MovieChat Forums > Shutter Island (2010) Discussion > Chuck antagonizing Teddy, bandaid on for...

Chuck antagonizing Teddy, bandaid on forehead?


Why does the officer pick him up, then give him a strange speech about violence, and gives him hypothetical questions about fighting him? He even tells him "Dr Cawley thinks you can be controlled"?

Why does Chuck antagonize Teddy in the mausoleum during the storm? He seems to be purposefully putting paranoid, strange thoughts into his mind and yelling at him?

Why does the husband killer write "Run" on his notepad? Where did she think he could run? She was doing that just to be mean?

Why does "Rachel Solando" hug Teddy, and he seems to connect with her? Why is she associated in his dreams, when she seems to b just be another patient?


How and why did someone put a tiny note in "Rachel Solando's" room? How was Teddy able to find it so quickly? Why did one man joke/laugh about the Law of 4?

Is there any reason they never gave Teddy his original clothes back?


What was the point of him following and beating that patient? The patient tells him he doesn't want to leave, then talks about the hydrogen bomb? Who is he and why?

What is the point of the cave scene? He hallucinates Chuck's dead body, rats, fire and warmth? The woman is also a hallucination but why?

Did they ever tell us how he got that cut on his forehead? There is a small bandaid covering it for a majority of the film?
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xoxo

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That officer was the Warden and he was not in support of Cawley's method. They all knew that Teddy was suspecting sinister experiments and that he could expose the place. Warden and some others wanted to silence him once and for all instead of what Cawley was trying by turning Teddy into a 'ghost' candidate. The warden was provoking Teddy in to getting violent so he can prove that Teddy cant be controlled.


Chuck was trying to gain Teddy's faith, so at the lighthouse when he says the opposite, Teddy would trust him.



She knew that Teddy is in a rat trap. Obviously she meant what she wrote I.e. Escape.




The nurse Rachel created a scene in Teddy's mind of a wife who drowned her kids. We can see at the end when Teddy who was at the peak of drug action, got brainwashed by the doctor's false story, with a depiction of the brainwashed memory, how it was coerced in his mind, the scene when he comes home and gets hugged by his wife.



It was placed by Cawley. Teddy being a detective would obviously search for clues in the room. The floor tile was deliberately kept half open so Teddy could find the note. The whole idea was that the evidence should come from Teddy so the doctors could easily coerce the law of 4 and that the patient 67 is Teddy.


The patient Billings was simply insane. That part of story was used by the doctors to claim that Teddy is violent. Infact you can see that it was Billings who jumped on Teddy and held him by his neck. Obviously any person, an aggressive cop, would retaliate.


The cave scene was not a hallucination. We see a shot from third person perspective with the Cave lady waking Teddy up who was sleeping and not hallucinating. The scene was also natural and was not treated like any other hallucination scenes where figures appear out of nowhere and with echoic sound etc. Scorsese clearly challenges the audience that despite being very clear on the treatment of the scene, are the audience still want to believe if it was a hallucination and believe doctor's (unreliable narrator) story?



Its believed by some Teddy was insane believers that he got the wound from the fight he had with noyce as claimed by Dr. Cawley. But Dr. Cawley didn't address to Teddy at the lighthouse 'hey...and you got that wound on your forehead from that fight'. Obviously he didn't want to trigger Teddy's real memory of how he got the wound due to some reason at the mainland.




Retard... Pussy... Sinister_prig

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Thank you for your answers. And yes I agree that I thougot the woman in the cave was real, the general consensus seemed to be that she wasn't so I just went along with that. But that creates more questions... why does she also try to put strange, paranoid thoughts in his mind? She in cahoots with the Warden?

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The woman in the cave was real.

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Yes she was. Do you think she was part of the role playing? I guess she was.

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The cave-lady's speech is the only part of the movie that makes any sense, so she'd better be real.

Was she part of the role-play? It could go either way...

Remember at the beginning when they show Teddy pictures of Rachel Solando? The FIRST one is of the cave-lady, so if she is just in his head (as Cawley says), then where did that picture come from? This suggests that she is real and part of the role-play.

On the other hand, how did they know that Teddy would go down the cliffs, find the cave, and go in there? Cawley bragged that he knew every move that Teddy was going to make, but since it's the ONLY time that they let him have full reign of the island, it's impossible for even Mr. Know-It-All to know the exact path that Teddy would take.

Let's say that he hadn't found the cave or decided to go in there. That's a lot of work on the part of the staff to set that all up for nothing. Sheehan didn't even lead him in that direction.

Now, if she is not part of the role-play (and really is who she says she is), then how did she know so much? She immediately knew that he was the marshal, but he was wearing patients' clothes. And how did she know that Cawley thought that she was dead? She also knew that they were out to get him and wouldn't let him leave the island. If he is just a marshal looking for a missing patient, why would they stop him?

Is she all in Teddy's head and just adding to his paranoia? Their conversation doesn't really support that. It's not like Teddy is leading the conversation, and the cave-lady is just agreeing. SHE is leading the conversation, bringing up stuff that he couldn't possibly know about (like Sodium Amytal and how pain enters the body), and he keeps asking questions and pushing back ("I'm not following you" and "I am a federal marshal--They can't stop me").

Everything that she says is factually correct too. He must be some kind of genius to be able to come up with that entire conversation on his own.

Who started the fire? Teddy puts his hands near it to get warm, but if it's in his head, there's no reason to keep them there. The mind is a powerful thing, but it can't create heat.

When Teddy assumes that she is the real Rachel Solando, she doesn't answer or even nod her head. If she is all in Teddy's head, and if he is so determined to be right, she is gonna say something like "Yep, that's me!" Even if she is part of the role-play and is supposed to go along with his delusional story, she would agree ("Yep, Rachel #2 of your fantasy-land reporting for duty!")

If she isn't real, then what else in the movie isn't real? The whole thing? All us-viewers have to go by is what we see, and if it's all from the point of view of an unreliable delusional character, then it's impossible to prove what is real and what isn't. We have to decide all of that for ourselves, and therefore any interpretation MUST be valid.

