Shutter Island (English Version)

 Shutter Island

Or the reinvention of fascism

 

Preface

We will deal here with the feature film Shutter Island, 139 minutes, 2010, Paramount Pictures. We will deal with the incorporation of memories, fabricated memories, we will discuss the Process and Kafka's Metamorphosis to illustrate what seems obvious. But it is not.

Introduction

It is curious to observe how modern society continues to deny the origins of fascism. Edward Daniels' story and his interpretations follow a strand that analyzes the character's dreams through formal representations of water, fire and ice.

To prove at the end of the story that the main character is a patient suffering from severe psychotic disorders, and that his memories are therefore not valid. Even the memories that the character remembers about Mahler and Nazism come to be considered as part of this schizophrenia that the potential character would represent.

Teddy Daniels' recurring memories of ice would be his memories as a combatant in World War II. The memories with the water would be the traumas of the federal agent and the reason for his blockage. The images with fire would be a combination of a conscious state with a semi-conscious state of the character's mind and body.

This state that varies between being awake and sleeping and is represented by images with fire and some with ash, are effects caused by the widespread use of psycho pharmaceuticals against the will of the character Edward Daniels. Let's remember that he woke up in the middle of a ferry going to Shutter Island.

We know that Edward Daniels was drugged, sedated, but we don't know how long he was exposed to medication, imagery exposure, and brainwashing.

Most interpretations are along the lines of casting Teddy Daniels as a dangerous psychotic with a past trauma that caused a haunting wound/trauma, from which he was not able to live, to the point of elaborating a fantasy that he was a federal agent investigating the crime of disappearance of a patient/prisoner from the island of Ashecliffe, so as to hide the past wound/trauma.

And the most curious and impressive thing is the memory of fascism. The memory of fascism is present at all times, and this eludes the majority of the audience that intends to make schematic and repetitive Freudian analyses. And in this the repression is latent. The danger of too schematic and quick interpretations is that they hide the nature of the scientific and forensic search for truth.

The truth is not found right at the table, inside the cell phone chip or computer processor. We seek the truth in difficult places, we have to face monsters of the most varied types and in this battle we know from the beginning that we will lose. Eventually we will be able to find, after much sacrifice, the cave, from where we ourselves came out to actually see this one for real.

Plato’s Cave and the search for truth

Plato's cave myth and the passage in which Edward Daniels, first descends one cliff and then over another, represents the search for truth, and the difficulties and horrors that Oedipus had to face in order to solve the miasma that terrified Thebes. Can the search for truth, the search for justice, the search for what is good lead one to madness?

The spectator is led to believe in the fantasy that a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane, in its fullness, would stage a play, an articulate farce, using all the institution's employees and patients with the humanitarian end of exposing the possible patient Teddy Daniels to his own fantasy/trauma and thereby cause him a catharsis so that he would purge this miasma from his mind and he could be a normal patient/prisoner.

Not only that: if Edward Daniels is indeed a dangerous prisoner/patient, for being violent, for having murdered his wife, for having witnessed Nazism, this type of prisoner/patient should never be released in the company of other patients and staff, for jeopardizing the functioning of the entire psychiatric institution.

What fascism wants to hide, and public repression helps a lot with this, is that the social institution does not work for the citizen, but to produce profit. The objective is to enrich the manufacturer of psychotropic drugs, sell drugs and test these drugs on those that society considers to be invalid. And that and other fascist horrors still happen today. The interpretations continue to be imaginary, surrealist, trying to deny the existence of fascism within democratic systems.

The purpose of the market is profit and it doesn't matter if you are a renowned diplomat or a scientist, from a family like the real Rachel Solando. The renowned diplomat is the character present in “The Constant Gardener”. Don't we see a case where to sell a certain type of medication a company may not have any ethical purposes?

The fascist representation is so absurd that the viewer is led to believe that for a humanitarian reason, a psychiatric institution isolated from any social context, would use a ferry to take the patient out of the hospital and bring him back, this time as a federal agent. And why does Edward Daniels never come to his senses and recognize that his partner is actually a doctor, that Doctor Cawley is another one, that Bridget Kearns is a prisoner just like him?

