The Crazy Thing Is… Part I
I watched Shutter Island sometime in April with my mom and my grandmother. My grandma fell asleep around half an hour into the movie. My mom was slumped in her chair half an hour before the movie ended. I was the one who didn’t want to watch it- I voted for Date Night- and I stayed up until the end. It was a fascinating story that might have been done before, but it was executed well by Martin Scorsese. This director is one of my queen’s most exalted people and I was glad to know he did it because it was one of the most thought provoking movies I’ve seen in a while. I don’t know if you remember when I mentioned that I was going through a shallow phase, but I’m beginning to think it’s extended to my choice in movies, too.
I’m sure you can find a summary or a synopsis anywhere on the net, but I’ll put it here anyway. Leonardo DiCaprio and his partner investigate the escape of one of the patients in a mental hospital on a secluded island which houses those with criminal violations. It turns out that he has a different motive when his dead wife appears in his dreams to tell him that the man who started the fire which burned down the apartment where they lived with her in it was in the island. There were too many twists and turns to remember. All you have to know is that in the end, the names of the escaped patient and the arsonist’s turn out to be anagrams of Leonardo’s screen name and his wife’s, his police partner was a doctor in the facility and the whole hour and a half was a delusion he made up to cope with the fact that his wife killed his three kids because she was bat shit crazy and he didn’t do anything about it. Or was it?
The middle of the story posed an interesting fact. One of the things Leonardo used to explain away his suspicions was that the hospital was using the patients to experiment on. The setting of the story was after the end of the Nazi reign so America was apparently finding ways to lobotomize people and make them into mindless zombie soldiers. One of the reasons why they used mental patients because even if they found out and were released, no one would listen to the ramblings of a previously diagnosed crazy person, even if they were already discharged from the hospital. It’s a flawed assumption, but one we come to whenever we deal with people who are weird and out of place- even in small scales such as school and the work place. When perfectly normal people are ostracized for being a little eccentric over comic book characters and video games, what about people with real mental problems? How do we deal with them?
The problem with the problem is that no one really knows how to define crazy. Sure there are the usual things like OCD, eating disorders and split personalities, but what about subtle things? What is different as opposed to being too different? It’s probable that even professionals can’t define the boundaries because they’re different for every person. Say if I find it normal to be macabre and pessimistic about everything, it doesn’t mean I’m suicidal. If I’m a dog enthusiast and think that randomly barking at people is a regular greeting, it doesn’t mean it has to be a mental disorder. The truth is that mostly, crazy people are those who live in their own world. Why? Outside pressure makes it too hard for them to cope with normal life and that’s because society makes it too hard for them to live comfortably with their interests. So, since I’ve run out of space, I’ll continue the discussion in the next entry. Feel free to express your opinions and I’ll address them there.
