(Note: If the title of this page isn’t enough of a clue, this article will discuss various plot details of Shutter Island. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, you might not want to read this. There’s your spoiler warning.)

This film is an exercise in doubt. If I were to break it into three parts, I would say that the first third sows the seeds of doubt over whether or not the authorities of Shutter Island can be trusted. Our U.S. Marshal characters go in to solve the mystery of a missing patient. They are met by a number of important people who make a big show of being helpful, without ever doing anything to help. We get the pervasive sense that nobody is being honest. This sense is communicated through every frame of every shot.

The middle third sows the seeds of doubt in our perception of the events. In a chance encounter, one particular character makes a compelling point: if our hero’s sanity comes into question, then his credibility is forever undermined, even to himself. And because our hero is our guide through this narrative, that means that everything we’ve witnessed so far and everything we’ll eventually witness can only be taken in those uncertain terms. His mission is no longer just to unravel the mystery, but to cling to the faith that he’s in the right. In his view, the authorities of Shutter Island might question his sanity, but his sanity allows him to see their ulterior motives for doing so. It’s all part of their devious plan.

So what does the final third do? The majority of movies don’t require the audience to think very hard. Most viewers have been trained to expect that the mystery will be solved, that the questions will be answered, that everything will be tied up nicely. The cleverness of this portion of the movie is that these people will find what they’re looking for. Shutter Island provides the necessary evidence to support this interpretation. All has been revealed. We’ve reached the cheese at the end of the maze.

That is, if we stop looking once we’ve found the cheese. We must be careful to guard ourselves against confirmation bias, which is what happens when we see the evidence we’re looking for and disregard the evidence we’re not interested in. In truth, Shutter Island is littered with too much evidence to conclusively point to any one answer. By my count, there are three major possibilities left open at the end of the movie, and they all deserve consideration. They are broken down as follows:

1. Our hero is insane. In the course of the final act, the authorities reveal that our hero is a mental patient, living in an elaborate delusion. It appears that they’ve gotten through to him, that he’s accepted their attempts to convince him. However, in the final scene, he speaks confidentially to his doctor—the man who, in his fantasy, is his U.S. Marshal partner. He reveals that he still intends to escape and bust this Shutter Island conspiracy wide open.

This seems to be the most commonly accepted interpretation of the ending. He’s insane, and has been the whole time. There have been some negative reactions to the film that appear to be based on this version. The viewers feel as though everything they’ve slogged through to get to this point has been invalidated, as if a film this well-crafted could ever be described as a slog. But never mind that.

2. Our hero is sane. In this version of the ending, our hero is still playacting—not as an insane man pretending to be sane to placate his doctors, but as a sane man pretending to be insane in order to guarantee a release from his pain. His last words to his “partner” strongly imply that he is sane, but is willing to be lobotomized so that he won’t have to live with the terrible things that his fantasy was safeguarding him against.

While this interpretation doesn’t frame the earlier portion of the movie in a drastically different way from the first interpretation, it does cast some interesting doubts upon earlier scenes that seem to imply insanity. It becomes that much harder to tell when he’s been wrong and when he’s been right.

3. The conspiracy is real. According to the laws of reality, this is the least plausible of the three endings. But for one thing, “least plausible” is not the same as “implausible.” Shutter Island is an utterly self-contained environment where any attempt to question the authorities can easily be dismissed as the ravings of a delusional paranoiac. One of the main reasons for disbelieving in conspiracy theories is that they’re untenable in an open marketplace of ideas. Shutter Island is anything but.

For another, to dismiss this interpretation out of hand is to ignore the seductive ideas that the film has been playing with all along. Our hero’s certainty is all he has to tell him that he’s sane, and the most obvious way for his enemies to protect themselves would be to declare him insane. In his most vulnerable moment, it may be that they’re not freeing him from the delusion, so much as crafting it for their convenience. In a place like Shutter Island, reality is fragile and mutable. Which version of reality is the “real” one might depend solely on how many people are willing to agree upon it. In the final scenes, our hero simply gets voted down.

There is not enough evidence to settle upon any one ending, and that’s just as it should be. As Scorsese’s on-and-off collaborator Paul Schrader is fond of saying, the final scene of a movie should continue to play out in the lobby of the theater. Movies with open-and-shut endings are rarely as interesting as movies that encourage the viewers to puzzle over the pieces. Unfortunately, it often seems as though a clean-cut ending is all that the average moviegoer cares about, as though two thirds of the story are just a means to arrive at that point. It’s a shame.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 7th, 2010 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Criticism/Critical Thinking, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.