SHUTTER ISLAND: A CROSS COMPARISON

In this section we’ll do an exhaustive survey of one of the most Shining-esque films I’ve yet to uncover: Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island. If you haven’t seen the film, beware of spoilers from here on out. If you have, you might want a refresher, since I’m going to try to avoid belabouring points. All set? Let’s go!

Okay, so, before we get into it I just want to say that I’m not saying Shutter Island is Kubrick’s The Shining. I think they were conceived, composed, and executed in extremely similar ways. But the purpose of this analysis isn’t to suggest the films are making every point identically, perfect twins, though you will note that they will start to seem like twins in some senses, and inversions in others. Also, all my points aren’t created equal; some parallels will seem eerier than others. And while I’m comparing the films for the most part, in some cases I’m simply analyzing Shutter Island for the sake of distinguishing that film’s purpose. The distinction should be clear in all cases.

Also, I recently read the novel, and found a few more points that I could add to this, but I’ll just note that there’s an extended sequence during the first meeting of Dr. John Cawley, Chuck Aule and Teddy Daniels where they ponder about how it’s a funny quirk of language that the name John is sometimes rendered as “Jack” (Torrance?), or how Chuck can be rendered as “Charles” (Grady?). If you want additional examples, go read the book! It’s great! Okay! Let’s actually go this time!

• A big general thing of note is the fact that Shutter Island was filmed in 2008 by one of the leading filmmakers in the world, starring one of the biggest stars, and yet wasn’t released until two years after principal shooting wrapped (by comparison, all four other Scorsese-DiCaprio pictures were released the year after shooting). Not the craziest thing, if indeed it was simple happenstance, but dig this: the other major Shine Baby I’ve discovered is Christopher Nolan’s Inception, also released in 2010. What are the odds that two of the most open and evident Shine Babies would be released months from each other, both starring the same lead actor, both 30 years after The Shining debuted?
• Also, those familiar with my Pillars of Hercules theory will have an easier time understanding my general thoughts on the Teddy/Dolores sequences.
• The film opens to the tune of György Ligeti’s Lontano, featured in three scenes of The Shining. Lontano means “far” or “distant”, which is what both the Overlook and Shutter Island are from society, and what both Jack and Teddy are from their mental transformations/endgames.
• Also, this takes place in ’54, which is the inverse of ’45, the year Dachau was liberated by our hero, Teddy, and others. The Shining is riddled with such inversions (the Grady murders of 1970, the Overlook was built in 1907). Also, there are nine years between these events (1945-1954), just as there are nine years between the Grady murders and the Torrance hiring (1970-1979). ’54 also happens to be the year The Caine Mutiny came out, the only other film before The Shining to film at the Ahwahnee Hotel, or to use its design as inspiration for a setting.

• Teddy reflects on the vastness of the ocean, which is part of what’s making him sick. This is similar to the opening shots of the Montanan mountains that will entrap the Torrances. So, right away both narratives would have us know that nature and isolation are part of the problem. Both perspective characters are, perhaps, unbearably humbled by the hopelessness of their tiny lives in the grand scope of things.

• Teddy looks directly into the camera while looking into a mirror, saying “pull yourself together”. Jack Torrance does this near the mid-point of the film (while doing the opposite of pulling himself together), and it’s at that exact moment that we think Jack’s finally lost it, since he seems to be talking only to himself, and then we see Lloyd.
• In keeping with The Shining’s way of setting up enormous information about the story and characters in their first appearances, Teddy is first seen here wearing the tie that will be the totem of his wife’s influence over his character, the root of his unfocus.
• Also, this is technically Andrew looking into the mirror and calling himself “Teddy”. As discussed in detail elsewhere, Lloyd acts as a kind of midway point between Jack and Grady (his outfit is Jack’s red jacket overtop Grady’s butlerish suit and tails). Jack goes to him for comfort after being scorned by Wendy for strangling Danny (which we know he didn’t do). Here, Andrew is going to “Teddy” for comfort, to avoid facing his real identity. What this implies is that Shutter Island starts at the spiritual centre of The Shining, at the moment of the perspective character’s ultimate self-delusion, and charts his journey to oblivion (sort of like a Mugen Noh Theatre version of The Shining). Narratively, this is interesting since, although Shutter Island has characters that remind of Wendy, Danny, Hallorann, Ullman, and others, this is much more Andrew/Teddy’s story than The Shining was Jack’s. This is doubly interesting because The Shining has a way of starting at the middle too.

• Teddy emerges from a door marked “1-11-OD” which bears a resemblance to the C-1 inscription above the storeroom, and the room here is full of hanging, mostly unlocked shackles, just as that room was full of hanging knives. The mark above the opposite door is “1-15-D”. If this is something clever, I haven’t figured it out. If it refers to the timecode, these times (1:11-1:15) perfectly frame our first look at Teddy seeing himself in the mirror.

• Main characters (Jack and Teddy) both wear a somewhat discordant array of grey, brown, white and green. Both their ties are green, just as the first other man they encounter (Ullman, Chuck) is wearing a red tie and a blue suit.
• The stairs behind Teddy have nine rungs. Rungs = years. 9 years: the time since Dachau.

• This shot is reminiscent of the one of Jack and Watson from behind. Clearly different men, but similar enough as to cause a sense of not knowing which is which. They blur in our mind’s eye, and we assume they’re similar enough, despite the fact that they turn out to be quite different. Watson also regards Jack with an unearthly skepticism once the pleasantries are out of the way (as will Chuck regard Teddy), and both Jack and Teddy are too preoccupied with their own concerns to notice.

• Teddy’s name is Teddy Daniels. Jack Daniels. The Shining is beside itself with bears and Teddy bears.
• Also, Teddy’s partner is buttering him up, somewhat, calling him, “the man, the legend”. In that sense, he’s playing Teddy’s enabler, but he’s also suggesting the mythical nature of the Teddy Daniels character–who is Andrew’s invention. Repeat viewers know that Chuck Aule (Ruffalo) is Teddy’s therapist, Dr. Lester Sheehan, and if he’s meant to echo Danny, it fits with Danny’s book character as the boy who idolizes his father, despite their abuse history, and who is at the end unable to protect his father from the miseries that hounded him.
• Chuck’s praise here also echoes Ullman’s ultimate positive regard for Jack, and the way both films are presenting this humble figure from the get-go as a kind of blown-up Ultimate Man.
• We won’t hear anyone say Aule’s name for some time yet, but we should note here that it sounds like half of Ullman.

• Teddy says he can’t stomach the water. Like an alcoholic going cold turkey, he’s retching, he’s a mess, he’s got a band-aid on his forehead (after Wendy’s bat crack?). For a moment he’s pulling his coat together with his right hand, which is something Jack does all throughout the final maze chase.

• The waves as they approach don’t quite look real, even to the untrained eye. This establishes the unreality of the premise from the get-go.
• But also, the choppiness of the water means it won’t mirror any distant landscape, like St. Mary Lake at the beginning of The Shining. This also allows for the clouds to have a consistent, controlled quality from shot to shot, just as Kubrick achieved with the Overlook exterior set, and the rear screen projection.
• Teddy asks what Chuck’s boys have “been smoking over in Portland, anyway”. Shining talks about two Portlands. Chuck corrects, “Seattle. I came from the office in Seattle.” And gives Teddy a scanning look, as if looking for the recognition that something in the matrix has changed. It’s also a bit like Chuck is saying, “I’m not your Lloyd, Teddy…so who is?” But Teddy is Teddy’s Lloyd. How do you hold a mirror to a mirror without creating a hall of mirrors?

• Teddy has his first memory of his dead wife, and she’s putting a tie around his neck the same colours as her dress. It’s the same tie he’s wearing on the boat. There’s a large, out of focus landscape painting nearby. And a strange record is playing on the player that sounds an awful lot like the Wendy Carlos score from the drive to the Overlook. So, if that’s Dies Irae being invoked, and that song is about Judgment Day, I’d say that pairs nicely with Dolores’ storyline.
• Also, we’ll see this in better relief later on, but over Teddy’s shoulder here is a painting with a bunch of lily pads in a pond, which of course foreshadows the truth behind the murders of his children (he pulls them out of such a pond). And beneath the painting are two red bull figurines (only one visible here), which is similar to the one behind Wendy at the breakfast table, but also, the fact that there’s only one seen here, but two seen later helps build on the notion that, at first, we only get the notion of Dolores’ role in a murder, and eventually we realize that both Teddy and his wife are murderers. So her application of the tie suggests the way she passed the role of murderer onto him. Also, the sequence of Andrew pulling his dead children from the pond is at the very end, so just as The Shining‘s beginning and end tie together, so does Shutter Island‘s, if a little more observably.

• Teddy says a fire at their apartment killed her while he was at work. He emphasizes that it was the smoke that killed her, not the fire. “See that’s…that’s important.” Wendy is constantly smoking, and the signs all over the hotel are telling her not to. “Four people died” = Grady, Grady’s wife and the two daughters? Of course, in the reality of Shutter Island, this number also corresponds to Dolores, and their three children.

• Teddy’s tie is largely purple and green, the 237 carpet colours. Chuck’s tie is red, brown and orange, the carpet outside 237 colours. 

• Chuck (referring to the dangers of Shutter Island): “Well, if it was just folks hearing voices and chasing after butterflies, they wouldn’t need us.” Of course, Danny and Jack, and finally even Wendy, hear voices, and butterflies figure prominently in the Suite 3 bedroom.

• Both films feature, around the 3 minute mark, the awesomeness of the ominous landmass that the story will take place at. Unlike The Shining, Shutter Island will ratchet up this tension for a while longer, snapping it off only once we’re inside the compound, which goes with the way the tension drains out of The Shining once Jack steps into the Overlook.
• The song that we hear here is Krzysztof Penderecki’s Symphony No. 3 Passacaglia – Allegro Moderato. Penderecki’s work features extensively in The Shining, and while he didn’t compose the Dies Irae that plays over the approach to the Overlook, he did compose a Dies Irae (1968), and dedicated it to the victims of Auschwitz.

• On the ride in, they establish that the island cannot be left once the men are dropped off.
• Also, the ship’s captain warns about a coming storm, just like Wendy’s/Hallorann’s news broadcast. Again, bearing in mind that Shutter Island starts from the middle of The Shining, news of a “weather emergency” is happening right at the centre of The Shining. What’s strange is that, at the end, the head doctor, Cawley, will suggest that the storm is a fragment of Andrew’s psychosis, so perhaps having the captain announce this helps suggest that the reason the waves looked fake is because they were never that far (lontano) from the island. The captain, like everyone else, was always in on it.
• Also, the captain is planting the notion of a storm in Teddy’s head here. So Cawley’s later insistence that the storm is part of Teddy’s delusional cycle is a bit funny since the team of deceivers is actively generating the image for Teddy. Perhaps the point there is to underscore the fact that this entire thing is a set-up. Teddy’s free will was always going to be limited. He had no other choice.
• Of course, the idea of an imprisoning storm is also central to The Shining, and its inspiration, Edgar Allen Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, and that story’s inspiration, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

• At first we get that huge, beautiful shot of the island, with all the large buildings around it all nicely squared out from each other, and in the next shot, the land has totally blocked out the sky. As the dock approaches, the claustrophobia steps up a notch.

• As the guards escort Teddy and Chuck off the boat, they walk in a diamond shape, like a compass, north and south guarding east (Chuck) and west (Teddy). The two detectives are imperfect twins in their matching beige coats and hats, and the officers are far better twins, in every respect but age. This symbol also reflects the Four Directions and didrachm symbolism throughout The Shining. (The captain had a similar shape on his cap.)

• There’s an increasingly odd and immediate sense of unbalance at play here. Teddy and Chuck are being called in to help with this investigation, but both men are dressed like shabby parodies of 1954 detectives. All the men on the island are dressed in polished black leather uniforms, almost like the SS officers in Inglourious Basterds. Why would the men who work here be sooooo much better off than the hired help? Do they simply have nothing more to do on the island than shine their caps, and polish their cufflinks? Also, in keeping with the REDRUM mirrorform way of looking at things, the AH – AH pins in everyone’s lapels look kinda like a backwards HA HA. As in, ain’t this whole shebang a big fucking hilarious joke? Give it a think!

• In fact, Teddy is actually shabbier looking than Chuck, which you first attribute to his seasickness, but his hat, coat, and attire are all bent and ruffled and lined, and sagging, and subtly unfashionable, as if cobbled together from a few people’s wardrobes. You imagine that this could also be owing to Teddy’s holding on to things his dead wife gave him.

• John Carroll Lynch introduces himself as Deputy Warden McPherson. Son of fear. Prince of “Shudder” Island.

• The name of the institution is Ashecliffe. So we already have another connection to fire. Ashes will play a large symbolic role in Teddy’s future. Also, note the patch on McPherson’s arm here, which bears a (poor) resemblance to the ones worn by the Overlook staff. Also, the red T-shape does have a certain (uncanny?) valley quality.
• Also, the red triangle will show up later in one of Teddy’s visions of Dachau, but since we’re getting our first look at one such patch here, note that red triangles meant something in Nazi concentration camps. They denoted political prisoners.

• There’s a momentary shot of a fire hydrant near the beach. Danny idolizes fire fighters. But also, it seems like an inconvenient locale, given the spread of the buildings. I suppose it’s there to put out fires on any incoming boats. Speaking of which, it’s funny that the boat they arrived on is still sitting there (under warm, sunny skies) after, presumably, some minutes, after the captain’s curt insistence that they “hurry up about it”. What’s he waiting for?

• In the sweeping helicopter shot, that tracks right up to the jeep (in true Shining fashion), we see a church, several red brick buildings, but most interestingly, one building with no roof. Not sure what that’s about.

• The first thing they pass is a cemetery, presumably of the inmates who’ve died here. “Remember us for we too have lived, loved and laughed.” So, again, we have that sense of death below our feet. Like the “Indian burial ground” the Overlook is thought to be built upon. This also echoes Cawley’s question to Andrew at the end, about his daughter, “Are you going to deny that she ever *lived*? Andrew, are you?”

• Teddy: “Electrified perimeter.” Chuck: “How can you tell?” Teddy: “Seen something like it before.” Already, at 6 minutes in, Teddy is hinting at his deep sense of déjà vu. Jack: “It was almost as if…I’d been here before….” Jack is describing arriving at the Overlook for the first time.

• The drive into the final holding pen is a bit like when Jack and Wendy reach the bathroom on the Abbey Road Tour. The claustrophobia has reached fever pitch in this innocuous place. Why?

• Also, when the final gate is opened on Ashecliffe, we see for a moment that the grounds look lovely with all the manicured gardens, and the spooky, intense music takes on a momentary comical quality, similar to the music that leads to the Overlook (when we see the building looking positively normal, boring and sun-bleached on the mountainside).

• Ward A is male, ward B is female. A similar gender hierarchy is established. Like how Ullman tells Dick to tour the kitchen to Wendy alone, as if Jack would never need to know how to work a kitchen. Wendy is picked up again by the tour and taken off to the boiler room where, as we see later, a dozen nude photos/paintings are hung about the work station.

• Ward A is still as a dead tree, and ward B has two women ascending the steps. From afar, they have the bearing of twins in their matching…blue and white outfits.

• Ward C is where the most dangerous inmates are kept. In an “old Civil War fort” says McPherson. We see a jeep and some kinda Austin/Studebaker/whateveroldcar parked nearby, and now the grounds appear littered with inmates, as if Ward C were somehow overflowing. There’s an interesting unspecified gender combination/delineation at play in Ward C. Also, Shutter Island is not gonna go light or subtle on the war imagery. But, again, we’ve seen The Shining–we don’t need subtle. Perhaps the point of Ward C’s ambiguous gender ratio owes to the reality that war effects everybody, and how there’s no gender barrier on psychopathy.