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I don't believe so.

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TLDR - There aren't clear answers to these questions. The movie is left ambiguous. Those who believe the doctors will have different answers from those who see the doctors are unreliable expositors. The viewer has to decide for himself/herself what these things mean.

These are all good questions. I'm responding because these are some of the usual questions viewers have after watching Shutter Island.

Why does the officer pick him up, then give him a strange speech about violence, and gives him hypothetical questions about fighting him? He even tells him "Dr Cawley thinks you can be controlled"?


One thing we learn from the Warden in that scene is that Cawley wants to control Teddy, which is not at all the same as wanting to heal him or cure him. While the Warden seems to support surgery to control Teddy, Cawley appears to want to control him psychologically and maybe chemically. Same difference - either way the goal would be a docile, compliant individual, not a healthy human being that could think for himself.

The Warden is trying to antagonize Teddy probably to increase his anxiety and further confuse and frighten him. Psychological stress. The Warden's behavior also brings into question the idea that Teddy is as dangerous as the doctors say. Why would the warden, alone, try to provoke the most dangerous and violent man on the island? That makes no sense.

That then leads to the question of why they would want to lobotomize a patient who isn't violent - what do they really want to control? Most likely, Teddy presents a danger to the staff because he is threatening to expose them. If he is lobotomized who would believe him? If he is identified as "insane" who will believe him? If Cawley can successfully convince Teddy that he is the problem, not them, then that neutralizes the threat as well. This idea is reflected, too, in the audience's tendency to focus on Teddy's sanity rather than the question of the ethics of the experiment done on Teddy (the only experiment we see and all we have to go by).

Why does Chuck antagonize Teddy in the mausoleum during the storm? He seems to be purposefully putting paranoid, strange thoughts into his mind and yelling at him?


Good questions all, GCrockergirl. This is not something they would do if he was really delusional. Remember that they claim he is so delusional and so resistant to treatment that he needs this epic, dangerous mind game to have any chance of helping him see reality.

He would never need to have his supposed delusions suggested to him if these ideas were really his. The fact that they suggest ideas to him that they later claim are his delusions is very suspicious and should make the audience question the truth of what the doctors are claiming about Teddy, especially since they have no reliable supporting information for their claims. Not only do they have to suggest his "delusions" to him, he resists believing these when they are suggested. That's not the way delusions work.

Delusion - an idiosyncratic belief or impression that is firmly maintained despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality or rational argument, typically a symptom of mental disorder.

The screenplay makes a point of having Teddy's original suspicions be a "guess" that they were doing unethical mind experiments. That shows that he is NOT delusional because delusions are firmly held beliefs, not "guesses". Anything beyond his "guess" about unethical experiments was information he received on the island during the role-play itself.

So, Teddy isn't delusional. At the most, before Chuck, Noyce and cave woman suggested more, all Teddy says is that he has a "guess" that they are doing unethical human mind experiments on the mentally ill at Ashecliffe. That is absolutely consistent with the historical context.

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

Teddy's suspicions were not at all far-fetched. In fact, what he suspected was less than what the government was really doing. Shutter Island is historical fiction and the real historical context is a major aspect of the story - the 1954 zeitgeist, the possibility that Naerhing is an Nazi Operation Paperclip researcher, the red scare, the fact that the government really was doing unethical human experiments in violation of the Nuremberg Code, are all suggested by the historical context of the story itself. Teddy has probably just stumbled upon covert experiments that the government was able to keep secret for another two decades after 1954.


Why does the husband killer write "Run" on his notepad? Where did she think he could run? She was doing that just to be mean?


They were using Kearns in the role-play. She was playing a part. I don't know if writing RUN was part of her role or if she was really trying to get a message to Teddy. At that point she may have thought Teddy was still able to leave the island. I don't think we can tell for sure, but it could easily be part of the role-play because they were definitely trying to make Teddy paranoid so they could use that against him to make him think he was crazy.


Why does "Rachel Solando" hug Teddy, and he seems to connect with her? Why is she associated in his dreams, when she seems to b just be another patient?


Most everyone assumes that the missing Rachel Solando in the chart picture is really a nurse. This may not be the case. She could really be a patient. She could be playing a nurse in her own role-play. The actress playing her said she played that scene real, not as if she was a nurse acting a part. It appears that they use patients in the role-plays as a sort of milieu "therapy". In fact, can we even know for sure the difference between staff and patients? How many of those nurses and orderlies are playing roles as their own "treatment"?

No matter if she is acting or not, the purpose she serves in Teddy's "role-play" is to connect Teddy to the idea that he is her husband. This is a step on the way to getting Teddy to believe that his wife is really the woman who killed her children. His dream later that night shows that he has subconsciously moved into the role of the child killer's husband. The only thing left to do is get him to replace Rachel with Delores. This is what the anagrams are supposed to be for.

In any event, her mixed messages, hugging him and then going off on him, served to add to Teddy's confusion. I hold the unpopular opinion that she is really a patient named Rachel something. Maybe Solando. Teddy got ahead of the game so they had to introduce him to Rachel early and may not have been completely prepared. Rachel became agitated and violent, which went beyond what they intended. Note that Teddy has two serious headaches for which Cawley gives him an unknown medication. The first time was after Teddy saw Rachel's picture in the chart and the second was after he met her in her room.

Interestingly, when he dreamed of Rachel after being given drugs for his "migraine", she looked like she did in the picture, not like she looked in real life. I have wondered if Teddy even remembers the encounter with Rachel in her room. We learn that Teddy has dreams based on photographs - and he colorizes. His dream images of the children could simply mean that he has seen the photos that Cawley has.


How and why did someone put a tiny note in "Rachel Solando's" room? How was Teddy able to find it so quickly? Why did one man joke/laugh about the Law of 4?


