by Nathaniel R
Ten years ago Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010) opened in movie theaters. Or did it? It did but what if I were an unreliable narrator?!? Once you start worrying about fact versus self-fiction, well, it can drive a person crazy. Curiously given its hit status (though perhaps not so curiously given its release date) this is the only Scorsese film from the 2010s to not receive a single Oscar nomination.
Are you a fan? What's your most intense memory of it? I'll tell you mine after the jump...
My most intense memory of Shutter Island is not from the film itself but viral dramas on the internet. I was annoyed at the should-be-retired "dead wives" trope in male-focused dramas at the time so I created the following poster to mock it.
Leonardo DiCaprio had done three consecutive dead wives dramas (Revolutionary Road, Inception, Shutter Island) all released in the span of 19 months. This poster became a viral sensation on tumblr... but was not attributed to The Film Experience which we found deeply annoying since the poster took some time to make. But, well, the internet as a public domain meme-world... you win some, you lose some.
Alas our frequent griping did not deter Hollywood it's still common for screenwriters to give male heroes dead wives as trauma for them to overcome (women as symbols-only/fodder for male growth -- "not at all problematic!" he said, sarcastically).
Leo even made it a quadrilogy, finally winning the Oscar for The Revenant (2015)... which like Inception and Shutter Island featured his protagonist being visited by a spectral vision of his dead spouse. Thankfully Rick Dalton's new Italian wife survived her death-threat experience in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood (2019).
