a man completely unto himself, edward daniels (dicaprio) unconciously re-plays his life as a us marshall hellbent on uncovering the sinister conspiracies (transorbital lobotomies, psychotropic drug use, etc.) practised on shutter island in a medically planned attempt to have edward recover from his own severe repressed psychological traumas. this act of role play successfully works, after two previous years of treatment, when the emotional shock of self-realization eventually kicks in. daniels learns that he is in fact the man (andrew laeddis) he was attempting to hunt down for the death of his wife.
in order to come to this ultimate truth daniels traverses the treacherous landscape of the island and penetrates the deep psychological labyrinth of his own mind. these two obstacles going hand-in-hand. the island itself is as isolated (geographically/socially) as edwards' own fantasy narrative. encircled by a perimeter of inescapable bluffs, the island's outer regions are almost impossible navigate. they become a border that works to prevent daniels from getting to the truth and likewise securing him in his dreamworld.
even in the opening scene, daniels is introduced aboard a ferry in front of a "stormy" green-screened background. a technique echoing the film noir staple of rear projection (casting a pre-filmed background before live actors) that today has the cinematic effect of blurring lines of verisimilitude and invoking a degree of artifice. on the boat, daniels tells his partner of their vague assignment and of his secluded personal history; equally unclear as the surface and texture of their setting. while shutter island certainly plays homage to the detective-thriller genre, its first scene also sets the stage for the jig-sawing of reality to come.
it is no wonder, then, that in this maze of a landscape scorsese should use a lighthouse (the place where daniels dellusionally believes houses the most unimaginable/horrific surgeries) at the base of the bluffs as the location for daniels' coming to; daniels reaches the logical conclusion of his fictitious"conspiracy" when he reaches the top of a structure designed for vision and clarity. like the rear-projected background of the ferry scene, the symbolism of such a structure seems strangely familiar. take for example, hitchcock's masterpiece vertigo which follows a similar thematic course to shutter. in place of a lighthose, a church bell-tower (a building of literal religious awakening) is used as the final location of scottie's (stewart) healing of his own individual trauma.
in addition to the symbolic reference of these buildings as psychiatric posts of consciousness, they have a common visual characteristic that works to encompass their character's respective journey. inside each building there is a staircase that winds upward to the top. although more prevalent in vertigo, this spiral motif represents a confusing/dizzying path. in shutter island, daniels traces this path into the truth of his own past. not limited to the staircase alone, the spiral can be recognized throughout the film: from the use of german records (which recollect some memory for edward); to the recorded tape of daniels' therapy sessions which dr. cawley (kingsley) reminds the viewer have been on a continuous loop for two years; to the circuitous route that daniels and partner take on the island, twisting and turning at seemless ends including daniels' own solitary venture into the nether-regions of ward c that coincidentally bring him closer to his real-life past; to the swirling of letters necessary to anagram the alter-ego's he creates; and even to the puzzling rotation of daniels and his partner's appearance on the island and the disappearnce of their counterparts. and holding all these elements together is the biggest natural cyclone of them all: the hurricane.