Most people think what the doctors want Teddy to eventually believe - that it was his room and that he left the note there. If you watch closely, there is some misleading editing and a swoosh sound that leads people to assume that Teddy finds the note quickly and goes straight for it. That's not actually what the film shows. Teddy was systematically checking the room for loose tiles - he didn't find it quickly. He was going to find the note eventually because he was doing a careful investigation.

The possibilities are:

1. "Andrew" left the note for "Teddy" to find. It was Andrew's room. Men and women are not in the same building, so that seems unlikely to me that they are showing Teddy Rachel's room as part of the role-play and it is on the men's ward. Also, they gave patients assigned hospital garb and "Andrew" would probably not have had street shoes in his room. The men's shoes are part of the role-play staging thus meaningless as to what is real.

2. The doctors left the note in the room they claim is Rachel's as part of their manipulation assuming or hoping Teddy would find it.

3. Rachel left the note. It seems that Cawley was surprised and wanted to take the note from Teddy. The note may have given the doctors the law of four idea they were so fond of. To call the anagrams "the law of four" is...just lame. Aristotle had a law of four. It is about associations and recall.

I don't think there is a way to tell where the note really came from. If you believe the doctors, it came from "Andrew". If you don't believe the doctors it was either left by the doctors as part of the role-play or Rachel really is a patient who left the note in her room.

The one doctor said he "loved" the law of four, because the anagrams were a major part of their manipulation of Teddy. They thought it was a clever thing they thought of. It is unlikely that the doctor would have said he loved a patient's delusion especially if the delusion was causing them so much trouble and getting people hurt.

The fact that Cawley staged the draped whiteboard that he dramatically uncovered in the lighthouse shows how important the anagrams were to the doctors. However, by the time the board was unveiled, the law of four was irrelevant for the doctor's purpose because Teddy thought Rachel Solando was a falsely imprisoned whistlebower psychiatrist, not a crazy woman that killed her kids. They didn't anticipate that Teddy would think the woman in the cave was Rachel because they had told him that Rachel had been found. Teddy had seen her. Notice that both the woman in the cave and Cawley are taken aback because Teddy assumes she is Rachel Solando.

Is there any reason they never gave Teddy his original clothes back?



It is a brainwashing thing. They want him to give up the identity of Marshal Edward Daniels. They said they were going for this look in the costuming - 50s movie noir. http://40.media.tumblr.com/3de76592082021b828c738ef04e52407/tumblr_nf6qzkuoxh1qcgwn4o1_500.jpg
One of the ways they take him away from his marshal role is to take away his "uniform", because his clothes are associated with his role as a marshal. They put him in a uniform that identifies him with an orderly - someone with less power - they also gave them a choice to wear the gray uniforms the patients wear.

What was the point of him following and beating that patient? The patient tells him he doesn't want to leave, then talks about the hydrogen bomb? Who is he and why?


By that time Teddy had already been in the controlled environment for two days so he probably wasn't acting as he normally would. It appears to me that Chuck didn't expect Teddy to chase the patient. It could be that the chase was something unexpected that happened. Maybe Teddy was acting on instinct since he has been told that these people are dangerous and his job is to capture and control dangerous people.

Maybe his judgement was off because of the drugs and psychological stress. We know that cops step over the line when it comes to violence all too often - it doesn't mean that they are mentally ill. Teddy could be one of these over-reacting cops. He appears to have been one of the over-reactors involved in the Dachau massacre, so it could be he is an aggressive personality without being psychotically violent.

That scene has a few other purposes. First, they want to make Teddy (and the audience) believe that he is a violent and dangerous man (whether he is or not).

*We learn that if Andrew is as dangerous and violent as they say then they were taking real risk with the lives of patients and staff by giving him the run of the island.

*That incident showed that the experiment was life threatening - Teddy could have killed the patient or the patient could have killed Teddy. They should have definitely stopped the experiment after that. The scene makes it unambiguous that they are violating the Nuremberg Code, so the "role-play" is by definition an unethical human experiment. The audience can know that the role-play the doctors describe is itself an unethical human experiment on the mind because they should have stopped it when it was clear it was life-threatening. Note how guilty Cawley looks when Teddy tells Lester that he risked his life for him.

*The experiment should be set up in a way that avoids unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injuries.
*It should not be conducted when there is any reason to believe that it implies a risk of death or disabling injury.
From the Nuremberg Code

Finally, both Kearns and the Ward C patient, Billings, make comments that show the audience that Ashecliffe is a controlled milieu - the first criteria for thought reform (brainwashing) as identified by Lifton:

Milieu (Environmental) Control - All communication with outside world is limited, either being strictly filtered or completely cut off. Whether it is a monastery or a behind-closed-doors cult, isolation from the ideas, examples and distractions of the outside world turns the individuals attention to the only remaining form of stimulation, which is the ideology that is being inculcated in them.

Neither Billings nor Kearns wants to leave the island because they both think that they are safe from nukes - where are they getting that idea? Kearns says "they say" there are bombs that turn cities to ash - and this is 9 years after the bombs were dropped on Japan! What does she mean "THEY SAY..."? Anyone with normal access to information would have known the bomb was a fact not a rumor. She also shows little understanding of what TV is, associating it with voices coming from her head rather than a source of information not controlled by the doctors. Add these comments to the switchboard scene that establishes that Teddy has no access to the mainland or any information not controlled by the island authority and it is established that Shutter Island is the sort of information controlled environment necessary for thought reform (brainwashing).

The goals of thought reform is to get the subjects to CHOOSE to do what the authority wants. The authority on Shutter Island appears to be either telling the patients or allowing them to believe that they are safe from nukes on the island - so they don't want to leave.

What is the point of the cave scene? He hallucinates Chuck's dead body, rats, fire and warmth? The woman is also a hallucination but why?


Teddy was on the way to the lighthouse. I don't think that this is where the climax was supposed to be staged. They needed time to set up, so the cave scene was another act in the play to stall for time to get set up in the top room. It also serves as another opportunity to make Teddy suspicious and further demoralize him - he has no friends; the government is too powerful; it is futile to resist.

