transformed the entire character of art–film theorists quickly adopted the same ill-considered standpoint” (28). I try to consider in what way film has transformed art. One approach I take is to compare films to their corresponding art–generally, the book from which they are derived. I watched “Shutter Island” (Scorsese) on the way to Ireland and read the book (Lehane) on the way back. That film is most interesting to me at least in part because it improves on the book (I haven’t found too many that do that–possibly some Steven Kings, possibly “The Silence of the Lambs,” to name others).

The literal story introduces themes common to both book and film. A quite literal theme: what is the proper way to treat diseases of the mind? Another, perhaps more aesthetic, theme common to book and film: the portrayal of insanity in light of Chesterton’s statement: ‘Insanity means losing everything except your reason.’ Another aesthetic theme, and here is where the movie goes beyond the book: the role of the actor and his humanity in the face of a dominating “apparatus” (Benjamin). [I have no qualms about spoiling the end of the movie for anyone, because I recognize that I’m pretty behind y’all on the movie front.] There is a pretty good possibility, at the end of the movie, that the main character is not actually insane, but rather is choosing to play a part, a role, that is not true, for the sake of preserving his personal integrity.

I am reminded of Benjamin’s statements about film-making as opposed to theatre. The actor in the theatre measures himself against nature; or, against the role he plays. The film actor, on the other hand, measures himself against “the apparatus” (30). To perform well before the demands of the apparatus is a “test performance of the highest order. To accomplish it is to preserve one’s humanity in the face of the apparatus. Interest in this performance is widespread. For the majority of city dwellers, throughout the workday in offices and factories, have to relinquish their humanity in the face of an apparatus. In the evening, these same masses fill the cinemas, to witness the film actor taking revenge on their behalf not only by asserting his humanity (or what appears to them as such) against the apparatus, but by placing that apparatus in service of his triumph” (31). In “Shutter Island,” the main character engages his humanity, the question of his own real identity, against what he perceives to be the false apparatus that is placed around him; he even uses that apparatus in service of his own heroism. The tragedy lies in that he chooses to hold onto his personal integrity , which turns out to be false (and thus “die” by undergoing a lobotomy), at the cost of the integrity of the apparatus, which turns out to be real (instead of living with the knowledge that he and his wife are “monsters”). (I won’t address the question here of how real that apparatus actually is–I mean, why would Scorsese end the film with a last shot of the lighthouse? It seems that Scorsese, by closing with that shot, invites at least some possibility that the character actually is sane.)

The last line from the main character in the movie does not occur in the book. It is solely the basis of that last line that I think the movie surpasses the book. The book concludes with the patient a confirmed criminally insane person, about to undergo out of necessity an operation that will destroy both his ability to harm others and destroy his ability to think rationally. The movie concludes similarly (just before the shot of the lighthouse), except with a person who I think consciously chooses to play the role of an insane person: “I’d rather die a good man than live a monster.” Brilliant. If the guy actually thinks he is sane, why would he say that?

Also, as a postscript, I have heard that there is massive controversy over the film “The Last Temptation of Christ,” another Scorsese film. I think that Kazantzakis’s book from which the film was derived was excellent, and I don’t think it was any more “heretical,” than, say, Paradise Lost (keeping in mind that ‘the morality of art is different than the morality of the church’–drawn from comments by Louise, among others). Is the film worth seeing? Is “Mean Streets?” Other Scorsese recommendations?