Shutter Island : Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

I mean why would Dr.Cawley spent so much time, energy and manpower creating a delusional world just to cure 'only one patient' ?! Its just ridiculous. Teddy actually came into island for investigating a missing person which is of course created and planned by Dr. Cawley and his friends to trap Teddy. As time went on with their medicines and everything they tried to manipulate Teddy into believing he actually killed his wife but Teddy was too strong and clever to believe all those. And hence those final words "To live as monster or to die as good man"..Monster meaning Chuck since he has betrayed him and joined those doctors. Good man meaning Teddy himself. Open debates and arguments welcome. (Just don't try to spout unnecessary nonsense to prove i'm wrong)

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

Ok, I'll try to spout necessary sense to prove you're wrong: the gruesome vivid memories of _how_ he killed his wife, how could Teddy have been manipulating into producing all those details?

After all, the movie depicts the scene of him killing his wife as _his_ own memories, not someone else's story. Which, btw, corroborate his pathological behavior: fear of water, his wife "let me go" mantra in his hallucinations, the girl "why didn't you save me" repeating pattern...

How could all of those have been induced into his subconscious?

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

Doesn't it seem irresponsible for the writers to slight (even mock) the power of suggestion, it being the most underrated force of manipulation in the universe? If the story plays only as you see it, I'd call this film a missed opportunity.





Is this to be an empathy test?

suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?

TLDR - Since this is fiction and the role play requires suspension of disbelief, why can't we suspend disbelief for the idea of false memories if they are unrealistic, too?

This is fiction so it doesn't have to be realistic, right? Whenever I argue facts, logic and reality, I'm told it is fiction and doesn't have to be realistic - then these same people go on to deride alternative opinions based on their belief that other opinions are unrealistic, impossible and "conspiracy theories".

When asked directly, the psych consultant for Shutter Island, Dr. Gilligan, has admitted that the role-play is so unrealistic as therapy that accepting it as such requires a willing suspension of disbelief. It is unrealistic to the extent that it is the OPPOSITE of what should and would be done to help a person like "Andrew". The role-play is essentially the unobtainium of psychiatric therapies. Why can people accept unrealistic therapy, but not the idea that the doctors are suggesting ideas to Teddy that become false memories?

I'm bringing this fact up because your argument about Teddy's memories is based on your own beliefs about what is realistic about memories and using it to argue that your understanding of the film is right and the OP's understanding is wrong. Your understanding requires suspension of disbelief so that you can accept the unrealistic "role-play" as legitimate therapy. Even assuming you are right in your understanding of false memories, why can't we suspend disbelief and accept that within the fictional universe if the "role-play" (which has no logical or realistic therapeutic value) helps Teddy see reality, then we can also suspend disbelief and say that the fictitious "role-play" is a way to create false memories? Why would we assume that a fictitious treatment has a realistic consequence?

I bring that up because it is hard to discuss this movie without having a common reference for the reality of the film itself. The movie gives us one - real history, it's historical fiction - but if we accept real history as our reference point for the fictional reality we can't effectively suspend disbelief for the role-play to be therapy. Is the film set in a universe where the commandant in Dachau killed himself? Or is that deviation from known history Teddy's false memory? It is confusing when people try to argue reality, logic and probability based on the acceptance of something as illogical and unrealistic as the role-play being therapy. Why would you presume that it is ok for you to suspend disbelief about the theraputic benefits of the role-play, but then find fault with other ideas you see as unrealistic like false memories?



After all, the movie depicts the scene of him killing his wife as _his_ own memories, not someone else's story. Which, btw, corroborate his pathological behavior: fear of water, his wife "let me go" mantra in his hallucinations, the girl "why didn't you save me" repeating pattern...



The "flashback" has manipulative editing that is extremely atypical for a point of view scene. My take is that the "flashback" happens after his collapse in the tower. He is IN THE CELL ON THE COT as the lake scene ends and the reaction shot immediately after is a close-up of Sheehan from Teddy's POV, not of Teddy as we would expect if this was his own subjective POV. In fact, there is never a reaction shot of Teddy after the scene. There is a shot of nurse Rachel from Teddy's POV, another shot of Sheehan from Teddy's POV and the overhead eye-of-god shot of the collapse in the lighthouse. That shot is inserted in a way that makes it appear that the collapse is Teddy's reaction to the traumatic memories returning, but that can't be since he is on the cot as the flashback ends. As the flashback ends with the overhead shot of Teddy, we hear Sheehan's voice asking if Teddy can hear him. From that we know that he was in the cell, not the lighthouse, when the "flashback" occurred.

The first shot we see of Teddy in the cell after the "flashback" ends he is reacting not to the traumatic memory but to Sheehan's voice asking if Teddy can hear him. His other reaction is to rub his arm where nurse Rachel apparently just injected him with an unknown substance. Since we don't know what he was given, we can't be sure that he wasn't given something that made him more suggestible and likely to give a false confession. In other words, instead of seeing Teddy react to the flashback itself, we are given images of Teddy reacting to Sheehan and Nurse Rachel. Except for the early commandant scenes (a known historical false memory) all of Teddy's other POV scenes are edited in the traditional way - subject set-up shot, subject's POV, subject's reaction to the POV.


How could all of those have been induced into his subconscious?


Maybe they are simply suspending disbelief like you are when you accept that the "role-play" is therapy? Since the treatment is an unrealistic way to get a person to see reality, why would you expect the results to be realistic? How can a destabilizing mind game get a person in touch with reality? It can't, hence the necessity for a willing suspension of disbelief to think the role-play is therapy.

Actually, we have quite a bit of information about how people form false memories and why they make false confessions. It requires no suspension of disbelief at all. During the role-play Teddy was psychologically regressed and destabilized. When he was at his emotional low point - hallucinating, scared and agitated, he was threatened with a lobotomy and coerced into confessing to a crime for which there is no proof presented in the movie. He was ISOLATED from anyone except those who were using him to prove their theories. There is no way for Teddy to be Teddy in the given circumstances. He either has to go along with the authority or be lobotomized.

https://faculty.washington.edu/eloftus/Articles/sciam.htm

http://web.williams.edu/Psychology/Faculty/Kassin/files/kassin_kiechel_1996.pdf

People do make false confessions that THEY BELIEVE. It is more common than people think. But, they may also give false confessions that they believe, but don't actually recall even as a false memory. Their thinking is that they must have done the crime, because people they trust are telling them they did the act. This may well be the case with Teddy. He says something important about his memories that few viewers pay attention too. In the confession scene in the cell he tells Dr. Cawley that he doesn't recall the past "loops" during his time (2 years) at Ashecliffe when Cawley was trying to "help" him.

Two things are remarkable about that comment. One thing is why does Dr. Cawley ignore the fact that Teddy's memories of the past two years haven't returned? There is no reason for Andrew to repress the memory of all the times kindly Dr. Cawley tried to help him. If his original traumatic memory returned, why would his less traumatic memories of his time at Ashecliffe not also return? Secondly, Teddy's comment also shows us that he believes Dr. Cawley about the past two years EVEN THOUGH HE DOESN'T REMEMBER! Is he also accepting that the story he is being told about Andrew and the lake crime is true, but can't actually remember it either? That statement has no purpose in the dialog except to create doubt that Teddy is truly remembering what he confesses.

If the "flashback" isn't a memory, then, what is it? It could be a GUIDED IMAGERY - a story Sheehan is telling Teddy that he is IMAGINING while he is in the cell. This understanding is supported by the fact that there are two close-up shots of Sheehan after the "flashback" BEFORE we see Teddy in the cell on the cot. Sheehan has the reaction shot to the "flashback". The scene is edited as being closer to hallucination (the set-up shot is a hallucination of the child's hand) and Sheehan's POV than it is to Teddy's POV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guided_imagery
Wikipedia
Guided imagery is a mind-body intervention by which a trained practitioner or teacher helps a participant or patient to evoke and generate mental images that simulate or re-create the sensory perception of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, movements, and images associated with touch, such as texture, temperature, and ...


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatry

Guided imagery is used therapeutically, but it can also be misused in black psychiatry. The sort of mind experiments Teddy suspects are black psychiatry.

So, false memories can be induced, and maybe that is what the flashback shows. That is a valid way to understand that scene - as a false memory. Another possibility is that Teddy isn't remembering the lake scene at all. He is being feed the story and then plugging in that information into mental images he already has.

One possibility, my best guess, is that the first part of the flashback inside the cabin is a real memory of the summer Teddy and Delores had a cabin at the lake. Teddy came home and poured himself a drink. Lonnie Johnson was playing in the background. Delores was in the gazebo. However, there is a liminal moment similar to when Dorothy Gale steps out of her B&W Kansas farmhouse into the colorful fantasy dream world of Munchkinland.

As Teddy steps though the cabin's back door Lonnie Johnson's contemporaneous Tomorrow Night fades out and the anachronistic withered hand sermon loop from John Adams' Christian Zeal and Activity fades in. We move from reality to unreality. The ducks in the lake disappear - an editing glitch that Scorsese uses throughout the film to suggest that Teddy's perceptions are off for some reason. The withered hand recording is a soundtrack piece we heard before as environmental sound. It sounds like a radio sermon playing in the background of the basement scene before Teddy falls asleep and dreams of Rachel, the murdered kids and the lake. In fact, the sermon in the Adams' piece WAS recorded from the radio.

Does that sermon loop trigger Teddy's mental images of the lake crime? Is the sermon loop an environmental sound they are playing in the cell to trigger Teddy to think of the murders at the lake? The withered hand sermon connects the "flashback" crime to the dream crime. Why would we assume that the "flashback" is any more real than the dream he had in the basement?

Since liminality literally means "threshold", passing through the doorways is the classic way of signalling a change in perspective/mental states. Teddy passes through two doorways in the "flashback". I believe the first doorway, the front door, is a "Gate of Horn" indicating Teddy's true mental images of the lake cabin where he and Delores stayed one summer. The second doorway, the backdoor out to the lake, is a "Gate of Ivory" indicating a false dream/memory. The part inside the cabin is realistic - the editing is realistic - so we have reason to think it is a real, true memory. The song is from 1948, so that is realistic, too. That realism disappears when Teddy steps through the back door. The sound transitions from a pop song from the era to something that had not been written and recorded yet in 1954. That Adams' piece is an interesting choice in that it is influenced by Mahler - an anachronistic recording (1970s?) of Mahler's "Quartet for Strings and Piano in A Minor" connects to Naerhing, Cawley and Teddy's false memory of the commandant's suicide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Zeal_and_Activity


The gates of horn and ivory are a literary image used to distinguish true dreams (corresponding to factual occurrences) from false. The phrase originated in the Greek language, in which the word for "horn" is similar to that for "fulfill" and the word for "ivory" is similar to that for "deceive". On the basis of that play on words, true dreams are spoken of as coming through the gates of horn, false dreams as coming through those of ivory.

One of several problems with the conventional interpretation of Shutter Island is that it fails to account for an awful lot of information that Scorsese includes in the movie. Everything in the film should be communicating something that advances the characterizations and plot. The comment that he doesn't remember the past times Cawley tried to help him has no meaning under the conventional interpretation. Like other facts in the film that point to the idea of unethical mind experiments, this comment is ignored as a throwaway line.

People have said that we can't expect all of Teddy's memories to return. Why can't all his memories return? That can be written anyway they want to. Why would they include a line about the critical subject of Teddy's memories if it has no meaning that matters to the interpretation of the movie itself? They wouldn't. His most traumatic memories should be the LAST to return, not the first. It also doesn't explain why Cawley didn't care that his memory problem persisted. Why write in that line if it doesn't advance the story in some way?

That line of dialog and Cawley's lack of concern about Teddy's persistent amnesia means that either:

1)Teddy doesn't remember because he wasn't there - he has nothing to remember. The manipulation (brainwashing) focused on the lake scene that didn't happen, but not the previous two years he was supposedly hospitalized. They made no effort to create Ashecliffe "memories". It shows that they were only after his confession and subjugation, not his mental health.

Or means that:

2)If Teddy/Andrew was there for two years they have had plenty of opportunity to mess with his memories. They must be able to control his memories if they can be confident they can "reset" his memories to coincide with a predicted hurricane. They don't want him to remember that two years because it is not advantageous for them - any memories of his two years at Ashecliffe would be of them doing illegal and unethical things they don't want him to remember - and have probably been actively trying to erase from his mind. Amnesia for secret and covert knowledge was one of the main goals of CIA mind-control experiments of the time.

MKULTRA GOALS:

*Materials which will cause temporary/permanent brain damage and loss of memory.

*Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.




The "role-play" and coercion is realistically the way to make a person mentally unstable and coerce a false confession. As Dr. Gilligan admits, the treatment Teddy gets at Ashecliffe is the opposite of what would be done to make him accept reality and be mentally healthy. Wouldn't the OPPOSITE of real therapy have the opposite effect? Sure. It would make Teddy crazy. It is an example of crazing-making gaslighting.

Realistically, the so-called role-play and coercion in the lighthouse is an extreme and radical example of the way the American POWs in Korea were "brainwashed". This history is mentioned in the movie by the woman in the cave. When these methods were investigated in the 1950's and 60's, psychologists and psychiatrists reported how the communists did what was known as brainwashing/thought reform/mind control/coercive persuasion/re-education - it goes by a lot of names. That is what is done to Teddy in the film.

Interestingly, it was discovered that these techniques didn't cause people to change permanently, if they changed at all. Often the subject targets said what they had to say to be rewarded with improved living conditions (get off Ward C?) or just to be left alone. When the subjects went back into an uncontrolled environment and/or the psychological pressure was off, they reverted to their original beliefs. This is why coerced confessions are notoriously unreliable and often recanted once the direct psychological pressure is off. If this is what they are doing to Teddy/Andrew that accounts for his "relapses".

When the doctors threaten Teddy with a lobotomy, how do they know if he really remembers or if he is just saying he remembers so they will leave him alone? They can't know. Do they even care? Maybe not since the point would be to control him and that could be accomplished whether he really believed or not.

There are good reasons to doubt the "flashback" is a memory in terms of both narrative logic and cinematic "language". Narratively, brainwashing isn't permanent and subjects typically "relapse" back into their original beliefs - if they didn't outright lie in the first place that they accepted the new beliefs. There are also reasons to think that the flashback isn't Teddy's subjective experience based on the editing which is extremely atypical for a POV scene - especially an important POV scene. Scorsese admitted to editing in an ambiguous way that could be taken as a "reaction shot" (the collapse in the lighthouse) or as "complicity" (they are in the cell when the scene ends, not the lighthouse), that is, a manipulation and false confession. The flashback to the lake scene is the most significant example of the sort of ambiguous editing MS was referring to.





Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?

I haven't read your entire post, yet. I'm replying to the part that I've read (which is up to 'The "flashback" has manipulative editing...').

Look, a movie is a contract. The movie's creators set out some premises whose outcomes are meant to arouse emotions in viewers. The point is that the contract _requires_ these premises. Without them...there's no basis to stimulate emotions in anyone. Just a bunch of disjointed pieces of action.

So, disbelief cannot be suspended _all_ the time. One needs to pick some premises and discard others for anything else to make sense, even more so if emotions are meant to be squeezed out of the viewer. If you constantly suspend disbelief than nothing makes sense anymore. One needs _sense_ in order to enjoy something. I know I do (is it just me?). Even abstract art... makes sense within the realm it defines. Even Dadaism (and I doubt this movie is so avant-garde as to aim to a Dadaist audience) had a clear sense of purpose, to revolt against a so-called world "order" that permitted 1st World War, whatever; but it had credible premises and within those premises things...made sense. Bottom line, even fiction needs its...consumer to accept _something_ as believable, and something else as not, in order to work.

So, now the question is ...what are the real believable premises of this movie (and the non-believable ones where disbelief is _not_ meant to be suspended):

1. The protagonist is actually Teddy and everything saying otherwise was induced somehow into his brain (brainwashed, if you will; hypnosis; hallucinogens, whatever).

2. The protagonist is Andrew; The "Teddy" story is a farce meant to heal him of his (probably) multiple personality disorder and avoid lobotomy.

These 2 premises are mutually exclusive, I hope we agree on that.

Now, if the premise #1 is at play, the question is, then: to what end? Well, to shut up a US Marshall who discovered a government cover-up. Okay. When did his manipulation start, then? Well, it must have started after he set foot on the island. Had it started before that the movie should/would have shown scenes from the past to support that long-ago started manipulation. However, the only scenes suggesting past-manipulation are actually supporting premise #2. In order to suggest manipulation the movie must show him, at some point, in a state _before_ the manipulation started. What was he like as a "normal" non-manipulated person? The only such scene is when he accepts himself as Andrew and volunteers to his own lobotomy, again supporting premise #2.