I don't think he hallucinates Chuck's body. He was under stress, and may have been drugged with something that affected his perceptions. In any event, what Teddy experiences was an illusion of a body. His eyes were playing tricks on him causing him to misidentify the reflection off the water as Chuck's white clad body.

There are rats on islands - it is a big problem - and the novel makes it clear that there really were rats on Shutter Island - so there is no reason to think he was hallucinating rats. Cawley doesn't say that the woman in the cave is a hallucination. He says she isn't real. She isn't real if she is a role-player - which is what she probably is because that's the way she fits into the role-play - much the same way that Chuck and Noyce fit in - they feed him information to make him more suspicious and anxious - Chuck on purpose and Noyce probably incidentally. If Teddy has visual hallucinations, they are only of Dolores and maybe the little girl and he KNOWS that they aren't real. The scene in the cave is shot realistically, Teddy thinks it is real (unlike his hallucinations of Delores). There is no reason provided in the film to assume there wasn't someone physically present in the cave with Teddy.

Did they ever tell us how he got that cut on his forehead? There is a small bandaid covering it for a majority of the film?


They never say why the bandaid is on his forehead. Those who believe the doctors think it was probably from the fight he had with Noyce two weeks before. The bandaid was fresh when we see Teddy in the mirror on the ferry, so my guess is that they did something to Teddy right before we see him - maybe what made him sick.

If you think the doctors are telling the truth then the bandaid represents his fractured mental state and it falls off once he accepts reality. However, if that's the case then the the narrative should have an explanation for the bandaid.

By omitting an explanation for the bandage we have a sort of Chekov's Bandaid if we accept the doctors as reliable expositors. There would be an innocent reason that supported their story. In fact, even if they are lying, they could have made up an innocent reason. It might not be true, but it would have left it ambiguous and would at least have filled a plot hole for those who believe the doctors.

The fact that we have a question with absolutely no answer provided is most likely because the answer isn't innocent as far as the doctors are concerned. No explanation for the bandaid is as close as this movie can come to telling the audience that the injury is due to some invasive procedure that's affecting Teddy's mind. In other words, because we get all our explanations from the doctors, missing information will probably not support what the doctors want Teddy to believe is true. If the bandaid is because the doctors harmed Teddy as part of their mind experiment on him, the characters who know the reason for the bandaid will not admit it to Teddy, they will either lie or omit the information, so the audience won't get an explanation either.

If the reason for the bandage is something like a burn from ECT that they used to wipe his memories, a lobotomy, or an implant, we would get no explanation in the film, because the audience is not told anything that Teddy isn't told. Since Teddy is never told anything that conflicts with the doctor's Andrew lake narrative, the audience won't have that information either. Any information they are keeping from Teddy will also be kept from the audience. Our only advantage over Teddy is that we have hindsight and historical context, so we can infer possibilities that wouldn't have occurred to Teddy.

Those are all good questions. Scorsese said one of the questions he was asking with this film is "who do we believe?" "Who do we believe in movies?" I don't believe the doctors. I know that what they do to Teddy in the movie is unethical even if he is Andrew and even if he is "insane". Given the way the story is told, unless the guilty characters come clean with Teddy and admit the truth, there will be no reliable explanation because the characters who know will never say. Like Teddy, the audience is forced to decide what is real and true without anyway to reality check.



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Hi, I've been reading the threads on this film and think a good case has been made that he really is Teddy and the doctors and island staff are in cahoots to make him seem crazy. But if that true, I have a few questions, and since this thread seems like a bunch of rational people, I'm asking here. So if he really is Teddy Daniels, US Marshall, then...

1) was he just the unfortunate soul who got sent to Shutter Island to investigate the missing patient (who was actually a conciencously objecting psychiatrist)? So they looked into his past once he was assigned to the case, and found the tragedy of his wife dying and WW2 service and played into that?

2) The staff at SI knew did this because they knew anyone the US Marshalls sent over would discover their unethical treatment of patients and report them/shut them down/have them arrested. And the unethical treatment ranged from lobotomies to chemically controlling patients for experimental purposes, possibly for military applications.

3) his "partner" really was Dr. Sheehan, in either way you look at this film? Who drugged Teddy or something on the boat ride to the island to kick off his chemical imbalance?

4) if the story the lady in the cave told was true, that she was a doctor from a respected family, who went "crazy" and became a patient, why would her going missing be reported at all? Family and friends couldn't visit her, she wasn't allowed any contact with the outside world, so why and how did this become a matter for the US Marshalls? This is my biggest hang-up for the he-really-is-Teddy theory. I can believe the staff were all against him to protect their illegal operation, but I don't see why a US Marshall or even a policeman was called in for this. Who notices or cares (or reports) if a mental patient goes missing on an island with no communication with the outside world?

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Never mind, I just read the answer to my question on a different thread. If you buy the TiT argument, he was not a random guy selected to handle this, but chosen deliberately (based on his background) to "investigate" the "missing person" at SI because he was a great candidate for testing their latest brainwashing techniques. Interesting theory. I need t watch this movie closely from the beginning and take notes to see which theory I agree with.

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I figure the real story is in the movie, but no one's story is 100% true. I think that it is possible that he has been there 2 years that he doesn't remember because they have been messing with is head and his memories for two years. This is mainly based on the novel, but being there two years doesn't mean that the doctors are telling the truth about anything else.

I think the best explanation for how he originally came to the island is what Chuck tells Teddy in the mausoleum - they lured him to the island with a fake missing patient report knowing he would jump on it. One of the tricks is to make sure he is suspicious of the truth and then pull the rug out from under him by claiming that his accurate suspicions are delusions.

I also think that it is very possible that Dolores was mentally ill and this is a source of his unresolved guilt over her death.

Really, the only difference between Andrew and Teddy is the name and the kids. The kids can be easily explained - the girl is a composite of the real death train child and the girl in the pictures. The boys are just from the pictures - they are always inanimate dead objects. Since Teddy Daniels is a common name and Laeddis isn't, I think he is Teddy. Maybe the maintenance man was named Laeddis, but it may have been spelled differently and may not have been Andrew. The doctors invented the anagrams to connect Teddy to the new identities.

