Shutter Island

The movie Shutter Island is full of psychology that leaves you thinking and surprised. I never would have guessed that the movie would end the way it would while watching it for my first time. The movie started out with the marshal arriving on a boat with his new partner and they were heading to the Island to investigate a prisoner that had escaped and to try and find her. Throughout the time that they are there the marshal starts to get head aches and then at night he gets really bad night mares that cause him to wake up in a panic.  But then skipping to the end of the movie, it turns out that he has been a patient at Shutter Island for two years and that he was making it all up in his mind. This really made me think back throughout the entire movie because the dreams at night and the day dreams he was getting weren’t about the other lady that had escaped. They were about his life and things that happened to him and his family. He was in there for killing his wife because she had killed there three kids, two boys and a girl, by drowning them in the pond or lake behind their house (cabin). He was also seeing things from when he was in the army and how he went and freed the Jews from some of the concentration camps. He mentioned how there were so many bodies lying everywhere, too many to count. In his imaginary world, he also turned his doctor into his partner. That the two of them were trying to solve the case together when really there was no case and that the doctor just wanted to keep a close eye on him.

When the marshal finally broke through into the real world realizing the truth of what really happened the doctors told him that it wasn’t the first time that he was better. That he had broken through before but then went back into the same mental stage. After the doctors told him this he went outside and then ended up convincing the doctor that he was not still okay by calling him partner instead of doctor. This caused him to have to go and get his brain wiped maybe even killed. But the last words he said went something like this. “Is it better to live a monster, or die a good man?”

After hearing this I believe that he pretended to act the way he did and that he was perfectly fine at that time. I believe he was just afraid that it would happen again and he didn’t want that. If I chose a side to this I would choose that it is better to die a good man. And the people in the movie could prove that by having to live in a cell and not being able to control themselves and I would not want to be remembered in that way.