But here we are, at the very beginning of the movie, there's the "fear of water" scene. This is the 1st scene indicating that something is not quite right with "Teddy". The 2nd one being the fact that he doesn't quite remember his newly acquired partner ("c'mon, you're a successful case-solving US Marshall...you don't remember your partner who must have been previously introduced to you since you both ended up on a frickin' boat?!"). So, where is the state of normality that can later suggest the type of manipulation that premise #1 supports?

Also, with premise #1, why did they need the elaborate work of convincing him he's actually "Andrew" just so he volunteers for a lobotomy?! As if they couldn't have lobotomized him many times, already, without his consent. And without putting guards and doctors in danger, etc. Lobotomy, to support premise #1, could've been easily forced on him. While, for premise #2, it was avoided, because his cure was sought after, instead. Justifying the elaborate farce they played on him, and their acceptance of the risks that came with it (putting guards in danger, etc.).

There are other things to contradict premise #1. Movies use subliminal scenes to suggest a course of action (see for example, "Fight Club's" short flashes showing Brad Pitt substituting Ed Norton's character for a split-second). Here we have Ms. Kearns "invisible glass of water" (see my thread on that) while "Teddy" was interviewing her. Again this suggests that the whole "Teddy" US Marshall investigator thing... is as real as the glass of water in Ms. Kearns' hand; i.e., not at all. You can argue that the glass of water is explained by the effect of the "cigarettes". Meaning that the brainwashing has started. But there are already more powerful and graphic scenes suggesting that, _before_ the Kearns interview. Namely his occasional conversations with his wife, which in either premises I hope you agree, are hallucinations. Why show a split-second scene most likely to be missed to suggest something that was already suggested plenty? Namely, that he is hallucinating? I'd say subliminal messages are more of a "wink" to the viewer: "current things (premise #1)...may not be what they appear".

Also, why do you consider "role-play being therapy" as "something [that] illogical and unrealistic"? More "illogical and unrealistic" than the elaborate brainwashing for the purpose of making him volunteer to lobotomy? (what other purpose can logically be explained for premise #1?)

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?

Thanks, for the thoughtful, intelligent and respectful reply!!!!

I took too many tangents and wasn't very clear as far as my topic goes.

First, just so there will be no confusion, I'm talking about the role-play itself. It doesn't matter if he is Teddy or Andrew or neither Teddy nor Andrew. That is never established in the film, and Andrew can be the subject of an unethical mind game same as Teddy. In fact, Teddy suspects they are experimenting on crazy people, not luring ordinary people to the island and making them experiment subjects. That idea came from Chuck, and Teddy didn't believe it.


Also, why do you consider "role-play being therapy" as "something [that] illogical and unrealistic"? More "illogical and unrealistic" than the elaborate brainwashing for the purpose of making him volunteer to lobotomy? (what other purpose can logically be explained for premise #1?



Yes. As therapy it is illogical to the point of absurdity. As brainwashing, it is dramatic and extreme, but still hits all the notes characteristic of brainwashing. It misses all the notes characteristic of therapy.

They weren't brainwashing him to get him to submit to a lobotomy. Cawley had a theory that he could CONTROL (not cure, but CONTROL) Teddy psychologically so that lobotomy would be unnecessary. We can imagine several different scenarios that led up to the start of the movie. For example, imagine that Teddy really did stumble upon some secret information about illegal and covert experiments like he said. Well, the government really was doing unethical and illegal mind control experiments (and other unethical human experiments)at the time (context info), so there is a good chance that it happened just like he said. What if Chuck was telling the truth - what if while Teddy was snooping around and asking questions about Ashecliffe, the authorities at Ashecliffe were looking into Teddy? That's a possibility.

They try to alter his beliefs with the mind game (make him crazy or make him forget). Even if he still believes they are doing unethical experiments, once he is labeled "insane" who will believe him? Cawley's way would be better than lobotomy because it would eliminate the threat of exposure without sacrificing Teddy's usefulness as an agent. As a failed experiment subject, they have to lobotomize him because he is a disposal problem (he knows too much) - lobotomies in the sewage/human waste treatment facility that is the lighthouse on Shutter Island. There are unclassified memos that discuss what to do with these "disposal problems" and reports that lobotomies were a way to go. Real history.

This is the fundamental point. The role-play is dishonest (a violation of trust between doctor and patient if Teddy is a patient), and couldn't possibly help Teddy or anyone to see reality. The role-play isn't really therapeutic unobtainium because it isn't imaginary or fictitious - it is really the way to make a person mentally unstable because it interferes with the way normal people test reality.

An example of what I am getting at is that if Teddy gets a fictional treatment it should be something like the imaginary "tansy root" in Rosemary's Baby. There are lots of real herbs used in folk remedies and magic. Levin needed his magic herb to be what he wanted it to be. Had he used a real herb like "wormwood" he would imply characteristics of real wormwood. I suppose if people don't know anything about real wormwood, it wouldn't matter, but for those who do know, the herb "wormwood" would imply meanings he didn't intend. If he makes up his own plant, the writer can control it's characteristics. We can suspend disbelief and accept that the fictitious tansy root is an herb with particular characteristics defined by the writer. In the case of Shutter Island, to use a real unethical destabilizing mind game to represent therapy will run the risk that some viewers will recognize what it really is and won't suspend disbelief. They will think its a dumb movie.

It isn't that in real life the role-play would be ineffective, but that it would do the OPPOSITE of what the doctors tell Teddy it is for. It would confuse him about reality, make him unsure of himself and weaken him mentally - that's the real psychology of how the "role-play" would affect a person. When Teddy says something to the effect that "you are NOT going to make me think I'm crazy," that's exactly what they were trying to do. They did make him think he was crazy, at least temporarily.

The movie shows that he gets steadily worse during the role-play because they were making him worse - and even if you believe the doctors, they knew he was going to be worse as the role-play went on because "Andrew" wasn't taking his antipsychotic medication. Again, they used the name of a real drug, "chlorpromazine" (Thorazine) which really doesn't have any clinically significant withdrawal symptoms. The main consequence when a psychotic person stops taking their medication is a RETURN OR WORSENING OF PSYCHOTIC SYMPTOMS. So, is that logical? That they try to make him accept reality by making his psychotic symptoms worse? They gave him other drugs, why didn't they make sure he got his medication so he wouldn't go into withdrawal and get more psychotic? The medication must have been helping because why else would they keep him on it for 2 years - and if Thorazine was just approved as Cawley said earlier, how was it "Andrew" was getting it for two years? And why did he use the generic name in the lighthouse when he used the brand name earlier? Did he not want Teddy to know he was talking about the same drug? The role-play is mental abuse that would destabilize a normal person.

That's not just my opinion. It is a fact. Cawley tries to pass the role-play off as an elaborate way for Teddy to check reality for himself - and a lot of the audience accepts his word for it. Give him the run of the island and let him see for himself that his suspicions aren't true. How can he do that if they make his delusions come to life? That is illogical.

It is the same thing as letting a child check under his bed for monsters. He sees no monsters, accepts reality and goes to sleep. Well, what if he is afraid of monsters and looks under his bed and sees a monster you put there? His suspicion about a monster would be validated especially if you went along with that idea and validated it was a monster. It scares him, traumatizes him - affects the child mentally. If you tell him it wasn't real days later, how does he know you are telling the truth now since you were telling him for the past three days you believed the monster was real, too? That's an abusive mind game.

For example, if the role play was a valid way for Teddy to test reality, if the woman in the cave wasn't real, say Teddy was delusional about an escaped patient in a cave, by giving him the run of the island, he could go to the cave himself and see no one was there. In this instance, if Teddy gets to the cave an hallucinates the doctor, that means that he is UNABLE to discern reality - he CANNOT see reality for himself, so why risk him falling off the cliffs? Giving him the run of the island and letting him check it himself is futile if he physically sees and experiences the things they say aren't real and true because they are creating it or if he doesn't have the mental ability to tell the difference between reality and unreality.

Actually, what the role-play boils down to with the doctors is that if there are specifically no "Nazi experiments" or "Satanic OR's" in the lighthouse, they can use that to show that Teddy's suspicions are evidence of his mental illness. That's what they want Teddy to believe. That is a false conclusion, illogical and has negative therapeutic value for the following reasons:

***********
1. Unethical experiments could be anywhere on the island - not just in the lighthouse.

2. Unethical human mind experiments are not limited to "Nazi experiments" and "Satanic OR's". Did Teddy ever say he suspected "Nazi experiments" and "Satanic OR's"? No, he did not. All he suspected was that they were doing unethical mind experiments on the mentally ill. That's it. That was his GUESS.

Barring Teddy witnessing obvious unambiguous abuse, what would evidence of unethical mind experiments on Shutter Island be? Mainly it would be in the documentation - experimental data and records of experiments for which there is no legal consent - in other words, for Teddy to have a valid reality check for his suspicions of experiments he would have to have access to the records, which he was DENIED.

3. Assuming that there WERE Nazi experiments and Satanic OR's in the lighthouse, the fact that Cawley was there before Teddy means that they had the opportunity to remove the evidence. Teddy seeing no evidence of such experiments in the lighthouse is meaningless. If Teddy had been in his right mind when he got to the tower, that would have been the first thing he said - "How do I know you, doctor, didn't hide the Nazis and Satan before I arrived".

***************

"Andrew" has two sets of delusions according to the doctors. He is delusional about the events surrounding the deaths of his children and delusional about experiments on the island. Giving him the run of the island could never show him he was delusional about what happened prior to getting to Ashecliffe, the information he would need to check that reality isn't on the island. Not only that, but his captors DO NOT ALLOW HIM A WAY TO CHECK WITH ANY INDEPENDENT RESOURCE HE CAN TRUST.

Because his accuser/captors are IN CONTROL of the "role-play", they will not allow him to find evidence of unethical experiments. Denying Teddy access to the records is the most direct way they prevented him from finding evidence, but they also mislead him in other ways. They feed him specific information that they later claim is his delusion. Chuck added a lot to Teddy's relative benign suspicions in the mausoleum - delusional people don't need to be told their delusions, and they sure don't resist those ideas as Teddy is shown to do several times.

Anyway, the film doesn't show what it should be showing if they are doing legitimate psychiatric treatment and ethical experiments. What it shows instead is the way to make a person mentally unstable. Once they break him down and Teddy doubts his own mind, WHEN HE IS ACTIVELY PSYCHOTIC AND UNABLE TO DISTINGUISH TRUTH FROM REALITY that is when they TELL HIM what he has to accept as true and threaten him with a lobotomy if he doesn't conform. He has no way to access information that could support his own ideas or falsify what he is being told.

He wouldn't know if they were telling the truth or not. He can't check reality with any source he can trust. He can't trust his own mind and can't trust these two guys who just told him that they have been lying to him for the three days he recalls knowing them. They have the authority of the federal government, and Teddy is alone - unable to contact an attorney, friend or advocate and no way to defend himself. If he agrees with them they will leave him alone and be nice to him. If he doesn't go along he will be lobotomized. What's he going to do?

If my opinion isn't enough, the psych consultant for Shutter Island admits that it is unrealistic as well.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jul/22/hollywood-mental-block


...It is Dr Cawley's treatment that is nonsense. Cawley attempts to shock Teddy out of his delusion by enabling him to act it out in glorious detail. This, apparently, is the exact opposite of what would actually happen. According to Gilligan, the therapist's task is to encourage the patient to face reality "and help him to mourn his losses".

Unfortunately, the film's plot depends entirely on Cawley's exotic roleplay experiment, so that was that. Gilligan says that the story as told requires "the willing suspension of disbelief"....


I don't think people suspend disbelief for the role-play. I think they buy it just like Cawley wants Teddy to buy it. They believe the illusion that the doctors create - maybe because they expect a mystery movie will have a resolution spoon fed to them in the narrative. Maybe because it fits with certain ideas about folk psychology and movie mental illness. It probably has to to with the assumed contract between movie makers and movie watchers that you mention, too.

The audience breaks down mostly this way -

*some viewers have no problem with the role-play and the doctors' story and the film is fine with them.
*others recognize the problems with the logic of role-play and don't like the movie. It is stupid "mess of a movie" (something a critic said) that insults their intelligence by expecting them to find it believable. They assume that Scorsese wants people to believe the doctors, which is true to a degree.
* Then there are people like me who see the film as a dramatic, but accurate, logical depiction of an unethical psychological experiment, and the doctors are not being honest. For us the common understanding of Shutter Island is lame because it is written by a bunch of amateur doctor characters who think the anagrams that Teddy couldn't care less about are clever. It's a play (role-play) within a play(the artificial controlled milieu of the island) within a play (the film itself).

We step back and see that the world Teddy is forced to accept after the role-play isn't reality at all, but a synthetic environment created and controlled by the doctors. The movie shows us nothing beyond the artificial environment controlled by the authority. As far as what happened on the mainland, we have no reliable explanation of that in the movie. Teddy's beliefs are said to be delusion and the doctors are lying about some things - maybe even the story about Teddy being Andrew and the lake crime. We have no good reason to accept that the "flashback" is a true memory, either. The "flashback" and confession just means that, at least temporarily, Teddy was successfully brainwashed.

There is no character in the film who can provide an explication the audience can confidently accept. We have to figure it out for ourselves. Scorsese said that one of the things he was asking in Shutter Island is "who do we believe in movies?" In this case the film is experimental rather than mainstream commercial - so the contract between the movie maker and the movie watcher is different.

I'll try to get to your other points later.

Thanks again for your reply.





Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?

Well, you’ve certainly planted the seed of doubt in my interpretation (this time I’ve read your entire most recent post).

I came to my original interpretation also by considering how a "fair" movie script should convey information to the audience (of course,...who gets to decide what a fair script should be, there are no laws cast in stone; true, but...).

I cannot claim any expertise in screenwriting (I’ve only taken a screenwriting online class, which makes me…an amateur, at best), but I think that, if you’re right (premise #1 is true), then the script is “cheating” (hehe, again…expecting “fairness” in a movie script) in the sense that, as said before, no purely sane state of Teddy is ever shown to gauge his gradual brainwashing. He’s messed up from the get go (fear of water in 1st scene, early wife hallucinations before the cigarettes had any chance to take effect, etc.).

A typical movie script has a “fish out of the water” stage in the first part of a movie. But for that, the audience needs to be shown (if only briefly; or at least suggested) a “fish in the water” stage (at some point; even “Memento” had it, although later on), so that we can measure what it means for him to be “out of the water”. No such stage is shown if we go with premise #1 (while one is shown for premise #2: his “memories” of the killing day). As you wrote: “It probably has to to with the assumed contract between movie makers and movie watchers that you mention, too.”

Also, under premise #1 (your theory is right) then Chuck is part of the plot to brainwash Teddy into believing he’s “Andrew”. Why then feed Teddy with observations that support him as being Teddy (not “Andrew”)? Like the valid point that he government might be unto him for his suspicions? How can that help Teddy into accepting himself as “Andrew”?

Maybe the pivotal point is Dr. Solando … (Patricia Clarkson’s character). Either Teddy/Andrew was lead to her (the cigarette hanging on the cliff’s edge; the silhouette painted in white to suggest Chuck has fallen), in which case the logical conclusion is that she’s part of the plot and there is no Andrew (premise #1 is the true one); or, she is a hallucination (along with the signs leading to her), maybe because the subconscious mind materializes things we want to believe; and Teddy wanted her to exist, especially after the first version of Rachel Solando (Mortimer) was shown to be fake and by now the cigarettes start to take effect – in which case… either premise may be valid (certainly premise #1 cannot be dismissed on the presence of hallucinations at this point).

I’ll have to watch the movie again. Thanks …for making me doubt ;-)

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?

All I was saying about suspension of disbelief is that people who can easily accept the illogical and unrealistic role-play is therapy argue against other opinions based on the idea that other opinions are unrealistic and farfetched. Why is one farfetched interpretation better than another? I'm only talking about people who believe the role-play is legitimate and ethical, but think that the idea that Teddy/Andrew is the subject of an unethical experiment is farfetched.

The role-play would never work and never be done for therapeutic reasons - that is unrealistic. A serious film would not require that sort of suspension of disbelief.