The doctors never show any actual evidence that he is Laeddis or that he has been there two years. They have no evidence that Dolores died at the lake - they had pictures of the kids, they should have shown picture of Dolores showing that she didn't die in the fire like Teddy believes.

We can't say for 100% sure who Teddy is, but we can know for 100% that the only experiment we see in the the movie, the "role-play", is unethical and would actually cause Teddy to become more unstable and no way could it possibly help anyone see reality for himself. If he was crazy, the role-play would make him crazier. If he is sane, the role-play would make him think he was crazy. That means that Teddy's suspicions about unethical experiments weren't delusions.


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

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So would you say the only thing we know for sure, we viewers, is that Chuck is really Dr. Sheehan and the doctors were acting unethically?

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These are the main points - more than you want to know:

- I think most people think that Chuck is really Sheehan. Since the US Marshals and the Bureau of Prisons that runs Ashecliffe are both agencies of the Justice Department, the Marshals would have been part of the ruse to get him to the island. Just tell him that he will meet his new partner, Chuck Aule from Portland or Seattle, at the ferry. No one will come looking for him because at very high levels of the Justice Department, they know where he is because they are the ones who lured him.

- Since we don't know what happened before the ferry because it isn't in the movie, it is possible that Chuck really was Teddy's partner, and they were both lured maybe two years earlier. Chuck was successfully brainwashed and pulled into the game like Kearns and Breene. It's also possible that he wasn't a doctor but a CIA agent with hypnosis skills. The only reason I think this might be the case is he looked confused by Teddy's headaches and didn't seem to know about migraines which is pretty basic for a physician. I personally don't think Sheehan was ever a Marshal.

- What they call role-play is really mental manipulation and abuse known as brainwashing. People often rewatch the movie looking for evidence of the "role-play", but any evidence of the role-play is also evidence for brainwashing since they are the same thing. Any symptoms of mental illness could also be caused by the role-play itself. If he has been there two years, well they have had two years to mess with his head, so who knows how he was before they got hold of him?

The thing is that the entire film is the manipulation to get Teddy to believe he is Andrew Laeddis. Everything we know about Teddy's identity and backstory we learn in the context of this mind eff. Since the doctors could be lying about the past and Teddy is alleged to be delusional about the past, neither side is reliable to provide a backstory that the audience can be sure of - and it doesn't matter because that isn't what the movie is about - its about the manipulation of Teddy by agents of the government. There needs to be a third party character - someone independent who isn't controlled by the doctors to provide an exposition, and there is no such character in the movie.

These doctors are antagonist characters - for example, they aren't like the psychiatrist in Psycho who shows up at the end to explain Norman's condition. They are characters controlling all the action in the film. We are told they have a lot riding on the experiment on Teddy - they will be discredited and lose everything if they fail. That provides a motivation for doing the experiment that has nothing at all to do with Teddy's mental health or potential lobotomy.

The "role-play" the doctors confess to is definitely unethical. It violates several points of the Nuremberg Code. It is unethical in its very concept since it can't be done if the subject knows whats going on. Even if they call it "treatment" to try to get around the code, Teddy is onto that trick, too. It's not been done before - it is an experiment. Success in this case would mean successfully brainwashing Teddy permanently as part of MKULTRA type mind control experiments. We know now that brainwashing isn't permanent, but maybe they didn't know that in 1954 and this is the theory that Cawley was trying to prove. That theory really was discredited in real life.

It's important to remember the role-play is unethical even if he is crazy Andrew and even if they claim they are trying to help him. Teddy suspects they are experimenting on crazy people and making them worse - he doesn't think they are luring ordinary people to the island and making them subjects of mind experiments - so who Teddy is doesn't matter, since Andrew could be the subject of an unethical experiment same as Teddy.

They aren't trying to help him; they are trying to control him. They don't care if Teddy's memories have really returned - they just want him to conform. We know this because:

* Cawley indicates that he would have been fine with him living his his "fantasy", but he can't because he is dangerous. That doesn't even follow since they have no way of knowing that if he thinks he is Andrew, he won't be dangerous. Besides, Andrew is the bad guy and Teddy is the good guy hero. Why would they think Andrew would be less dangerous than Teddy?

* When they threatened him with a lobotomy if he didn't comply, they can't ever know for sure if his memories really came back or if he just said what he needed to say to avoid a lobotomy. A lot of people who are supposed to be brainwashed are actually lying to get a reward or avoid punishment.

* After the so-called flashback, Teddy says he doesn't remember his previous loop - the doctors don't care that all of his memories haven't returned. Even though he doesn't remember, he seems to believe the doctors and says that Cawley was the only one who tried to help him - he didn't remember, but he believed it anyway. So, is the flashback just the story he was told to confess - an internalized false confession - something he believes because he was brainwashed, but doesn't really remember?

From what we see in the movie they weren't really interested in Teddy's mental health improving - they were ok with him being crazy. They were interested in controlling him, if not by Cawley's psycho-behavioral methods then with a lobotomy.

Brainwashed people don't stay brainwashed, so Teddy probably would "relapse" after he rested and the mental stress stopped or, if he was drugged, after the drugs were out of his system - (if he was drugged - drugs aren't required for brainwashing).

The role-play is the opposite of real therapy to get a person to see reality. It would only confuse him about reality. The role-play is the KNOWN way to brainwash someone. Brainwashing can also be called "thought reform", "re-education", "coercive persuasion", "rape of the mind" and "gaslighting" among other terms. It is an extreme form of social influence and considered mental abuse or mental torture. The role-play adheres to Robert Lifton's "eight criteria for thought reform". He studied the allegedly brainwashed POW's that the woman in the cave referred to and wrote about what he discovered in a book called Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of "Brainwashing" in China published in 1961. The limits of brainwashing wouldn't have been known in 1954.