• Ward C (Reality?) cannot be accessed without the presence and permission of Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and McPherson. Dr. Cawley might be meant to echo Crowley, as in Aleister. But a Border Collie is a dog, and The Shining is full of dogs.

• “Execution order 319” McPherson says, means he has final authority, and so they’ll surrender their weapons. 319 has the ring of a 237. The number in the book is 391. Another inversion.
• Also, the over-shoulder guards here have the ring of the two US Forest Rangers, in their old-young bashful-grumpy dynamics.
• The five men have also transformed from a four directions diamond shape to a V shape, which is half a diamond. Also, the twin effect is being broken into a symmetry effect of black-beige-black-beige-black. Midnight blue, but you get the idea.

• Chuck fumbles taking off his gun because he’s a pretend cop and the real cops know it. They roll their eyes. Teddy is having his first moment of suspicion here.

• The leg cuffs worn by the inmates echo the loose, hanging cuffs from the intro. Just as Jack learns about Grady and imagines he could never become like that, Teddy sees this and senses the (false) gulf between them.

• Two of the orderlies on the cross to see Cawley are young black men. The camera also tracks backwards here, as the performers walk toward it, making a zig-zagging series of short turns. As such, the background swings widely.

• On the approach to Cawley: men in the distance up ladders.

• Also on the cross, Teddy spies three particular inmates: a man, an older man, and a much older woman. This seems a bit like the three main Overlook ghosts. The woman has bloody eyes, a slit throat and is gesturing to be quiet. The bath crone is very quiet. When Teddy looks again, the woman is grinning devilishly to herself, sort of like how the crone laughs without ever saying anything. Also, the crone ghost strangles Danny, rendering him mute, but Shutter Island is more concerned about how our mental health struggles affect us internally.
• Note the similarities in the hairstyles between all three figures and their ghost counterparts.

• In fact, there’s a younger woman being shepherded out of the way to reveal the older woman. They have similar builds. Sort of like the crone ghost transformation.

• The red bulb that lets them in is a bit like the red bulbs above the lockers in the kitchen.

• There’s a catwalk above the intake at Cawleys. The floor is see-through, and patterned like two crossing railroad tracks. Railyards are a recurring image in The Shining, but prominently in Carson City, which is all about the building of a railyard.

• Two portraits are hung about the intake. I’m just noting this. The Overlook is beset with old portraits, but they don’t start showing up until 21 minutes into the film.
• Incidentally, the people in the Overlook portraits are Nakoda, which means “friend” or “ally”. So, perhaps Shutter Island is similarly concerned with defanging the public attitude toward mental health practitioners. That said, the relationship between such practitioners and the mentally aggrieved is a bit different from the old cowboys and indians dynamic.

• When Teddy and Chuck flash their ID, both are difficult to make out with their time on screen, but Teddy’s looks real, and Chuck’s is too out of focus to tell. Teddy’s has an eagle insignia on it.

• Cawley has a bunch of old artefacts and leather bound books (colour coded: red/green/blue—the colours of TV light guns?), not unlike the display cases in the lounge and lobby. The windows are also stain glass a la the Colorado lounge (with butterfly designs in them?). At least one of his idols is a Venus figurine. Perhaps simply an allusion to pre-history, or to the pre-early climate change worship of female deities?

• Cawley shakes Teddy’s hand enthusiastically and friendily, much like Ullman and Watson both do with Jack before becoming more morose. I’m too worn out from my Shining research to go identifying every piece of art here, but note that the two paintings behind them here are of two ships running into each other. In fact, they are the same painting in mirrorform, though different little red lamps sit beside them to highlight their inversion. Note the similar dark wood of the sculptures behind Cawley, and the two eagles in Ullman’s office.

• He also addresses Ruffalo as Marshal Aule (Marsh-all-all), giving us the first instance of Chuck Aule’s name spoken aloud, which is spoken more softly, away from the camera, and with more gravity and finality than he said “Marshal Daniels”. Having the name “All” is interesting. We’ve been given this notion of Ward C as consummate reality. But all is more than reality. All encompasses reality and fantasy. There’s also a tone to it like “This is ‘all’ you need to understand to get this movie.” Figure out who Aule is and you’ll figure out everything. “That’s ‘all.’” Cawley’s next line of dialogue is actually, “Thank you, Deputy Warden. That will be all.”
• Also note that the two actual doctors in this scene are here overlapping with the mirrorform ship paintings. These men are more alike than Cawley and Teddy.
• Aule also sounds like the sound at the end of Daniels, Teddy’s last name. Dan-ee-uhl-s. Which implies a closeness between them, the little dot of yin inside the yang. But of course it’s also inside Cawley. So perhaps it acts as the bridge between all these men.
• Incidentally, Aulë (Ow-lay), spelled the same as Chuck Aule, is also the name of a god in Lord of the Rings. The one who creates the dwarves before the creation of men, which went against the plans of Ilúvatar, the ultimate god of that universe. This might be a hint at Sheehan’s seemingly rebellious nature, siding with nutty Teddy over the good doctors.

• Cawley’s office is bedecked with artwork. Portraits, busts, sculptures, photos, drawings and paintings (like the Overlook, but with busts!). Upon McPherson’s departure we get this shot of Pan, which can be translated as “all”, between Aule and Daniels. The word “panic” also comes from Pan, who was the Greek God of nature and, among many other things, theatrical criticism. Aule and Cawley are putting on a little play for Teddy here, and Teddy is judging them. Also, Peter Pan is invoked in The Shining through the “Wendy? Darling?!” line.
• Incidentally, I’m not a bust man, so if anyone can identify any of these sculptures, I’ll be happy to credit your contribution.

• Here’s two mirrorform copies of William Blake’s piece Nebuchadnezzar, which alludes to the bible’s book of Daniel (as in Teddy Daniels), both of which seem to be crawling away from the other, right (unlike the ships on the opposite wall)? One is colour, one is black and white, like the photos in the radio room, or the colours on the screen behind Wendy playing Carson City. To quote from Wikipedia, it “tells of a ruler who through hubris lost his mind and was reduced to animalistic madness and eating “grass and oxen.” According to biographer Alexander Gilchrist, in Blake’s print the viewer is faced with the “mad king crawling like a hunted beast…[with] spottings of the skin, which takes on the unnatural hues of green, blue and russet.” Sort of like our book collections here. Jack Torrance is writer/intellectual who wasn’t able to keep from devolving into animalistic madness.
• Also, just a note on those red-white-black books in the lower right: Nazi colours. A foreshadow?

• Cawley and Aule have the same colour ties here.
• As for how “Aule” can be heard inside the name “Cawley”: what remains when you extract the “Aule” from C-awl-ey? Key. Like Jar Jar Binks, they’re the key to understanding everything.

• As Teddy studies the art of insanity and torture, his memory isn’t jogged. Not even when Cawley suggests that former patients were “*drowned*” in the quest to invoke sanity.

• Teddy says “prisoner” and Cawley immediately corrects him with “patient”, enforcing on the story that there is no such thing as a prisoner, only patients that need curing. A utopian viewpoint to the skeptic or uninitiated. But this also speaks to the nature of the labyrinth. The labyrinth (a true labyrinth, not a laboratory rat maze) only locks you inside according to the strength of your mind. It has no doors, no locks or keys.

• The giant windows behind Cawley’s desk are like the ones behind Ullman’s desk, but unlike those, we’re given ample reason to suspect that what lies beyond here is real. Including the fact that the film never tries to suggest otherwise (and it would be rather self-defeating to do so).
• Though there is a slight resemblance between what lies beyond these windows and the design form of the room 237 bathroom. The dome shape with the twinning lights.

• Teddy says “Rachel Solando” and the sense of former knowledge this gives Teddy tricks us into thinking Teddy had more time before heading in than he did. In fact, both his name and hers are anagrams for himself and his dead wife, as we find out near the end. These anagrams are something like the genesis of his current mask of sanity. Also, “Solando” contains “Solo” (if only aurally): the two stories are one story. The story of the Laeddis family.
• Also, all the busts of unnamed men (while recognizable to some, perhaps) give the feeling of not knowing who someone is, but wanting to. It evokes an uncertainty in us about who exactly we’re looking at, and a sense of this knowledge being forgotten. The Shining is, in part, a lament for the poor memory of time, expressed most directly by the song It’s All Forgotten Now, which plays during the ghostball.

• Cawley says Rachel escaped “Last night. Sometime between ten and midnight.” Many of the events of The Shining are noted to happen between eleven and midnight.

• Cawley says Solando “killed all 3 of her children” and that the husband “died in Normandy”. He’s told one part of the story true (reading Rachel as Dolores), but used a myth to describe Teddy’s post-war self.
• He also embellishes Solando’s post-murders behaviour, summarizing her uncanny valley calm and serenity with the fable of her sitting the corpses around the breakfast table for a meal. This combination of eating and murder, sustenance and annihilation, is a real headscrew. Why would you want to survive after perpetrating such a heinous act? Why *does* Teddy?
• Also, note that behind Cawley’s head here is three pictures of brain sections beneath a profile of a man. Teddy is looking at a metaphoric representation of himself regarding his three dead children.
• Note: the phrenology bust (if that’s what it is) on Cawley’s desk here is interesting both for the way it marks Cawley as one behind modernity, but also bears a strange coincidence to the events of Django Unchained, in which Calvin Candie (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) invokes the “science of phrenology” as a way to disparage Django to his face. Also, Candie’s estate is called “Candyland” and a copy of Candyland the game appears on Danny’s shelf in The Shining. Also, both these scenes were shot by legendary cinematographer Robert Richardson.

• Teddy is shot with the two twin ship paintings right at his neck throughout this sequence. He is in the middle of the mirror, as it were.

• Solando’s story is not unlike Grady’s story, except she doesn’t suicide in it. Except in reality (where she’s Dolores), she does in a way. Also, note the top button on her left photo here. That Four Directions/didrachm shape is seen throughout The Shining. It’s also the rough shape of Ward C from above, as we’ll see later.
• Also, her jailhouse photo (a mock-up; this woman works for Ashecliffe) contains the number 17566. Concentration camp inmates were given numbers up to 20000 in some cases, post-1944, so I wonder if this was meant to jog Teddy’s memory. Since he is about to have a brief flashback. As for any significance the number itself might have, I’m not sure.

• The letters behind the photo here almost seem to say “REPENT” . I honestly don’t know if that’s significant, but I always assume that when Scorsese gets a chance to be religious, he’ll take it.
• Also, Solando’s shadowy throat here nicely echoes the bloody one she’ll have in a later vision.

• When Teddy sees Solando he has his first flashback to the war. In it, Teddy sees people frozen in impossible icefloes, like fish spilling out at a fishmongers. But how could they possibly have frozen like this? One of the girls is seen twice. This man encased in a block of ice brings to mind frozen Jack.

• Cawley calls both men “Marshal” after their titles, but it reinforces that twinning effect.
• Also, after Teddy downs the pills, he looks like he’s about to drink the water, and then the doc interrupts, and Teddy’s water glass has vanished…to its spot behind the picture frame here (at the base of the lamp). This is significant because when Teddy says “seasickness” Cawley affirms, “Mmm. Dehydration!” and brings him the pill and water. But as we all know, “too much damn water” is exactly Teddy’s problem. Also, several of the sculptures are animals, but they’re tough to discern: there’s a lion on Cawley’s desk, directly behind him during the latter part of the interview. Is that because…maybe he’s a-lyin’?

• Cawley says that Solando thinks Ashecliffe is her “place in the Berkshires” which is now considered one of the last 200 great places by the such and such society. Of course, the Berkshires is where Dolores drowned Teddy’s kids, so this is another direct reference to wake Teddy out of his delusion.

• To the repeat viewer, Cawley’s whole story of Solando is obviously the partial story of Teddy/Andrew, but what’s interesting is that while Ullman only subtly frets that Jack could be another Grady, Cawley and Sheehan/Aule know who Teddy really is. Cawley’s telling him a partial twin story of himself. Another inversion is that the punchline of the story (Grady’s murder of his family and suicide, Solando’s vanishment into the island) doesn’t happen the same way in The Shining, and does happen the same way metaphorically in Shutter Island. Teddy’s brains get scrambled, and he “evaporates” as if straight through the walls. Jack attempts to murder his family, but only succeeds in murdering a relative stranger. The other way to look at that is that Jack does kill who the Overlook wanted him to kill, while Teddy might be deliberately upending the experiment in a conscious suicide when he says his last cryptic line in the film.

• Also, Rachel’s escape is apparently absurd. And an absurdity it is, since it couldn’t have happened, and didn’t happen. The trick, it seems, with Shutter Island, is to present apparent impossibilities, which, nonetheless, ultimately have rational explanations.
• As Cawley is here saying “It’s as if she vanished. Straight through the walls.” the design behind him reminds of room 237, where a young woman vanishes and an old dead woman appears.

• Teddy studies the mark of someone who’s paced the same spot over and over, and in The Shining, characters are constantly retracing their steps or inverting their path, or someone else’s path. Unlike The Shining, which is partly about how retracing steps leads to victory, Shutter Island is about breaking the cycle of an endlessly repeated rotation of thought.

• Aule asks how many shoes the patients get. Cawley answers, “Two pairs.” It’s a small thing, but Danny has two pairs on his shelf here, and a pair of red galoshes.

• Following the pace-rutted path on the floor is how Teddy discovers the secret note. THE LAW OF 4 – WHO IS 67? This is obviously explained by the film later. But mysterious numbers are the Shining’s bread and butter. The 46 is 23 times two. And then the 7. Does it count if it’s not across the board? The expression sixes and sevens means confusion, disorder. So the note could be saying Who is confused? Which connects to the Tower of Babel, seen throughout the Overlook.

• Teddy inquires if Cawley thinks Rachel’s note is just “random scribblings” and Cawley replies that “Oh, no, not at all. Rachel’s smart. Brilliant, in fact.” But brilliance is not enough, is it?

• In the next shot of a common area, there’s a guard, four orderlies, and six patients, and as the shot pushes into the room, a 7^th patient is revealed. 4/6/7.

• Cawley says that last night seven men were sitting at this table, playing stud poker. Tonight there’s two playing, one watching. A man draws a card. It’s a 6. Solando is said to have slipped past them, as if invisible. Another impossibility.

• A landscape hangs in this room (a mountain beyond a distant lake) behind a man playing dominos alone, and another man shouting out, “Why?!” to himself. The painting bears considerable resemblance to the Lawren Harris in the lobby, or the unidentified pieces behind Danny in the games room.
• The three men here are like the three parts of Teddy’s mind. The accomplished authority figure, the studious analyst interested in cause and effect and how patterns can be used to win a game, and the one seemingly out of his mind with some kind of existential grief.
• There’s also something to be said for the way the man asking “Why?!” seems both ridiculous, and like his question is directed at the game student. Like, it’s silly to question the analysts of the world. They might be our best defence against fascistic authority. On the other hand, it’s silly in its own way to think analysts alone can defuse the tension between corruption and justice. And finally, it’s silly in another way to think that authority can ever solve the existential and intellectual issues that have dogged us since the dawn of time. Nevertheless, all three of these men seem rather civilized in a way.

• We’re now seeing our 2^nd or 3^rd shot of many guards out searching in the rain. This search is a pantomime, of course. McPherson is still taking it seriously though, which is funny because he sounds both the most sure of himself, and the most dismissive of Teddy’s viewpoint. Also, he says it’s “11 miles to the nearest shore”: an important number for The Shining. Teddy wonders if Solando could’ve escaped to the cliffs on the far side of the islands (the cliffs…of insanity?!!?!) and McPherson makes a good case for why that would be highly, highly unlikely. Also, Lontano plays again in this scene, mixed with a professional score. And mixing songs is another big trick of The Shining.