Also, Ashecliffe is a federal prison, not a health care agency. In 1954, health care services didn't adequately fund psychiatric treatment - hospitals were overcrowded and under-resourced. The Justice Department which runs Ashecliffe, sure wouldn't devote those resources to do health care and research UNLESS they thought it could have political/intelligence applications - which fits with the idea that Cawley is consulted law enforcement and intelligence agencies. It requires suspension of disbelief to think that it is a legitimate facility to help the mentally ill. It takes no suspension of disbelief to accept see that sort of secure facility would be necessary if they are doing illegal government sponsored experiments on 66 ghost patients.

The government just didn't care enough about the mentally ill to invest those resources in so few ordinary patients. Mental hospitals the size of Ashecliffe would have had hundreds if not thousands of patients just as bad as the ones in the movie. They would be cared for by a staff that was stretched very thin - one psychiatrist might be responsible for hundreds of patients. The staff patient ratio at Ashecliffe is absurd. A real facility that housed dangerous criminally insane would have a fraction of the security we see at Ashecliffe.

Maybe some people don't know how unrealistic Ashecliffe is. It wouldn't exist in real life, not in 1954, just so good, progressive doctors could help insignificant mental patients. However, if they were doing covert, illegal and unethical experiments like this one that Dr Harold Wolff wanted to do, you bet we would see a company of prison guards and a bunch of "overseers".


CIA Project QK-HILLTOP

In 1954, the CIA’s Project QK-HILLTOP was created to study brainwashing techniques, and to develop effective methods of interrogation.

Most of the early studies are believed to have been performed by the Cornell University Medical School’s human ecology study programs, under the direction of Dr. Harold Wolff.

Wolff requested that the CIA provide him any information they could find regarding “threats, coercion, imprisonment, deprivation, humiliation, torture, ‘brainwashing’, ‘black psychiatry’, and hypnosis, or any combination of these, with or without chemical agents”.

According to Wolff, the research team would then:

…assemble, collate, analyze and assimilate this information and will then undertake experimental investigations designed to develop new techniques of offensive/defensive intelligence use … Potentially useful secret drugs (and various brain damaging procedures) will be similarly tested in order to ascertain the fundamental effect upon human brain function and upon the subject’s mood …

“Where any of the studies involve potential harm of the subject, we expect the Agency to make available suitable subjects and a proper place for the performance of the necessary experiments.” (Dr. Harold Wolff, Cornell University Medical School)


We don't know if project QK Hilltop was implemented or not. If it was the records were destroyed as were most of the records of the CIA's illegal unethical human experiments of that era.

It is actually more believable that a place like we see in the movie is a "proper place" (isolated and well-guarded) and the patients are the "suitable subjects"(no family, vulnerable, devalued because of mental illness) that the CIA made available for unethical experiments that "involve potential harm to the subject".

As far as the "conspiracy" idea, that angle is the same whether they are doing it to help Andrew or brainwash Teddy or some other reason. It's not so much a conspiracy as it is people doing their jobs. Very few know what is actually going on and how unethical and illegal it is. We don't know what the staff, guards and patients have been told, but I'm sure they would be told what they need to know to do their job and no more - they also have a lot of fear of Dr. Cawley, so I'll bet they do as they are told. As far as the doctors and the other authorities, they are the ones doing the crimes, so they aren't talking because they would get in legal trouble, be sued for malpractice, loose their licenses. If their conscience starts to bother them and they are tempted to whistle blow they end up like Frank Olson.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Olson

These experiments were done by reputable doctors and scientists in mainstream settings like universities - no farfetched conspiracy required because most of those involved didn't know what they were really doing. Some authority above them approved it seemed ok to them. That's how it works. It isn't very complicated. These mind control experiments were kept secret for two decades after 1954, so people weren't talking, and if they were they were deemed to not be credible.

Maybe people just don't know the history. They don't know how overcrowded and underserved real psych hospitals were in the 1950s. They don't know that bad conditions like we see on Ward C weren't normal or acceptable. Bad conditions were not by design. It was because they didn't have the resources to do better - something which Dr. Cawley can't claim. The only reason to keep people on ward C is torture. It would be a scandal if made public.

Maybe people don't realize how widespread these unethical experiments were. It is more realistic to think that Ashecliffe is doing unethical human experiments - maybe something like project QK Hilltop, than it is to believe they are doing ethical treatment and research. That isn't believable in the least. We just don't see what we would be seeing if they are legitimate. Instead we see things that we would see if they are doing something illegal and unethical that they don't want the public to know about.

Also, in 1954 people were aware of the unethical Nazi experiments and the Nuremberg Code. They KNEW WHAT THE RULES WERE. Since the US took the lead in establishing the rules for human experiments, like Teddy, most Americans would have taken it for granted that their own government was going by these rules. But the US was breaking these rules all the time, not just in mind control experiments but in syphilis studies, radiation experiments , drugs, bioweapons ... those who are interested can look it up. No massive conspiracy needed. And those in control knew they were violating the law and ethical code when they did these things, too. That's why they were secret. When the government breaks the law and the rules, only the public can call them to account, and if the public is kept in the dark, then they get away with it pretty easily. Teddy threatening to "blow the lid off the place" would be something the violators would take seriously.

People like Cawley most likely believed the end justified their means - or at least that how they rationalized it. Cawley didn't want the public to know what he was doing because they "wouldn't understand". He didn't think his ideas would be understood in the present time. If he is ethical and helping people what's not to understand? Why keep it secret?

So, people think that the role-play is realistic enough because they don't know what therapy would really be, and they don't recognize what the role-play really is. They don't know the relevant history and don't realize that what Teddy suspects is consistent with history. Something like QK Hilltop may well have happened. I'm sure less extreme but similar experiments like in the movie happened a lot. The research from these experiments ended up informing a lot of today's psyops techniques.

I figure Scorsese was counting on the public not knowing the significance of much of what he showed, so when Cawley explained it all, people would believe him as long as they didn't articulate an alternative explanation. We like our movies to be tied up with neat bows and don't want to have to think about it too much. To make the movie financially viable, it had to have a plot that would go over with a mainstream audience with a lot of young and international viewers who weren't familiar enough with the subject and history to realize what it really was. It had to pass as a conventional Hollywood movie, but that doesn't mean that's all it is.

I don't know who Teddy really is. He gets to be Teddy to me since that's who he thinks he is and the doctors have an alarming lack of evidence - like NONE - to back their claim he is Andrew. Since the authority have access to everything to make their case to Teddy/Andrew (and the audience) and Teddy has NO access to anyway to defend himself, then I think he is probably Teddy, but I'm not 100% sure, and it doesn't matter to the question of whether the role-play is ethical. That just isn't relevant. In fact, focusing on Teddy is the trick of the film and probably what causes most people to fail to look critically at what the film shows the doctors doing. A harmful, unethical psychological experiment.

I have a good theory about the disappearing glass, too. I'll check out your thread.











Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?

"Maybe people just don't know the history. They don't know how overcrowded and underserved real psych hospitals were in the 1950s."

I'm willing to bet this is not common knowledge, no.
-------


"Maybe people don't realize how widespread these unethical experiments were."

It's hush-hush history some of which was only recently declassified. So, yes, "people" cannot be expected to be mass-educated about this.
-------


"So, people think that the role-play is realistic enough because they don't know what therapy would really be..."

Yes, I think it's fair to assume the audience are not all psychology majors or historians.
-------

All of the above contribute to my point that the script is "cheating". A movie "should largely be" self-contained, not something that requires pre-requisites.

Of course, what a movie "should be" and what "largely" means, in this context, are subjective... Thanks anyway for the interesting lessons I've learnt.

PS. Why was Frank Olson poisoned with LSD? He tried to resign AFTER the fatal meeting so something else must have prompted them to poison him? From Wikipedia:

"On the second day of the retreat, after dinner, Gottlieb spiked a bottle of Cointreau with a small quantity of a substance that he and his TSS colleagues privately referred to as "serunin" but which was in fact lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD.[4]

Olson asked to quit the biowarfare program the week after the retreat"

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


All of the above contribute to my point that the script is "cheating". A movie "should largely be" self-contained, not something that requires pre-requisites.


Isn't that what folks are talking about when they complain about how movies dumb down for the mass market and how they say that the audience is more intelligent than the movie makers think? I've heard the complaint, "the audience doesn't need it explained" - they'll know what its about. Doesn't that mean that the intelligent audience can draw on a broad base of general knowledge?

That said, the information is actually in the movie but few viewers recognize its significance. So, I can’t think that it is cheating as lond as there is enough information to identify unethical experiments. The cheating I see is in the extra-textual statements and promotion that prejudice the early critics to favor the doctors. The movie supports the idea of unethical experiments because the role-play itself is easy to identify as unethical. The film is “self-contained”. To me it looks like people ignore the information that would tell them what is going on in favor of confirmation bias for the only explication that is articulated.

People don't consider things like this: Teddy says what they are doing - “you’re not going to make me think I’m crazy” so that possibility is in the movie. Why is this possibility not considered? Why dismiss what Teddy says? They are trying to make him think he is crazy. That's in the movie. We only see one experiment that we know of - Teddy’s role-play. How can we dismiss Teddy's suspicions without looking critically at the only example we have of the sort of experiments they are doing? If people think Teddy is "insane" how do they know that it isn't being caused by the doctors?

Shouldn’t it be common knowledge that ethical human experiments require consent and that they can’t put the subject's life at risk? Shouldn't we expect a very high percentage of the audience to know this? Don’t people know what a coerced confession is? - once they threaten him with a lobotomy they are coercing him.

I'll try to come up with a list of things that are in the film that support Teddy's suspicions - things that are rarely if ever mentioned by people who believe the doctors.



Why was Frank Olson poisoned with LSD? He tried to resign AFTER the fatal meeting so something else must have prompted them to poison him?


Gottlieb was all about dosing unsuspecting people with LSD. I have heard that they even spiked the CIA water cooler. I think that there are reports that Olson was distressed about the unethical nature of the bio-warfare experiments he was working on at Fort Detrick. This may have been before he was dosed with LSD at the retreat - you can imagine how distressing it would be to a person who didn't know they had taken a hallucinogen - they would think they were crazy and probably start acting crazy. In any event, after the dosing it is pretty clear that he wanted to quit what he was doing at Fort Detrick, probably because it was unethical.

So, maybe the CIA dosed him because they suspected he would be a whistle-blower and if the LSD made him crazy then his credibility was shot. Or if he was deemed unstable after the LSD incident, then they may have thought him to be a security risk - so they pushed him out the window. I think the case is currently a suspected homicide, not a suicide.

Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


Also, with premise #1, why did they need the elaborate work of convincing him he's actually "Andrew" just so he volunteers for a lobotomy?!


What ?? Why do you think that they brainwashed him so he will volunteer for Lobotomy later?

They brainwashed Teddy into believing that he is not Teddy but Andrew. They didn't want or expect him to come back to his real memories. The brainwashing failed and Teddy started to come back to reality. He volunteered for the lobotomy to discredit the doctors.

At Shutter Island, the doctors experimented on patients. They needed a sane man whom they can experiment upon. They got the right candidate....Teddy who was already looking into the place. Dr. Cawley thought of killing two birds with one stone.....silencing a man who knows too much and testing their science of drugs and mind control on a sane subject.

Perhaps other doctors such as Dr. Naehring & the Warden weren't in support of Dr. Cawley's idea. May be they straight away wanted to lobotomize & silence Teddy once and for all. But Cawley didn't want to give up and at the end, at the lighthouse, he successfully brainwashed Teddy who was at the peak of drug action [Remember Cavelady's quote: it (drugs) takes 36 to 48 hours to reach workable levels].

But few weeks later at the very end, at the staircase, we see Teddy coming back to reality. The doctors didn't expect that. Dr. Cawley said at the lighthouse that everything will be discredited if Teddy doesn't believe that he is Andrew. Dr. Cawley was upset because his experiment failed. And Teddy didn't get along. He knew that there is no escape and his choice of staying as Teddy and not Andrew will discredit the doctors' work.


Teddy's final line is....this place makes me wonder...which is worse....to live as a monster (doctors) or die as a good man (honest cop).




Retard... Pussy... Sinister_prig

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


They brainwashed Teddy into believing that he is not Teddy but Andrew.


When does this happen in the film? They treat him from the beginning as Marshal Teddy Daniels. This is how they refer to him, this is the only way they speak to him until he reaches the top floor of the lighthouse.

So, if they never pressure him to believe he is Andrew, never call him that, never tell him or encourage the idea he murdered his wife because she killed his children...how are they "brainwashing" him to believe that he is not Teddy Daniels?

If they are "brainwashing" him to believe anything at all it could only be "brainwashing" to believe he is Teddy Daniels because during the entire film until the lighthouse that is what they are letting/making him believe.

It is ridiculous to say that all Cawley has to do is tell him he is Andrew when he reaches the top floor of the lighthouse and "boom he is brainwashed."

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


When does this happen in the film? They treat him from the beginning as Marshal Teddy Daniels. This is how they refer to him, this is the only way they speak to him until he reaches the top floor of the lighthouse.

So, if they never pressure him to believe he is Andrew, never call him that, never tell him or encourage the idea he murdered his wife because she killed his children...how are they "brainwashing" him to believe that he is not Teddy Daniels?




They brainwashed Teddy at the lighthouse when he was at the peak of drug action. Remember Cave lady said that it takes 36 to 48n hours for the drugs to reach workable levels.

Brainwashing doesn't work the way you are trying to imply.

Sodium Amytal is already proven for coercing false memories. Combined with other drugs, they would have to wait for Teddy to get vulnerable enough to coerce the wrong story, the wrong identity and have him question his own sanity.

And that's what we see happening at the lighthouse.




If they are "brainwashing" him to believe anything at all it could only be "brainwashing" to believe he is Teddy Daniels because during the entire film until the lighthouse that is what they are letting/making him believe.

It is ridiculous to say that all Cawley has to do is tell him he is Andrew when he reaches the top floor of the lighthouse and "boom he is brainwashed."




This actually stands true for TiA theory. its absolutely ridiculous to see the doctors validating Andrew's delusions and his delusional identity. Infact they reinforced it completely with due respect at all stages that he is a US Marshal and Teddy Daniels. And at the end, when he Teddy/Andrew firmly believes what he is, they expect him to snap....booom!





Retard... Pussy... Sinister_prig

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


Brainwashing doesn't work the way you are trying to imply.


You are right about how "ridiculous [it is] to see the doctors validating Andrew's delusions and his delusional identity". One of the reasons for my strong opinion - and I think the reason that my arguments have caused so much dissonance - is because I have tried to justify what the doctors do - and it can't be done. The Andrew story doesn't stand up to logic. As psychiatry it is the WORST thing they could do to someone who is delusional. As brainwashing, it may be epic and over-dramatic, but it is by the book, step by step.

The first thing they do in brainwashing is to gain the subject's trust - flattery (calling Teddy "Boss" and telling him he's a "legend"). That was Chuck's job. Teddy will be far more likely to believe Chuck's suggestions if Teddy trusts him. People can be hypnotized covertly - which is what Chuck does, but first they must have trust and rapport with the subject. They can't start calling him "Andrew" off the bat if he is really Teddy.

If he is Andrew, then what they do is even worse to me because they are manipulating a man who is already mentally vulnerable. It is mental abuse to give mixed messages, because it confuses a person about their perceptions. Not only that, but if the role-play is to get Andrew to see for himself what is real they should not have done anything to make him more suspicious, which they do over and over. Too, if they were really trying to get him to see reality for himself he should have been positively reinforced whenever he was on the right track. For instance, when Teddy/Andrew says he doesn't want to kill Laeddis, Chuck says he would kill him twice and says he will help Teddy/Andrew kill him - encourages the pathology rather than healthy ideas and perceptions. Or whenever Teddy/Andrew was resisting paranoid ideas like he was lured to the island, they should have encouraged that rather than stoke his suspicious and make them more extensive.

If they are brainwashing an innocent Teddy to believe he is Laeddis then they first have to gain his trust and they could never do that if they start out calling him Laeddis. If they are manipulating Andrew, they shouldn't have ever given him any message that wasn't true and real. They should have always "reinforced" reality. If he is Teddy, calling him Teddy isn't "reinforcing" anything because he knows who he is. If he is Andrew, calling him Teddy reinforces a delusion and prevents him from seeing reality for himself. That's actually psychological abuse and mentally harmful - and they would have known that in 1954.

Teddy becomes more and more unstable, probably because of a combination of drugs and and mental stress. Mental stress alone could break him down. By the time Teddy got to the lighthouse he was scared, agitated and betrayed by his only friend on the island. He had no where to turn for help or any way he could reliably check reality. He is forced to go along with these two guys who just confessed to lying to him for the entire time he remembers knowing them. He is shown no evidence - just an easily forged "intake form" and three pictures of unknown children - and notably, no picture of the other body at the Laeddis family crime scene, his wife's - which would have shown Teddy and the audience that she didn't die in the fire as Teddy remembered.

