So why all the mystery? Why weren't things just made a little bit clearer?
After uttering that last line, he leaps up and strides purposefully into the midst of the waiting lobotomists they don't have to jump him. In his final murmurings, DiCaprio is clearly trying to act as if he's acting. The film, according to Gilligan, shows it succeeding, at least in dispelling delusion.Ī second look at the film suggests that Gilligan's reading must be right. Shutter Island the book shows such a treatment failing. Gilligan, however, is firmly opposed to this trend, and keen to see psychosocial treatments defended. This debate shows some signs of being rekindled: growing understanding of brain physiology is reawakening interest in tinkering with its workings. If it fails, the lobotomists' position will be reinforced. If it works, non-invasive treatment will have proved itself. Andrew's doctor (played by Ben Kingsley) is one of these. However, progressives were pushing for the replacement of such methods by less ruinous remedies. In America, more than 40,000 patients were lobotomised over a 30-year period. During that era, severe mental disturbances were often dealt with physically. If treatment returns them to their senses, guilt may then overwhelm them.įor Gilligan, the correct reading is important. I'm not going to actually commit suicide, but I'm going to vicariously commit suicide by handing myself over to these people who're going to lobotomise me." Gilligan says that people who kill others in the way Andrew has don't realise what they're doing at the time. According to Gilligan, those cryptic last words mean: "I feel too guilty to go on living. His answer was clear cut.Īndrew does indeed choose his fate. On a visit to the location where most of the film was shot, the now-abandoned Medfield state hospital in Massachusetts, I asked the professor what was really supposed to be happening.
One of these was Scorsese's psychiatric adviser, Professor James Gilligan of New York University.
It's just one moment of sanity mixed in the midst of all the other delusions."Īs it happens, just how to end the film was much debated by those more directly involved. "Personally, I think he has a momentary flash," he suggests. When pushed, he tries to reconcile DiCaprio's gnomic inquiry with his own original story. Sadly, even he doesn't seem wholly certain: he explains that he stayed out of the scripting process. Lehane is credited as one of the film's executive producers, so you might think he at least would know what's going on. He found his role traumatising, and told an interviewer: "I remember saying to Marty, 'I have no idea where I am or what I'm doing.'" Yet Scorsese hasn't chosen to indicate which is the right one.
These two versions of what the film means could hardly be more at odds. His unusual treatment's made him aware of the terrible thing he's done: guilt has therefore engulfed him, and he's deliberately getting himself lobotomised to escape it. Others, however, take it as meaning that Andrew's only faking his relapse. "This place makes me wonder," he asks, "which would be worse – to live as a monster, or to die as a good man?"įor some, this is to be seen as no more than the rambling of a madman. However, before he falls into the clutches of the lobotomists, he utters a line that isn't in the book. Leonardo DiCaprio's Teddy does indeed turn out to be Andrew. The film's been described as faithful to the book, and many cinemagoers seem to have assumed that it's telling the same story. The role play fails: after a brief recovery, Andrew relapses into insanity and is therefore taken off to be lobotomised. He's a patient in a mental hospital who's been encouraged by his psychiatrist to act out his delusion in the hope that this will dispel it. The book's protagonist, Teddy Daniels, who's apparently a US marshal, turns out to be Andrew Laeddis, a demented killer. Martin Scorsese's film is based on a best-selling novel by Dennis Lehane.