Scorsese Loves Lobotomies

Shutter Island Glorifies Authority, Conformism and Mad Science (February 2010)

“I’d rather die a good man than live as a monster,” says Teddy Daniels/Laeddis (Leonardo DICaprio) at the end of Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island.  With this line, Scorsese puts his stamp of approval on the extremes of psychosurgery.  The camera tilts up to the Lighthouse, formerly implied to be a house of horrors, but now become a holy house where Laeddis/Daniels will be transformed into a good man by having an ice pick stuck through his eye socket to destroy parts of his brain. 

And for what?  Laeddis slaughtered a bunch of Nazis at Dachau and shot his wife after realizing that she had just drown their three little girls. Wrong, yes, but no monster!  The ending also wants us to accept that Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow), the creepy German shrink and his demonically bearded pal Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) are really good guys who only want to help people. It therefore denies the truth that America in the 1950s experimented with various methods of mind control, including brain surgery and psychoactive drugs.   

While I’m a huge admirer of many of Scorsese’s movies, Shutter Island ranks as among his worst. There’s tension in parts of the movie, but it leads to empty, un-scary climaxes and lengthy bits of repetitious exposition, designed only to trick us.  Each story twist  requires explanations that get more and more implausible. The whole clunky movie is a massive cheat whose big revelation is another annoyingly lengthy expository flashback scene.  Nothing is what is seems remains one of the great clichés of bad horror movie-making, but in this case nothing makes sense either. Even so, I’m ready to accept entertaining nonsense if it were entertaining and not  so politically conservative.

Shutter Island is a direct descendent of the 1920 German Expressionist film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, considered by author Siegfried Kracauer, in From Caligari to Hitler,  as a cultural precursor to the rise of Nazi ideology.  In the German movie, Francis realizes that the domineering Caligari hypnotizes his assistant Caesar, who becomes a zombie-like automaton carrying out the doctor’s murderous, psychotic revenge.  

Francis tracks Caligari to an insane asylum, revealing that the hypnotist is the director of the hospital and a murderer using mind control. At this point, the film rebelliously criticizes Dr. Caligari as the embodiment of irresponsible authority that uses  power to satisfy his lust for vengeance. Unfortunately, a further development shows that Francis, like Daniels/Laeddis in Shutter Island, is himself insane and that the whole movie must be seen as the ravings of a lunatic.  The murderous Dr. Caligari turns out to be a respected psychiatrist rather than a power-mad killer.  As in Shutter Island, this perverts and reverses the movie. Rather than exposing authority gone mad, both Caligari and Shutter Island show revolt as insanity and glorify authority, conformism and mad science.

Obama’s First Nine Months (October, 2009)

Compared to recent presidents, is he pregnant with promise or the proud parent of significant achievements?

Saturday Night Live’s  satirical attack on President Obama for accomplishing nothing, nada, and zilch stimulated lazy news outlets like MSNBC, CNN and others to parrot the joke as serious critique and even dumb it down further.

“Has Obama lost his ‘mojo,’” asks CNN’s Anderson Cooper; “How bad does Obama need something to go right?” moans MSNBC’s Chris Matthews while CNN’s Larry King talks ominously about the crisis in the Obama presidency. These people are supposed to be legitimate journalists, at least Cooper and Matthews. Instead, they mindlessly mimic the mockery of a second-rate comedy program.

SNL does not have to be factual, it just needs to be funny. Of course, it happens to be neither. Even so, there’s nothing wrong with journalists picking up on SNL’s “analysis” and debating its legitimacy. But they didn’t do this; rather, they repeated the charge without counterpoint.

In nine months, Obama averted a depression, stabilized the financial system, prohibited torture, kept America safe, successfully appointed the nation's first Hispanic Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, and positively changed our image in the world. He has not done nothing!

Even more damning to the media, no journalists bothered to research and contextualize the “done-nothing” critique by comparing Obama’s performance to that of our recent presidents - Bush 2, Clinton, Bush 1, and Reagan. What did each of them accomplish in his first nine months in office? Let’s look at the record:

A disaster that grew worse, George W. Bushgot Congress to pass a major tax cut for the rich that, along with the unfunded Iraq War, helped create the largest deficit in history and set the stage for the collapse of the economic system. Besides this, he took lots of time off. Mike Allen of the Washington Post reported that Bush, by August 10, had spent 42 percent of his presidency at vacation spots or en route.

Most significantly, Bush failed to keep us safe, presiding over the World Trade Center attacks - the deadliest on American soil ever. Following that, he was forced by pressure from Congress and the authors of “The 9/11 Report” to create the Office of Homeland Security. In early October, he launched the invasion of Afghanistan.

Bill Clinton mostly floundered in chaos and confusion for nine months. His taking power was described as “the worst transition in American history” by Stephen Hess, a former White House official. Clinton then got bogged down in controversy with his promise to end the Pentagon’s ban on homosexuals in the military. He eventually backed down from the pledge, looking weak and indecisive.

Clinton did get The Deficit Reduction Plan enacted in August, his only significant accomplishment. Passed without a single Republican vote, the plan established fiscal discipline and helped turn the largest deficits in history into the largest surplus - later squandered by George Bush 2. Finally, the National Health Care Overhaul was announced and then defeated the next year.

George H. W. Bush failed to achieve anything during his first nine months in office, unless one counts his being the first U.S. President to speak live on Chinese television. Saddled with the $2.7 debt of the Reagan years and an opposition Democratic Congress, Bush lacked a unified agenda and became a Veto-President.

Wounded by an assassination attempt in March, Ronald Reagan had already proposed a tax-cut economic plan. A few months after passage, America went into a deep recession that lasted two years with unemployment reaching 11%.  Finally, Reagan broke the strike of Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization and appointed the first female Supreme Court Justice, Sandra Day O’Connor.

Obama has clearly outperformed each of his predecessors, if not all of them combined. While keeping us safe, he transformed the world’s perception of America from arrogance and militarism to cooperation and negotiation, symbolized by his winning  the Nobel Peace Prize. Bashed in the early days of his term for the continued stock market decline, he should be lauded for its recent remarkable resurgence. Not only that, the guy works tirelessly, taking only nine days vacation.

Journalists, criticize what you will but provide informed perspective especially when pilfering bits from a past-its-prime mockfest.