He deteriorates throughout the game so that by the time he gets to the lighthouse and is TOLD the supposed truth and threatened with a lobotomy, he is actively psychotic. Does that make any sense? Psychosis means his ability to discern reality is impaired. If the woman in the cave is a hallucination that is even more proof that at the time of the "flashback" his mental state was such that he was UNABLE to know the difference between reality and unreality. Since he has no way to know for sure what is real, that's the best time to get him to accept a lie as the truth. He doesn't know what is true, he can't trust the doctors and he can't trust his own mind, but he knows the consequence of not accepting he is Andrew is a lobotomy.

If he is Andrew, then taking a psychotic person off their Thorazine would be much more likely to cause a return or worsening of psychotic symptoms than it would cause withdrawal. So, there is no getting around the fact that they knew that Teddy/Andrew would be mentally weak by the time they confronted him with the story they wanted him to believe. They are either causing a "sane" man to become mentally unstable because that would make him easier to influence (brainwash) - or they are making a man who is already mentally unstable worse because they think it will make him see reality for himself. Those are the only possibilities and only former makes sense.

If they are trying to get him to see reality for himself, why would they make him more psychotic? If they were trying to get him to see reality, there is no way they would have taken him off his anti-psychotic medication because his psychosis would get worse - his ability to see reality would deteriorate during the game and they would have known that. They gave him other drugs during the role-play and controlled everything he took in, so they could have kept him on his medication if they wanted to.

I've heard that argument many times about how they are "reinforcing" the Teddy identity during the role-play - as if a man would need to have his name reinforced. It should be simple common sense that they would first have to establish rapport which would be impossible if they call him Andrew from the start. The role-play wouldn't work if they call him Andrew, not if it is brainwashing and not if it is therapy as the doctors claim. The planned role-play requires that he be Teddy.


Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?

Very good points, Gleamy_jog!

You nailed it.




Retard... Pussy... Sinister_prig

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


They brainwashed Teddy at the lighthouse when he was at the peak of drug action.



So, you think that the lighthouse scene is where the "brainwashing" takes place?



Remember Cave lady said that it takes 36 to 48n hours for the drugs to reach workable levels.



Remember "Cave Lady" is a hallucination/thought that is visualized for us the audience. It is actually a conversation taking place in his head. Secondly, what drugs do you think are reaching "workable levels?"

The aspirin the doctor gives him for his headache or you think the cigarettes were drugged or both or you think there was just drugs in everything he touched on the island?

Remember this key aspect of the film/story...all the information about Andrew Laeddis is introduced to us through DiCaprio's character.

We see his three children in the first dream he has the "first night" on the island...playing outside the window...and we also see through a window the pond and the gazebo where his wife drowned the children and he shot his wife. When we see this water symbolically starts pouring into the dream from all over the place.

So, according to your "theory" they would already be "controlling" his dreams the first night he is there...except never in the history of brainwashing OR medical science has anybody been able to plant a dream of exactly what they want a person to dream in a human's head...that's not how dreams work and is an idiotic premise.

Hence the dreams in the film are not "planted" in his head...they are his dreams, introduced so the audience can see what is taking place in his head.


Brainwashing doesn't work the way you are trying to imply.


Brainwashing is difficult and requires a great deal of control over your subject and repeating information that you want the subject to accept over and over and over again.

The only information they repeat to him and is part of the environment he explores relates to him being "Teddy Daniels" so this remains the only thing they could possibly be attempting to convince him of IF they were trying to brainwash him. Except at the end, not through any brainwashing (because none is shown in the film) all Cawley does is show him the anagrams and photos of his children...that would not "brainwash" even the most weak minded human on the planet never mind a guy as stubborn as Leo's character.

So it would be ridiculous to believe that all Cawley had to do was to give him some sort of magic drug and then wait for him in the lighthouse to show him on a blackboard that his name and the name of Andrew Laeddis --the man he believes killed his wife-- (a name Leo's character introduces to the film, not the doctors) just happens to be an anagram of his own name, and boom, he is brainwashed.

Not only is that not brainwashing...it is hilariously dumb.

The only way that scene works is if his character is rejecting information about himself that he does not want to revisit because it traumatized him.

Because if anything about "Teddy Daniels" and what he supposedly believes is real how is it that the name of the man that he claims killed his wife is an anagram of his name, he has never realized this until he comes to the island...and hilariously the name of the missing patient he is supposedly there to find (which slyly is also a name he introduces us to NOT the doctors) is also an anagram for his wife's name and he also does not realize this?



Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


Remember "Cave Lady" is a hallucination/thought that is visualized for us the audience. It is actually a conversation taking place in his head. Secondly, what drugs do you think are reaching "workable levels?"



Its what Dr. Cawley an unreliable narrator says it. Infact the evidence suggest otherwise....We see a third person narrative shot from audience's POV of Cavelady waking Teddy up who was sleeping and not hallucinating. This alone is a concrete proof that Cavelady was real. You may form whatever drivel you want to explain that scene but can't escape the fact that we see Teddy sleeping and Cavelady waking him up.



Remember this key aspect of the film/story...all the information about Andrew Laeddis is introduced to us through DiCaprio's character.



So what? I mean, if a protagonist gives description about some person and his acts to some other character who doesn't know about the person or pretend to not know that person for sinister reasons, then it means the protagonist's information can't be trusted? Wow, what a logic!



We see his three children in the first dream he has the "first night" on the island...playing outside the window...and we also see through a window the pond and the gazebo where his wife drowned the children and he shot his wife.



Its not his children. He saw those photographs of the kids in Rachel Solando's file. Obviously, if an aggressive cop wants to go through patient's file, interrogates the patients, the first thing he would want to do is to go through the file of the missing patient. If film-makers start showing or rather spoon-feed such obvious details, then movies would be like 24 hours long.



So it would be ridiculous to believe that all Cawley had to do was to give him some sort of magic drug and then wait for him in the lighthouse to show him on a blackboard that his name and the name of Andrew Laeddis --the man he believes killed his wife-- (a name Leo's character introduces to the film, not the doctors) just happens to be an anagram of his own name, and boom, he is brainwashed.

Not only is that not brainwashing...it is hilariously dumb.



You don't know the effect of drugs. I already told you drugs like Sodium Amytal (mentioned by Cavelady) has been proven to coerce false memoires. I mean the movie is not going to spell technical details and bore the audience. Even a heavy session of alcohol can make us next day forget how we reach home after the session. There are hundreds of chemical compounds & drugs which gives varying effect on Brain.

The effects were temporary. Teddy started coming back to reality. Cawley failed. I never said that brainwashing succeeded.


The aspirin the doctor gives him for his headache or you think the cigarettes were drugged or both or you think there was just drugs in everything he touched on the island?



How do you know for sure that the doctors gave him aspirin? There's no evidence from the movie, given the fact that Dr. Cawley is not a reliable narrator of third-person narrator.


Because if anything about "Teddy Daniels" and what he supposedly believes is real how is it that the name of the man that he claims killed his wife is an anagram of his name, he has never realized this until he comes to the island...and hilariously the name of the missing patient he is supposedly there to find (which slyly is also a name he introduces us to NOT the doctors) is also an anagram for his wife's name and he also does not realize this?



Wow, so people around the world keep checking whether their names are in anagram to someone they despise or love or whatever. Let me start today by making a list of all my friends, foes, relatives etc. to check if anyone's name is anagram/s to mine and if I find any, I would certainly say...."Hey! I didn't realize that!'. Ofcoure I will need a PC, MS Excel and a formula but that's ok!




Retard... Pussy... Sinister_prig

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


Its what Dr. Cawley an unreliable narrator says it.

Cawley isn't unreliable, and isn't a narrator. It's disturbing when a buffoon like you hears smart people mention a film concept and then you misapply it so easily.



Wow, so people around the world keep checking whether their names are in anagram to someone they despise or love or whatever. Let me start today by making a list of all my friends, foes, relatives etc. to check if anyone's name is anagram/s to mine and if I find any, I would certainly say...."Hey! I didn't realize that!'. Ofcoure I will need a PC, MS Excel and a formula but that's ok!


Or, if you were interested in making an alter ego and loved anagrams, you would just make up anagram names of the two key people in your delusion.

Teddy wasn't searching the world for people who were anagrams. Your brain just makes up a stupid premise that doesn't apply so you can knock it down and feel like you've accomplished something.

You have such a convoluted, moronic understanding of logic it's scary.



Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


Cawley isn't unreliable, and isn't a narrator


Its what you guys look at him as the one second-person narrator telling the true story to the audience at the lighthouse, dickhead!

Your poor education standards & lack of general knowledge is proving your idiotic self, as_hole!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreliable_narrator



Teddy wasn't searching the world for people who were anagrams. Your brain just makes up a stupid premise that doesn't apply so you can knock it down and feel like you've accomplished something.

You have such a convoluted, moronic understanding of logic it's scary.




Your reading comprehension is bad as your IQ.

My reply to Veritas was in context to his statement "Because if anything about "Teddy Daniels" and what he supposedly believes is real how is it that the name of the man that he claims killed his wife is an anagram of his name, he has never realized this until he comes to the island."

He argued how come Teddy (if Teddy is Teddy) not realize that his name is anagram to Laeddis.


You need to go through some program to calm your frustrated self down and boost some IQ. I really pity your parents. What unfortunate parent could have a dumba_ss like you!




Retard... Pussy... Sinister_prig

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


second-person narrator


Real question: Is your brain so fcking filled with fecal matter that you don't know what a narrator is?

It's cringeworthy seeing you parade your utter stupidity without an ounce of shame or self-awareness.


He argued how come Teddy (if Teddy is Teddy) not realize that his name is anagram to Laeddis.


There's a difference between realizing something about someone and "keep checking" everyone to find something. For instance, I don't actively search IMDB to see which posters are dumb as rocks, but when I see you post I realize you are.

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


There's a difference between realizing something about someone and "keep checking" everyone to find something.


Oddsareyouareretard, that's the point, you Dumba_ss! People don't happen to realize on their own for such 13-15 letter names to be anagrams unless they are deliberately checking for it.

If stupidity was a disease, you'd be dead by now. Its sad to see retards like you given internet access instead of getting a proper treatment.



Retard... Pussy... Sinister_prig

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?

You are such a moron. Teddy was obsessed with Laeddis. He {A) may or may not have realized the anagram IF that red herring was real, but that is a separate speculation than saying (B) he would need to check EVERYONE's name for an anagram before he would figure A out.

But you've always been completely bereft of logical thought, so no surprise you would fail miserably here as well.




Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?


Its what Dr. Cawley an unreliable narrator says it.


Dr. Cawley is not the "unreliable narrator" of the film/story...he is a side character in the film. "Teddy Daniels" is our entry point in the film and where our attention is focused. This is why it is key that he is the one telling us about Andrew Laeddis...not the doctors...this is intentional because we discover what he says is not only not true but not possible.

The film never sets up that the doctors are telling us lies about Laeddis or anybody else. Instead the film allows "Teddy" to feed us information through the stories he tells and his dreams. This is because DiCaprio's character is the one the film sets out attempting to convince us to believe. It is not the doctor's story that collapses as the film progresses it is the stories he tells. That's not an accident.


This alone is a concrete proof that Cavelady was real.


I'm sorry but how the sequence is shot does not tell us the woman in the cave was real. In fact the woman in the cave is not real but another door to show us what is going on in DiCaprio's character's head. The dead giveaway in the sequence as to the validity of the character in the cave is that as she says the nonsensical things she does she is sitting behind a fire...one of the symbols in the film for his delusional beliefs. The fact we see the woman in the cave waking him up is meaningless...we see this earlier in the film as well when he wakes from sleeping to see his wife but then we discover that is just a dream as he wakes again into reality to find himself in the busy room where all of the workers have taken shelter from the storm. Plus it is clear the scene makes no sense and what he says to or about the woman in the cave makes no sense.



So what?


The reason that it is important is because it is intentional and done by the creators of this story to establish it is DiCaprio's character that both introduces the anagram names to the audience...so we know the anagrams come from him not the doctors...and tells us nonsensical stories about the people with these names.

It establishes DiCaprio's character is the unreliable one because his character is the one that sets up the audience. Remember this is fiction we are watching so these things are done intentionally specifically to establish things about the characters.


Its not his children.


If the creators of this fiction wanted to establish that the kids were not his they would have put that in the film. They don't but rather go in the opposite direction and put the children in his dreams/and or hallucinations in increasingly more significant ways. These point toward the children being his not away from the children being his. Again, DiCaprio's character is the one introducing us to the information about the children...not the doctors. That is very significant.


You don't know the effect of drugs. I already told you drugs like Sodium Amytal (mentioned by Cavelady) has been proven to coerce false memoires.


Drugs DO NOT induce any sort of specific "false memories" they can blur, distort, or for some periods for some people cause loss of memory but they do not CREATE memories and certainly not specific memories that are used to change a person's entire life story. That does not happen. There is also NOTHING in the film about doctors working to create complete false memory stories to brainwash people about who they are. That would most certainly be in the film IF that was what the film was about. It would probably be a ridiculous film because it would make no sense but they would put it in there if that's what they wanted to show.


How do you know for sure that the doctors gave him aspirin?


Well, because he shows no effects other than his headache going away after taking the aspirin the doctor gives him. Also how would the doctor know he was going to collapse the way he does so he would have this amazing chance to give him some pills? I mean in terms of plot that's pretty silly and based on what happens afterwards everything backs the doctors attempting to help not harm him. That is what is actually in the film.


Wow, so people around the world keep checking whether their names are in anagram to someone they despise or love or whatever.


No, are you nuts? The people that created the story put the anagrams in the story for a specific purpose...not as a coincidence. Your job as a viewer of this fiction is to determine why the anagrams are in the story. The anagrams tell us something about the character...something rather large...and it is not about brainwashing. Your options are pretty small as to what they tell us. They either are there because DiCaprio's character has created them or they are there to tell us he is the world's dumbest detective. Which makes a better story?


Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?

You don't understand about brainwashing - which goes by many other names. It isn't magic. It is social influence taken to extremes. Many people who are supposedly brainwashed don't believe what they profess, they just go along to avoid punishment (like a lobotomy?) or for some benefit (like getting off Ward C?)

We don't know what drugs Teddy is given - not the drugs we see him being given, and we don't know what he may have been given that we don't see. It is widely known that they were experimenting with LSD at the time, and LSD is a better explanation for Teddy's visual hallucinations than DID. Hallucinations aren't characteristic of DID. DID is also not associated with adult trauma except for DID reportedly created for mind control programs like Project Bluebird.

Your opinion is pure confirmation bias - it is what has to be true if the doctors are telling the truth about Andrew and the lake crime. Maybe your conviction that the doctors are telling the truth makes it hard or impossible for you to see that there are ways to interpret things in the movie that actually point to other possibilities. The facts of the film can be interpreted in more than one way most of the time but you seem to think it is impossible for it to be any way but your way. That is what is most ridiculous and hilarious. You ignore lots of things in the film for no reason other than these details don't confirm your bias.


Brainwashing is difficult and requires a great deal of control over your subject and repeating information that you want the subject to accept over and over and over again.


Where do you get your information? The most powerful requirement for brainwashing someone to reject their identity and accept beliefs they oppose is isolation and control of information. Teddy is totally isolated and dependent on them for everything, so I'd say they do have "great control". That's simple. People who cannot verify what they believe and remember may well accept a belief because it is the only belief the authority will accept. They may accept a belief (or say they do) to get a reward or avoid punishment.

Teddy and the rest of the inmates are isolated and have no access to reliable information that isn't controlled by the doctors. Teddy can't be Teddy even if he really is Teddy because the authority needs him to be Andrew for the experiment to be successful. Ashecliffe is a totalitarian environment where everyone has to believe what the authority tells them to believe or else.

Given the facts of the movie, how would Teddy prove he was Teddy? He can't because the powerful authority isolates him from information that would conflict with the story they want him to accept. There is no way he can defend himself. One of the most disturbing things Cawley says in the novel is to ask a debilitated Teddy for the evidence that proves who he says he is. Like how could he get to the evidence when they are holding him prisoner and he can't even get a phone call out?