What is evident

 

1) Had Teddy Daniels really been Ashecliffe's patient, he would have been drugged against his will, and placed in the middle of the sea on a raft. This does not exclude fascism, but it is overwhelming proof of the existence of this institution.

 

2) Had Teddy Daniels really been Ashecliffe's patient and had the fantasy of being a federal agent, that fantasy would have been reinforced through brainwashing, torture, and widespread use of psychopharmacological substances.

People will see fascism pass under their noses and won't believe it exists. When Teddy Daniels wakes up inside the ferry, he realizes he's out of cigarettes. The character expected a federal partner to come from Portland, but instead, it was someone from Seattle.

When Teddy Daniels enters the gates of Ashecliffe and is ushered in by the institution's wardens, he recognizes that he has seen such a situation before.

The average viewer, who doesn't want to see fascism, will interpret this as further proof that Teddy Daniels is a patient/prisoner at the Psychiatric Hospital for the Criminally Insane, because he recognizes that institution.

However, the institution that Teddy Daniels recognizes is not the Hospital, but the institution of fascism. Teddy Daniels had already witnessed the horrors practiced by fascism in Germany during World War II.

What Teddy Daniels observes is the repetition of fascism passing before the cynical eyes of the community.

For Teddy Daniels, an institution of social control isolated from a geographical and geopolitical context, inside an island, with many heavily armed guards, with prisoners chained and surrounded by walls, barbed wire, electric fences and where absolutely, the act of experimenting with the human body and perverting its nature, through transorbital lobotomy, is another fascist institution:

Italian psychiatrist Amarro Fiamberti developed a procedure that involved accessing the frontal lobe through the eye sockets, but in 1945, the transorbital lobotomy emerged, a method in which the doctor inserted the tool into the patient's orbit with the aid of a hammer.

Doctor Cawley says he is against transorbital lobotomy, which he intends to treat patients with psychopharmacological, psychotropic drugs such as Chlorpromazine:

Chlorpromazine (CPZ), marketed under the brands Thorazine and Largactil, among others, is an antipsychotic drug. It is primarily used to treat psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. Other uses include treating bipolar disorder, severe behavioral problems in children including those with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, nausea and vomiting, anxiety before surgery, and hiccups that do not improve after other measures. It can be given orally, by injection into a muscle, or into a vein.

Chlorpromazine is in the typical antipsychotic class, and chemically it is one of the phenothiazines. Their mechanism of action is not entirely clear, but it is believed to be related to their ability as a dopamine antagonist (they block Dopamine receptors in the brain). It also has anti-serotonergic and antihistaminergic properties.

Common side effects include movement problems, drowsiness, dry mouth, low blood pressure when standing, and weight gain. Serious side effects can include potentially permanent movement disorder, tardive dyskinesia, neuroleptic malignant syndrome, severe lowering of the seizure threshold, and low leukocyte levels. In older people with psychosis as a result of dementia, it may increase the risk of death. It is unclear whether it is safe for use in pregnancy.

Psychiatrist Cawley makes it clear that he is against transorbital lobotomy, but all other psychiatrists at the institution are in favor of using this method, including the director of the institution, the German physician Dr. Naehring.

The common citizen has a repression in relation to fascism and that is what the film tries to show. It's not Teddy Daniels who has a repression against fascism, because the federal agent has already experienced this type of situation and can recognize the same institution being practiced on American soil.

Teddy Daniels is in fact a federal agent, who was bothering a part of the fascist system and for that reason was used as a rat by the institution's psychiatrists.

Fabricating Medea’s memories

As soon as Teddy Daniels is received by Doctor Cawley he is introduced to a series of images of torture and pain, which were methods historically practiced by social institutions responsible for the less favorable or the unwanted "mentally ill".

