Movie- Shutter Island

"Shutter Island" is one of those films that rips the rug out from under your expectations with the frequency and intensity of a magician's act. Only during the final act (unless you've connected the foreshadowing dots), when our barometer falls off the charts, do we realize that the narrative is really about tragic psychosis and elaborate role play.

Shutter island and mental disorder

Overall, I found the film to be a very intense, somewhat entertaining discussion of lines - the kind of elusive, easily blurred lines that exist between perception and reality, normalcy and insanity, even exceptional and subpar filmmaking. There is another extremely relevant though largely ignored line of which I'd like to discuss, the line between realistic and melodramatic portraits of clinical psychology. Although issues like delusions and 20th century inpatient treatment are aggressively examined within the plot, many of its exclamation points are in fact question marks that warrant further discussion.

Teddy is a strange case. In retrospect he presents as an intelligent, high functioning individual, so much so that his traumatic experiences during WW II merely dented, rather than overwhelmed, and his coping resources. However, the mild and (then) socially acceptable alcoholism and workaholics he exhibited as a family man provided just enough emotional detachment to blind him from the murderous insanity bubbling up within his bipolar wife. One Saturday, an unsuspecting Teddy arrived home from a work trip to his three drowned children and a creepy, suicidal wife (whom he promptly put out of misery). Although such an experience would seem to virtually guarantee the development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, somewhere along the way his symptoms tipped into the very real but much less common psychiatric condition known as Delusional Disorder (Jeremy: p.17).

Inception and mental disorder

"Inception" entered theaters mid-summer amidst tremendous hype due to the bold and creative filmmaking tendencies of writer/director Christopher Nolan. In subsequent weeks, the box office ballooned with ticket sales alongside a unanimously positive critical consensus. Indeed, there are two underlying themes within Nolan's films that mirror the aims of psychologists: a relentless dissection of common yet complex mental processes, and a case study of relatable characters battling psychological woes. In short, Nolan tackles the sort of mental mysteries found in therapy offices, and he treats the material with the kind of careful and sophisticated stance nurtured by clinical training.

In "Inception" the next frontier of espionage is the mind. The central character, Cobb (played brilliantly by Leonardo Di Caprio) is the best in the business at inception - the art of infiltrating the dreaming mind of another in order to steal ideas. Saito desires for an idea to be planted - not simply extracted - into the mind of his rival, Robert Fischer Jr. Specifically, Saito wants Fischer, the recent inheritor of his father's energy empire, to dissolve the monopoly.

In addition to the curiosity-driven exploration of unusual mental events like dreaming, the other way in which Nolan doubles as a psychologist is in his attempt to comment on mental illness ...