The authority has no evidence for what they claim - and the only reason for this that makes sense is that there is no evidence because it isn't true. They could get all sorts of evidence, they are the federal government, and all they have is a one page intake form (where is his thick two year old chart?) and three pictures of what seem to be dead children - one of which reminds Teddy of a dead child he saw at Dachau. Teddy can't get evidence to prove his side, and the authority should be able to show Teddy (and the audience) tons of evidence for such a notorious crime, but they have nothing.

That may not seem important to you, but it is a fact of the film and you should be careful about ridiculing those of us who see that and think it is meaningful. Not only should we interpret what the movie shows us, this film demands more than most films, that we also pay attention to what we are not shown. It means something that we don't see a crime scene photo of Dolores. The conspicuous absence of the fourth and most important crime scene photo casts doubt on the doctor's story because it leaves open the possibility that there is no picture because she died in the fire just like Teddy thinks.

What we call brainwashing tends to be transient and people revert to their former beliefs when they are removed from the controlled environment or when the direct psychological pressure is relieved. This is the best explanation for what happened with Teddy - whether it happened once or repeatedly. What they call "relapse". Brainwashing requires the individual to think that he is deciding for himself to have these new beliefs because they will be more cooperative and less likely to be subversive and disruptive. Part of the process would be to see if the new beliefs stuck after Teddy rested and the drugs wore off. That's the test. We know now that Teddy's "relapse" was pretty typical, but many chose to keep saying they believed whatever because that's the only way they could get along.

What makes sense to me is that after Teddy rested, he realized that his basic rights were being denied him, and that the role-play wasn't a valid way for Teddy to see what was real for himself. He would realize that they had no evidence and that unethical experiments could be anywhere. He may have asked for a lawyer, for example. If this was denied to him he would know that whatever they were doing it is bad. He is overpowered and knows that they will never let him off the island because he knows too much about what they are doing. He wouldn't be sure of the exact nature and purpose of the experiments, but he would know that they were doing something wrong if they deny him his rights.

Since he is denied any way to verify reality, he wouldn't be sure who he was. We all depend on regular validation to know what is real. He would know that if he can't verify that he is Andrew with something other than these doctors, then he couldn't know they were telling the truth. Teddy is too smart to blindly trust people who have deceived him and won't let him check if their story is true.

Teddy would have either had a false memory or maybe just confessed to the story they told him and didn't remember any of it. He could have believed it at the time without remembering it. So, he can't verify that he is Andrew, but he also can't verify that he is Teddy either. They told him he was mentally ill, so maybe that's true? He can't trust his own mind and he can't trust the doctors, but that doesn't mean he doesn't know his rights and know that if they are denying him his rights what they are doing can't possibly be legitimate.

That is a logical and straightforward interpretation that considers what we see, what we don't see and the historical/factual context. I'm sure it makes it easier if a viewer knows the historical context and the relevant psychological processes, but I think it common sense should be enough to keep from believing the doctors without any proof. That would be what Teddy/Andrew would be thinking.

Call it coercive persuasion. Threatening him with a lobotomy is coercion and coercion doesn't cure mental illness, but it can be an effective control technique. They should never have threatened him if the experiment was truly therapy because then there is no way to know if he really remembers or is just saying he remembers to avoid the lobotomy. If it is therapy, then he would need to really remember, not just agree with the doctors. The goal of the doctors appears to be a confession with just the right words. They aren't interested in his memories. We know this because Teddy tells Cawley he doesn't remember his previous "loops" and Cawley ignores him and instead asks him to promise not to relapse. Mentally ill people can't promise such a thing, but someone making a choice to believe something could.

There are the three Ds of coercive persuasion/brainwashing:

1. debility - that is the purpose of the role-play - it gave them time to debilitate him mentally and physically. Any drugs like LSD or sodium amytal would be in this category.

2. dependence - all the inmates are completely dependent. Teddy has to depend on them for all his basic needs. He has no other options. I'm sure many like Kearns are completely institutionalized.

3. dread - bad things will happen if the person doesn't conform and cooperate with the authority. like get sent to Ward C or get a lobotomy.

Are you denying that we see the three D's in the film?

Brainwashing isn't permanent, so it is to be expected that Teddy would "relapse" if he was subjected to that process. If Cawley's theory was that he could control a person's mind permanently, then he was wrong and should be discredited. All the details fall into place.



Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?

Interestingly, you seem to be putting on a "confirmation bias" clinic in that response. The reason for this is you are attempting to take minor elements from the film and blow them up into the major thrust of the picture. Your purpose for doing this seems to be only to satisfy your belief of what you want to see.

Brainwashing is simple and a basic concept to understand. The majority of of "brainwashing" studies revolve around cults or countries like China, Japan, or North Korea...but these studies focus on societal brainwashing. The studies that focus on cults and how they will indoctrinate candidates show similar but slightly different methods because cults have the option of choosing candidates to bring into their smaller groups and to focus on dependency on the group.

Brainwashing an individual like the character in the film we are discussing would be a whole different ballgame. We see no brainwashing in the film. Yes, we do not see the three "D's" you mention in relation to the character with respect to brainwashing.

First, state the goal of the brainwashing that you think you see.

I ask this because ANY type of brainwashing demonstrates a clear and generally simplistic goal that any outsider watching the brainwashing can identify. So, if this is a film about brainwashing, showing brainwashing, then the majority of the people viewing the film will easily identify the goal of the brainwashing.

I believe it has been asked here what the goal of the brainwashing in the film is over and over and generally there is no response or the response is that they are brainwashing him to believe he is Andrew Laeddis. However, clearly in the film they make no attempt to "brainwash" him he is Laeddis. They make no attempt to convince him of that, to convince him he had children, to convince him he murdered his wife.

Secondly, if these were the goals of the brainwashing they would be near impossible goals to achieve. Why? Because these are items that are easy for a subject to reject. So, they would be setting out specifically to fail.

However, if they wanted to brainwash DiCaprio's character of something a far better goal for altering his identity would be to brainwash him that he was "Teddy Daniels" because that provides a positive position for them to work from. Daniels is supposedly a good cop, that loved his wife, and lost her in accident caused by a fire bug that he is now attempting to track down. If he were a bad person or a person that believed he was bad but wanted to be a "good man" then the Daniels "delusion" would be a very good identity to attempt to convince him of. It would be potentially a good experiment with possibly a positive/successful outcome.

Also in the film the doctors do not discourage his belief that he is Daniels and that he is investigating a missing patient on the island for the majority of the running time of the film. So, the only thing they could possibly be doing were they attempting to "brainwash" him that he is someone he is not is to brainwash him that he is "Teddy Daniels."

In the film though we discover he is the one attempting to convince himself he is "Teddy Daniels" not the doctors. And he has good reason to do so.

1. debility- He appears debilitated to a certain extent right from the start of the film and before he takes the pills from the doctor. He is sick on the ferry, collapses in front of the doctors, and in general does not look well. However the film reveals this is because he is mentally ill and a patient of the hospital. The doctors are not shown debilitating him. Nor does the film provide any evidence that the doctors give him any sort of LSD or drug of any kind to debilitate him. The film does not make any reference to LSD or giving him a drug to debilitate him. Were this meant to be a serious aspect for the audience to consider the filmmakers would have made it so. He suffers from paranoid delusions that are clearly ridiculous and the film shows are false.

2. dependence- He shows no dependency on the doctors and the doctors are not shown attempting to form a bond of dependency with him. Cawley has little interaction with him over the course of the film and does not attempt to force DiCaprio's character to be dependent on him. He mostly appears to attempt to avoid him. In fact in his few interactions with him he focuses on making DiCaprio's character function and reason independently of him. Also the "Chuck" character does not attempt to create dependence upon him...in fact he does the opposite and attempts to show that he depends upon DiCaprio's character. He is his "boss" and he follows him where he goes and does not want to be without "Teddy." He only wants to help "Teddy" find the missing patient and then also to find Laeddis once "Teddy" reveals "Laeddis" to "Chuck."

3. dread - While the film itself is steeped in dread due to the fact it is a thriller and the subject matter involves severe mental illness and murder the doctors do not threaten DiCaprio's character in any way. They do not threaten him with lobotomy, in fact they specifically tell him he does not need to have a lobotomy and they attempt to reason with him. He is not forced into a lobotomy...in fact the heartbreak of the film is that he chooses a lobotomy...perhaps knowingly...and this is why the ending is a bitter one for the doctors.




Re: suspend disbelief for role-play but not false memories?

You argue with people who do not accept that everything the doctors say is fact like you do. The doctors are not reliable characters. Virtually everything you argue as a fact is something that the doctors have said that can't be verified. It isn't necessarily true. I'm not sure you even know what you are doing or realize how much of your opinion is just a firm belief that the doctors claims are true. Since the movie provides no way to check what is true about stuff that isn't directly represented in the movie, the things the doctors claim can't be used as absolute facts that everyone should accept. Not with people who don't take for granted that what they say is true.

Think about this. You have no more way to check if the doctors are telling the truth than you do to check if Teddy's beliefs are true. If you can't verify either story how can you be so sure that the doctors story is the true one? How can you know that the "flashback" is real and not a false memory/confession that was created under the influence of the doctors unfair influence? You can't. That's just a fact of the film. Verifying information would have to come from a reliable source that isn't controlled by the doctors.

What if you went to the mainland and met people who know Teddy and learned that there was no such person as Andrew Laeddis? What if you researched old Boston Globes and saw Dolores Daniels obit saying she died in the apartment fire with four other people and no mention of kids? That could very well happen. Nothing in the movie disproves Teddy's memories.

Actually it is likely that the doctors' story isn't true for the following reasons:

1. They have absolutely no evidence and resort to fabrication of evidence at least once when they try to misrepresent the transcript as saying that Noyce called Teddy Laeddis. To claim that the pictures and the intake form are proof of anything is also dishonest. A picture of Dolores would be be far more influential than a misrepresented transcript of something a crazy guy said and some ridiculous anagrams that may well have been made up by the doctors. Why would they use that questionable crap when when they could have had access to actual evidence to show Teddy?

2. The isolation and strict control of information would not be necessary if the facts they would hear from off the island are the same as what they are being told by the doctors. In fact, independent information would HELP the doctors because it would be a reliable way for the patients to check the reality of their beliefs. I mean, who believes anyone who won't let you check their story? They won't let you check, they are likely to be hiding something from you.

Your assumption that everyone has to accept the doctors are telling the truth seems to get in the way of your being able to see the film from the other points of view. The doctors say things that are blatantly false like misrepresenting the transcript to make it seem like Noyce called Teddy "Laeddis" and using the fact that no experiments in the lighthouse meant that it was "impossible" that they were doing unethical experiments at all. Those are lies we can identify - what else are they lying about that we can't check?




Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Good man and the monster


You argue with people who do not accept that everything the doctors say is fact like you do. The doctors are not reliable characters.


This statement makes no sense. First, I am not "arguing" with anyone. I am discussing a film and the structure and content of the film. It is a piece of fiction and therefore anybody can feel anything they want about it. If you enjoy the paranoid delusional aspects of the film, great, but that is not what the film is all about. There is much more to it than that.

Second, the film is not about accepting what the doctors say as "fact", that is purely nonsensical. The focus of the film is DiCaprio's character and the film is about his confusing and emotional journey. The doctors are pulled into his story, that is how the story is built, they do not pull him into their story. So, the primary character that the film is built for you to evaluate is DiCaprio's character. We get information about him that as an audience we are asked to observe and evaluate. The overwhelming majority of that information comes directly from DiCaprio's character and performance. We see not only his interactions with people from the hospital but also his dreams, recollections, hallucinations, and his thoughts visualized for us. His character is the one that Shutter Island offers up for us to study and get to know. The doctors are side characters and in the structure of the film they are not there to do anything but provide ways to reveal more about the DiCaprio character.

The primary question at the heart of the story is would you feel the same as DiCaprio's character had you experienced the same tragic loss of his children and his wife. Would you also go insane? This is a universal question that people anywhere can identify with. This is what the author of the story calls the "greatest horror of all" something he said he did not even want to have to imagine going through. Like many great Noirs the film's central theme is loss.


Virtually everything you argue as a fact is something that the doctors have said that can't be verified.


You seem to be stuck in some idea that the film is meant to be about disproving the "Teddy Daniels" delusion but that is just a surface element of the picture. That there is some challenge to you to have to "verify" what the doctors do or say...that is not how the film uses those characters. The doctors and DiCaprio's character are not at odds in the film. The doctors are not playing some sort of standard mustache twirling bad guys. An interesting aspect of the film is that the "bad guy" in the film is also its hero...they are one and the same. The entire film is built upon this one man's search for himself and his constant questioning of if he is a "good man" or a "monster."

This is specifically why he asks that question at the end of the film. He killed his wife but she killed his children...he was shocked to discover he still loved her even after he did this and his murdering of her was really an act of setting her free. The conundrum there is there are aspects of both good and bad in everything he did.

The challenge in the film is that question...how do/would you live with this?

The film is in no way about fact checking side character doctors. That's ridiculous and a shallow way to look at a work that is a study of how we deal with the horrors of life and how they damage us. It is not about boogie men doctors brainwashing people. That good man or monster question at the end of the film refers to him and in a larger context the way that we, mankind, can be both good and monstrous. We have the capacity for both.

It's great how all of this is wrapped in a spooky thriller but by the end of the film what should resonate with viewers is the larger questions the film asks...not verification of paranoid delusions.


part 1

I'll start by saying that I don't think you will make an effort to understand this post, so I'm writing it just in case someone else is interested.

If you don't think I make sense, that's on you, not me. I agree that you have comprehension problems. It is frustrating and boring to have to keep repeating myself because people argue without trying to understand.

Ok, so you are not arguing. Are you then presuming to TELL me that your OPINION (that you don't support, I suppose because you take it for granted) is right and my own (well supported) opinion is wrong? Is that what you are doing?

Of course you are arguing. You are arguing with me right now. Sheesh... What planet are you on?

You are arguing badly, too, because your perspective is so narrow that you can't understand other opinions well enough to come up with a reason they are wrong. Your opinions are NOT facts. People with confirmation bias are overconfident they are right for that very reason.


It is a piece of fiction and therefore anybody can feel anything they want about it. If you enjoy the paranoid delusional aspects of the film, great, but that is not what the film is all about.


Did you know that you have ZERO self awareness?



^^^That's funny

You can believe whatever you want, but that isn't the same as saying one opinion is as good as another. Some opinions will be wrong because they don't have narrative and factual support - they will be invalid. You have a right to have an invalid opinion, but I doubt anyone would be interested - except others who hold the same invalid opinion. Valid interpretations will be supported by facts and elements of the film and some of these valid interpretations will be better than others. It can't mean anything you want, but it may have more than one valid interpretation.

When you tell other people they don't know what the film is about or tell them their opinions are "ridiculous", you have started a contest between your ideas and the ideas you're critical of. When you can't back up your opinion with facts, then your opinion will be objectively weak. If the other person has support for their opinion that you can't refute then their opinion is better. You started a contest that you lost, so no hiding behind "I have a right to whatever opinion I want" card and pretending like that makes your discredited ideas on par with better supported opinions. All opinions are not equal.

You sure don't have a problem telling people who don't agree with you that their ideas are "ridiculous" and telling them to "remember" that your understanding is so perfect that any idea that doesn't depend on your initial assumptions is automatically wrong. You're one of those can "dish it out but can't take it" people. Anyway, if you don't see that people like me do not make the starting assumptions that ALL OF YOUR IDEAS RELY ON, then its going to be the same old thing. I really don't think at this point you realise that everything you believe about this movie DEPENDS on your assumption that the doctors are honest. Nor do I think you have any concept of why people you disagree with disagree with you. You never say anything that shows you understand.

This is some serious projection. You just stated the following opinions as objective facts:

1. Your own poor understanding of my opinion (as opposed to my actual opinion) when you state that I "enjoy the paranoid delusional aspects of the film" There is MUCH MORE TO IT THAN THAT.

and

2. That you know what the film is about and I don't. "If you enjoy the paranoid delusional aspects of the film, great, but that is not what the film is all about". .... arrogant much?

Actually, there is much more to the alternative interpretations than the common understanding you ascribe to for the following specific reasons:

First, the common understanding is not serious because it is unrealistic and inauthentic so it can't be related back to the real world very well. You have to do a lot of stretching and twisting of facts and have to suspend a lot of disbelief, which takes away from any serious meaning. I don't think that you guys know that your beliefs aren't logical and realistic. You argue as if you think it is true.