Doctor Cawley wants to make it very clear that the institution has evolved and abandoned these methods of corporal punishment, brainwashing, torture, scientific experiments with the body, and the contradiction of this argument comes soon after when the doctor recognizes that the institution's psychiatrists still practice transorbital lobotomy.

Doctor Cawley also offers an "Aspirin" to Teddy Daniels, when in fact the drug the character ingests is Thorazine (Chlorpromazine). It is observed that Cawley does not open a bookcase or a cupboard to look for Aspirin: he already has a pill in his hand ready to serve with the glass.

The Ashecliffe institution's brainwashing methods are unethical, and no one sees them. Most Ashecliffe patients/prisoners repeat the same version of a story as if it were not a natural memory but an implanted, fabricated memory.

The employees, for not having power within the institution, and for fearing to suffer the same tortures that they see the institution practice, are conniving and “intelligent”, because they want to survive within the fascist system. Society is alienated from Ashecliffe because it is an island. What good Samaritan would take a ferry to visit a psychiatric hospital from the mainland to the island? And with what kind of permission can a citizen enter the administrative part of a public institution?

What is the probability or possibility of two people, within the same institution, pronouncing the same sentence that is constituted by the same memory? When could two people have an identical memory and describe it using the same words, in the same order, as if the words had been dictated? In a context of exploitation of one man's mind by another man.

It is a resource widely used by fascism, the principle of Goebbels, that if we repeat a lie several times, that lie becomes the truth. This is brainwashing: information is repeated so many times that it becomes a memory and is assimilated in its entirety by the person who repeats it, not just the syntactic content, but the constructed emotions that that sentence emanates.

We see Nurse Marino repeat a phrase identical to a phrase Doctor Cawley said to Teddy Daniels. We see prisoner Bridget Kearns, from the scene where the glass of water disappears, speaking matter-of-factly that she had murdered her husband, said something about the hydrogen bomb that was repeated identically by the bald prisoner, fugitive from Ward C, who got into a fight with Teddy Daniels.

Andrew Laeddis' memories are constructed through the memories of a possible runaway patient named Rachel Solando. Rachel Solando was actually a single doctor, from a respected family, who began to investigate illegal situations within the public institution to report it as a crime, and for that, she was hospitalized as one of Ashecliffe's patients and they tried to manufacture the memory that she had committed triple infanticide by drowning three children. Edward Daniels and Rachel Solando were exposed to the same fabricated memory, Medea's fantasy.

It's quite plausible to assume that Teddy Daniels was never Andrew Laeddis, as in Fight Club (1999), where we're pretty sure Tyler Durden doesn't represent two people, but a divided person.

Therefore, we assume that Teddy Daniels was never married, never had children, because these memories were implanted through brainwashing and extensive use of the antipsychotic Thorazine (Chlorpromazine).

Medea's memory began to be implanted when Doctor Cawley informed Teddy Daniels that the runaway patient had committed triple infanticide by drowning her three children in water.

Teddy Daniels was exposed to this fabricated memory again, when he interrogated the possible patient Rachel Solando, who in fact, within the myth that fascism never exists, or may not exist today, is a nurse at the institution, who at the moment practiced an action drama, which coincidentally happened to have to do with Teddy Daniels' fabricated memory.

There are no coincidences with fascism. It only repeats itself as a farce, and it is precisely a farce that wants to convince us of the non-existence of fascism in modern public institutions. Institutions of social control such as public schools, public hospitals, irregular psychiatric clinics, shelters for homeless people, federal and state prisons, and even some universities.

Kafka's theory that once a citizen is branded as "crazy" by society, nothing he does will be useful to him, and on the contrary, the more he speaks and tries to expose the truth, the more that citizen will be put as a mad one.

First the institution will disregard everything he says. Then it will start administering medication. Ultimately, the citizen will be arrested, either as in Metamorphosis or in Kafka's Process.

The Anagram does not prove anything, because who created these names was the institution itself. Dolores Chanal can exist only within the constructive myth of fascism itself. Within the myth manufactured in the mind of the character Edward Daniels, who in his objective of seeking justice against fascism, became the object of the same monster he was trying to destroy.