• I’m not sure what it would mean, but Lynch’s accent plays a funny trick on the line, “It’s an old lighthouse. The guards already searched inside it.” It sounds like he’s saying “the gods already searched”. Probably not a wink, but I thought it was worth musing over.

• There’s a moment when a bunch of black orderlies are being questioned, and they’re all in white, and then we see Ben Kingsley, a caucasian man dressed almost all in black. In fact, the guards and wardens are all white guys dressed all in black. So there’s definitely a yin-yang thing going on here.

• When Glen introduces himself, he says, “Me. Glen Miga.” It sounds like MEE-GLEN-MEE-GA. So there’s an echo aspect to that.
• Also, note that we’re back in the room where the man was crying out “WHY?!?!?!” a moment earlier. And Glen seems to be the only white male orderly. Is Shutter Island to slavery what The Shining is to indigenous genocide? That seems like too huge a kettle of fish to just let out on the table, and not do anything with, but suffice to say my understanding of American slavery is not sophisticated enough to snap my fingers and see all the buried connections. As it stands, the orderlies and nurses at least seem to mirror the visible identities of Jack’s victims.

• There’s discussion of time here, and then we see a large wall clock telling us it’s 7:20 and there’s a landscape painting right below. The poker set behind Teddy reminds us that this is a room for games.

• As Teddy interrogates the staff, they joke at his use of the word “unusual” – Nurse: “This is a mental institution, Marshal. For the criminally insane. Usual isn’t a big part of our day.” And everyone laughs. This laughter is a lot like the laughter in Inglourious Basterds when the Basterds are interrogating the Nazi in the forest. The realistic nature of the sound signals to the audience how they’re meant to feel, but the situation as a whole is telling us to feel another way. Dimly, this reflects the way Ullman cheerfully recounts the Overlook’s gruesome construction on a graveyard.
• Also, the nurse says Solando was in a group therapy session, which is what this is for Teddy.

• Dr. “Shee”han is a “he”. The staff is discussing Solando, a “she”, but they’re thinking about the behaviours of Teddy, a “he”. Also, the nurse here looks at Aule/Sheehan while talking about Sheehan. The patient known as Bridget Kearns will do the same thing in her interview.

• Sheehan is pronounced “sheen” by the characters, which sounds very close to “shine”, as you’ve probably noticed. Sheehan is trying to hide his identity, just as the shiners in The Shining all try to conceal their shine, to some extent. And I can’t resist mentioning how in Carson City, the movie playing behind Wendy during the interview call, is showing a scene with Mr. Sharon, whose name, when spoken by the actors in the film, comes out so much like “shine” that YouTube’s guessing subtitles pegged it as “Schine”.
• Also, note the reference to “books and magazines” on the blackboard. Patients are being warned not to remove them from the area, but there really are not a lot of books or magazines to be seen.
• Incidentally, the music in this scene (Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel 2) sounds a lot like a Super Metroid track called The Space Pirates Appear (go to that link and skip to 0:40 to hear the part I mean). If that was intentional (I highly doubt it; Rothko came out before Super Metroid), it does give the alien planet feeling. The more likely explanation for this track is its name, which refers to a building designed by the artist, Mark Rothko (kinda sounds like Mark Ruffalo), for people to come see his latest, transcendence-minded art. The Shutter Island psycho-drama is in part the creation of both these men, Sheehan and Laeddis, and it is about trying to help the “artist” in this case to transcend.

• The games room/interrogation room ceiling has a mirror-like quality.

• They try to call Sheehan using a switchboard, very similar to the one Wendy uses. (Also, I don’t know why, but this shot reminds me of The Lives of Others for some reason (see below). Maybe it’s because the setup seems to be the only thing in a rather large room, overlarge for this to be its true purpose.)

• Cawley reports that his house was also built during the Civil War (like Ward C). There’s a pool table in it, like the ones in the games room and the Colorado Lounge. And of course there’s large, out-of-frame/focus paintings all about.

• Teddy correctly IDs the music playing on Cawley’s phonograph as Mahler, an Austrian Jew. Who is the first notable digression from The Shining and possibly Kubrick altogether. Also, Aule guesses Brahms, which is another composer alien to Kubrick.
• Brahms was German, and was not banned by Nazis, the way Mahler was, due to his heritage. Also, Teddy’s ability to recognize the music brings to mind the nature of all of Cawley’s unrecognizable art, and this quick cut to the line of Jews at the camps, with numbers for names also speaks to the horror of our inability to put names to these faces, who suffered so terribly and pointlessly. Also note the red triangle on the person’s breast here and how it resembles the Ashecliffe insignia.
• Again, red triangle means political prisoner, which is what Teddy’s about to make out of Dr. Naehring, in a sense.

• I’m not sure what to make of Jeremiah Naehring. His name is florid and religious and German-sounding. In the film he heightens the dread about Germans who successfully fled the judgment of the post-war era. But that name “NIGH-RING” bears some sonic similarity to “nihil” or “nothing”. Or “the end is nigh”. Does he foreshadow Teddy’s oblivion? Also, I’m no bible scholar, but the Book of Jeremiah, according to online sources, is about how “judgment is coming” and how we should all “repent”. Perhaps the “Nigh” is meant to be about the end being nigh.
• As we’ll hear later, Naehring has far less concern for the survival of the inmates than Cawley, and he takes on a kind of Talmudic god quality vs. Cawley’s Biblical god.

• The men playfully discuss alcoholism (Cawley calls it “poison” in the line “Your poison, gentlemen”). Teddy professes not to drink, just as Jack does around this same minute to Ullman.

• Note the way the ceiling resembles the carpet near 237. But in this case, the waves seem to be ambidextrous. Symmetries parallel to other symmetries.
• If I’m exactly right that that’s the reference, I wouldn’t be surprised if Scorsese was elevating Kubrick’s earthly concerns to his own heavenly ones.

• Naehring suggests Teddy’s teetotaler status, in conjunction with his defence mechanisms, heightens his interrogation abilities. Jack Torrance, as a writer, is an interrogator of the human condition.
• But the word interrogation brings to mind the war again, and sure enough, Teddy gets a kind of shine of a Nazi office place on the verge of papers about to drift down from the ceiling en masse. There’s a portrait of Hitler, along with some other photos and pictures/paintings about, in a relatively symmetrically laid out room. I’m wondering if the impossible flood of papers from above is meant as a correlative of the bloodfall.

• A record is seen playing in the Nazi office, but on close inspection, it has no information on its label. A fake? The suggestion seems to be that the same music was playing in both rooms, and that’s how Teddy could ID the composer, but a Nazi would not have been playing banned music (an absurdity?). Teddy is seen in the room, but with the papers flying everywhere impossibly, the sense is that this isn’t really happening.
• Also, an “odeon” was a Greco-Roman concert hall, and Greco-Roman concerns are ample in The Shining.

• Incidentally, the Nazi on the floor either shot himself, or was shot in the head when the Americans entered, and his guy fell nearby. The idea of it being a failed suicide would be more in keeping with the Shining analogy.
• Also, with regard to the bloodfall crossover, note all that blood pouring down from above, and the shadow that extends the effect.

• Teddy says that he was raised by “wolves”. Jack pretends to be the Big Bad Wolf. Also, the red and yellow tones here are quite similar.

• The Nazi, on closer inspection, is shot through the cheek, just as Jack Nicholson was in Batman, part of what made him the Joker.

• Teddy looks more like Glen Miga in his memories of war. So Miga “letting” Solando get away does seem to connect to Teddy’s war guilt.
• Also, note the way the mesh on the pith helmet resembles Cawley’s ceiling. Perhaps what’s happening here generally is that Cawley’s study is creeping into Teddy’s vision, because of Teddy’s rage at seeing a German in a position of power.

• Naehring asks Teddy if he believes in God. Kubrick asked Stephen King this as part of one of their long late-night chats. Teddy explodes in a fit of xenophobic rage at Naehring, but we get the sense that these men have done no wrong, and Teddy ends up looking the fool. Like Basterds and The Shining, Shutter Island plays on this idea that WWII isn’t the simple morality nightmare it’s often played as.

• Naehring/Cawley have an enormous beer stein as a showpiece. A Frankenstein echo? Teddy is their monster? Also, in Inception, someone, I think DiCaprio, will reference something called the “Stein job” in which they invoked the Mr. Charles gambit, where Cobb will draw attention to the fact that they’re in a dream. Teddy just came out of a little dream. But also, all of Shutter Island is about these men drawing Teddy’s attention to the fact that this scenario is dreamlike.

• Aule asks if Teddy is bluffing about leaving. “The bluffs” is how the far side of the island were described earlier. So it’s an echo of that, foreshadowing that Teddy will run to the bluffs. Which is where he thinks Solando has gone. And since he might know that he’s Solando, perhaps that’s why he imagines her there. He wants to escape out the back. He doesn’t really want to go back out the front, which would mean confronting the pretence and accepting his reality.
• This is also the first time we’ve seen Teddy without his tie in the present. And he’s about to have a very conflicted dream about Dolores. Note the tie is visible in the frame here, slumped on the chair in the bottom right.

• In Teddy’s dream he’s hearing the song Cry (by Johnnie Ray) play on record. Is Teddy telling himself he needed to grieve? To hurt? They have a record player exactly like the one in the Nazi office. Does that help show the Nazi office wasn’t real? He tells her he killed a lot of people in the war, and she asks if that’s why he drinks, but we don’t get a pure sense if any of this actually happened.

• Teddy dreamshines into a moment in the apartment with his wife, confronting him about his drinking. Her outfit mirrors the colours of the surrounding landscape (instead of the discarded tie). Only the deep brown of the booze stands out. The colour match, and the floral patterning of her attire, are being used to say his wife is symbolic of all life.
• Also, she appears as if in two mirrors—the reflective surface of paintings—to either side of her, like eyes. This creates another diamond shape between four figures.
• This also brings to mind the fact that Jack wounded Danny “three goddamn years ago” and yet Wendy reports that Jack “hasn’t had any alcohol in, uh, five months”, despite the fact that he apparently said, after abusing Danny, “Wendy, I’m never gonna touch another drop. And if I do, you can leave me.” If everything Wendy says is true, a scene like this must’ve played out at some point.

• In the profile shot, as the snow/ash begins to blow in, there’s a large diamond mirror behind Teddy, showing obscure twin paintings on the wall behind him, and his wife’s head obscures another painting of some dark blue animal (a whale? a mermaid?) on an orange background. The snow disappears in future shots, and it’s just ash.
• The diamond mirror seems to speak to the previous shot, where Teddy was passing down the narrow hall, with the two Dolores mirrors between them. This is the RULE OF 4.

• He asks her if she’s real, and she shamefully admits she is not. The bottle has vanished from her hovering hand, and we see she has a heart of gold locket around her neck. In the sense that his wife represents Teddy’s inability to reconcile life’s ultimate positives/joys with life’s ultimate negatives/pains, it’s fitting that he casts her with this symbol (in fact, when we see him kill her at the end, the locket begins to float in the pool of her draining blood). He sees in her a profound, unshakable core of goodness. In a sense, she’s perfect and untarnished. He wants to see himself as the imperfect one. In reality, she is the one who’s destroyed his mind, and he’s trying to forgive her. And in case you’re thinking, “What about Dachau?” one of the doctors at the end says that, while Teddy was there, it’s uncertain whether Teddy took part in anything remiss there.

• She tells him in this vision that Rachel (herself, Dolores, and by extension, Teddy), is “still here. She never left.” Teddy is grieving the loss of his family, but because of Dolores’ murders, and his murder of her, it’s as if she never left. Or cannot leave. It’s as if she’ll be there forever. And ever. And ever.

• When Teddy asks who is still here, On the Nature of Daylight by Max Richter comes on the soundtrack. Richter is a British composer, born in West Germany in ’66. This track, besides being gorgeously haunting and perfect for this moment, echoes the name of a recurring set of tracks that appear in The Shining, De Natura Sonoris #1 and #2, which means On the Nature of Sound. Sound and Light: the two aspects of film.

• In this moment, we hear a loon call which sounds just like the call that we hear over the first two exterior shots of the Overlook Hotel, once the Torrances are alone there. These calls remind us of nature in a film that can at times feel totally removed from nature. The horrors of human civilization are invoked, as is a sense of cabin fever, and both make us want to run screaming from organized human life, like Nebuchadnezzar, and abandon the problems that arise from these complexities. Also, note the wallpaper here (behind the lamp), and how it resembles the ceiling pattern in Naehring’s office.
• Also, note how the yellow tones in her dress and hair now stand out hugely. She’s no longer a symbol of the scary, judgey world. Now she’s Dolores the woman, who committed a terrible crime inside the world. Oddly, the tension melts out of this view, and perhaps that’s because Teddy isn’t really mad at the world. He’s just mad at Dolores.

• Dolores mentions a cabin in the summer, and the past happiness between the two. Cabins appear in the Shining.
• There’s an Asian-style fan behind Teddy, just like the Asian banners at the Torrance apartment.
• Even the curtains here resemble the lamp on the Suite 3 make-up table.
• Also, as this one shot jumps to the next shot here, we can hear Dolores’ voice, but we can’t see her lips moving, and then in the second shot, they’re moving, and she’s turned away from him, as if two realities are fighting for control of Teddy’s mind.

• Just wanted to note that Dolores’ name is Dolores Chanal, which bears a resemblance to “charnel” which is a room where bones or bodies of the dead are kept. It can also be used to describe a scene or place of great physical suffering or loss of life. In fact, her name can be rearranged to spell A Charnel’s Dolor, dolor meaning a state of great sorrow or distress. In that sense, is Dolores just a metaphor for the unspeakable horror felt by the 20^th century over WWII? If so, it’s interesting that Ashecliffe is associated to the Civil War as well, a period even further back, and still resonant in the modern psychology.
• Andrew Laeddis can be rearranged to spell A Ladder Widens, which could be a reference to Jacob’s Ladder, which is heavily referenced in The Shining, in a post-war song (of considerable unease) by Penderecki. If these anagrams are intentional, Dolores might be associated to the horror of objective life, and Andrew (Teddy) might be associated to the subjective dream of ascension. This could support the idea that Chuck Aule is analogous to Danny, since he seems to have mastered both: he’s a doctor and a man of science, but he helped mastermind this great fantasy for his patient.

• As Teddy embraces Dolores with her burned-out spinal column, we see both their wristwatches. His is telling us that it’s 7:30, and hers is too small to see. First water pours out of her stomach (a reminder of the lost Cry song?), followed by blood. This vision of death contrasts the frozen fish pile corpses from the Dachau moments. She’s melting away, and Teddy can’t accept it.
• But yeah, water followed by blood. Very Pillars of Hercules.

• She says that she’s just “bones in a box” and he says, “no”, and then we see two figurines of two bulls pointed at each other with a plant in the middle, beneath a landscape of lily pads in a pond, which is how Teddy will later realize he found his dead kids.

• Following the bulls is a horse head on a side table with a black phone, and a glass bowl filling up with ashes. The Torrance apartment has a horse head and bull figurines on the shelf behind Wendy. So perhaps, in this sense, Teddy is more like Wendy. In serious denial about the nature of his partner.