Your understanding defies real world facts and logic. For example the role-play violates the Nuremberg Code but for your understanding to be right, it has to ignore the most important fact that shows that they really are doing unethical experiments like Teddy suspects. You disregard the standard for ethical experiments in a movie where the antagonists are suspected of doing unethical experiments Then you become hostile towards those who don't also disregard the Nuremberg Code.

Why do you think the Nuremberg Code doesn't apply? I've asked that before. There is no good reason except the confirmation bias that you fail to acknowledge and project onto others. Without the film providing a separate conceit as a guide, which it doesn't, there is no reason at all to think the Nuremberg Code doesn't apply to this film - which was promoted as being realistic and historically accurate, I might add.

Second, the common understanding is nothing more than just believing the doctors. It requires no mental work or actual assessment of the information which is probably why people who hold that opinion miss so many important details. In other words, when you think of the film you think in terms of confirming the exposition provided by the doctors instead of actually assessing what the elements of the film actually mean. Except for some (not me) who use the cave woman's reports as an alternative explication, those with alternative opinions have to come to their opinions without it being spelled out for them.

So, not only do those with other opinions tend to NOT have very much confirmation bias because they have no belief to confirm before considering the meaning, they tend to understand the movie better because they have considered alternatives which those devotees to the common understanding do not seem to have ever done probably because of over-confidence and never feeling a need to explore other ideas because they already knew they were right - and were validated by so many other people who also developed firm opinions before they thought about the possibility that the doctors are lying and trying to cover their butts. Once a person has a belief it perseveres.

I know that when I joined this discussion I was open to any ideas that could be supported by facts and the movie. I was absolutely shocked that when I asked why people assumed the doctors were telling the truth or why they were so sure Teddy was really Andrew and then saw that there was no reason except confirmation bias backed by a huge amount of confidence and a chorus of sheeple telling each other how right and superior they were to see that the "interpretation" they were TOLD (the one that requires no thinking) was the only right one! Well aren't y'all clever regurgitating something that was spoon fed to you! I can't believe I didn't think of that! Anyway, it was weird, but its the internet, so what are you going to do?

EVERY SINGLE DEFENSE OF THE COMMON UNDERSTANDING WAS NOTHING BUT CONFIRMATION BIAS AND THERE HAS NEVER BEEN ANYTHING ELSE - and you don't even recognize that you have confirmation bias. You project that onto me - without support, as per usual. Once a person believes they know a solution what is the purpose of considering alternatives? People who are sure, aren't curious. Those who aren't sure are the ones who do all the thinking.

In general, most people think movies will explain themselves - the mystery will be revealed in the end in some sort of exposition from a reliable authority figure. When they hear Cawley TELL Teddy the supposed TRUTH, a lot of movie goers never consider that the details of the film may be at odds with the doctors' explication.

The common understanding is the explanation that is spoon fed to you, so since you all don't question the doctors, you see no need to consider anything else. If the doctors explication is only understanding you will consider, there isn't going to be much of a discussion. What's to discuss? There goes your claim that you aren't "arguing", but "discussing". There isn't much discussion with people who have only one very uninteresting and unoriginal idea to bring to `the table.

We all heard the doctors and only some of us recognized the need to question it. I could have believed the doctors, too, taken the easy way like you, but I knew that what they were saying was either identifiably false or absolutely unverified and that there was no more reason to assume that they were telling the truth than to believe Teddy's memories are correct.

There is much more to it than than the story you are spoon-fed by unreliable characters. - I mean possibilities that you can't go near because you would have to give up your certainty and admit that it is possible the doctors claims are false and they they are not as benign as you believed. That's why all you can talk about is one thing - defending the doctors' exposition. That is why you disagree with people who don't make your starting assumptions. That's your one and only point.


Every "discussion" with someone who insists that the common understanding is the only right understanding is the same old thing because the difference goes back to one basic assumption - do you believe the doctors speak for the film or do you not believe the doctors speak for the film. Those who think they speak for the film assess the "clues for second viewing" as confirmation that the doctors are right and in doing so make a lot of errors and fail to consider many important details.

Also, because your approach is one where every detail has to fit your predetermined assumptions, you see everything as supporting your point of view even when it doesn't - because the movie seems to support your opinion so completely (it can't be any other way when you are already sure before you look at the facts), you are overconfident. I mean, you think you have better arguments and stronger opinions than you really do. Plus, since a lot of other people fail to think about the movie before they buy into the doctors claims, you get a lot of validation from people who made the same error you make. Sometimes I wonder if the the dynamics of the conversation about this movie is more interesting than the movie itself because it exposes all the ways people get their beliefs and chose their beliefs - which is a theme of Shutter Island as well. Who do you believe in movies?


As long as you start with the assumption that the doctors are the voice of the film, then there isn't much to discuss. It is all laid out there and no thinking is required. Your stuck with trying to convince people who don't think the way you do that you are right, that they are "ridiculous", and don't know what the film is really about. In fact, those who don't agree with you are far more likely to have seriously considered the details because their opinion isn't handed to them in an exposition by unreliable characters but rather come to by looking at the details and actually interpreting the movie instead of letting the doctors do it for you. Do you understand? ...... I thought not.


Second, the film is not about accepting what the doctors say as "fact", that is purely nonsensical.


Oh, please. Tell me what the film is about, oh wise one. 🙇

Know what "double standard" means?😑

Everything you argue including the current paragraph I am responding to REQUIRES a blind acceptance that the doctors are being honest. You can't discuss the film any other way, and you are so arrogant about it and so sure of yourself that you demand that everyone else think just like you do or they are "ridiculous". That is nonsensical in MY opinion.😒


The focus of the film is DiCaprio's character and the film is about his confusing and emotional journey.



I say that it is about an unethical experiment, and the Teddy/Andrew story is a distraction from the actual film. I will explain why, and the reasoning and facts behind my opinion will quite sound. If you tell me I am wrong or ridiculous as I anticipate then that will be an example of a double standard.

The film is about Teddy being manipulated by powerful agents of the Federal Government. That is all that is directly presented to the audience. The action of the film is the 3-4 days of the role-play, coercion and confession plus the final scene. Now, maybe you think that it is better to focus on stuff that the film doesn't show except through conflicting unreliable reports and memories than focus on the film itself, but I don't. We have a film, evaluate the film.....

The role-play is primary, not the backstory. We have two accounts of what went on before the film starts and have no way to prove that either one is right. That's the end of that.

If you though your wisdom KNOW that the doctors' claims are right, and Teddy's memories are delusional then all your opinions about the movie will require that assumption. Not only that, but you will stop focusing on what is in the movie and all your opinions will be based on an idea that we can't possibly know is true because IT ISN'T IN THE MOVIE. Stick to the movie and what can be known instead of backstory that can't be verified.

Why do people keep arguing is he Teddy or Andrew? Is he sane or insane? That argument will go on forever because we can't know for sure from the movie. But, as far as the movie we do have, it doesn't even really matter because what we see in the movie applies to the protagonist no matter what his name is. But as long as you think the film is about Teddy rather than the role-play what's really in the movie will be ignored.

Understand? I know for a fact that there is no way to be sure of Teddy's identity or what happened before the role-play started. You can't justify an assumption that only the doctors' story is correct. So, if you think he has to be Andrew, for the film to be understood, then not only are you wrong, but you aren't even assessing the film. All your opinions about the movie will be based on something that may not even be true. You will also rationalize all the details to fit your opinion rather than evaluating the elements and adding them up to interpret the film. You won't interpret anything. You will just confirm what you have already decided is true. And... you will be critical of people who see it differently. Because you don't understand their reasoning you will call them "ridiculous" and insult them, because they don't know what the film is about and you do. Right?

More later.







Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Question 1

So, as we began this discussion I asked you a single question which in your two lengthy responses you have continued to avoid. I am not at all surprised you have avoided it. So, let's present the question again and see if you are capable of providing an answer...

First, state the goal of the brainwashing that you think you see.

You see a discussion is made of up of people addressing points others have made. I directly address the points in your posts, let's see if you can or will do the same.

Now, I only address what is in the film, this is what is relevant to understanding it. Using information you believe you see in the film, if there is indeed brainwashing in it, you should easily be able to state what the goal of that brainwashing is.

Re: Question 1

Do you think that any answer can make a difference to the fact that the role-play is in violation of the Nuremberg Code? We don't have to know the goals of the brainwashing to know that. So, it doesn't matter. There is nothing to say that I haven't said before.

I've not been avoiding that question. My focus is on the film, not on things that aren't in the film. One of the things that isn't explicit in the film is what exactly they are trying to do on the island. Teddy himself says he doesn't know what they are doing, all he knows is that it is bad. That is pretty much all the audience can know, too. It is left deliberately ambiguous.

I can and have made inferences. I talk about it all the time. It isn't relevant to the question of whether the role-play is ethical, and it looks like you were trying to distract from the issue of ethics by claiming that the reason for the unethical experiment matters when it actually doesn't. Most unethical human experiments that harmed and killed people were to learn things that would eventually help people. Those experiments were still unethical. So, any belief that you have that they are trying to help Teddy and that makes a difference to the question of ethics is mistaken.

This is your answer:

There is one goal for any brainwashing and that is control. Are you asking what I think they are controlling him to do? Except for trying to dishonestly and unfairly influence him to think they aren't doing unethical experiments, I can't know for sure because it isn't in the movie. I've said that repeatedly.

The other thing that can be inferred is that Cawley has some sort of theory about psychological and/or chemical techniques that can be used as an alternative to lobotomies. Since this is a suspicious covert operation that is violating the civil and human rights of the inmates, I suspect that lobotomies are being done on disposal problems -"treatment" failures - the people who are damaged in the unethical mind control experiments and become human waste sent to the "sewage treatment" facility in the lighthouse. They are trying to neutralize the threat of them exposing the truth and/or becoming subversive influences on the gen pop. That is, to make them docile and stop challenging authority. The purpose of Teddy's role-play would be the same as lobotomy only with psycho-behavioral methods instead of surgery.

Do I think they are trying to turn him into a Manchurian Candidate? Is that what you want to know? Since the government was trying to do that very thing at the time, that's a possibility. If that is true, then I think it must have happened before the role-play in the movie and it didn't work, so Teddy became a disposal problem and a threat. To me it looks like they were trying to make Teddy less of a threat with the role-play, to neutralize him, not weaponize him. Lobotomies aren't for making mind controlled assassins, they are for people they failed to turn into mind controlled assassins or whatever.

Doesn't matter because the role-play is still unethical no matter what it's specific goal. All I can say with confidence is that they are trying to manipulate him into thinking he is crazy for suspecting them of unethical experiments and that Cawley is testing some theory that he can control subjects with methods other than lobotomies.

What they do to Teddy is unfair, coercive influence also known as brainwashing. It is not therapy because therapy is about health, not making a person controllable by subjecting them to unethical experiments. Cawley specifically says that he would like for Teddy to keep his fantasies - what sort of doctor says he would like for his patient to stay sick? That he'd like it "a lot"? His goal is not Teddy's mental health but control - apparently because he is threat as a "disposal problem" would be.

I can recognize therapy, and there is no therapy in the movie. I know that the role-play is the opposite of therapy and would have the opposite effect. It is the way to make a person mentally unstable, not the way to get them to see reality for themselves.

The role-play unambiguously violates the Nuremberg Code and it is mental abuse that would injure a person emotionally and psychologically - which is exactly what we see in the movie. Teddy, who was vulnerable from the start, is a confused tormented mess after he is subjected to their cruel mind games.

Ok?








Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Teddy, Andrew, the code and question 2


Why do people keep arguing is he Teddy or Andrew? Is he sane or insane? That argument will go on forever because we can't know for sure from the movie. But, as far as the movie we do have, it doesn't even really matter because what we see in the movie applies to the protagonist no matter what his name is.


Why do you think that the creators of this fiction inserted the Teddy/Andrew anagram question/idea in the story? What purpose do you think this being there serves? The doctors did not do that. They are just fictional characters. The author of the story CHOSE to put that in there and he created the anagrams.

Now, the obvious aspect of the Teddy/Andrew (as well as Rachel/Dolores) question is it allowed the author to use the anagrams.

Based on your quote above you dismiss the identity issue the creator of the fiction intentionally presents in the film and this appears to be so that you can also dismiss the anagrams.

Thereby you are claiming DiCaprio's character is an unknown. Meaning, in your "version" of the film we never know who he is...which also means we must take ALL of the backstory he delivers about himself as meaningless. Because if the character has no identity in the film and his two possible names are meaningless and unimportant (your claim) then his wife also is meaningless and unimportant because we can't verify she ever existed either.

This means everything he says about himself in this story is totally meaningless and we are...in your version...meant to ignore because it is unimportant.

Nothing, according to you, about DiCaprio's character can be verified. So, we don't know and should not care if he is a marshal, if he was ever married, if he had children, if he was ever in the war, the character is a blank and nothing about him is important...because it can't be verified according to you.

OK, so we have our blank, unnamed mysterious character, that we are watching in this film...so, the majority of what is in the film has now become meaningless.

It is there only as distraction, according to you, to see if it can get us not to notice a horrible experiment being performed by...well, in your version...Nazi influenced doctors that want to do something terrible to the patients on this island and the central point we should be taking out of what we are watching is one single item...these doctors are violating the Nuremberg Code.

So, there is no missing patient, no dead wife, no dead children, no Teddy, no Andrew, no Dolores, no Rachel, there is no marshal, there is no backstory for Teddy/Andrew because that is just unverifiable nonsense we should not let distract us, there is no point to any of those items in the story.

The dreams, the symbolism, the hallucinations of his wife, or the little girl, any story DiCaprio's character tells, anything any hospital employee says, or patient says, we should only see as possible manipulations of the doctors.

We can't even verify, according to you, if anybody there is really a patient or if they are "role players" just there to assist in this elaborate scheme to violate the Nuremberg Code. The people that we think are patients could all just be role players. We can't verify what they are. All we know according to you is the doctors are trying to fool/abuse/manipulate/brainwash DiCaprio's character so we literally can't trust any of the characters in the film...they are not verifiable.

Even the hospital may not be real because all we can "verify" by watching the film, according to you, is that what is going on is all some sort of show/experiment to do something that violates the Nuremberg Code to the DiCaprio character.

We should, according to you, watch this film with one, and only one question in mind...is the Nuremberg Code being violated?

OK, so now that we have rendered the majority of what is in the film pointless what do we have left?

We have a film that is showing us an experiment they are doing on a man we know nothing about, for reasons we are not told, with no clear goal for the experiment, but the film is showing an experiment, and it is set in the 1950s, a time we know experiments were done on people, we know there is something called the Nuremberg Code and that if you experiment on people in real life without their permission you could be found in violation of that code.

This is all that is "verifiable" according to you in the picture.

So, according to you, the entire point of the film is to show us that the Nuremberg Code can be violated by government sponsored doctors and we know this because we know this did happen in the past. Everything else in the film is just window dressing meant to distract us to think some sort of emotional drama is playing out.

So since it is no secret doctors have in the past performed experiments on people, this is public knowledge after all, why not just make a film about that if that is the point you want to address?

I mean in your "version" of the film most of the film is utterly meaningless and is a total waste of time. So, really you must see the people who dreamed this whole story up as utter morons.

Re: Teddy, Andrew, the code and question 2


Why do you think that the creators of this fiction inserted the Teddy/Andrew anagram question/idea in the story? What purpose do you think this being there serves? The doctors did not do that. They are just fictional characters. The author of the story CHOSE to put that in there and he created the anagrams.


Let me tell you in detail about that scene.

First, what do you mean the doctors didn't write the law of four because they are fictional characters? Of course, the writer wrote the law of four. But according to you, you think the writer wrote that the law of four was Andrew's invention. Andrew is just as much of a fictional character as the doctors. Lehane could also write that the doctors wrote the law of four as part of the plot for the role play, which you seem to think is impossible. The writer could make that choice, too. Sheesh.


This is an example of one of my major points, so thanks for providing a good example of how confirmation bias increases confidence in an opinion and makes people totally blind to alternative possibilities. I guess that is why you can't conceive of the idea that Lehane could have written that the doctors came up with the law of four. In your mind ONLY Andrew could have done that. Right?

Because you are so sure that you are right, you can't conceive of any reasons for anything in the movie unless it relates back to your belief in the doctors. You can think of only one reason for the law of four being brought up in the meeting, and it isn't even a very good one.

You think the writer wrote the law of four to give us information about Andrew - he wrote that Andrew made up the law of four. Actually, that's not true, not necessarily. Lehane wrote that the doctors said Andrew wrote the law of four, and he also wrote the law of four to be closely connected to the doctors closer than to Teddy to imply to a close reader that the doctors may be responsible for the law of four as something they made up for the role play to connect the invented identities of Andrew and Rachel (twin terrors) to the real people Teddy and Dolores.