Fascism is not something visible, easily interpreted and accepted by society. This repression, this desire to never see the evil acts practiced by social institutions, this alienation is what guarantees that the fascist institution is still present in many democratic countries.

Who isn't afraid of the police? Who is not afraid of the Judge? Who isn't afraid to challenge the system and lose everything? Like Jesus Christ, who defied the system and lost his own life. Why run the risk of losing everything, including life, when it's much easier to join the existing bundle!

Edward Daniels is traumatized by fascism. Fascism is a practice that will inevitably produce more fascism. Edward Daniels felt bad about not murdering his wife Medea/Dolores Chanal after she drowned three children in the lake. Even because that never happened, they are manufactured memories.

A tragedy, a father who finds his three children murdered by his wife sees no alternative but to murder his own wife, guilty of this heinous crime. One madness produces a greater one, and so on. And we are facing another Orestes, another Achilles, another Oedipus, but the context and the perspective are what really change the play.

The madness of fascism perpetuates and further produces fascism. And the only problem is that neither you, nor your neighbor and nobody wants to see it, because that is a public repression, a taboo, a subject that is not talked about so we don't have any responsibility for it.

It is much more convenient to believe in the fantasy that Teddy Daniels is really a violent patient and that there is nothing to do with him other than removing part of his brain via the eye. This fantasy elaborated and constituted with images of fire and water, images created by the institution itself.

Teddy Daniels' guilt memory is the memory where the American army had captured several Nazi SS prisoners, and when one of them runs, and some American soldier shoots, the situation spirals out of control and Teddy Daniels shoots one of the Nazi soldiers, which causes the extermination of this soldier and dozens of other prisoners who are summarily executed.

We saw very well in Inglourious Basterds that only in a fantasy can we fight fascism using fascism itself. Inglourious Basterds is a fairy tale where American fascism defeats German fascism. And now the winner of this clash can practice any kind of fascism.

Yes, Inglourious Basterds is a fantasy about fascism because it starts with "Once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France...", and a few more occasional questions like Cinderella's lost shoe, Bridget von Hammersmark.

Doctor Rachel Solando has never had children and has never been married. She was a respected doctor within the institution when she began to question the reason for so many shipments of sodium drugs and surgical procedures.

What the institution did with the doctor Rachel Solando was to admit her as a patient inside Ashecliffe and try to implant in her the memories that she was married, that she had three children and that she had drowned them. The same memory they tried to implant inside Edward Daniels' mind.

Teddy Daniels does not recognize, at any point in the film, any staff or patients of the institution. There is no moment of recognition, essential in determining whether Edward Daniels exists or is the dark ego, Andrew Laeddis.

Ultimately, all of Edward Daniels' memories can be fabricated. As he has become a mad patient, anything he says will only further confirm his madness, even his real memories of WWII.

Rachel Solando's dialogue with Edward Daniels inside the cave

Rachel Solando: Who are you?

Edward Daniels:I am Teddy Daniels. I'm a cop.

Rachel Solando: You're a Marshal.

Edward Daniels: That's right. Would you mind, mind...take your hands from behind your back?

Rachel Solando: Why? Why?

Edward Daniels: To make sure what you have hold there does not hurt me

Rachel Solando I'm gonna keep this...If you do not mind… fine with me.

Edward Daniels:You're Rachel Solando. The real one. Did you kill your children?

Rachel Solando: I never had children. I was never married. Before I be a patient in Ashecliff, I worked here.

Edward Daniels: You were a nurse?

Rachel Solando: I was a doctor, Marshall. You think I'm crazy?

Edward Daniels: - No, I...

Rachel Solando:- And if I say I'm not crazy... well that hardly helps, does it? That's the Kafkaesque genius of it. People always tell you you're crazy and protested, on the contrary, confirm what they say.

Edward Daniels: I do not following you. I'm sorry.

