Viraj's Weblog

I wasn't sure what to expect seeing the trailers for Shutter Island portraying a Scorsese movie as a horror. I just knew I had to see it because it was Scorsese.

What made this film even more interesting is that I just read My Lobotomy and Great and Desperate Cures, both excellent books on psychosurgery, or lobotomies to the layman. In Shutter Island, the term 'transorbital lobotomy' is thrown around as if describing a monster. It's set in the 1950's, when indeed such surgery was mainstream even to the point of doctors like Walter Freeman making house calls to do them. I especially liked the reference to there being 2 psychiatry frames of thought during this time: psychosurgery and therapy/pharmacology. You had one camp that felt physical changes were needed to cure people (e.g. lobotomies), and another where it was thought Freudian therapy would work. Freudian therapy soon meshed with pharmacology, and it has been brought up many times whether drug treatment is just a "chemical lobotomy" (quote from Walter Freeman).

The film also mentions Chlorpromazine (Thorazine) which was the first of the pharmacological treatments for mental disorder, making the movie scientifically convincing. That's one thing that that impressed me about this, just how well it was done . I mean, it is Scorsese after all, and you can tell. Most scenes are just perfect in all aspects, from the music, acting, camera work, and overall immersion. I wasn't sure how Scorsese would do dream scenarios, but this movie is impressive how well it conveys hallucinatory drugs and withdrawal. I guess DiCaprio was made to play this ever since Basketball Diaries.

Scorsese's films all include some kind of meditation on violence. It's not so much that he glorifies it, but he portrays it as a human disease that we all suffer from. There's a short dialogue between two people that realize this in the film, and you can't help but think it is the director's view on the human condition expressed in a few sentences.

The unrealistic part of the movie is the idea that an institution would work so hard during this era to cure someone without resorting to the quick-fix lobotomy. A masterful plan is made to cure a patient, and it is unconvincing that such a plan would ever really be employed. In those days, an ice pick through the eye socket was much less expensive.

And that ice pick does come, after all, glimmering in the sun. There is a good quote at the end, "Is it better to die a good man or live life as a monster?"