The woman in the cave is probably a role-player, and that is why she looks real. Cawley just says she isn't real. He never says she was a hallucination. Anyway, Teddy and the audience always know when he is hallucinating, so she doesn't fit the established pattern. She serves the role-play the same way that Chuck and Noyce do - they stoke his suspicions and serve to demoralize him. She also misleads him about the true nature of the experiments they are doing on Shutter Island. Lobotomies weren't really experimental and weren't used to create "ghosts" or superspies. The drugs she mentions have legitimate uses, so finding those drugs wouldn't necessarily mean they were doing unethical experiments. She fails to mention the true risk - mental manipulation. She didn't expect that Teddy would think she was Rachel Solando which is why she seems confused when he assumes that's who she is.

Cawley says he is dangerous and that is why he will be lobotomized, but the final scene shows that he is calm and cooperative and no one is scared of him - people walk all around him. While Teddy was shown to be tormented by his memory of Dolores from the very first scene in the movie, in the final scene he was serene - he let go of Dolores at the car explosion when he burned his tie.(until Cawley's cruel game brought her back temporarily in the lighthouse).

Scorsese made a point to show he was NOT TORMENTED by his memories in the final scene. He made a point of showing that he was not dangerous in the final scene and was extraordinarily cooperative with his abusers. Teddy thought they were doing something bad and he refused to be a part of it. He could have gone along and done what they wanted. But he is up against the Federal Government, and he knows they will never let him expose them. The consequence of not conforming was a lobotomy, but he knew that not conforming would discredit them and stop the experiments anyway - he outsmarted them. That means that no matter who he is he died a truly good man who sacrificed himself for the good of others, not a phony good man acting out of his own weakness selfish interests.

I think that covers most of the questions people have about the movie. It's pretty clear that the film was meant to be understood on two levels. The conventional understanding satisfies the mainstream audience. This is the level those involved with the film usually talk about publicly. Serious viewers can consider the historical context, science and alternative interpretations for ambiguous information. Everything in the movie fits very well without having to distort or ignore any detail or rely on suspension of disbelief. The film is consistent with real history and real science.

It is pretty straight forward as long as you don't assume the doctors are doing legitimate experiments and treatment and telling the truth about everything. And if you think Teddy is crazy, then don't forget the doctors could be the cause.

Random notes:

- The first thing we learn in the film is that it is 1954 which tells us that the historical context matters. The implications of that date go straight to the political themes in the film. Real history is the only reference point for reality in the film. The government was doing unethical mind experiments on non-consenting people. HUAC, the red scare and McCarthyism was the zeitgeist. Modern, well-funded psychiatric facilities did not keep patients in subhuman conditions like we see on Ward C - that would be unethical and even torture. Doctors would have been well aware of the Nuremberg Code and the ethical standards for human experiments and Americans would have assumed that our doctors and government were abiding by those standards because we thought we were better than the Nazis.

- Teddy tells us who he thinks the monsters are in his confrontation with Naerhing in the hallway. He rejected the idea that he was a monster and threw the label back at the doctors. He isn't sure what they are doing, but he knows it is bad. Living as a monster means the doctors who are abusing their subjects. If Teddy goes along with them he would be a monster, too. A good man is one who stops the bad experiments by sacrificing himself and refusing to go along with something he knows is bad.

- The final word in the film is "Teddy".

- The final shot of the film is an ominous shot of the lighthouse. Apparently, they were taking Teddy to the lighthouse for a lobotomy. (Scorsese says he is going to the lighthouse). So where was the evidence they did lobotomies in the lighthouse when Teddy got there?






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Thank you for your rational, well explained reply. This movie is fascinating. As you said, you can either take it at face value and be briefly entertained, or get sucked down the rabbit hole of history, psychology, and questioning every line, every glance, every camera angle.

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...you can either take it at face value and be briefly entertained, or get sucked down the rabbit hole of history, psychology, and questioning every line, every glance, every camera angle.


Well put, Janderson2!

Don't forget sound, score and lighting!









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

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* After the so-called flashback, Teddy says he doesn't remember his previous loop - the doctors don't care that all of his memories haven't returned. Even though he doesn't remember, he seems to believe the doctors and says that Cawley was the only one who tried to help him - he didn't remember, but he believed it anyway. So, is the flashback just the story he was told to confess - an internalized false confession - something he believes because he was brainwashed, but doesn't really remember?

It's little nuggets of wisdom like this one that never would have occurred to me if it weren't for Gleamer and her persistence on this board to point out all of the inconsistencies with the commonly-accepted story-line that the doctors present.

How can you say that you don't remember the loops, and then you follow it up by saying that Cawley was the only one who tried to help you? Do you remember or don't ya?

The obvious follow-up question that the doctors DON'T ask is "Okay, so exactly what do you remember?" to make sure that he's cured.

There's only two possible explanations: Either they've brainwashed him into believing that they're helping them, or he's still completely messed up in the head.

But the doctors got the answer that they wanted, so either way, they don't care.

This is a HUGE red flag that something is wrong here.

The same thing happens when Teddy comes back from the cave and encounters Cawley...

Speaking of which, have you seen him, doctor?
Who?
My partner Chuck.
You don't have a partner, marshal. You came here alone. You know--I've built something valuable here, and valuable things have a way of being misunderstood in their own time. Everyone wants a quick fix--They always have. I'm trying to do something that people (yourself included) don't understand, and I'm not going to give up without a fight.
I can see that.
So tell me again about your partner.
What partner?

The obvious follow-up question here is "The partner that you're so determined to find?", but that question never comes. Teddy gives him the answer that he wants, so Cawley lets him go.

Yep, Teddy successfully outsmarts the doctor who supposedly knew every detail of the loops that Teddy has been playing out over and over for two years straight, yet he was easily played for a fool this time.

And there's more to that scene... Cawley puts him through this elaborate "role-play" experiment and says at the end how important it is that Teddy get cured, yet he's gonna forget that easily which partner Teddy is talking about?

Of course he knew exactly which partner that Teddy was talking about!