Rachel Solando: Once you are declared insane, then anything you do is called as a part of insanity. Your reasonable protests are denial, valid fears, paranoia. survival Instincts as defense mechanisms. You're smarter than you look Marshall. That's probably not a good thing

Edward Daniels: Tell me something ...

Rachel Solando: Yes ...

Edward Daniels: What happened to you?

Rachel Solando: I started asking about shipping this this large amount of sodium .

Edward Daniels: - And the sodium-based hallucinogens.

Rachel Solando:- Psychotropic drugs. And I began to ask about the surgeries, too. Ever heard of transorbital lobotomy? They cap the patient with electroshocks, then go through the eye with an ice pick and pull out some nerve fibers. Makes the patient more obedient. Tractable. It's barbaric. Unconscionable. Do you know how pain enters the body marshal? Do you?

Edward Daniels: Depends on where you hurt.

Rachel Solando: No, it has nothing to the flesh. The brain controls pain. The brain controls fear, empathy, sleep, anger, hunger ... everything. what If you could control it?

Edward Daniels: The brain?

Rachel Solando: To re-create a man, so he doesn't feel pain. Or love. Or sympathy. A man who can't be interrogated because he has no memories to confess. And you know the North Koreans use american POWs during brainwashin experiments they turns soldiers into traitors. That's what they are doing here. Creates ghosts and give way in the world. And do things sane man never do. That kind of ability, that kind of knowledge it would take years. Years of research, experiments on hundreds of patients. For 50 years now, people will look back and they say ... this place is where it all began. The Nazis used the Jews. The Soviets used prisoners in their own gulags and we...We tested patients on Shutter Island.

Edward Daniels: No, they won't...no

Rachel Solando: you do understand that they can't let you leave?

Edward Daniels: I'm a federal Marshall... They can't stop me.

Rachel Solando: I was a esteemed psychiatrist, from a respected family. It did not matter. Let me ask you... any past trauma in your life?

Edward Daniels: yes, why... why that matter?

Rachel Solando: If a particular event is past the reason you lost your sanity…  so when they commit you in here, your friends, colleagues will say... “he has cracked”. And who would do it, after what happened. That could be said of anyone

Edward Daniels: - anyone at all.

Rachel Solando: - The point is they're going to say it about you. How's your head?

Edward Daniels: - My head?

Rachel Solando: - You had funny dreams? Trouble Sleeping, headaches ...

Edward Daniels: I'm prone to migraine

Rachel Solando: you haven't taken any pills, no? Not even aspire?

Edward Daniels: - I get a aspirin.

Rachel Solando: Jesus! And you ate in the canteen and of drinking coffee that gave it. Tell me that even smoking Cigars of you.

Edward Daniels: Not ... no. I haven't.

Rachel Solando: It takes between 36 and 48 hours for neuroleptics narcotics to reach sufficient blood that you-and take effect. Pulse will become first, fingers first and then shall include all labor. Seen any waking nightmares lately, Marshall?

Edward Daniels: Tell me what's going on in that lighthouse? Tell me.

Rachel Solando: Brain surgery. Like, "to open the skull to see “what if we pull on this kind. "That's not different with Nazi's kind and then they created the ghosts.

Edward Daniels: Who knows about this? On the island I mean. Who?

Rachel Solando: Everyone.

Edward Daniels: Come on, the nurses, the orderlies? It's not possible ...

Rachel Solando: - Everybody. You can't stay here.

They think I'm dead, that I drowned. If they come looking for you, they migh find me. I'm sorry, but you have to go.

Edward Daniels: I'm gonna come back for you.

Rachel Solando: I will not be here. I move during the day. New places every night.

Edward Daniels: But I could come get you take you out of the island.

Rachel Solando: Haven't you heard a word I've said? The only way off the island is ferry and they control it. You'll never leave here.

Edward Daniels: I had a friend. He was with me yesterday, but we got separated. Have you seen him?

Rachel Solando: Marshall... You have no friends.

 

Carlos H. Barbosa: Shutter Island