Eyes Glued to "Shutter Island"

So…I love Shutter Island. With the same star (I can sympathize with Serensky’s obsession with him) and similar feeling throughout as Inception, what can you possibly not like?

I have been excited since we first got the new calendar for this week of watching the movie in class because I could not wait for other people to see it and get excited and creeped out like I did in my first viewing. While watching the movie throughout this week for my second time, I loved it just as much as the first, and this time I found myself noticing many extra details and hints to the twist that I already knew was coming. I had a really great time seeing these sneaky details and wrote them down during class (as I also did productive notes of course) and decided to share them now. So if you did not really like the movie and do not feeling like hearing more about it, this probably is not the blog post for you. 

-I found that the guards, doctors, and all island personnel exchanged many umcomfortable glances at eachother throughout the movie that on the first time around we interpret as conspiracy related, but the second time around it become obvious they all feel uncomfortable because of the charade put on for Andrew. For example, when he throws the light house guard to the ground his “are you going to kill me?” seems extremely calm until we realize there are not bullets in the gun.

-I noticed some of the camera tricks the director used to hint at the unrealistic, dillusianal “reality” shown in the majority of the movie. For example, when Andrew interviews one of the patients, she takes a drink from a glass of water, but as the scene quickly cuts to her lifting the glass to her lips, it’s not actually there! Her hand is empty, and this just blew my mind and I think that it depicts the director’s way of hinting at the insane "reality" Andrew imagines and the audience gets pulled into.

-I finally understood the reason the creepy, old lady in the garden says “shh” to him as he walks by when first arriving on Shutter Island. On my first viewing I shrugged her off as just another scary insane lady, but at the end the doctor reveals that everyone on the entire island played along with his charade, (including the patients) and it become evident that this woman simply is not doing a very good job of keeping the secret and playing along.

-I noticed the characters that function in Andrew’s imagined reality and how they actually fit into his life at the asylum. The movie obviously gives away that Chuck depicts his psychiatrist, but also I saw this time around that the woman whom he sees as the "fake" Rachel Solando (the one in her room-not the cave) is the nurse leaning over his bed as he wakes up at the end and tells the doctor and policeman his real life! I thought this displayed an interesting detail showing how his psychotic fantasy world formed.

-I noticed the reoccurence of water throughout the film as a symbol of his fear of the truth of his wife drowning their children and how it haunts him. Water becomes used through the repetition of “why are you all wet baby?”, the imagined horrible thunderstorm, the start of the movie as him having sea-sickness on the ferry, and the appearance of water in almost all of his “walking nightmares”.

I really enjoyed understanding and noticing these details because it made me appreciate how the director masterfully created this film to force the audience into Andrew’s shoes so then the jolt of everything shattering as we realize his psychosis truly affects us. This brilliant movie was a wonderful choice to watch in class because of its obvious relevance to the book and also its abundance of interesting aspects and details as a film.