• In the high wide shot of the ashy apartment, Dolores’ bloody form is a lot like the bloodfall. It’s also being seen in a mirror, to the right.
• Also, this effect of splitting Dolores in half seems to come around again later when we see a few mermaids buried in other images, and also, when we meet Solando #2, she’ll have a blue dress stained darker in the bottom half, presumably by water, but it’s unclear. A mermaid is a bit like the female version of the centaur, but a minotaur isn’t far off.
• The red and yellow tones of Dolores are a bit like Winnie-the-Pooh, but I’m not sure the point of that.

• Teddy embracing his beautiful, dead, loving wife who then turns to ash, is a lot like what happens to Jack in 237, the alluring siren becoming a diseased, dead crone in an instant, and while he’s feeling intense need. Also, Dolores’ saying “But [Solando’s] here. And so is he.” is an invocation of the binary, something that The Shining is riddled with. Technically speaking, she’s telling Teddy he has a male and female half.

• The sopping, ashy mess where Dolores vanished is seen in the mirror again as the room has suddenly burst into smokeless flames.

• When Teddy wakes, we see he’s got a shoulder tattoo of a bird or butterfly with two stars above it, perched on an orb, with a banner wrapping around that seems to say STORY – END. But END could be a longer word, like FRIEND.
• Also, stars = Asterius = minotaur.

• The orderlies seem to have a nude on their wall, like in the Overlook boiler room.

• The storm is an interesting aspect of these films. In The Shining it mainly serves to make Hallorann’s rescue the more impressive, and to cement the relative impossibility of Wendy’s on-foot escape. In this, it actually gives a perfect timely cover to the pretence of Teddy’s investigation. He was going to leave, and now he can’t. Was this part of the Sheehan/Cawley plot? Knowing that Andrew/Teddy would seclude himself if the truth came too close? As discussed, the ship’s captain is the first to invoke the storm, so it would seem that it’s part of the Solando superstructure of pushing Teddy into his delusions from the perspective of an invoked objectivity (taking him out in the boat until his memory wiped).
• For the record, the book gives a slightly different accounting at the end from the film, but there’s no point in spoiling it.

• Cawley tells of a “war” going on in the field of psychology between those who would lobotomize their patients and those who would use psychopharmacology. He says that Thorazine “relaxes psychotic patients, you could say tames them” which characterizes people as base animals. Or accepts their nature as animals.
• Notice too that Cawley’s bowtie is now different, and doesn’t match Aule’s anymore. This is similar to Dolores’ shift in the dream, from reflecting the colours of the world to reflecting nothing but herself. So we’re getting a better sense that Cawley is his own man.

• Teddy and Chuck interview Peter Breene (a violent offender) at a long table in the Wing A kitchen, and behind them is a kitchen, not unlike the Overlook kitchen, with similar storeroom doors, and similar equipment lying about. Even the chairs are similar. And the two scenes are at about the same length into the movie (this one is starting while that one is about wrapping up).
• As for the names, there’s some possible apostle imagery later, so it’s probably worth pointing out that Andrew (Teddy) was the first apostle of Jesus, and brother of Peter, another apostle (also know as Simon in the bible). They were fishermen and Andrew was a student of John the Baptist. A name that John Cawley shares.

• Breene is ironically showing sympathy to Teddy (if he understands what’s going on, and you almost have to assume he does, since he’s using the made up names) when he says Solando should be gassed for killing her kids.

• Teddy unnerves Breene by rubbing his pencil into his paper pad, a meaningless, repetitive motion, we see this in tandem with Teddy’s watch: 11:48. The wall clock behind Breene matches. Also, the name Peter is like an inverted “repeat”.
• This time also happens to be one of the clearest time codes of The Shining. The moment of the repeating KDK1 to KDK12 radio calls.

• Breene uses the n-word here, which echoes the Grady scene, but also echoes the fact that Danny is talking to Hallorann at a similar distance into the movie: the subject of Jack and Grady’s epithet.
• Teddy uses this as a moment to break through to Breene about Andrew Laeddis, who he heard about in his last dream. Breene, amazingly, doesn’t give in to what he knows. You almost have to respect the racist, misogynist face-biting psychopath. He came through for a friend. What’s also really interesting about these interviews is the way they suggest a better grasp of reality by these people who lack a common perception of reality. They’re able to keep up the ruse about Teddy being a detective, even as their awareness of Teddy’s delusion causes them to reflect on their own sanity. 

• This is possibly one hell of a coincidence. Mrs. (Bridget) Kearns, the inmate who seems “quite normal” but who confesses to chopping up her husband with an axe on her bad days, shares a last name with Juli Kearns, one of the leading Shining theorists, and who has a website with many wonderfully conceived essays studying the film, and pointing out many intricate symbolisms and inconsistencies (I actually haven’t read too many, to keep my own perspective pure, but I plan to when I finish up the site, here). Juli grew up in the south, and, as far as I know still lives there. Dennis Lehane grew up in Boston and went to school there. They were born around the same time, and it’s possible they met each other online sometime in the late-90s, early-00s. It’s possible Kearns had her theories online by then. I can’t find any evidence of that, though. All the lovely art and literature she posts on her site are from 2004 onward, and Shutter Island was published in 2003. I could speculate further, but I’ll leave that for you to ponder.

• Mrs. Kearns talks about not wanting to be on the outside world, how they got bombs now that reduce entire cities “to ash”, and that thing, what’s it called, television? “Voices and faces coming from a box. I hear enough voices already.” Again, I have to wonder if Kubrick (and now Scorsese) understood that the voices of media are a good deterrent against the voices that come from loneliness. Also, the emphasis on “ash” seems like a way to connect Ashecliffe to the atomic bomb. If I was a more free-wheeling analyst I might wonder if everyone on Shutter Island is dead, and if this is some sort of purgatory. But I will admit that when I first started noticing the parallels, I wondered if the story took its inspiration from the idea “what if Jack Torrance had to atone for his crimes in the afterlife?”

• When Kearns is describing Solando, her lines almost perfectly echo Cawley’s and Teddy finishes her line for her, noticing it. This is when Kearns becomes the most nervous, because now the heat is on to get the story straight, and she almost falters. So you have that point of repeated lines (The Shining is flushed with repeated and echoed lines), and Teddy draws attention to it a second later.

• The hanky poking out of Kearns’ sleeve is reminiscent of the note in photo Jack’s hand at the end. Also, the shape formed by the rings on the table here is like the marriage symbol on the All Work pages (because they’re discussing Rachel, who is secretly Dolores, Andrew’s wife?). And note that the two types of paper before Kearns have the same two tones as the two tones that the All Work pages seem to have between shots.

• There’s also a very odd blink-and-miss-it moment here where Kearns is miming that she’s drinking water, and then slamming down an empty glass. Almost all of the water drinking scenes in the film have something odd about them, some seeming blip in the time-space continuum. Do people not drink water around Teddy/Laeddis because it sets him off? Still, there’s traces of water in this slammed-down glass. I’m wondering if the absurdity is a reference to Juli Kearns being the one who drew out the absurd layouts of the Overlook hotel.
• Of course, this could simply suggest that Teddy imagines the glasses into existence when they are suggested to him, a la the coming storm. In this sense, the water in the film is being projected at Teddy much as the ghosts are projected at the Torrances.

• The first time Teddy sees Aule, he’s on the other side of a chain link fence on the boat. Here, he’s with Aule between the two fences, and they’re standing in a formation like when they “first” met. We’re getting another dose of the notion that they are in what they’re in together.
• Chain link, again, has that design from Cawley’s ceiling. Or it is the other way around? Is Cawley’s ceiling the chain link fence against the heavens?

• Chuck says he doesn’t give a damn about by-the-book. That’s funny because I think this book was originally written as a screenplay, and then turned into a novel. The novel reads exactly like that, and the film is basically just an edited version of that text, taking lines and details out for time. (I admit I haven’t read it in full) And of course, The Shining is somewhat famously liberal with its adherence to King’s plot. To stretch this further, Kubrick was constantly rewriting the script during production, to the frustration of Nicholson and others, so you could say he didn’t give a damn about his own “book”, either. Diane Johnson, the co-screenwriter, and Wendy Carlos, the composer, also saw the finished product only to find that (frustratingly) vast swathes of their work on the project had vanished into the editing aether. Kubrick’s only concern was the masterpiece being perfect, not anyone’s ego.

• Teddy describes Laeddis as a firebug and maintenance man. A caretaker? He also describes him as having a scar across his whole face, basically, and different-colour eyes (aside from a missing nose, he’s almost describing Tyrion Lannister there). He says he burned down a schoolhouse, which killed two people. So if Laeddis is “Teddy’s” idea of who he really is, perhaps by murdering his wife, he sees himself as the killer of both himself and her, and the burnt schoolhouse is a metaphor for his own inability to learn anything new, repeating the same scenario in his head, over and over, inescapably. “Said voices told him to do it.”
• Also, note the way Chuck’s eyes are framed by one diamond (above), and Teddy’s eyes appear in two diamonds. The difference between seeing one reality and two.

• Chuck notes that the island has a lot of places to hide a body, and Teddy returns that there’s one place no one would notice. And they arrive at the graveyard. People don’t seem to generally notice the paranormal activity that goes on at the Overlook, which is also built on a graveyard.

• Chuck makes a Wizard of Oz reference while they’re out in the storm. That’s pretty close to Alice in Wonderland. Also, Kubrick famously deplored The Wizard of Oz, and at one point, right before trying to murder his family, Jack says, “Come out, come out, wherever you are”. This happens to be a reference to something much larger, but it also happens to be a song in the Wizard of Oz that Glenda sings to summon the munchkins.

• They enter a mausoleum to ride out the storm, and it has a stained-glass eye in the ceiling. Teddy is about to give a kind of confession, and since we’ll soon see a Noah’s Ark image in a different stained-glass window, it’s probably safe to imagine this is a Biblical eye looking in. Also, the Overlook is besot with instances of dual eye shapes (as in the cashier lattices below), so perhaps this one eye suggests all the false dualisms of Teddy’s narratives.

• Teddy inhales the smoke that’s coming out of his lungs here. First, you have the visual of a seeming inhale-exhale cycle, an Ouroburos image. But you also have a kind of enlarged Hitler moustache at play as well (Jack Torrance gets a kind of Hitler moustache toward the end of The Shining).

• Chuck asks about Laeddis and Teddy says he’s not there to kill him. Chuck responds that if it was his wife, he’d kill Laeddis. “Twice.” How do you kill a man twice unless there’s two of him?
• Also, we just had a blip of a WWII moment. This is a big idea that I’m only having now, and probably won’t invest much thought in, but perhaps the reason twins have such resonance in suggesting the Holocaust is the way the two world wars are like imperfect twins, with similar constellations of power warring over the same regions with the same outcomes. And of course while major genocides and wars have unfurled since then, we’ve kept the two “world wars” as a mental couplet, as if it makes the most sense to do so.
• Also, this scene is similar to Jack’s nightmare of killing his family (both Jack and Teddy will confess their role in a murder which was (for nightmare Jack), or may have been (for world war Teddy), imaginary), which leads him to see Lloyd for the first time. Teddy’s storm will set up the conditions that lead him to George Noyce, who is like Teddy’s Lloyd. And just as Lloyd reflects Jack in a way that carries him down the river to familicide, Noyce reflects Teddy in a way that pushes him toward self-annihilation.

• He says the bodies were “Too many to count” and “too many to imagine” that speaks to Geoffrey Cocks’ point about how these films shrink the war down to a more manageable size. Also, he’s seeing his own daughter in this moment. Which personalizes the event for him and us, while her figure remains part of the encoded mystery, at this point in the narrative. It should also be noted that we have here a visual impossibility, which is common in The Shining, but rare in Shutter Island, except in Teddy’s memory, which this seems to be: the frozen water here would have either frozen in the train, or splashed out on the ground and frozen in a thin layer against the earth. Like the bloodfall, this should not be.

• The shot of Teddy’s men massacring the German troops is almost comically unrealistic. In a left-to-right tracking pan, we see as the German’s are shot in a silly kind of domino effect (remember the game of dominos?), almost as if his mind is already distorting what really happened. Or maybe because he’s lost objectivity over this act, or he can’t remember it perfectly, it’s becoming something different.

• Teddy: “It wasn’t warfare it was murder.” I think this distinction was probably important to a lot of post-war thought.
• Also, you know, REDRUM, and all that jazz.

• Not sure about George Noyce’s name rearranging, but you got orgy in there.
• Teddy: “George Noyce. Nice college kid. Socialist.” That Noyce-nice bit is too corny for words. Like the “Me. Glen Miga.” bit. Just as the Overlook calls attention to its nature in various ways, the names on Shutter Island call attention to their superreality.

• As Teddy tells George’s story, of killing three people, and him begging for the electric chair, and winding up at Ashecliffe after crooked experiments gone awry, it starts to look like Chuck (Dr. Sheehan) is starting to lose the thread. What is Noyce’s significance in Teddy’s mind? A metaphor? An abstraction of Dolores? Teddy turns the metaphor against Ashecliffe in his delusion, so Sheehan notices this and starts to try to make Teddy see what he’s really doing. Noyce is real, and their relationship is nothing like what Teddy supposes. But why does Teddy need to make up details for Noyce (if that’s what he’s doing), other than to cloud his reality? Also, we get our first peak at the fuller Noah’s Ark here (the rainbow waters were beside Teddy’s head during the war story).
• Whatever the case, it seems that Chuck is playing the Wendy part, reassuring Jack that his nightmare was only that. Except in his case, he’s drawn Teddy away from making the self-comparison to Noyce, and redirected his partner’s attention back to Ashecliffe, and what his relationship is to this place.

• Chuck: “No, no, no, boss. Luck doesn’t work that way.” There’s a pack of Lucky Strikes on the table, which Chuck is smoking.
• Also, Chuck walks around Teddy, in a way breaking the 180-degree rule, just like what happens in the Gold Room bathroom, or when Danny approaches zombie Jack. In all these cases, the effect is to make us start to see these two men as being more different than we previously thought. In all cases we’re set up to see them as extensions of each other, but with that growing suggestion that something is deeply different and this move clinches it.  

• Chuck suggests that maybe while Teddy was looking into Ashecliffe, Ashecliffe was looking into him. This is an interesting way of describing the relationship between Tony/Danny and the Overlook. When Danny “looks into” the Overlook, he sees twins, the bloodfall, and his own mortified face. Here, Teddy is seeing the great flood in the stain glass. The first thing the Overlook shows Danny is the first thing that happens to Danny in the Overlook, which is the twins appearing behind him in the games room. So it’s as though the building knows what Tony showed him, and is retorting, “Let me show you what you think you know.”

• The name on the mausoleum is Alden Leeds. Significance? It’s the name of a swimming pool chemical company that’s been in operation for “over 50 years” as of 2012. Product placement? Or just a way to emphasize the notion of heavy loads of liquid?

• Teddy has a tattoo over his left nipple of a little bird above a banner with DOLORES written on it. Also, the song from his dream about Dolores, Cry, comes on in the deep distance here. This seems like an odd touch, given the song’s role in Teddy’s fantasies (unless its presence on the island is why his mind plants it in the dreams). That said, he has lost his clothes, which includes the purple-green tie, his Dolores totem. So the song could be his mind screaming out for his totem.
• The orderly, Trey Washington, tells the boys their smokes (Lucky Strikes) are done for, thanks to the rain. Since there might’ve been no storm, this seems like an odd volley for continuity. But on a symbolic level, it’s like saying, “Your luck’s run out.”
• Comparing the time codes of the two films, Teddy and Chuck lose their ties as Wendy is radioing for help. Which comes shortly after Danny’s first trike past 237. 237 is where we see the two carpets matching their ties, but we don’t go into 237 to see the purple-green pattern until 58:17. Teddy’s tie comes back to him in a dream, which starts at 57:52 and ends at 62:27. Both the tie and 237 will return once more, for The Shining when Jack is moving through it, around 72:00-76:00, and for Shutter Island between 98:00-102:00 when Teddy steals it back from Trey Washington, and uses it to blow up Cawley’s car.

