A Double Standard

I will start out by establishing that I was not clever enough to realize Teddy in Shutter Island was crazy all along. I was completely rooting for him and he had my head filled with paranoid conspiracy theories about the doctors, nurses, orderlies, and warden from scene one. Based on the informal poll we took in class today I was not alone in my misplaced belief in Teddy's sanity. At first I did not really see anything odd in the widespread trust we had of Teddy. He is the main character, he seems haunted by the war and the death of his wife, but he also approaches his job with diligence and integrity. Diligence and integrity are both valuable character traits, so what's not to trust? In retrospect, the hallucinations should have tipped me off. Even though he seemed to know they had no basis in reality, a sane man does not have recurring visions of the dead. I guess I should have seen it coming, but I was caught off guard again when a parallel to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest cropped up in my mind. I remembered our initial debates over whether to trust Chief Bromden, mainly because he had recurring hallucinations. However, in this case it seems more correct to call it a perpendicular because we behaved in a totally opposite manner with Shutter Island. Why, as a class, did we display such reluctance to trust Bromden because of his hallucinations and then so easily trust Teddy in spite of his hallucinations? I have come up with two possible answers to this question. First, the difference between the characters themselves. As I said before, Teddy appears to know his hallucinations have no basis in reality. In contrast, Bromden seriously believes the things he sees actually occur, which makes him seem crazier than Teddy. Another difference between these characters lies in the form of media in which we encountered them. Chief Bromden resides in the pages of a book, while Teddy comes to us on a movie screen. I think books lend themselves more easily to analysis; you can easily revisit the pages as many times as you like and for as long as you like. This gave us time to probe Bromden's character more deeply and perhaps led us to question him more. Meanwhile, Teddy appears in a film, made up of short scenes which often seem to flash by. We saw each scene once, and for a relatively brief amount of time and I feel sure this affected the depth of my analysis. This really drives home the point that watching a movie is not the same as reading a book, which in turn reinforces the importance of literature.

Sane?

Crazy?