There's only one possible explanation--Cawley is trying to bully Teddy into accepting the lie that he's feeding him, and if he doesn't accept, he gets put away. But Teddy was on to him and quickly gave the right answer, and Cawley (amazingly) accepted it. This never came up in any of the previous loops?

So you put these scenes together (along with a helluva lot more that we haven't even touched on yet), and you get Brainwashing 101. Yet there are people who have been posting on this board for years who still refuse to see it.

They think that you can't brainwash anyone unless you torture the hell out of them and deprive them of basic needs. It doesn't have to be that drastic--I've seen it first-hand!

It's gonna be sad to see these boards go--especially you Gleamer. Thank you so much for all of your time and hard work dissecting this movie (and putting up with A LOT of crap and responding to it with pure class) over the years. If there were more Gleamers on these boards (and less You-Know-Whos), I bet IMDb wouldn't have made this decision.

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I do appreciate you, soggy. There haven't been enough open-minded posters here, I'm afraid.

One of the big red flags in this movie is how the doctors don't do what we would expect them to do if they are really trying to help Andrew. Besides the details you refer to, the fact that they never provide emotional support for "Andrew" at what must be the lowest point of his life. His memories were so overwhelming he dissociated. They inculcate false guilt - the "guilt complex" was considered a major neurosis at the time. That makes no sense. They also never show compassion for Teddy/Andrew or provide any emotional support to help him deal with his losses as his memories returned. Instead, at the time they should have been focusing on Andrew and the emotional fallout from the return of his traumatic memories, THEY FOCUS ON THEMSELVES. They will be discredited and lose everything! They ask a man who is acutely disturbed in the midst of a major emotional crisis to DO THEM A FAVOR. They will lose EVERYTHING unless "Andrew" goes along with what they want! They treat him as if all he has to do to not be mentally ill is just decide not to be -either to avoid a lobotomy or to keep them from losing their program and professional reputations. 

Why haven't viewers questioned the cruelty of the "you have no partner" or Cawley taunting "Andrew" with "why you all wet baby?" Or Sheehan yelling impatiently to "Andrew" as he described the alleged trauma that caused him to dissociate? Or how cold they are to him as they demand his confession and his assurance that he won't "relapse"? Or that threats don't cure mental illness?

Since Cawley said he wished Teddy could keep his delusions if he could, but because he was dangerous, they wanted to lobotomize him, why did Scorsese go out of his way in the final scene to show us that he was NOT dangerous when they took him away? He was calm and serene even - staff walked all around him unafraid. The answer has always been - they knew him so well they knew he would be violent in the future.  But they didn't know him well enough to know that he would have preferred a lobotomy to their "cure"?

Lots of people are critical of the movie because there are so many details that don't add up. Every one of these disappointed viewers presume that the superficial explanation is the only way to see it. The common understanding isn't a serious movie at all. I hope that in time, the film will be appreciated for its actual genius. As it is, the crummy genre thriller plot is actually the story made up by amateurs - the characters of the doctors - they are the ones who created the lame anagrams (the law of 4 the doctor loved so much), an unrealistic mental illness and an unverifiable back story.  But, if a viewer keeps an open mind and realizes that the doctors can't provide a reliable exposition because they are antagonists who would lie to cover-up the unethical experiments Teddy suspects, then all the details have a place - no suspension of disbelief required.




Bye, all!


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The really enormous problem with a Teddy is Teddy theory is that it raises more questions than it answers,as you yourself found out.

There is nothing in the film that suggests that Teddy was actually specially selected and would never be missed by anyone ever, nor is there anything to suggest that the US Marshals decided to be "in" on the whole plan to send him there as a Guinea Pig.

There is no actual brain washing shown,in fact the doctors are never shown to be doing anything remotely close to brainwashing.What's more is nobody who believes Teddy is Teddy has ever been able to say exactly where the brainwashing takes place!

Anything that fills in the massive chasm that is the TiT theory is pure fan fiction I'm afraid.

Teddy is not Teddy,the writers,actors,film makers have all confirmed that the story is that Teddy is really Andrew a former US marshal who killed his wife after she murdered their children. He was committed to Ashecliffe as a criminally insane patient who had invented an alter ego called Teddy Daniels.The doctors were attempting a last ditch attempt to bring him back to reality using role play to save him from a lobotomy.







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Change has to be here obviously

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Why does Chuck antagonize Teddy in the mausoleum during the storm? He seems to be purposefully putting paranoid, strange thoughts into his mind and yelling at him?

Great question. I believe it's the interpretation of this scene that informs one's overall take on the story.




Is this to be an empathy test?

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Agreed. So what's your take on it Lanis?

When I first watched it, I thought that Chuck must really be his partner to be bringing this up (and I was waiting for the "So why did they want YOU to come here?" question from Teddy).

Then of course later we find out that he was never his partner named Chuck and is really Dr. Sheehan (no matter how you interpret the story).

I'm guessing that there are 2 possibilities under TiT...

1) Sheehan was trying to put all sorts of paranoid thoughts in his head so that they would have more reason to commit him.

2) Since Sheehan seemed to be telling him the truth, maybe he took this moment (without Cawley around) to tell him what is really going on to give him a chance to escape. Maybe Sheehan wasn't as gung-ho about the brainwashing experiments as Cawley was, and he had a moment of weakness where he actually felt bad for Teddy, so he decided to throw him a bone.

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I have an idea while you're waiting for lanis.

Teddy has a just vague suspicion that they are doing unethical mind experiments. Because at least one goal is to get Teddy to believe his suspicions about the unethical experiments are delusional, they have to first give Teddy a specific suspicion that they can then set up something to show that his suspicions are baseless.

They need him to be suspicious of what they are really doing (in a limited way), so they can make him think he is crazy for believing it. They get him to be suspicious of lobotomies in the lighthouse, so that when he gets to the lighthouse and doesn't see lobotomies (or "nazi experiments" and "satanic ORs ) they can say it is "impossible" that they are doing unethical experiments at all.

