SHUTTER ISLAND and the loneliness of insanity

About 45 minutes into SHUTTER ISLAND, our protagonist Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) starts to fear that the government is doing secret experiments on communists, and that they’re doing them on the very island where he’s been sent to investigate a mysterious disappearance. The island is ostensibly a secure facility for the rehabilitation of the mentally disabled, but Teddy believes that’s just a front for a much more sinister activity, one that reminds him of the horrors he witnessed in Nazi concentration camps during the war. He cites a story about a college kid, a socialist, who was taken to the island for a year, then released, only to commit three murders. During the trial, he begs to be executed — anything but going back to the asylum. This idea of a place that is supposed to be safe and healing becoming a nightmare, especially in the context of post-war trauma and anti-communist propaganda, brings to mind a feeling of being trapped in one’s own country while it slowly decays into an unlivable place. To be an outcast in one’s own country is to live in a prison. To watch your country or your society degrade around you, to the point where you start to feel like an enemy to your society, can be both a great curse and a taste of insanity. If everyone around you says you’re crazy, are you? Or are you the only one who’s right?