• Someone calls Dr. Cawley “Stephen”, but I see that his name is John in the official sense of the script. Was this a Stephen King reference? Or a reference to Grady’s shifting name? Teddy and Chuck have just stepped in looking like twins again as the name Stephen is heard.
• Also, John Cawley sounds like “on call”, which speaks to Cawley’s seeming eternal work involvement. The all work and no play of this place.

• As Teddy and Chuck listen to the board meeting, there’s a black and white photo of a room full of people looking back. Echoes the final photo in The Shining.

• The board is debating how to best keep the inmates in their cells. Cawley is fighting Naehring’s idea of everyone being manacled to the floor, since a flood would kill them all. Interesting that we’re hearing someone fight the notion of a flood killing off all the worst people alive, since we were just looking at Noah’s ark.
• Fun fact: Ben Kingsley’s birth name is Krishna, as in an ultimate deity of Hinduism.

• Cawley says “This is 24 human beings. And you can live with that can you?” Naehring replies, “Well if it were up to me, I’d put all 42 in wards A and B in manual restraints as well.” 42 is obvious, but 24 is the mirror of 42.

• The board has 13 members. Not sure the significance there. There seems to be a kind of God Debating Himself situation here, where one part of him doesn’t want to wipe out the dregs of humanity, and one part doesn’t mind so much. Perhaps 13 is the 12 apostles and Cawley is the Jeebs of the gang. But then does that negate Naehring’s apparent old testament god thing? Or was one of the apostles a little more old testament than the others?
• And Andrew and John Cawley are the only ones in the room we know to have apostle names. Also, “Teddy” bears a similarity to another apostle, Thaddeus, the patron saint of lost causes.

• Teddy puts together the answer to WHO IS 67? In front of the boardroom (6+7=13), and no one acts surprised on illumined. I just wanted to note that ANDREW LAEDDIS, EDWARD DANIELS, DOLORES CHANAL and RACHEL SOLANDO are both sets of names that go 6 letters/7 letters. Dolores is the only one that goes 7-6, which perhaps underscores the way she’s the only one who isn’t Andrew, or an abstraction of Andrew.

• Three times now, Hoover and HUAC and red scare ideas have been used to explain away confusion. The first time it was because Teddy couldn’t seem to recall a bit of protocol, right away, offered by Chuck (“Hoover’s boys”). The second time was in the mausoleum, offered by Teddy, perhaps thanks to Chuck. And now, again, Teddy is using it to prompt Solando to tell what happened during her escape.

• Rachel Solando enacts (by happenstance? because everybody knows about his nightmares?) a reversal of the interaction Teddy had with Dolores in his dream, telling him he’s dead, and that she mourns him. This is, of course, right after saying to the man she’s now calling Jim that yesterday Jim left for work, and she took the kids to school. So, there’s definitely some uncanny valley there.
• Also, she says, “I cry every night” when describing her mourning of him, and this brings to mind the song Cry which plays in his dream–fake Rachel is mourning in a way that Teddy is not. 

• Rachel’s embrace of Teddy/Jim which turns rancid in this moment, is a bit like a reversi of Jack’s encounter with the crone ghost in 237. So, while the Overlook wants to break Jack’s brain by presenting him with a temporal impossibility, Ashecliffe wants to unbreak Andrew’s brain by presenting him with someone witnessing an impossibility like the one he witnesses when he imagines that the institution is out to get him, or the things in his nightmares.

• His migraine sends him to an infirmary of sorts. There’s two doors that read EXIT FIRE DOOR KEEP CLOSED. This reminds of the giant sign in the Overlook kitchen that reads FIRE EXIT MUST BE KEPT CLEAR.

• Also, there’s some sort of obscure sermon being recited as if over a radio just for a moment here. It doesn’t show up in the subtitles, but it’s saying something about Jesus and a wizard’s hand? Something like, “Why would Jesus have been born by a wizard’s hand?” This seems especially pointed because we’re getting our first glimpse of the warden here, who will later describe life as a theatre of violence that god has created for mortals to wage in his honour. The warden’s confidence in a god of Darwinian violence, and his seeming obsession with that concept, connects him to our notion of deities, and as such I wonder if he, Cawley and Naehring are, therefore, something like the Grady, Lloyd and 237 ghost of this place–in the sense that those ghosts are also extensions of the hotel’s ultimate godly character. In the book, the nameless warden uses the n-word a whole lot more, which would seem to connect him to Grady.
• Also, I’m not sure I buy this, but the warden is showing up here around the same time as the pink ball rolls up to Danny outside 237. The pink ball has a twin in the yellow ball Jack plays with earlier. The warden has a sort of twin in the deputy warden, McPherson. Yellow is associated to fear in The Shining‘s visual language, so perhaps if we could figure out the warden’s name, we could know for sure. Why I suppose I doubt this somewhat is because the warden shows up much later, and has a very meaningful scene with Teddy, whereas the pink ball never shows up again (in the final cut of the film; it does show up again in the deleted epilogue).
• I just did another hard look at the warden’s following scene, and my best guess is that his name tag says PHE___CE_. But, you know, that’s awful close to Pherson.

• In Teddy’s next vision of Dachau we first hear a tragic, despondent woman’s voice, perhaps reporting something about the end of the war, perhaps giving her own kind of sermon. John Cage’s Root of an Unfocus plays during this sequence. Cage was a major post-war composer, and his work figures frequently throughout. Cage’s most well-known work is of course 4’33”, which I just realized is 273 seconds. Which looks a lot like 237. Oh man, I’m actually writing this at 2:37. Dun dun dun!!!! (Update: OMG, I’m editing this at 2:17, months after writing this little joke to myself. That’s crazy. 217 is the book version of 237.) (Update: I’m re-editing this at 5:20. Ah well. Can’t win em all.) Anyway, I really like what that title suggests about the war in Teddy’s life. More even than the murder of his children, perhaps, Dachau was a bedrock aspect of his undoing. His unfocus.
• Also “cage” is a good way of describing Teddy’s relationship to himself, his environment, and his history. And both films study the difference between cages and labyrinths. Also, all labyrinths become parts of cages past a point, whether they’re an island, an atmosphere, a solar system or a universe.

• He sees the frozen mother and child. They become Rachel and one of his children. Note the way the lighting and colour filter shifts. This happens a lot in The Shining on repeat shots, to give that subtle sense that more than the physical has changed. Also, note the way that Rachel has the Four Directions buttons again. This was also the design for the didrachm, the coin most associated with the minotaur and the labyrinth.

• His girl tells Teddy he “should’ve saved” them. This is obviously his guilt talking. But it’s interesting the way this relates to the implied proposition of a godless universe. The function of Christ is a practical one (everyone’s already been saved by him, depending on your faith, so no one actually needs must save anyone else–except in, you know, reality), and it’s to deal with situations like these. Teddy might be able to move on if he could just imagine that someone else had saved his family metaphysically. Cawley has a Christ-like role in Teddy’s life, going to such extremes to try to save Teddy from himself, as to fabricate an entire superreality.

• The way the people slump out of the trains like fish makes me think about the Dutch paintings of disgusting fish slumped around in butcher’s shops, and whether or not those were made to kind of put dead fish in the place of dead fish. Like, this is what fish are supposed to look like, this is where our violence belongs, and where it should remain. Of course, this could be commenting upon art like that. As in, look at what it looks like when we treat humans like animals. That’s my basic read, but perhaps the most effective as well. There’s something unearthly about this scene as well. Like, we keep getting shown it, and it is a beautiful image in its own horrific way, but why would anyone open up these carts, one by one, and let all these bodies out? You’d think that after one or two, you’d get the idea. But all four seems excessive.
• According to one source, fish were symbolic of Christ in those old paintings, so this might be Scorsese imposing his Christian worldview on this Jewish experience. Not to imply impropriety, I just wonder if Scorsese couldn’t help himself, with his symbolic background. Also, you could argue that Teddy’s apparent WASP status made him envision the suffering of the Jews through a Christian lens.

• The vision carries on, and Teddy is now back in Naehring’s study, walking slowly around the chair. Now there’s a statue on the mantel of a boy with wings, exuberantly gesticulating, in an X shape. This reminds me of Kubrick’s line about how Icarus should build better wings. But is it mocking? Or is it applauding Teddy in some way for getting his mind this far? Or is it a reference to the woman in the portrait above? Perhaps Teddy is aware on some level that these men are trying to help him, and so he thinks of Icarus.
• Also the Mahler has come back on the soundtrack, with a weird, backwards-talking young voice that we first heard during Teddy’s first vision of the war, which involved the little girl we just saw. It’s like his mind is trying to rewind to process something he was repressing.
• Actually, what might be interesting, if this Wikipedia entry is implying what it sounds like it’s implying, is that the piece couldn’t be performed until the 1960s, after the original manuscripts were lost. So, if there weren’t manuscripts, and there presumably weren’t recordings to derive manuscripts from, can this music possibly exist in 1954? Does that explain the blank record label? Does that explain Chuck throwing out Brahms instead of the correct composer?

• There’s an impossible image of fire flickering in the close frame, as the back of the chair appears. This fire is way too far over to be in the right spot, but also, as we’ll see when the shot changes, the camera shouldn’t be able to be in this location, so the camerawork is calling attention to the unreality of the place, just how it does all throughout The Shining.

• Matches—here struck by dream-Laeddis—will be a recurring image throughout the film. One of Delbert Grady’s daughters stole a pack of matches and tried to burn the Overlook down. In Andrew/Teddy’s mind, the association to fire seems a contrast to his wife’s method of drowning the children. He’s not only trying to take responsibility for something he didn’t do, he’s trying to take control of its method. It’s like the Robert Frost line “some say the world will end in fire, some say ice”. He’s cast his real self as the cartoon villain of his life, and he’s given himself that to unravel. To arrive at the truth (if he can arrive at the truth) that he isn’t the monster he thinks he is.
• Also, note the cool lighting effect of the matchstick shadow crossing dream-Laeddis’ chin. As if the fire is as phony as Kearns’ water glass.

• Laeddis lights Teddy’s smoke and offers him a silver, mirror-like flask (which takes on the blue-grey colour of his shirt), saying, “I know how much you need it.” Teddy needs fantasy, mirrors, delusion. He needs to see himself in something he hates. Laeddis also says “no hard feelings, unh?” as if he’s strongly aware of how ridiculous that premise is.

• He transforms into Chuck, who warns Teddy that there’s much to do and so little time “The clock’s ticking my friend”. This seems like another Peter Pan reference (the clock in the alligator). There’s a woman’s scream, and when Teddy looks we cut to a high wide shot and Chuck is gone. Also, we hear clock ticks in this sequence, first five ticks between Laeddis and Chuck, and then two more before a woman screams. We know that it’s 1954, and that Andrew’s been a patient at Shutter Island for two years. Five ticks, two ticks. 52. The year of the murders.

• The smoke that hovers around Teddy’s head reminds me of a famous painting, but I can’t think of which. Something like Dali’s Woman with Flower Head.
• Also, I just want to note that spotlit box in the lower left foreground, flanked by the two candles. Not sure that that’s about, but it might relate to that portrait.

• The smoke in this shot is all sucking back into the cigarette. Time is reversing. We’re heading back to 1952.

• Solando is revealed, covered in blood from the neck down. She says, “Give me a hand here” and the shot whips down to reveal the three murdered children, also blood-spattered. This echoes the Grady twins, since this isn’t how the kids were murdered. Also, the “give me a hand” sounds like a work thing. Like, come do your job. This could be Teddy’s version of “Come play with us, Danny!”
• This also seems to play into the Pillars of Hercules idea, but if you don’t feel like reading all that, here’s a short version: mother nature has turned on us (by flooding the earth 12000 years ago), and we must fight back against it. Men, feeling so betrayed by the devastation wrought on humankind by nature, which they saw as female in essence, decided to reconcile their anguish by working into the myths that women drove them crazy, and drove them to become violent against their families, which they then had to square with society by performing some of the greatest tasks ever performed by man. Herakles, remember, has the name Hera in his name. It means the “glory/pride of Hera”. But it was Hera who drove him insane, which lead to him murdering his family. Perhaps this is the point: Herakles is the key to understanding the genesis of all Judeo-Christian thought. Or maybe it just seems that way to me because I’m not a bible scholar.
• Also, we’ve got another RULE OF 4 here, with two females bisecting two males.
• The two males lay in a similar dynamic as the slaughtered Grady twins: opposing head-to-toe direction, and laying on back and stomach. The female lies in almost the exact same way as the closer Grady twin, but head left instead of right, and even resembles her facially.

• The girl announces in his arms that she’s dead, we see him walking backward from the lake (note the mirror quality of the far trees), and then he’s in the lake, laying his daughter into the waves. The daughter is mouthing something through the ripples as blood plumes around her head (another water/blood image). There’s so much time and space distortion in this episode that it’s a wonder he’s processing anything at all.
• Also, here’s that shot I was talking about before were Solando 1’s neck is darkened with blood.

• Teddy wakes from the nightmare into another one. He’s in the infirmary, and his wife comes in through a red exit door that is pouring with rain. Even after she closes it, rainwater continues pouring over it, and the door shimmers and glistens, taking on the look of the bloodfall elevators. His wife encourages him to find Laeddis and “kill him dead”. Bloodfall = all the murder/death of all time.
• Also, Teddy says, “Why you all wet, baby?” which is almost what he says to her in reality upon discovering her right before noticing the murders (“Baby, why you all wet?”), and it’s also what Cawley says in the lighthouse to trigger the memory, and confirm his knowledge of Andrew’s real life.
• There’s a soft, split-second refrain from On the Nature of Daylight, which seems to speak to the raw hurt and destruction Dolores caused Andrew, but here, it’s more buried, more momentary, because she’s telling him to kill himself (Laeddis), and remain in the fantasy with her as Teddy.

• I’ve noticed a bunch of ladders around the film, earlier on. As Teddy and Chuck come out to witness the real damage from the storm, Teddy notices a ladder (9 rungs again) going up to where a fallen branch is tamping down the barb wire. Laeddis comes up immediately, and they decide to go to Ward C.

• An aerial shot of C reveals that the roof is a green roof, which is a strange touch. Four men in white are creeping up to the edge as the shot goes on. Kind of reminiscent of the Overlook tour. But does the green roof imply that this building has sprung up out of the ground? That there’s something more friendly and natural about it than one would suppose? It’s reminiscent of the way the Mt. Hood myth in Wy’east is about a man turned into a mountain by a deity. Here, it’s almost like the inverse: a prison sprung up out of the island.
• Also, the design of the building is very much in the style of the didrachm again (on the floor of the lobby), which would lead us to think this will be our labyrinth. But as we’ll see, it’s quite unlabyrinth-like inside. In complexity, anyway.
• This also happen to be the middle moment of the film, depending on how you define that (including credits or not including them).
• The building’s relatively high degree of symmetry feels pointed.

• Breaking into C, a quick shot of a black orderly with an axe, trying to bust up a fallen tree. Right before we see this, Teddy tells Chuck that Noyce told him this is where they “keep the worst ones”. That could be an inversion of Ullman’s “All the best people” line.
• C is also the designation for all the food stores in the Overlook kitchen, where Hallorann reigns, and where Jack will once be imprisoned.

• Workers throw a massive tree off the roof. How did it get up there? In the aerial shot, you can see that all the surrounding trees are off and down to the sides. A hurricane that powerful would’ve probably destroyed every window of every building.

