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Screening Response #2: Shutter Island

April26

     Shutter Island is a film about U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), who travels to Shutter Island investigating the case of a missing patient from a hospital for the criminally insane. Directed by Martin Scorsese and released in 2010, this drama is a piece of art that uses costumes to pull the audience into 1954 as well as create meaning of opposing forces through color.

The entire visual design of Shutter Island portrays the world of 1954 Massachusetts, but the costumes are the key element that depicts this. The first scene of Teddy and his partner Chuck on the ferry shows the two characters dressed in long trench/raincoats, short ties, 1950s suits, and fedoras. Automatically the audience knows that this story is not taking place in the present day.

Now that the audience has been made aware of the story’s period through costumes, the costume colors become very important. The nurses and orderlies that work in the hospital are dressed in all white, which normally represents purity, goodness, safety, and has a positive connotation. However, the positive connotation of the color white conflicts with Teddy’s negative belief that the nurses and orderlies are all hiding something from him. The color yellow in the floral dress that Teddy’s wife Dolores wears, in dream sequences and flashbacks, is a warm color symbolic of joy and happiness, yet whenever Dolores shows up Teddy is uneasy and damaging events occur. For example, Dolores appears in the lighthouse scene near the end of the film. In this scene Teddy is told that he is Andrew Laeddis. Soon after Dolores appears Teddy tries to shoot Dr. Cawley and then Teddy has a mental breakdown resulting in him passing out. Dolores is wearing the same dress in the scene in which Teddy comes home to find her soaking wet from drowning their three children in the lake. The symbolism of white and yellow contradict what the viewer believes about the characters’ personalities and actions and is an example of how the colors of costumes in Shutter Island cause viewers to question the opposing forces on screen.

To continue, throughout the film the colors of costumes of some characters contrast with the colors of costumes worn by other characters. For example, near the end of the film Teddy and Chuck are dressed completely in white orderly clothing instead of their usual light grey or khaki suits because they had been caught outside in the storm completely soaking their suits. The orderly clothing that these two men have to wear starkly contrasts the dark gray/black costumes of the psychiatrists Dr. Cawley and Dr. Sheehan. The symbolism of white contrasts the symbolism of black in the way that good contrasts evil, light contrasts dark, and life contrasts death. However, this time the colors match the audience’s perception of these characters. Teddy and Chuck are believed to be good characters while Dr. Cawley and Dr. Sheehan are believed to be the “bad” characters and the costumes reflect these beliefs.

All in all, the costume colors in the film are infused with symptomatic meaning. At the beginning of the film these colors contradict characters’ personalities and actions, but by the end of the film the colors match the audience’s perception of characters.

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