Why do you think they included the line from the "overseerer" at the meeting about how he "loved" that law of four? Why does he love the law of four? What does that say about that doctor?

And why did Cawley shoot him that "shut the eff up" look?" How does that line and Cawley's look advance your story? It doesn't. It doesn't mean anything . All you think is important is that they said something about the law of four and from that you jumped to the conclusion that they were trying to let us know how important the law of four was to the Andrew. They could have done the same thing any number of ways, but they didn't. Let's break it down.

Sure, its likely the doctors made up that line. They thought it was very clever which is why the doctor loved it. REMEMBER - "Andrew's" delusions are causing them a lot of trouble. So, much trouble that they were going to lobotomize him. They have been hearing his crap for two years and they are sick of it. They do not love the law of four, and they sure don't think it is funny.

Why did Cawley shoot him the dirty look? Does that not mean anything either? If Andrew came up with the law of four, it wouldn't matter what the doctor said. The Andrew identity must not be buried very deeply in his subconscious if he is leaving himself notes and getting defensive and beating people up when they call him Laeddis. Hopefully, Andrew will himself realize that he came up with the law of four, and it doesn't matter that the doctor was amused. Teddy thinks that Rachel came up with the law of four, so he thinks the doctor is amused by her delusion. So, what's with Cawley? Did you wonder. No. You never did. But that's ok because I wondered and came up with something.


The fact that Teddy shows no interest in the doctor's comment shows that he didn't think it was important. It shows that the writers and Scorsese were showing that the comment wasn't important to Teddy. That exchange belongs to the doctors. The reason Cawley would give the doctor a dirty look is that CAWLEY knows why he is saying it, a reaction to guilty knowledge - because they probably all laughed about it when they were coming up with the plot to the role play. Cawley was afraid the doctor was giving away their secret which mattered only if Teddy is Teddy. If he's Andrew, he came up with it so there is no reason to hide it. That's an interpretation, its detailed and pretty darn good if I say so myself, for a few seconds of film.

And all you can think of is that the line was included because they were trying to tell us that it was important to Andrew? And once again you declare your opinion as fact without bothering to consider any alternatives. You say the doctors didn't come up with the law of four as if it is impossible for these fictional characters to come up with the law of four, but not the fictional character of Andrew. .

What is clear to me is that because of your confirmation bias you never considered any other alternatives - that's why alternatives seem impossible to you. Other possibilities are IMPOSSIBLE only if you are having to interpret it to confirm your conclusion.

The law of four isn't realistic, but this is fiction, and if I was writing the anagrams to be true to Andrew, I would have first made Teddy Daniels the real name and Andrew Laeddis the anagram because Laeddis seems like the made up name. Calling him Marshal Laeddis or Andy would have changed nothing except the realistic name would be the real person and the made up sounding name would be the anagram.

I would have made the anagrams from the names the characters used, not their given name and maiden name. The anagrams would have been of the name Teddy Daniels and Dolores Daniels. If there aren't any good anagrams for these names I would give them other names. I also considered that if the anagrams were important to Andrew, he would have probably not been going by a nickname - he would call himself Edward or at least use the name Ed or Eddie. I don't think he would have messed it up by giving himself an anagram name and then not using it by adding a letter that didn't fit. Seems like that would defeat the purpose. The name he uses, Teddy Daniels, isn't an anagram of Andrew Laeddis at all. Same with Dolores. She would probably go by her married name and since they have been married for some time, that's how Teddy would think of her - as Dolores Daniels. That's how I would have written in the anagrams if I was writing a POS novel about a multiple personality because a can't see that being written into anything serious.

I thought of all those things which included how it would work under your understanding. You didn't think of anything else because you were sure you were right since you blindly accepted what the doctors said. Rationalizing details isn't the same as interpretation.

That line gives us no information at all about Teddy/Andrew. Not that I can recall. I don't think he notices it because what he is doing at the time is adding up the number of patients. The only reaction to that line was Cawley's. The writers are telling us that the doctors are connected to the law of four, not Teddy. That line is all about the doctors. Teddy couldn't care less.

I think that is a far better interpretation of that scene than yours. I think it's is an actual interpretation, not confirmation biased rationalization. Psychiatrists do not love their patients symptoms. It was a weird thing to say and a weird reaction from Cawley, and as far as I was concerned it was screaming for an explanation.

If they wanted to connect Teddy to the law of four, they would have shown him showing some interest in the law of four and some emotional connection WHICH THEY DON'T. To my recollection, except for finding the note and looking at it before he went to sleep the first night - something he would do as an investigator, he never shows any interest in the law of four, not even when the board was unveiled. They would have written in some emotional connection or better yet had Andrew notice the connection himself without having to be told to FOCUS and a whiteboard. As far as I know, he never understood the anagrams.

The law of four is shown to be important to the doctor's manipulation, but not shown to be important to Teddy at all. He never connects to it as I recall. Even the fact that it was such a prominent part of the way the doctors staged the final scene show that it was important to them. Teddy's lack of connection and interest shows that it wasn't important to him at all.

The film is about a manipulation to get a man to accept a new identity. Memories, real or false, arise from connections to other memories. They were creating ways to connect Teddy to the new memories. Teddy connects emotionally only to the girl child in the picture because he connects her to his real haunting memory of another murdered child at Dachau. The cabin where Teddy and Dolores vacationed becomes the setting for the lake crime. The scene with Rachel casts Teddy in the role of husband to a woman who murdered her children, etc. The anagrams were a final way to connect Teddy and Dolores to the created identities of Andrew and Rachel.

One other thing about the anagrams. We don't know how these names were really spelled. Laeddis could be spelled any number of ways. Chanal is an unlikely spelling. It would more likely be spelled Chanel or Channel. Solando is an unusual name, too. There doesn't really have to be much of a coincidence because the doctors had so much latitude with the spelling and choices of names - surnames and nicknames.

I think that Teddy dreamed the name Laeddis, spelling unknown, and the name Andrew came later. If the name of the maintenance man wasn't Laeddis or something that sound like Laeddis, the name Laeddis could have been suggested to him during sleep programming on the first night which is why it appears in the dream. Like the recording we know they have in the dorm of the record Cry appears in his dream. That becomes the name of the man who started the fire whether it was or not. "Andrew" could have been added later during some of the gaps where we have discontinuity that represent missing time. Because we can't know for sure what happens before the movie started or what happened in the gaps, we can't know for sure anything about where the names came from so the possibilities are endless. The most likely thing to be is the doctors made the anagrams up and manipulated the spelling. That's the best explanation I have. If you have additional facts to consider. I will consider them.

Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Re: Teddy, Andrew, the code and question 2


The film is about a manipulation to get a man to accept a new identity. -Gleamy Jog


Now we are getting somewhere. So, your belief is the goal of the "brainwashing" is to get him to accept a new identity. So, in the film identity matters because the doctors want him to accept an identity...but which one? Well, Gleamy says...


Why do people keep arguing is he Teddy or Andrew? Is he sane or insane? That argument will go on forever because we can't know for sure from the movie. -Gleamy Jog


So, Gleamy can't grasp that the fiction itself poses this question and that the author of the fiction provides two choices for his identity Andrew or Edward.


I think that Teddy dreamed the name Laeddis, spelling unknown, and the name Andrew came later. If the name of the maintenance man wasn't Laeddis or something that sound like Laeddis, the name Laeddis could have been suggested to him during sleep programming on the first night which is why it appears in the dream.-Gleamy Jog


Gleamy also hilariously thinks we don't know the spelling of the anagrams even though the author of the story spelled them out in his novel and the film uses this spelling as well. Somehow though, in the land of Gleamy, Dennis Lehane is just kidding about the spelling of the anagrams in the novel and he does not want his "special readers" to believe how he spelled these names. He wants his special readers to think perhaps he misspelled them because he really wants his "special readers" to think up their own spellings for the names...or maybe Gleamy just dreamed all this...(giggle)...we know none of this is in the film or the novel.

Sleep programming...oh yeah, that's in the story. (loud laughter)


One other thing about the anagrams. We don't know how these names were really spelled. Laeddis could be spelled any number of ways. -Gleamy Jog


Ah, yes, that crazy Dennis Lehane...coming up with anagrams for names so that we will think he is a guy that can't spell. It does not get better than this...(full chuckle)

Gleamy Jog...what a maroon. Is there no hoop you won't jump through to make yourself look foolish in a sorry attempt to justify your nonsense?

Re: Teddy, Andrew, the code and question 2 rest of answer

This is part II


Now, the obvious aspect of the Teddy/Andrew (as well as Rachel/Dolores) question is it allowed the author to use the anagrams.


What? That has nothing to do with the idea that it is entirely possible that the doctors are the characters who came up with the anagrams so they could manipulate Teddy into accepting a new identity. The anagrams are still a part of the story, just not in the one way you think they can fit.



Based on your quote above you dismiss the identity issue the creator of the fiction intentionally presents in the film and this appears to be so that you can also dismiss the anagrams.


You think this because you don't understand my interpretation. You think the identity issue can have only one explanation. This is not true. In fact, creating multiple identities is the way they were trying to create "Manchurian Candidates".

"The key to creating an effective spy or assassin rests in splitting a man’s personality, or creating multipersonality, with the aid of hypnotism.... This is not science fiction. ...I have done it." George Estabrook, hypnoprogrammer.

DID isn't associated with adult trauma. It is associated with early childhood trauma. So, it is suspicious that in a movie where they are suspected of doing the sort of experiments that create assassins, Teddy has the disorder they induced to create the mind controlled killers. Also, brainwashing is an attack on identity, so identity can be an important theme without the unrealistic claims that Cawley makes about Teddy/Andrew true.


Thereby you are claiming DiCaprio's character is an unknown. Meaning, in your "version" of the film we never know who he is...which also means we must take ALL of the backstory he delivers about himself as meaningless.


Oh, yeah? I never said anything was meaningless. I said the backstory, which can't be known for sure, doesn't matter to the question of whether or not the role-play was ethical. I do think that his emotional trauma - which is most likely his experiences at Dachau and Dolores' death, are the traumas they exploit to manipulate him. Veritas, they never talk to Teddy about his raw feelings, the trauma that was supposedly so awful that he dissociated rather than face it. Not about his war experiences and his wife's death or even about his alleged murdered children. They only talk about themselves and not being discredited. That should set off some alarm bells.


Because if the character has no identity in the film and his two possible names are meaningless and unimportant (your claim) then his wife also is meaningless and unimportant because we can't verify she ever existed either.


I never said any of that.


This means everything he says about himself in this story is totally meaningless and we are...in your version...meant to ignore because it is unimportant.


Never said that either. He is disturbed from the start. To manipulate him they would exploit his vulnerabilities. That's how his past figures into the movie we are shown. Of course, his past trauma is important to him, but the movie is about the role-play, not the past trauma. We can evaluate the details for which traumas might be true, but it won't change the fact that the role-play is unethical. The acute emotional assault he experiences during the role play is the subject of the film. His past trauma would be another movie. This movie is about a traumatized man man having that trauma exploited unethically. You are ignoring what he goes though during the role-play and focusing on the past, which we can't know for sure, and isn't reliably presented in the film.


Nothing, according to you, about DiCaprio's character can be verified. So, we don't know and should not care if he is a marshal, if he was ever married, if he had children, if he was ever in the war, the character is a blank and nothing about him is important...because it can't be verified according to you.



I didn't write it. No. Nothing can be verified about the fictional past. I think there is a way to identify a reference for the past, but that's another post. The role play is the subject of the film, not his past. As I sit here I can think of many different possible backstories and not one of them, including the flashback of the lake crime changes anything about the movie, which is the unethical role-play. I'd like to talk about possibilities for his backstory, but that is a tangential subject and doesn't make a material difference to the movie we have. Maybe he's the commandant - he speaks German. Maybe Dolores was an operative and isn't even dead - they just made him think she was dead to traumatize. Maybe both of them were like The Americans - deep cover sleeper agents. I don't know. Because it's ambiguous all those possibilities can be considered.

All I know is that the government really was doing stuff like trying to erase memories and create multiple personalities and that could relate to Teddy's past any number of ways. Changes nothing about the movie. The film is still about the role-play. You need to read the Seven Types of Ambiguity. It can be applied to any fiction. The reason the past is not explicitly defined is because it keeps open a range of possibilities. It is a way to write about all of the possibilities at once rather than being limited to just one. When you focus on only one you miss the others.


OK, so we have our blank, unnamed mysterious character, that we are watching in this film...so, the majority of what is in the film has now become meaningless.


The reason it is meaningless to you is because you haven't been paying attention to the actual movie. You've been focused on a limited and unknowable backstory and aren't evaluating the movie we are shown. It is the same movie it has always been and it is far more interesting and authentic than your movie is. You don't know that because you've been taking movie itself as secondary to the unknowable backstory. You just didn't consider how the role-play was affecting him.


It is there only as distraction, according to you, to see if it can get us not to notice a horrible experiment being performed by...well, in your version...Nazi influenced doctors that want to do something terrible to the patients on this island and the central point we should be taking out of what we are watching is one single item...these doctors are violating the Nuremberg Code.


. Authorial intention is a different post. The past is important. There is trauma but we can't know what it was. The central point is the movie we are watching, which is the role-play and what they are doing on the island. It isn't about the Teddy's past, it is about what he is going though during the role-play and its aftermath. That IS the movie. Why do you think the movie itself is nothing?


So, there is no missing patient, no dead wife, no dead children, no Teddy, no Andrew, no Dolores, no Rachel, there is no marshal, there is no backstory for Teddy/Andrew because that is just unverifiable nonsense we should not let distract us, there is no point to any of those items in the story.


You can still evaluate what the protagonist goes through during the role-play and its aftermath. That is a very interesting film. Better than the melodrama in your head that you find so distracting.


The dreams, the symbolism, the hallucinations of his wife, or the little girl, any story DiCaprio's character tells, anything any hospital employee says, or patient says, we should only see as possible manipulations of the doctors.


Everything gives us information that we can use to assess what Teddy is going through and it has its place in the overall story. I'm not saying that things don't matter only that when you think the story is these details rather than the role-play you are letting the tail wag the dog.


We can't even verify, according to you, if anybody there is really a patient or if they are "role players" just there to assist in this elaborate scheme to violate the Nuremberg Code. The people that we think are patients could all just be role players. We can't verify what they are. All we know according to you is the doctors are trying to fool/abuse/manipulate/brainwash DiCaprio's character so we literally can't trust any of the characters in the film...they are not verifiable.



I didn't write it. Seems to me everything you think is vital to the story is actually ambiguous information that is ambiguous for a very good reason. You limit the ambiguous information that can mean several things to one meaning(the one that supports the doctors unverifiable Andrew story) and disregard the actual action of the movie and what Teddy is experiencing during the role-play. That means you don't even appreciate the backstory fully. The film is about a man being subjected to an epic mind-eff. That's it. Focus on that and the other stuff can remain ambiguous.


Even the hospital may not be real because all we can "verify" by watching the film, according to you, is that what is going on is all some sort of show/experiment to do something that violates the Nuremberg Code to the DiCaprio character.



The film is historical fiction. What happens in the movie is something that could have happened in real life. In some form it is something that can happen again; it is something that may be happening at this moment.

One reason I was so shocked at how so few people noticed the significance of the film is that is related directly to what was in the news. What they do on Shutter Island, brainwashing and unethical psychiatric experiments, the legacy of these experiments appears to be at least in part (the part we are told) modern psy-ops and psychological torture that has been in the news with how the war on terror prisoners are treated and alleged war crimes. Lehane said that the story was inspired by the Bush Administration's response to 9-11 - reactions like the patriot act which he saw as opening the door to unconstitutional infringement on liberty. That is something that really affects all of us as citizens. Very few of us will experience a horrendous family tragedy, but we are all players in the larger social structure either as passive participants, active abusers or vocal and active resisters.


We should, according to you, watch this film with one, and only one question in mind...is the Nuremberg Code being violated?


You should watch the film and pay attention to what Teddy goes through at the hands of the powerful federal government. How does THAT affect him? How do they cruelly exploit the death of his wife and the trauma he experienced at Dachau? How do they violate his civil and human rights? What kind of people do this? what kind of government does this? There are lots of questions. You don't need to ask if the role play violates the Nuremberg Code because that's easy. You can trust me that it does. 😇


OK, so now that we have rendered the majority of what is in the film pointless what do we have left?