• The Ward C journey has always struck me as the strangest part of the story. Like, if it’s all a ruse, there’s still the worst killers known to man in here. So even if guards were hiding everywhere, waiting to jump in, Dr. Sheehan is taking his life in his hands to maybe heal Teddy’s mind. I don’t know that the story ever properly accounts for this (I suppose we’re to think that doctors with this much bravura would take such a risk; Teddy is also called by Cawley the most dangerous patient on the island, so I suppose Sheehan’s in relatively equal danger whenever he’s alone with Andrew). Sheehan will later say something like, “Somebody had to keep an eye on you” but they definitely run into Billings, and that could’ve lead to one of them killing the other. Sheehan was also the one who suggested this mission into Ward C, so he’s not exactly innocent of everything that goes down here. And he even seems less concerned by this mission than some of the others, and he seems more casual about everything than when he’s passively having to listen in on, and help guide Teddy’s thoughts.

• Another didrachm/four directions shape in the window. Directly above where Billings will tag Teddy.

• Billings is the one who initiates the implosion/explosion atom bomb conversation later on. He also asks why anyone would ever want to leave Ward C. What a wonderful place, he figures. Out in the outside world, there’s bombs and all manner of whosawhatsit. So, in Shutter Island, it seems less about indoors vs. outdoors, and more about the safety of the island vs. the freedom of the wide world. None of the inmates express a desire to leave. Only Kearns warns Teddy to run, and only Teddy ever expresses a desire to leave the island.
• This distinction of the hydrogen bomb imploding feels significant. It seems to speak to the internal collapse of Teddy and Jack. How the memory of Dolores and the Overlook eat them from the inside out.
• Billings could be an echo of Bill Watson, but it also sounds like accounts payable (the Overlook does have an accountant that we know of…). This man, obsessed with destruction, is associated to the notion of bills that come due. Bills that must be paid. And he appeared beneath an old symbol for money.

• This shot pivots 90 degrees as Teddy moves, suggesting labyrinthine shifts, but also the relativity of space. Teddy is moving forwards, he thinks. But is it forwards? As he approaches Noyce, he’ll be approaching the place where he himself is normally kept. Since he’s the one that messed up Noyce. And since Noyce is like the one truth teller in Teddy’s existence right now, it’s a bit like Teddy’s approaching the mirror surface (like how Lloyd is the first serious liar that Jack meets, and who he first sees by looking into the bar mirror). And it’s after this section that he’ll abandon Chuck and go off on his own quest for Solando. So it really is like Teddy passes through the looking glass of the fantasy they set up to expose his private fantasy, into the fantasy he creates to undo the effects of their fantasy.
• This shot also reminds of the first shot of Teddy having broken into the lighthouse, with the stairwell shooting down at him.

• The Ward C inmates are largely naked, a la the naked 237 ghost (who also appears just past the halfway mark). Also, both Solando 2 and Teddy will refer to Ashecliffe’s activities as making “ghosts” out of people.

• A tattooed inmate has a panther head, a snake around a skull, some weird zombie man, a lightning bolt passing from his forehead to his cheek, some Asian lettering (one character looks close to the symbol for “peace”), a rose on his neck and back, a naked pin-up-type woman coming out of a fish mouth or something (a mermaid?), a giant Jesus with Thy Will Be Done written overhead ending at the base of a dagger thrust into his back, and an eagle flying around an American flag with the phrase DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR (a phrase with roots going back to Caesar’s day, but popular among samurai and WWII Japanese, which would be fitting given the recent talk of hydrogen bombs).

• A man is writing something on a wall with blood from a flesh wound. He’s begging to be stopped before he kills more. Sort of reminiscent of REDRUM.

• George Noyce (who Teddy thinks will be Laeddis, despite the fact that he’s come this way hearing someone whisper “Laeddis” repeatedly), tells Teddy that everything that’s happening here is about him (Teddy), that it’s all a “game” about him. “You’re not investigatin’ anything. You’re a fuckin’ rat in a maze.” That might be this movie’s “…leave a trail of bread crumbs…”

• This whole scene is uncanny. When Teddy’s matches go out, the light dims (even though there’s bright, obvious light pouring in through the window, as you can see behind Noyce in the next section). And George seems to know this will happen. But when Dolores appears, the matches are no longer an issue. And George doesn’t seem to care, either. So the question is, is the whole Ward C episode unreal? Near the end, Cawley will read from a transcript of this conversation between Teddy and George. Is that because Chuck never really left Teddy’s side? If so, that would nicely parallel the way the perspective shot moving through 237 isn’t clear at first (is it Jack, Danny, or Hallorann inside Danny’s shine?)

• Noyce’s facial wounds are very similar to dream Laeddis’ but not identical. Having the actors resemble each other is another nice touch that seems to refer to Jack, Grady, Lloyd and photo Jack all wearing similar outfits, or Grady’s resemblance to the Great Party ghost, or Jack’s supposed resemblance to Bill Watson. Oh, speaking of which, I keep forgetting to point out when very similar instances are happening between movies at similar time codes, but the Ward C bit is very close in time and scope to the Lloyd/237 business. Danny is the reason Jack goes to Lloyd and 237, and Chuck is the one who suggests Ward C. I guess that somewhat accounts for Chuck’s go along. Like Danny, he’s curious to see what’s in there, and what’ll happen.

• Noyce says he got out once, but that that somehow proves he won’t get out twice. “Not twice. Never twice.” That’s an echo of Chuck’s line about how he’d kill the guy that killed his wife “twice”. Noyce resembles fake-Laeddis, Dolores’ “killer”. We later learn that Teddy gave Noyce these wounds, and that the two are cellmates. So Noyce’s nature is as a mirror for Teddy, the receptacle for all Teddy’s dreads about his own mental ailments. In that sense, he makes a good analogue for Lloyd the bartender, in the sense that a) Noyce and Lloyd only appear twice (I’m counting the mausoleum discussion as Noyce’s other major scene, though Cawley will mention him later), and b) Jack and Teddy seek Noyce and Lloyd as a way to course correct reality, and both lead our perspective characters away from their desired goals, Noyce with the truth and Lloyd with lies.

• Referring to everything going on as a “game” and Teddy as a “fuckin’ rat in a maze” seems pretty on the busted up nose.

• As you can see here, once Dolores shows up, seemingly thanks to Noyce telling Andrew to let her go, Teddy’s match going out has no effect (like the inverse of Jack’s ghost drink; a fake thing which has an apparent effect). Noyce also seemed to know that the matches were an affectation of Teddy’s, another security blanket. So it’s like when he’s channeling Chanal, his resources are all absorbed in that effort. He can’t delude himself about anything else.

• It’s funny that Chuck/Sheehan says, “You brought me into this, boss” as a way of trying to explain why he doesn’t want Teddy to self-destruct by climbing down to the lighthouse. If Sheehan is analogous to Danny, then Sheehan the psychiatrist is as much Teddy’s creation as Danny was Jack’s creation. I’m not saying Sheehan isn’t real. He’s real. But on a figurative level, it’s like he’s saying Teddy created his role in this dynamic. In reality, Sheehan designed the theatre that’s playing out, so he brought Teddy/Andrew into it. But then he wouldn’t have created it without Andrew’s presenting problem. So it becomes a chicken and the egg thing, which is a running theme in The Shining.

• Teddy uses Portland again to test Chuck, who passes the test, and is banished anyway. This is very similar to the way Jack essentially casts himself off when Wendy suggests leaving the Overlook. All you have to do to beat the Overlook is leave. And Jack can’t do that. All Teddy has to do is prove that the institution is up to no good, and even though he’s got what he needs to do that, he strikes onward anyway, to the lighthouse. He’s determined to get to what happens at the lighthouse.

• His vision of Chuck having committed suicide, brings him impossibly down the slippery cliff face (like a rock ladder?). He finds the Laeddis intake form impossibly on the wind during his descent. When he can’t find Chuck’s body, below, an impossible infinity of rats pop out and cover the rocks. We see the rat hole where they’re popping out from, and then he spies a light inside a cave up above. This reminds me of the ghost ball. All these ghosts popping out of nowhere to move Jack along after he rejects Wendy utterly.

• Oh, Noyce told Teddy he’s a rat in a maze, so all these rats running around free are like a metaphor for Teddy’s anxiety at reaching a kind of mental dead end (like Jack faces in 237). And that’s why Solando #2 has to show up, to blanket him with a new explanation.

• Teddy’s rock weapon and Solando #2’s kitchen knife are a bit like the bourbon and the advocaat held by Grady and Jack. In The Shining, the objects are drinks because the weakness of these men is chemical escape, but Teddy’s problem is violence. Naehring called him a man of violence, and after this sequence, the warden will rhapsodize about the role of violence as the active agent in transcendent human life. Also, note the way her dress seems to dampen halfway (and how it’s the same as Solando #1’s dress). As if Teddy’s still trying to tell himself about what his wife did to the kids, only this time, he’s extracted the blood.

• Solando #2 claims to have been a doctor at Ashecliffe. In The Shining doctors are associated with shiners. Teddy seeing her standing over the fire, self-reliant and impossibly evading capture, and childless. She’s everything Teddy wishes he could be.

• Solando 2 uses the word Kafkaesque “…that’s the Kafkaesque genius of it…” in undermining Ashecliffe’s dirty deeds. Kubrick talks about Kafka in the interviews about The Shining. He talks about how what every adaptation of Kafka gets wrong is they try to create a visual sense of the weirdness of Kafka’s plots and stories. Kafka’s writing itself was very journalistic, almost hyper-real, in Kubrick’s opinion, so he feels like that’s how the bizarre should be handled, perhaps when the material is worthy. And while I wouldn’t fault Robert Richardson’s cinematography here for its beauty or its dynamism, there is a certain otherworldliness to it at times, like during the whip pans that introduce the different wards at the beginning. But perhaps the strangeness of everything is meant to underscore the un-Kafkaesque quality of the story. The story is only as strange as the people in it are forcing it to be. Also, Solando 2 just said how saying she isn’t crazy doesn’t help against the charge that she is crazy, which is a bit like a Catch-22, which is featured behind Danny in The Shining.

• Solando 2 is a bit like Teddy’s Grady. She’s the full projection of everything he’s come to fear he is, and everything he wants to be: she says she was a doctor at Ashecliffe, and that their nefarious plans put her in the position to have to run and hide. She says she never had children and that she was never married, two things that would make Teddy’s life and mind such a better place to have to be, he imagines. She brandishes a large knife (not unlike the one Wendy uses to defend herself), which means she can defend herself, unlike him. Though he does clutch a rock. But he’s not up against one person, in that sense. She’s started a fire in a damp cave in the middle of a cliff. I don’t care how ashy your cliff is…that takes skill. But it shows a self-preservation and self-sufficiency that he wishes he had, against all these odds.

• As ghost Solando goes on here she gets into all manner of stuff about brainwashing experiments and mind control. She invokes tales of North Koreans doing tests on American soldiers. So, as soon as we hit WWI and maybe the Boer war, we can call it a day on major war invocation (I didn’t find evidence of these, but I’m not a war scholar). Teddy says you can never take away all of a man’s memories, but that’s kind of what happens to Jack. His memories get slowly eroded (or at least his sense of his reality does) in pursuit of immortality.
• Solando 2: “They turned soldiers into traitors. That’s what they’re doing here. They’re creating ghosts to go out in the world and do things sane men…sane men never would.” That line about ghosts is pretty fascinating. Teddy’s Grady is not at cross purposes with Jack’s Grady, necessarily, but she’s certainly taking a nobler approach.

• Teddy’s protests that it would take years of research is similar to the way people think there couldn’t possibly be enough time in a lifetime to come up with Kubrick’s methods. But this also suggests the wonderment that people regard new science and technology with, as though every progress sprung out of holes in the ground, and weren’t the result of thousands of years of incremental advancements.

• She says in fifty years people will know that this is the place where it all began: the book was published 49 years after the year it’s set (1954-2003), the film 56 years later. Either way, the audience gets that creepy feeling of knowing that we have that paranoia, that America didn’t prize the chalice of its post-war power over the world, instead abusing it to no end in the pursuit of further scientific/cultural/military/commercial progresses, and the like (as every global superpower has at some point, so far). Another instance of 4^th-wall tap-tapping. Grady’s use of the n-word hopefully had a similar effect on white 1980 audiences.

• She asks if he’s seen any “walking nightmares” lately. What a great line. Delivered perfectly.

• There’s almost no point in detailing everything, but suffice to say, Solando 2 is Teddy’s mind feverishly trying to establish a narrative that can undo all of the doctors’ work. “The learned-it-from-the-Nazis kind. That’s where they’re creating ghosts.” According to Solando, Shutter Island is a ghost factory. Again, the Grady bathroom scene is largely red-white-black. Nazi colours.

• Another Solando/Grady moment: she forcefully wakes Teddy, just as Grady wakes Jack knocking on the storeroom.

• Her last words to him are “Marshal…you have no friends.” This is the death knell for Teddy’s sanity. With those words, she’s set him on the course to never believe the truth. Fittingly, the light half of this shot is overwhelmed by the dark half.

• The warden’s license plate is J8-691. That’s 1968 backwards, a bad year for the Vietnam war. Like Hallorann’s plate that says 194247.

• The warden has a very strange conversation with Teddy. They’ve never spoken as far as Teddy knows, and he’s being extremely familiar and tactless. He refers to the day as “God’s latest gift” and talks about the storm blowing a tree into his living room as a divine, outreaching hand of god, because god loves violence, “Why else would there be so much of it?!” He goes on: “We wage war, we burn sacrifices, and pillage and plunder and tear at the flesh of our brothers.” It’s almost like this movie is out to purge all the acts of violence ever committed in one narrative. Very Shining.

• As the car speeds along, the two men are obviously on a set, and the trees behind them are rear projection (if it were real, there’d be much more dappling light falling over the men), but the really interesting effect of this is that the open-concept war jeep, with the low backs allow for the men to seemingly be flying through pure air. The real, natural feel of Solando 2’s cave is now replaced by this unnatural, natural flight. Actually, in the hero’s journey, what follows the capturing of the boon is what’s called the Magic Flight, which allows the hero to escape with the boon. In this case, though, the hero’s boon is a bad boon (if Solando’s ravings can even be described as such). It’s going to destroy him. Perhaps that’s suggesting a critique of the warden’s depiction of Darwinian reality, though it is being offered seemingly in counterpoint to Teddy’s present paranoia.

• The warden defies Cawley’s wisdom and presents an extremely amoral view of the universe. It’s a very strange combination to see a man who believes in god, a violence-loving god, who doesn’t seem interested in the word of god (presuming the warden belongs to a denomination of some organized faith). If the warden is ex-military, and served in the war, perhaps this is his explanation: he hasn’t completely lost his humanity from his exposure to the meaninglessness of the universe, but he’s turned hard down the road toward destruction. Destruction and creation are necessary, harmonious forces, and they can be used to restore one from self-annihilation. The narrative obviously favours creation, or it would give more floor time to positive depictions of destruction. Here, destruction reminds the viewer of the highest good that could come from Solando 2 being wrong, and the doctors being altruistic.

• Warden: “We’ve known each other for centuries.” Has the ring of “You’ve always been the caretaker here.” Is the warden the other half of a Grady split between him and Solando 2? We don’t see the warden exchanging words with anyone throughout the entire film, other than this conversation. Though he does appear alongside Cawley and Naehring at the end, and walks with the group that will lobotomize Andrew. And that scene seems to be played from reality’s perspective.
• In the book, the warden continues from where his filmic counterpart leaves off, on a page-spanning tangent about who the real n-words are in this world (almost everybody who isn’t an alpha male, by the sound of it), which is like the n-word Grady business writ real large.