This is so obvious, that once Teddy got some rest and came back to his senses, he would have known that was a crock - Cawley getting to the lighthouse before him meant that even if there had been experiments, they had time to get rid of the evidence before Teddy arrived. And he would have realized that experiments could be anywhere - not just in the lighthouse. He also would have realized that he was the subject of an unethical experiment. In the novel and the screenplay he knows about the Nuremberg Code and knows that they try to skirt the rule by claiming that experiments are "treatments", and he's not buying that.




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

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Gleam, that is an excellent explanation (as usual), and it makes perfect sense. Thanks!

As I was reading through this thread, I got the idea that maybe Sheehan wasn't as bad as Cawley and was actually trying to help Teddy out for a minute.

This is the only part of the movie where Sheehan shows any emotion--He's pretty much deadpan the rest of the time (giving me the impression that he's not really into the brainwashing-plan as much as Cawley), but I guess that's just how Mark Ruffalo played the role, and it doesn't mean anything.

I knew you and Foxcatcher didn't think so, but I thought that I'd see if Lanis thought I had a good idea since I hadn't seen it posted on this board yet. But I don't think Lanis is coming back, so I'm glad you responded.

A long time ago, I thought that Teddy and Chuck were really partners, and that Cawley just succeeded in brainwashing Chuck before Teddy. Or maybe he didn't brainwash Chuck--He just cornered him and threatened him that if he didn't pretend to be Teddy's psychiatrist at the lighthouse, they would do awful things to him.

Anyway, I see now that I was way off on that. Your reasoning makes a lot more sense.

One interesting Sheehan-line is "Don't you recognize me?" at the lighthouse.

At this point, I was screaming at my screen "Of course not! If he did, he would've said so way back when you were in the boat!"

This is just another example of the doctors trying to beat Teddy down and prove to him that he's lost his mind and isn't capable of thinking for himself.

What scumbags Cawley and Sheehan are. I've tried hard to see some good in them, but unfortunately, there just isn't any good there to see.

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I might be over influenced by the prologue of the novel, but I think that Sheehan has a conscience and regrets about what he did to Teddy. My take on the final scene is that Teddy and Sheehan are speaking in a sort of coded language. They are always being watched. If you think about it, once these guys become involved in these illegal and unethical activities, they are seriously at risk themselves. There were a lot of professionals involved in experiments they knew were illegal and harmful. Some of them were surely uncomfortable with what they were doing, but where are the whistle blowers? Some think that Frank Olson was killed because he was having serious doubts about the experiments he was doing, and it was feared that he would go public. Given what he knew, he was a huge threat if he went public.

So, since they are always monitored, they can't speak freely. I think that when Teddy asks Chuck how he's doing and Chuck says, "can't complain" it means that he really can't complain or he would be in trouble. Thinking back to the first time the staff was interviewed, Nurse Moreno was uncomfortable saying that Rachel complained about the food. Glen Miga was scared of the authority (Cawley) as was Kearns - they were all afraid of saying the wrong thing.j

So, I think what they were talking about wasTeddy's decision - was he going to conform or not? That isn't the way it would be if he was really mentally ill because people can't just decide to not be psychotic and this is clearly what they are expecting of Teddy. As I recall, Teddy's answer was "we gotta get off this rock, Chuck. Whatever they are doing, it's bad." And Sheehan replies something like, "I thought you would say that.". That isn't a mental status evaluation, it is asking him for a final decision and Sheehan knew which way Teddy was leaning - they all knew. They must have known.

Teddy's cryptic question about living as a monster or dying as a good man is teddy asking if Sheehan will defect. I suspect he recognized that Sheehan had regret and guilt about what he did. So, like Sheehan asked about Teddy's decision about conforming, teddy is asking Sheehan to make a choice. Only monsters are allowed to live on Shutter Island. Good men are lobotomized. The question is about Sheehan will he live as a monster (taking the safe path of conformity) or die as a good man (take the risk of standing up for what's right) ? His answer is evident in his inability to look Teddy in the eye and the way he looks down in shame. Teddy didn't want to put Sheehan at risk, so the exchange was indirect. To me that explanation is the best way to account for the way the scene plays out.

I don't think there is much of a case for Sheehan ever being Teddy's partner. I have wondered if he was a psychiatrist because he seemed unsure of what to do about Teddy's migraine - like he didn't even know what it was. There are a couple of times when it appears that Chuck is an authority above Cawley - in Rachels room when they find the note, he gets between Cawley and Teddy and signals Cawley to step back. There are a couple of moments in Cawley's living room when Chuck seems to be in charge. I wondered if he was an intelligence operative specializing in hypnosis. Or possibly, he was the one called in to implement the radical, cutting edge role-play. I'm not convinced that he knew Teddy before the game. The don't you recognize me,Andrew, seems like a suggestion of a detail they want him to accept as fact. The main reason I think he may not have been at Ashecliffe before is that he seemed unfamiliar with Ward C like he'd never been there before and didn't know his way around - he even asks if Noyce had told him anything about the layout of the building.

Again, this is based on the book, but it is unusual that the narrative isn't first person, Sheehan, but rather third person subjective, Teddy. How does Sheehan know everything Teddy thinks? In the book he thinks highly of Teddy, but refers to Andrew and Rachel as"twin terrors". That makes me wonder if he created Teddy, and that's why he knows what he thinks? It looks to me like his contribution is ericksonian covert hypnosis and the sort of hypnosis Estabrook said he did to create multiple personalities.

Sheehan is pretty harsh in the way he confronts Teddy with the "truth" that was supposed to be so painful it caused the man to dissociate. Neither doctor shows any compassion or consideration of his feelings or support him emotionally as his supposedly traumatic memories returned. But, I think they feel justified in their experiments because they rationalize they are doing something necessary for national security. I don't think they want to hurt Teddy for fun and they probably would like to minimize his pain as much as possible. Unfortunately, however, using an individual without his consent, putting him at risk and betraying him means they knew what they were doing was going to hurt Teddy and they did it anyway. At the end, Sheehan seems like an ordinary chicken sheet bested by his victim.

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

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