Well, now that we have seen that the backstory isn't the movie what is left is the ACTUAL MOVIE YOU HAVE TO THIS POINT FAILED TO PAY ATTENTION TO. It's a smart, original film, that relates to subjects that should concern everyone of us because unlike mothers killing their children and husbands killing their wives, we all play a part. Never Trump. 🇺🇸


We have a film that is showing us an experiment they are doing on a man we know nothing about,


Because most of us who have lived to adulthood have experienced some sort of emotional trauma that can be exploited. The ambiguity makes it broadly identifiable. The point isn't what the trauma is it is that the trauma exists. It is also why the writer keeps it ambiguous - we are all potential Teddy's.


for reasons we are not told, with no clear goal for the experiment,


Because the point is the violation of the sovereign human being, not the purpose of the experiment. The purpose can be any number of things. That's why it is left ambiguous. Leaving it ambiguous means that it could be anything that violates our human and civil rights.


but the film is showing an experiment, and it is set in the 1950s, a time we know experiments were done on people,


The year 1954 was picked as a metaphor for post 9-11 "Ashcroft's America" as Lehane refers to it.


we know there is something called the Nuremberg Code and that if you experiment on people in real life without their permission you could be found in violation of that code.


You got a problem with that?


This is all that is "verifiable" according to you in the picture.


So? We can generally verify real history - or at least that is as close as we can get. The role-play experiment is unethical in its very conception - that experiment can't be done ethically, so there is no question he is being abused and the doctors are his violators. No question. That is probably why that experiment works so well in the story. That bit is unambiguous which means that Lehane created a protagonist who was DEFINITELY being abused by people with lots of power - agents of the US government. That is a very major detail that you have ignored.


So, according to you, the entire point of the film is to show us that the Nuremberg Code can be violated by government sponsored doctors and we know this because we know this did happen in the past. Everything else in the film is just window dressing meant to distract us to think some sort of emotional drama is playing out.




Well, not exactly, no, but at least you are on the right track when you are sarcastic.


So since it is no secret doctors have in the past performed experiments on people, this is public knowledge after all, why not just make a film about that if that is the point you want to address?



They did make a film about it. The entire movie from first scene to last is a covert unethical experiment that violates the human and civil rights the protagonist. Every last bit of the film is about that. Even the memories, real and false, are related to that and take place in the context of a planned and systematic exercise of abuse of power. That you don't see that explains a lot. You haven't been paying any attention to the movie at all.


I mean in your "version" of the film most of the film is utterly meaningless and is a total waste of time. So, really you must see the people who dreamed this whole story up as utter morons.




Ah, you morons keep us mighty busy! Where would we be without you?



I'd be working in my garden.🌾


Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

On brainwashing and identity

So, first you need to grasp that this fiction has an author and his name is Dennis Lehane (that is if you believe the spelling, ha). This is the person responsible for writing this story and for inventing these anagrams spelling and all. So, of course we know how the anagrams are spelled, Lehane wrote them out in his novel, he did this for a specific purpose and it was not to suggest "sleep programming" he used them as a key to the characters identity.

So, the character can be Edward Daniels or Andrew Laeddis. Now the film spells out that there is no Teddy Daniels so, that is perfectly clear by the films end but as a thought experiment...

If you consider brainwashing in the film and the idea that they are attempting to get DiCaprio's character to accept a new identity the only identity that they could be attempting to get him to accept is "Teddy Daniels."

Why?

Well, that's simple it is the only identity the doctors appear to go along with in the film and the only identity they refer to him by until the end of the film and it is the identity he is clinging to at the start of the picture.

Brainwashing a person to accept an entirely new identity would be very difficult but if that person had some sort of reason to want to be somebody else...some backstory that created trauma for them or a sense of self-loathing...then you may have an opening to manipulate that person into accepting they are someone else. You certainly would want to create an identity that was an improvement on the identity you want them to leave behind. Otherwise, you would be setting the experiment up to fail.

So, during the "role play" the idea would be to reinforce the identity they want him to accept, "Teddy Daniels", and then at the end of the role play, what takes place in the lighthouse would be a test by Cawley to see if introducing to him his real identity and the trauma that made him susceptible to this "identity change" could shatter his belief in his new identity.

The goal then being that no matter what he is confronted with he will always revert back to this new "Teddy Daniels" identity they have given him. It would make a nice mirror plot to the actual story the film tells except they never add anything to the story to back that up.

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

Plus all the staff were robots and the doctors were aliens. Obviously Teddy figured that out, so they needed to brainwash him. It's the only thing that makes logical sense.

Open debates and arguments welcome. (Just don't try to spout unnecessary nonsense to prove i'm wrong)

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

I find it pretty funny you find it preposterous he'd go to all that trouble to cure "only one patient", but are perfectly fine with the idea that they'd go to all the exact same trouble to trap "only one man".

If they wouldn't go to the trouble to cure a single patient, then why would they go to the trouble to "entrap" some single random US Marshall?

If you don't believe the one, you can't possibly believe the other.

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?


If they wouldn't go to the trouble to cure a single patient, then why would they go to the trouble to "entrap" some single random US Marshall?

If you don't believe the one, you can't possibly believe the other.


Unless you have a brain and realize the risks/returns of curing a patient vs brainwashing a federal marshal aren't equivalent.

Then you can "possibly believe" the latter would truly be a stupid plot for this movie.

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

Hey, Odds. Thought I stop by the ol' Shutter board to see if you're still patrolling - yup!

Serious question - do you lose sleep at night knowing people have dissenting opinions on this film?









Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?


do you lose sleep at night


I don't sleep some nights...



...but that's only because your mom is friggin insatiable.

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

Ah right because entrapping a US Marshall and keeping him there for the lulz (else having him lobotomised), that has oh so many benefits. Oh so many rewards. You know unlike a *doctor* actually curing a patient, you know the life goals of most doctors out there, and them actually accomplishing that with one very difficult patient.

I dunno what you do for a living but *most* people actually try to excel at what they do, not sit there trying to do foolishness and disguise themselves so as to harm other people or engage in wrongdoings. But I'd hate to be the company/boss you work for, 'cause it sounds like you're more interested in the latter.

Regardless, my point wasn't to say there is a delusion or it isn't. I'm just saying that both points of view are understandable. I can see why one person could find one version more believable than the other but I can't see how someone can just dismiss one as preposterous when it's basically equally as believable as the other; and, we aren't shown any conclusive proof in the movie for either (which is more than likely intentional by the filmmakers).

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?


I can't see how someone can just dismiss one as preposterous when it's basically equally as believable as the other


It's believable doctors cure patients.

If you think it's equally plausible that mad scientists lobotomize US Marshals by luring them to an island via a false FBI reports, then that tells me what type of logical person you are.


we aren't shown any conclusive proof in the movie for either (which is more than likely intentional by the filmmakers).


The filmmakers likely never believed that even a miniscule proportion of the audience would be so silly and stubborn to refuse to give up the obvious red herring when it's exposed as the fantasy of a mental patient.

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

The problem is that the role play won't do what the doctors claim. It is unrealistic. Even the psych consultant for the movie said it was nonsense as therapy and the opposite of what would be done as therapy.

However, just because it is nonsense as therapy doesn't mean that it is nothing. It is a realistic way to make a normal person mentally unstable which is something that would be done in an unethical mind control/ brainwashing experiment. Also, the role play is unethical because it can't be done with consent. There is no way to do it ethically - even if they claim it is for his own good. That isn't the standard for ethical human experiments. The Nuremberg Code is the standard and the role play is a gross violation of the code. In the novel if not the movie Teddy exposes the way they skirt compliance with the code by calling it treatment, and he is not fooled.

I don't know why you assume that the alternative to therapeutic treatment to help him is doing something to harm him for no reason. That's not what they would be doing. They would be using Teddy as an expendable experiment subject to learn if they could control his mind covertly. Their goals have nothing to do with helping Teddy or doing what is in his best interests. They have goals that have nothing to do with the subject's well being. When the experiments fail they have a disposal problem - damaged people who know too much. These are the ones they lobotomize in the lighthouse - aka sewage treatment facility for human waste.


Anyway, it is hard to make a case that they are doing unethical experiments that harm the subject for the benefit of the subject who is harmed and put at risk. They put not just Teddy's life at risk but the lives of those he encountered while he was at large. They did that for nothing more than avoiding a lobotomy that Teddy ended up choosing in the end anyway, so there isn't much way of justifying that the role play was for Teddy. He would rather be lobotomized.

Putting the lives of others at risk without consent - like Billings on Ward C and Nelson the guard at the lighthouse is totally without justification and shows that the whole program is government sanctioned abuse for political purposes, not legitimate health care and research. A long shot chance for Teddy to avoid a lobotomy isn't worth the risk to his life and sure isn't worth the risk to the lives of others. If we recognize these facts it really isn't believable that their true agenda is to help the mentally ill. Rather, the true agenda is just what Teddy said to Chuck in the mausoleum. The mentally ill are devalued and thus expendable human subjects who are being exploited for political advantage in mind experiments. If they report the abuse, who will believe them anyway?

Cawley seemed to be trying to "excel" by having his theories validated. But his goals do not seem to be therapeutic. His subjects aren't able to function independently because his methods make them dependent and institutionalized and CONTROLLED.It appears that his theories have to do with being able to control people psychologically perhaps with the help of drugs and other procedures. The CIA and other law and intelligence agencies were interested in using psychiatry not to help people but to manipulate them and use them for political advantage as articulated by the woman in the cave. This is known as black psychiatry - methods that can help can also be misused to exploit individuals for political purposes.


Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

Not picking a side, and not an expert on this movie (I watched it about 3 times and loved it) but wouldn't the US marshals just send in another agent or two to see what happened to the first guy? Or do another investigation? As an average movie watcher, I didn't even realize there was a debate as to whether it was real or not when I watched it the first time. I believed the doctors. It was coming here I realized there is a debate, and now I'm not sure which is the reality. My main question was whether the girl in the cave was real or not, and by reading posts it seems there are many more now.

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

There is no debate. The doctors tell the truth in the lighthouse top room.

There's just a handful of mental patients who desperately need the movie to be about delusions being real, so they argue an incredible fantasy version which makes no sense.

Their god-awful movie would have been a horrible experience for us normal viewers if they were right. But of course they aren't.



Teddy is a Federal Marshal and Ashecliffe is a Federal Prison

I understand how the set-up would seem far fetched under ordinary conditions. But there are details that make the situation quite plausible.

Two small overlooked details explains it.

1. Lehane could have made Teddy a statie or local sheriff or even a journalist; under the common understanding there is no reason for him to be a US Marshal instead of a local or state police. Why is he a federal marshal?

2. Scorsese made Ashcliffe a Federal Prison (Lehane had it operating under a joint charter between the state and the feds)- none of the inmates we know of have committed federal crimes, so that alone is suspicious. How did the feds get jurisdiction? We know Ashecliffe is a federal prison because when the deputy warden gives Teddy and Chuck the rules when they arrive, he cites a federal prison regulation as the reason they have to surrender their arms. Additionally, we get a good look at the license plate on the warden's jeep and it says Department of Justice.

So, we have two relevant agencies of the federal government - The US Marshals Service and the Federal Bureau of Prisons. And both of these agencies just happen to be in the Justice Department which is headed by the US Attorney General.

To have an operation as large and militarized as we see on Shutter Island, they would need authority from very high up - these are not rouge mad scientists, they are working for the government. In that case the AG would have to have approved of the covert operation probably financed though a slush fund granted by HUAC. The AG answers to POTUS himself who would probably not know the details to give him deniability. They can get away with doing illegal things on the island because the ones breaking the law are the ones who are responsible for enforcing laws. They just need to keep it secret. That's why Teddy's plan to blow the lid off was such a threat. As long as the public is in the dark, the government doesn't have to account to anyone.

In other words, to lure Teddy to the island would be easy and no one will come looking for him because it is an inside job. Teddy, Cawley, Chuck and the rest of the employees ultimately have the same boss - the attorney general. Their higher ups would know what they needed to know about the operation and would have participated in the set up. Since Teddy doesn't seem to have any close family, there is no one who will investigate or demand Teddy's whereabouts. The marshals know where he is because they set it up.

Ashecliffe would be a black op carried out by the justice department. Another little bit of trivia is that when Lehane wrote the book (2002-2003) he was angry about what he called "Ashecroft's America" - the Bush administrations post 9-11 responses like the patriot act that he saw a being in violation of civil liberties. Ashcroft - Ashecliffe. The novel is his indictment of Bush's policies which were approved by John Ashcroft - the attorney general (2001 and 2005). Another little bit of trivia is that Ashcroft's father was a fundamentalist minister. The deputy warden's name is McPherson - "son of a preacher man" or son of a parson. 😀

I realize that a lot of the audience, especially those not from the US would not be aware of these specifics. But Lehane made his choices for a reason and the choices make what seems farfetched actually far more likely than most people would think.

Lehane didn't have to make the Ashecliffe a federal facility run by a law enforcement agency rather than a health care agency - that is suspicious. Realistically if this were a legitimate operation Ashecliffe would be a state hospital. That is where a criminally insane person would be sent. There is no explanation for why these people are in federal custody. So what is going on?

Shutter Island is in Massachusetts, so I imagine that in real life the state police would have jurisdiction and be the ones to investigate a missing inmate. But since Ashecliffe is a federal prison, it would be under federal law enforcement and investigation - the US Marshals. I imagine that they might have sent a marshal to get a report and ask a few questions, but the FBI ("Hoover's Boys") is responsible for investigations while the marshals are responsible for enforcement. Lehane made sure to be as realistic as possible. So, no plot hole.

Although most of the records were destroyed, we know that the government really was doing mind experiments on unwitting subjects in 1954 - so Teddy's suspicions are realistic. We also know that the government illegally allowed Nazi scientists/war criminals to immigrate, so Teddy's suspicion that Naerhing was a Nazi is even realistic. And it is realistic that Teddy could be lured to the island without arousing any suspicions.

The woman in the cave is probably a role-player because that is how she functions in the story. Cawley says she isn't real, not that she is a hallucination. If she isn't who she says she is, if she is playing a role, then she isn't real.



Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

"why would Dr.Cawley spent so much time, energy and manpower creating a delusional world just to cure 'only one patient' ?"

firstly, because he cares about his patients and wants to show that his methods work. And if this method did actually work it would be a career-making achievement

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?


I mean why would Dr.Cawley spent so much time, energy and manpower creating a delusional world just to cure 'only one patient' ?!


Well, it should be pointed out that Cawley does not do all of what he does just to cure one patient...that's not the premise of the film. He does it because he is against lobotomy and Andrew is obviously in line for a lobotomy. Cawley has approval to attempt to reach Andrew through the "role play" we see play out in the film. If it works, not only does he save Andrew from a lobotomy he then has a case that gives him back-up not to use lobotomy on other patients as well.

In the film though, because it is a thriller, Cawley's intentions are mostly masked from the audience, particularly on your first watch of the picture. Your first time through you are meant to experience the film through DiCaprio's character...accepting him as a detective investigating the island and through this the state of confusion that exists for a mentally ill man.

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

exactly my point .. so much time, energy and manpower creating a delusional world just to cure 'only one patient' .. and what if somethings goes wrong ..

He was not a patient and that's what makes this movie legendary ..

knwMe ...(it's my name)

Re: Its not delusion as everyone thinks here ?

To add to why it is so ridiculous:

Ashecliffe is a federal prison. Federal prisons are run by the Justice Department - health care and research isn't something that they would spend enormous resources on - unethical mind experiments - sure they would - they need confessions.

In the 1950's the census in psych hospitals was at its peek. A facility the size of Ashecliffe would have had thousands of patients. Federally run St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington D.C. had 8,000 patients in the 1950s. That much staff and security for 66-67 patients is absurd.

If Cawley's techniques that he is researching requires that extensive a staff, then it would never be feasible to use on a wide scale. Everyone would either be crazy or taking care of crazy people. He also doesn't seem to be preparing people to be independent, either, Kearns and Billings are very clearly institutionalized. Any program that made people permanent dependents on the state would never be considered - unless they are doing mind research for some other reason - something that was never intended to be used on a large scale.

I know people think it is more likely they are doing legitimate work than unethical experiments, but that is because they don't recognize how unrealistic the whole thing is. On the other hand, Ashecliffe isn't unusual if it is for communist style "reeducation". That sort of place would most likely be doing something illegal which would account for the highly militarized security - the security isn't for the patients - who aren't all that bad. It would be to keep unauthorized people out.



Are they slow? Yeah, they're dead. They're all messed up.

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