• When they arrive outside the hospital, the warden says a hilarious line about sinking his teeth into Teddy’s eye, and Teddy, obviously shaken by this confusing appeal to living life to its fullest, dares him to, and the warden replies, “That’s the spirit”. So even this harsh and brutal man wants Teddy to re-enter life. Teddy reacts with great confusion. He doesn’t understand why this sounds better than what Solando was saying, but the concept seems to resonate.
• Also, note the way it seems like the fallen tree is blasting out the headlamps of the jeep here. The Warden was just talking about a tree blowing in through his home, and how there’s no moral order as pure as the storm. So the film is telling us that the warden is an agent of growth, despite how he seems. Darwinian reality, however horrible seeming, shines its own kind of light forward.

• Now this is really something. Cawley’s new context is that Teddy didn’t have a partner, and arrived at the island alone. This is the plot of Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are, except where the missing friend is a ruse on the part of all but the main character.
• Also, this ties nicely to Tony’s takeover of Danny’s physical being, after 237. “Danny’s gone away, Mrs. Torrance.” Danny will reemerge right before the end, just as Chuck will reappear as Dr. Sheehan. And while I’m on that subject, it’s worth noting that Shutter Island doesn’t seem to have a perfect correlative to room 237. There are similar moments, like when Solando 1 is reacting to “dead” Teddy. Or how Solando 2 gives Teddy something to lie about to the people trying to help him. Or how Ward C is full of naked people. But the way room 237 acts as a kind of centrepiece to The Shining, a mirror room, where we get all these multiple layers and dimensions of perspective and experience…Shutter Island doesn’t have that, exactly. On the other hand, there’s a slight ambiguity to the nature of the storm that has just passed in the story here. Cawley, at the end, will include “the storm” as part of the list of things that seem crucial to Andrew’s psychosis, his deluded, personal narrative. If that’s so, if there was no storm, then everything we see relating to it–the orderlies chopping up fallen trees, people pushing trees off roofs, trees fallen on the razor wire–is all a show for Teddy’s delusion. Like the fake glass of water in Kearns’ hand. Given that these are likely to be so, the effect of 237 is a bit like the effect of the entire film on Teddy/Andrew.

• Right after Teddy goes along with the pretence that he has no partner (facing his fear of the island’s conspiracy against him) we see him facing another big fear: water.

• There’s radios playing in the orderlies’ quarters. And there’s a pinball machine called SEVEN SEAS (an echo of the Seven Dwarves? Or simply an ancient Mesopotamia reference?), it has a mermaid on it, who has a transformed lower half, just as the many Dolores/Solando figures do, with their dampness and bloodiness. Similar too to the tattoo of the topless woman emerging from the fish mouth in Ward C. Seven Seas also bears a resemblance to “seven seals”, an element in the Book of Revelations, and judgment day, which The Shining references in its first shot. Teddy is about to stab Naehring in the neck, Naehring who is played by Max von Sydow, who famously squared off with death in The Seventh Seal.

• The orderly is reading the July 1954 issue of BOXING AND WRESTLING magazine, and there’s an ad for something that reads “HALF LIFE?”. Tony Burton, who plays Durkin, is famous for being in the Rocky movies, and Hallorann has his life cut short by Jack (not exactly in “half” but still). Both this sequence and the Durkin sequence appear at 97 minutes.
• There’s also an echo here with Hallorann’s two nude portraits. In that scene Hallorann is being depicted venting his male energy, so to speak, by surrounding himself with these gorgeous nudes, while Jack is about to have his mind destroyed by such a temptation. Here, the orderly, Trey Washington (shout out to Curtiss Cook for giving a very fine performance with almost no dialogue), is tempering his male aggression by reading up on the latest in organized fighting, while Teddy is about to stab a man in the neck.
• Oh, Cook is named Cook and Hallorann is a cook. Can’t believe I almost missed that.
• And there’s a copy of THE TRAMPLING OF THE LILIES (1906) by Rafael Sabatini sitting on top of a copy of the September 1944 POPULAR MECHANICS (with the tagline Picking the Target, and an article about how movies recreate the sounds of war at one-tenth the sound with cinematic trickery), so, again, we get some literature with buried significance. The Sabatini book is about the French Revolution, and about a jilted man of low birth eventually having to save the young woman who let class come between them, but who did save his life at the last moment in their youths. I’m not sure if the book itself or its writer was important; probably invoked for the bloody French Revolution angle. But the Boxing and Wrestling cover includes the tagline FRENCH FISTIC INVASION, and France was liberated in August of 1944, which was when the makers of Popular Mechanics were putting the September issue together.

• Teddy runs into Naehring, who tries to subvert Teddy’s attempt to reach the boat. Teddy grabs his needle out of his hand and jabs it at him. Naehring then begins to discuss how the word “trauma” comes from the Greek word for “wound”. This seems to speak to Kubrick’s love of Traumnovelle (Dream Novel), which became Eyes Wide Shut. Teddy is a bit like a man who cannot reach the acceptance phase of his grief (I have a big thing about how Eyes Wide Shut is about the grief cycle, but I don’t know if I’ll ever expand on my outline for that essay series). Oh, Naehring makes the dream connection a second later.
• Also, here, when he’s implying Naehring’s a Nazi, Naehring’s colours are white, black, and red.

• “Wounds can create monsters, marshal. Wouldn’t you agree, when you see a monster, you must stop it?” But what about when a monster sees a monster? So Teddy stabs him with the drugs. If I’m not mistaken, this is the one time that Teddy acts violently against a man who is trying to help (he’ll subdue the guard at the base of the lighthouse in a bit). So, this might be the axed-Hallorann moment. Which would be especially apt, given that Jack’s prejudice is against them black folk comin’ and havin’ better jobs than us awesome white folk. And Teddy’s prejudice is against Nazis, despite his confession to Chuck about what he really thinks about what he did to the German soldiers. His shame and moral superiority are constantly wrestling (and boxing?).
• The other thing is, timing-wise, this would pair better with Wendy going to fight Jack, and since Teddy does strike down two figures (and blow up one sweet old car) these acts might compare between with Wendy’s two wounding blows against Jack.

• A passing orderly (most of whom are black) says he’s been on for 18 hours straight, and his friend says, “Nice paycheck.” Hallorann gets the shine while watching the 10:00 news, and then spends the next 19 hours coming to save the day. He gets axed at 5:25. A miscalculation of Dennis Lahane’s? Or a coincidence? Or means something else? Or nothing? I’ve been skipping a lot of the soft phrases from orderlies, because while they’re often on point, they’re parts of other points I’m already making. That one felt especially direct, though.

• The plate for the car Teddy blows up (belonging to Cawley) is 235 743. That’s a 237 almost! And this takes place in ’54. What’s the leftover 3? Suite 3?

• Teddy finds a pack of matches. Like the one the Grady twins wanted to use to burn down the Overlook. I wondered if the Camel brand might be a reference to the “eye of a needle” bible quote, but that’s Mark 10:24, and here we see the clock showing 10:01 (a palindrome). Seems like it would’ve been easy to use the clock to that effect, had the reference been intentional. Though the film does end with Teddy asking if it’s better to live as a monster, or to die as a free man. That’s a bit like a warped “rich man into heaven” concept.
• Actually, Mark 10:1-12 (10:01) is about some people asking Jesus if divorce is cool cuz Moses said it was, and Jesus is not having any of it. So, when Teddy blows up Cawley’s car in a bit, and Dolores’ ghost is unaffected by the fire, that speaks to these passages in a warped sort of way, too.

• Teddy blows up the car with his “fucking ugly” tie. It feels like a funny line, but on reflection, it’s a bit of an odd send off to his wife, who, for all he knows, he’s obliterating from his subconscious. The tie has been his only physical connection to his ghost wife, and he can’t use any other physical artefact to achieve his ends? This feels a bit like the way Jack has to denigrate Wendy in order to move forward.

• Also, this car, the 1947 Buick Roadmaster, from behind, bears a certain resemblance to the design philosophy at play in the VW from the Shining.
• Also, Hallorann drives a 1977 Buick Riviera to save the family, as he’s passing the smashed Beetle.

• There’s another great moment, when the fire recedes, and his ghost wife, and newly arrived ghost daughter, remain fully intact, and fully disappointed. It’s like they’re saying, we’re not going anywhere. You can’t just blow us up like that. You have to commit the ultimate in mind loss for that to happen. Jack’s volleys for his desired immortality are similar. Even after he’s begun his entrapment process, killing the radio and snowcat, we see him back at the desk, typing out more All Work lines.

• There’s a shot when Teddy dives into the water to swim to the lighthouse that is very similar to the one of Jack taunting Wendy inside the storeroom. We see Teddy gearing up to dive from in front, and then it reverses and his full-body dive looks like a man not diving forward, but diving downward. Jack’s storeroom face cuts back and forth with Wendy’s medium shot face, creating the sense that one of these people is a normal person, and one is beneath the ground, calling up. It’s a twisting of our physical concept of what these people are doing.

• Is the lighthouse analogous to the labyrinth? I don’t think Shutter Island is really about labyrinths. But it’s almost elegiac about that notion. Teddy comes looking for a mystery, and everywhere he goes, the mystery, he realizes again and again is only within himself. When he busts into the lighthouse, the intense music stops mid-note, and there’s no moment like that in The Shining, but when Jack finally chases Danny outside, there’s a moment when he’s at the 2^nd Entrance door, and the Utrenja music quiets to just the sounds of many voices whispering.

• Nelson here shares a name with Barry Nelson, who played Ullman.

• There’s a high-angle shot of a wrought iron spiral stair that’s exactly like the one in Scorsese’s top ten film The Red Shoes (I think; I can’t actually find the shot I’m thinking of), which is also about giving up everything in pursuit of a dream. In this shot, the stair almost resembles a Gatling gun barrel, or a massive drill. I suppose this foreshadows the one that will be transorbitalizing him soon.

• There’s a pipe on Cawley’s desk in the lighthouse. It’s positioned to the camera at the same angle as the one from Ceci n’est pas une pipe (The Treachery of Images). In fact, it’s the exact same model, with the exact same colours at the exact same points of the pipe. The only difference is that this pipe doesn’t have a curved stem (it’s straight as a lighthouse). The ensuing conversation is all about Solando not being real, and really, this whole sequence is about revealing to the audience that nothing is what it seems. You know, I’m actually wondering if one of the most profound visual cues in the film is straight things, things like needles, pipes, and lighthouses.

• Cawley says Teddy’s been receiving chlorpromazine for the past 24 months. Just as there are 24 inmates in ward C, etc.

• The number of letters in each name is 6 and 7, and the order goes 6-7, 6-7 for Andrew and 6-7, 7-6 for Dolores. Andrew and Edward are the same person, while Dolores and Rachel are reflections of each other. And with regard to “Who is 67?” the only name that doesn’t go 6-7 is Dolores’ who is the only person is was never on Shutter Island.

• Cawley lays out the scenario where Teddy’s imagined conspiracy is what he uses to reinforce his delusion. Another Catch-22 scenario. A mirror of the one Solando 2 laid out. And it’s ironic of both Cawley and Solando to do this, since both parties are essentially responsible for presenting Andrew with a fantasy world.

• Teddy calls Cawley’s explanations a “game”. And he repeats Solando’s phrase that he’ll be turned into “one of [Naehring’s] ghosts”.

• There aren’t too many instances of Teddy and Chuck not looking like twins or imperfect twins throughout, but especially at the end here, the difference is black and white. In fact, the only times they aren’t wearing roughly the same thing, or exactly the same thing is from 17:00-49:00 (In Shining terms, this is the period where Danny receives all his lessons). And in this period, there’s still several instances of seeing them in identical ponchos, or back in their fedoras and beige trench coats. Also, note the speckles on the back of Teddy’s coat here, which resembles the big dipper, otherwise known as the Great Bear, which is what Andrew is clinging onto by trying to keep the name Teddy.
• Also, Sheehan’s emergence at this point, 33 minutes after Chuck disappears, greatly reflects Danny’s disappearance into Tony, emerging only to save himself from Jack’s madness. In fact, Danny reappears just as Jack kills Hallorann, and Lester Sheehan reappears just as Cawley is trying to “kill” Teddy.
• Also, just a small thought: Dr. Lester Sheehan bears a sonic resemblance to Dr. (Hannibal) Lecter. I don’t think the implication is that Sheehan is an evil monster, but consider that Peter Breene, the inmate Teddy interviews, bears a similar M.O. to Lecter as a face-biter. And the scene where Teddy goes to find George Noyce bears a resemblance to Clarice Starling’s first walk down the hall to speak with Lecter. Buffalo Bill is playing the warden. I don’t know. But in a film so obsessed with names, Lester jumps out.

• Cawley calls what’s going on in psychiatry a war, again. This seems like an odd tactic, given that Andrew obviously has mixed feelings, to say the least, about his role as a soldier. Possibly Cawley thinks that he’s giving Andrew the chance to make things right. He also says that the war crime Andrew blames himself for might not have happened, which would explain the unreality from his visions.

• Teddy says he knows the gun is loaded and that it’s his because there’s a notch in it from when Philip Stacks shot him. Philip Stone played the part of Grady in The Shining. This is the first time that Teddy is referencing this mythic Philip Stacks, so it does feel pointed to introduce this proof at this point. Also, since we don’t know who Stacks is, the reference to him sounds silly and ludicrous. It makes Teddy sound absurd to be referencing someone we’ve never met, as if we should know him. Of course, in the reality of his situation, it’s less so. I’m just saying, from a narratology perspective, it’s quirky.
• Also, if the Stone reference is intentional, Teddy is waving the pistol at around 115:00, which is exactly when Jack is waking up and hearing Grady. So, if Teddy is using Stacks as some proof of the past, only to break apart the pistol in his hands a few seconds later, it’s interesting to note that this could be a sly reference to Stone’s Grady (Delbert), and the real Grady (Charles), being different people. Perhaps Teddy shooting Cawley, seeing his blood spatter, and then seeing him come back to life unfazed is analogous to Grady freeing Jack from the pantry.

• Sheehan talks about how Dolores set the “city apartment” on fire, which drove them to the isolated lake house. The Shining features the same movement from city to country isolation.

• In the beach house of Andrew and Dolores there’s a clock set to 12:10 (the witching hour), a couple landscapes on opposite walls, a stuffed dog on the back porch, a lawn ornament of a rancher on his white mule/donkey/horse. There’s also the sound, again, of a preacher on the radio, connecting this moment to the infirmary.

• The family of loons here might be a reference to the painting Flock of Loons, which appears in Susie’s office and the 2^nd Entrance.
• Also, note the way the distant land has lost its mirrorform quality in the water. This is no longer Teddy’s way of trying to understand reality. This is reality.

• It’s a small thing, but when Andrew speaks the line that he later quotes in his dream, and which Cawley quotes at him in the lighthouse “Why you all wet, baby?” what he actually says is, “Baby? Why you all wet?” So reality was the inverse of the fantasy reference.

• Dolores says, “I wanna go home” to which he replies, “You are home”, and this brings to mind the song Home which plays over the most murderous of the Jack-Grady bathroom chat. And of course the Pillars of Hercules business. Also, the way Jack says, “Wendy? I’m home.” After first chopping the front door down.

• Andrew says, “School’s not in on Saturday”, and Dolores says, “My school is” meaning her lesson was murder. Jack is also a murdering ex-schoolteacher.
• Danny also receives the last of his Lessons on a Saturday. That’s when he sees the Grady twins for the last time.

