Some of the most macabre vestiges of the Cold War remain on view beside basement doors and the mouths of underground garages in New York: fading metal signs declaring the presence of a fallout shelter. It’s hard for younger people to recall the ambient paranoia of an age in which nuclear war seemed an imminent nightmare, but Martin Scorsese’s new film, “Shutter Island,” gives them the chance to experience something of it, in a claustrophobia-inducing yet mind-expanding form, and they seem eager to do so, to the tune of a forty-million-dollar opening weekend. Twenty-five of those dollars were mine, as I took my older daughter, Juliette, to see it yesterday; she was seeing it for the first time (and loved it), whereas I had attended a press screening several weeks ago, from which I had emerged exhilarated and impatient for another viewing.
Many in the critical community differ, including Anthony Lane, who, writing in this magazine this week, compares its protagonist’s torments unfavorably with those shown in “Taxi Driver” and “Raging Bull” and considers Scorsese’s grotesque and ominous allusions to horror classics to be “light, rhetorical gestures toward the dark.” I see it differently. In “Shutter Island,” Scorsese lets his crazies out with a torrential, terrifying ferocity—but one which, for all of its intensity, is captured in controlled, precise, even chilled, but no less demonic visions. Yet here Scorsese plumbs the terrors not merely of the personal psyche and of society at large but also of the cinema itself, the cinema he loves and grew up with. For a cinephile of such depth and intensity, the effect is of a bitter confession.
The story, which is set in 1954, concerns a federal marshal, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), who, with a new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), heads to an isolated island housing an asylum for the criminally insane, in search of an inmate who has escaped; but Teddy has personal reasons for seeking the assignment: the presence at the facility of the man who is responsible for the death of his wife, Dolores (Michelle Williams). His intertwined searches take him deeper down a rabbit hole of suspected conspiracies, involving the psychiatrist who runs the hospital (Ben Kingsley) and another doctor, an elderly German immigrant (Max von Sydow). Scorsese’s skill at evoking the physical limits and emotional strains of confinement (for the officers quickly learn that their comings and goings occur solely at the discretion of the asylum’s authorities) is impressive—even on my second viewing of the movie, I felt that constraint as if physically. Yet this classic trope of cinematic fear takes second place to his evocation of an altogether darker, wilder, and deeper source of terror: the historical horrors of the day, which surge forth, as for the then-twelve-year-old Scorsese, with the long-repressed force of a primal nightmare.
As if unable to tune out the most hectic and staticky stations, the director fills the film with references—redeemed from kitsch by their frightful power and depth of associations, personal and historical—to nuclear war, the Second World War, and the concentration camps. Far from unduly aestheticizing his vision of German-perpetrated horrors, Scorsese—in presenting them from the war veteran Daniels’s own tangled and submerged perspective and blending the character’s intimate drama with that of the world stage—neither sacralizes nor cheapens them. Dream sequences haven’t had such coherence, visual power, and psychological resonance since the heyday of Ingmar Bergman.
And the overall notion that Scorsese seizes upon, and one that torments him, is the ambience of these horrors in the movies he loves. By now it’s a cliché of cinema studies and pop criticism to acknowledge a sort of postwar post-traumatic stress, resulting from the enforced national transition from global combat to instant normalcy, at work in the classic film-noir tradition of the late forties and the fifties. (Indeed, a key point of Scorsese’s plot is the era’s aversion to psychotherapy and shame of mental illness.) It’s as if Scorsese had lifted the lid from that tradition and, in effect, from his own vertiginously cinephilic psyche and movie-obsessed childhood to suggest the terrifying destruction of identity—through the steady and joyful consumption of ecstatic symbols and the disproportionately colossal power of their latent meaning—that results. The title is “Shutter Island”; the shutter is, after all, a part of the camera, and once you pass through, you don’t get out.