• Andrew’s watch here shows around 1:26 (that’s 237 minus 111…). Are we supposed to think 76 minutes have gone by? Or was this to get the bull horn effect (the hour and minute hand looking like horns) right before he kills his wife? The Shining also contains two temporal headscrews (one completely impossible (or shown ridiculously out of order), and the other just hugely out of step with the presentation of time), the one of which is happening around this length into the film.

• Root of an Unfocus starts playing again when Andrew’s finished laying out his kids on the grass. So we have an instance of music being used to connect themes.

• Dolores calls the kids their “living dolls”. This is, of course, an affront to reality by calling something that which it is not, and cajoling him to play along. Also, “living dolls” has a kind of echo relationship to Solando’s “walking nightmares”.
• She says they can take them on a picnic tomorrow. Teddy Bear’s Picnic was the other big hit by Al Bowlly, whose music is featured prominently in The Shining.

• She begs him to “set [her] free” which is the “root” of her similar pleas in his fantasies. But he doesn’t want to kill her again. He doesn’t want to kill her “twice” as Chuck was saying earlier. Incidentally, this happens at 123:00 while Jack killing Hallorann is at 128:00. At 128:00 in Shutter Island Teddy is killing himself by showing Sheehan that he’s regressed into his fantasy.

• The fact that his daughter’s name is Rachel seems odd. Rachel Solando is an anagram of Dolores Chanal. His daughter’s name is Rachel Laeddis. He had to abstract his wife’s name, in a sense, Dolores Laeddis, to get to Rachel Solando. He had to think of Dolores’ name in its maiden form (Chanal, presumably) to give himself an obsessive phantom who possessed the same name as his daughter, in order to, what, beg himself to come to terms? Neutralize the effect of his daughter’s memory? Is that an example of him wanting to keep his daughter, but reject his wife? Keep the good, reject the bad? On top of it all, that coincidence is meant to be taken as reality, when all the other coincidences are in fact part of an elaborate ruse. There’s something very convenient about that. I’m not saying it’s more ludicrous than anything else about the premise, but it’s almost too neat.
• That said, his daughter does always appear as the daughter she eventually turns out to be in reality. So perhaps Rachel is his totem, his way of drawing himself out of his delusion, by triggering the memory of Rachel every time he hears the name of Solando.

• Also, there’s no fanfare given to the fact that the woman who played Solando is actually one of the nurses. She’s simply there when Andrew wakes up, and then carries off his tray. Just felt the need to remark on that.

• At the end, Andrew tells that Dolores reported feeling an insect living in her brain, “clicking across her skull” and making her do things. Earlier, as Teddy, he describes Andrew Laeddis as a firebug, and blames him for the deaths of his family, in a fire. In fact, we learn that Dolores set the fire that drove them to the country. That’s a pretty awesome way to show how deep Andrew’s self-hate and self-crucifixion goes.
• Also, you know, Jack drives a Bug.

• Andrew’s last breakthrough was nine months ago. Is the pregnancy imagery there intended to convey that this new breakthrough is the result of the last one?
• Of course, Dolores dies while in a lovemaking position, splayed out in similar fashion to the dead results of their procreation. So perhaps there’s something to be said for the way the film deals with family tree anxiety. I don’t know if there’s a word for that. But the fear some people have that all their efforts to live on through their offspring will come to nothing. A fear that would’ve been quite legitimate for the progenitors of 3% of the world population, thanks to WWII.

• Cawley: “You reset, Andrew. Like a tape playing over and over on an endless loop.”

• Teddy/Andrew’s final question to Chuck/Sheehan (“This place makes me wonder…what would be worse? To live as a monster, or to die as a good man?”) is like the Inception top. In a sense, they’re unanswerable questions, and in a sense they aren’t. Just as the photo of 1921 Jack at the end of the film seems to have no clear answer. I actually don’t think in any of these cases that the point is to make you consider both options equally. I think the films have enough lean in every instance to give you what you need in order to know what the filmmakers were trying to say. But by appealing to both sides of possibility, it’s reaching across the aisle to anyone who might be inclined to feel the opposing way. The hotel seems to give Jack the eternal glory he was after, the spinning top seems to suggest that there is no escaping the realm of dream and you can never know what’s real, and Teddy’s suggestion here implies that there is a way to hold on to sanity and insanity in equal measure, as it suits you.
• Also, Teddy/Andrew is only dying intellectually. The lobotomy will keep him around till natural causes bring him down. Till then, he’ll be a bit of a photo Jack, won’t he?

• Sometimes a lighthouse is just a lighthouse. The final shot of the film (10:45 shy of The Shining‘s length) occurs at the same moment as Jack is scanning the grounds and seeing the entrance of the labyrinth, which now faces the front of the Overlook, as opposed to west of the Overlook. This nicely refers to the major difference between the two films: The Shining is about transformation and adaptation to shifting realities while Shutter Island is about trying to come back from transformation and adaptation to the concrete objective existence of our objective reality.

Before I get on to the last part, I just wanted to note a few things about the score, which I wasn’t familiar had a completely unoriginal soundtrack, comprised entirely of preexisting modern classical music.

1. There’s two tracks by Ingram Marshall (Fog Tropes and Prelude — The Bay), and Marshal is what Cawley is always calling Chuck and Teddy.
2. John Cage’s Music for Marcel Duchamp is ostensibly a reference to dadaism, which The Shining is ostensibly doing by referencing Abbey Road, which references dadaism on track 3. There’s also a twin Cage track in Root of an Unfocus.
3. There’s a twin song written for someone else called Hommage à John Cage, by Nam June Paik, which, obviously, references a different set of twin songs.
4. Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel 2 and Cage’s Music for Marcel Duchamp are two tracks with a famous painter in the title. Although Cage was also a painter, though I doubt he’s better known for that.
5. Here’s a neat one: Uaxuctum: The Legend of the Mayan City Which They Themselves Destroyed for Religious Reasons by Giacinto Scelsi has a neat double in John Adams’ Christian Zeal and Activity, for how both reference religious activity. But more incredibly, Uaxactun was the name given to the city by an American archaeologist, Sylvanus Morley, partly as a pun on “Washington” which “Waxactun” would sound somewhat like (the Maya words Waxac and Tun mean “Eight Stones”). The final song in the film, This Bitter Earth, is by Dinah Washington. And also there’s a character in the film, Trey Washington, the black orderly who gives the marshals their change of clothes.
6. There’s also a second John Adams track in that he performed on Fog Tropes (as conductor?).
7. On Christian Zeal and Activity, John Adams was modelling his style upon Mahler’s. Mahler is the one composer referenced in the film by name.
8. There’s two composers featured in The Shining, György Ligeti and Krzysztof Penderecki. With the same Ligeti song (Lontano) making an appearance here.
9. Richter’s On the Nature of Daylight is the only track to appear on both discs of the commercial soundtrack, and, as previously mentioned, Krzysztof Penderecki’s two tracks, De Natura Sonoris #1 & #2 (On the Nature of Sound) appear on The Shining soundtrack.
10. Kay Starr’s Wheel of Fortune was a big hit in 1952, like Johnnie Ray’s Cry. The other big 1952 hit of Wheel of Fortune was by Dinah Washington.
11. Two performers on the album have last names that are Beatles last names: Kay Starr (Ringo) and Lou Harrison (George). In case you somehow missed it: The Shining has some things to say about the Beatles.
12. Brian Eno’s Lizard Point and Scelsi’s Uaxuctum are both named after places. Rothko Chapel 2 is like that too, but that’s named after a building. These are named for land.
13. The only tracks that leaves are Alfred Schnittke’s Four Hymns: II for Cello and Double Bass, and Lonnie Johnson’s Tomorrow Night. Maybe they have some twin factors that aren’t jumping out at me. I guess On the Nature of Daylight and Tomorrow Night are both time of day songs. A night and a day track, like on Abbey Road.

So yeah, if this twin/duo-heavy soundtrack is intentionally that, they did an incredible job of assembling the tracks, and finding ones that paired so whimsically with Scorsese’s nightmare. Nothing felt the slightest bit off with its paired sequence.

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• Finally, as with all Shine Babies, I want to look at the role the Fibonacci sequence might play in the construction of Shutter Island. In case this is your first stop at my site, I have a theory that Kubrick’s Shining was edited to 143 minutes as an experiment to see if this length would feel more natural to audiences, and to see if segmenting the film’s sections this way would effect our understanding of the plot, upon analysis. Shutter Island falls short of this length by 5 minutes (counting the end credits). What follows is a brief description of what occurs in each of Shutter Island‘s ten sections, and a reflection on whether this film passes the Fibonacci test.
• Section I: 1:00 – Intro credits followed by foggy water. A massive boat emerges from the fog.

• Section II: 2:00 – Teddy’s whole sequence of trying to “pull [himself] together” and going out to meet his partner. There’s one line from Chuck in this part.

• Section III: 4:00 – The whole conversation between Chuck and Teddy on the boat, ends on the visual introduction of the island.

• Section IV: 7:00 – Pulling into the island, meeting the guards, driving up to the institution, and hearing the descriptions of each ward. Ward C’s description finishes right here, and the next part starts with the surrendering of firearms part.

• Section V: 12:00 – The firearms bit, going to meet Cawley, the intake area, meeting Cawley, hearing about the escaped patient. Ends when Teddy sees the fake Rachel photo and has his headache. Right after this, Cawley gives him the water and the pills, that apparently do nothing, so parts 1-5 are the non-paranoid half of the film, in the sense that Teddy taking the pills would initiate that for some.

• Section VI: 20:00 – Pretty much the entire preliminary Solando investigation. The private Cawley scene ends, they see Rachel’s room and Teddy finds the note, they interrogate the staff at length, and then they try to radio for help. The next part starts with Cawley saying he has rounds, and wouldn’t they like to come to his place after his rounds.

• Section VII: 33:00 – Meeting Naehring and having WWII flashes, conferring with Chuck in bed then having the Dolores dream, discussing Cawley’s war-themed perspective on the field of psychology, then meeting Peter Breene. This sequence would end halfway through Breene’s speech about why he committed his crimes, just as Teddy is trying to move the conversation to Dolores.

• Section VIII: 54:00 – The rest of the Breene interview and the whole of the Mrs. Kearns interview, Chuck and Teddy go searching in the rain and spend the night in the mausoleum discussing the war and Teddy’s crimes, they get brought back and switched into the all-white garb they’ll wear til the end, they interrupt the discussion of revising the captivity of the inmates, and it ends halfway through the fake Solando interview, with her telling him he’s dead.

• Section IX: 88:00 – Fake Solando breaks down, Teddy gets his headache and takes the pills, in the basement infirmary he has his extended dream with Dachau, evil Laeddis, and the Solando murders, the storm passes and they break into Ward C, the “Tag” guy, George Noyce, Chuck comes back and they go to the lighthouse, Teddy banishes him then comes back and thinks he jumped, scales the cliff to find nothing then goes to discover Solando 2. This sequence ends halfway through the Solando visit, right after she finishes making her case about her whole vision of Ashecliffe. The next sequence begins with her bringing up Teddy’s traumas.

• Section X: 131:00 – This is 12 minutes short of perfect, but let’s put that aside for now. First we get Solando’s dire warnings, then the Warden’s magic flight, then the pretence that Chuck doesn’t exist, then the escape attempt, running into Naehring and injecting him, blowing up the car, getting to the lighthouse and hearing the unpleasant truth, reliving the memory of Dolores’ murders, and the aftermath.

• Conclusion: Without doing a rigourous dissection (which I think would be great fun), it seems pretty clear that the film’s sequences and themes are nicely compartmentalized by these faultlines. What’s more interesting though, I don’t think any other film I’ve compared is this close, with timing beats so thematically similar, even identical. Let’s look at those.
• By the end of four minutes both movies have arrived at the remote destination, at seven minutes both films cut in half a sequence of the main character learning about the operation of this remote institution, dividing up the routine from the specific.
• At twelve minutes Danny has just seen the bloodfall and passed out, Teddy has just seen the fake Solando photo and collapsed in pain.
• Section VI is Danny’s interview by the doctor, Wendy’s follow-up interview, and then the drive back to the hotel, and in Shutter Island it’s searching Rachel’s room and then interrogating the staff, and then radioing for help. In the sense that Solando/Dolores are like the bloodfall/shining (confronting the reality of murder/violence and our power to see it coming and do something about it), these interrogations are similar.
• Section VII is the whole of Ullman’s tour and the first half of Hallorann/Danny talk, vs. Shutter Island introducing us to Naehring (Hallorann’s other), and includes the first massive dream. Both these sections end with the Danny figure (Chuck) sitting in a large kitchen. And just as the Hallorann interview goes on, the Breene and Kearns interviews go on.
• Section VIII is where Danny has all his important visions and lessons and where Jack has his first breakdown (“When I’m in here, that means, don’t come in!”) at the midpoint, and where Wendy calls for help. Danny then sees the twins and has his only major confrontation with Jack. In Shutter Island they get caught in the storm, and Teddy makes his confessions in the mausoleum, and when Chuck challenges him, they have their first fight (although Teddy’s confession also bears resemblance to Jack’s nightmare in Section IX). The Solando 1 interview at the end is similar to the Danny/Jack interview: both are the only time these two characters confront each other, and both include one character being really weirded out by the strange behaviour of the other. Also, both have characters feebly trying to break the other out of a delusion.
• Here’s a really good one: Section IX in both films begin and end with a major confrontation. And in Shutter Island it’s the two Solandos. In The Shining, it’s the two Jacks (Jack and Grady). In both, Jack and Teddy are being harshly challenged: first by someone who cares for them (and in a way they can’t recognize), and then by someone who is a projection of their own mind, to varying extents (Grady, we understand, is much more a consequence of the hotel’s nature).
• One of the major differences would be that Section X Jack seems completely beyond help, and Section X Andrew has several moments of possible redemption. I think that owes most to the difference in story and character. So yeah, without going into extreme detail, I think there’s a good case to be made that The Shining was a major influence on Shutter Island, if not a direct template for its existence. I would not be surprised if reading Juli Kearns’ analysis inspired it.
• But! Does it completely pass the Fibonacci test? It’s not 143 minutes. Does it have to be in order to qualify? I debate this all the time. Part of my colourful personal history is that my PTSD was misdiagnosed as schizophrenia in my late teens, so films that rock the boat of reality this hard leave me feeling rather indignant. The antipsychotics I was falsely prescribed really warped my sense of reality, so I don’t appreciate narratives that end with “your paranoia was wrong”. My paranoia saved me from a life destroyed by a false diagnosis. “This can’t be how it ends!!!!” my mind screamed out for the last ten minutes “Believe what your senses are telling you, Teddy!”, and the whole walk home with my partner, I was fighting off bitter tears. So, while I doubt most people would have had such an idiosyncratic response, those missing 5-13 minutes (depending on how you count the credits) probably leave some portion of the audience wanting more. Perhaps we can say that, since the film (possibly inadvertently) follows the structure of The Shining perfectly enough, it trips into being a Fibonacci Film, with a ghost finale. But I can’t give it a full pass. Let’s say it gets a B+.
• For the record, the reason I thought to study the film wasn’t the Kearns connection or even the Lontano crossover, but the red door in Teddy’s vision of his wife coming into the infirmary. It just reminded me so strongly of the bloodfall. And I started to wonder. About four months before I started Eye Scream I asked my friends if they wanted to do a Shutter/Shining movie night to look for connections, and, enthused as we all were, we never got around to it. Would Eye Scream exist, if we had…?

• Finally, just for fun: is Shutter Island an anagram? My favourite is TRUST SHINE LAD, but it can also be rearranged to spell SHINE LAD STRUT, TRUEST LAND IS HE, SHUT TIE SLANDER, SLENDER SUIT HAT, LAST RED TIE SHUN and LAST SHINE TURD. Make your own!

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