An ongoing theme in all the texts is mental illness, and how the treatments have changed over time. Some mental illnesses can cause people to commit crimes as it just changes their whole well being. The film Shutter Island directed by Martin Scorsese contains the major theme of mental illness and how the character is treated, it shows the main character in a mental institution, trying to be healed with different treatments in order to try help him. The aspect symbolism is also used in the film to help give more meaning. The second text that contained a lot of mental illness is the film The Notebook directed by Nick Cassavetes, which contains an old lady who suffers from dementia, and shows the more peaceful treatment she endures in the film. A consequence of mental illness is it can sometimes lead to people committing crimes as they can’t see the wrong they are doing. Two texts that show this is the short story Tell Tale Heart written by Edgar Allen Poe.The theme of crime was present as the narrator killed the old man in the end of the story, because he was infuriated by the old man’s eye and wanted to get rid of it. The use of symbolism is also used throughout this text. Another text that had crime as their ongoing theme was the television series The following produced by Kevin Williamson. It’s about a serial killer who is obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe trying to make his stories into a reality which brings about his “following.” This is a cult of people who want to help the serial killer commit crimes while he is incarcerated.
Although mental illness is seen throughout all the texts, it is a major theme in the two films Shutter Island and The Notebook, both films show the difference in treatments as time periods change. Shutter Island is a thriller/drama set in 1954. Although the audience only find out at the end that the film is about a mental patient you still understand the point of the film when it is all laid out at the end. The main character Edward ‘Teddy’ Daniels believes he is at Aschecliffe to investigate a disappearance but instead he is a patient himself. His real name is Andrew Laeddis and he was incarcerated after murdering his manic depressive wife after she killed their three children. Andrew is always given drugs in an attempt to calm him, and maybe even slowly break his ideas about him being Edward. As this never works the chief psychologist decides to try a new treatment on him called intervention therapy which was designed to break Andrew’s conspiracy by allowing him to play out the role of Edward Daniels and hopefully then able to get him to come to his senses and drop this fake persona in order for him to come back to reality. They were able to get through to Andrew by showing pictures of his children and telling him about his past. He then tricks the doctors into believing their new treatment didn’t work by saying, “We gotta get off this rock Chuck. Back to the Mainland. Whatever the hell is going on here, it’s bad.” Dr Sheehan/Chuck then looks over acknowledging the head doctor that their intervention therapy hasn’t worked. The film then ends on Andrew saying, “Which would be worse – to live as a monster? Or die as a good man?” This quote does confuse most but you can depict it as Andrew talking, not Edward and that he remembers his past life and the crime he committed, so he would rather die remembering himself than living a lie. He then gets taken off, and the audience assumes that a lobotomy can be performed on him. The lobotomy was a very common treatment in the 1940’s which is the era that this film is based on. The lobotomy involves severing connections in the brain’s prefrontal lobe and was suppose to reduce symptoms of mental disorders. Shutter Island is a thriller so the director’s purpose was most likely to make the film seem as dark and mysterious as possible because if he had made the setting bright and happy that would have changed the whole mood of the film so he had to make the film seem cold and depressing so give the audience the full effect on what the hospitals back then would have felt like for the patients locked in them. The film also reflects the values of the era it is based on because of the clothing, setting, and habits that the characters had. The trend of the 1950’s was for women to wear long skirts and long dresses (ankle length), the nurses were wearing clothes that resembled this style, Teddy’s wife was also seen wearing very long dresses and her hairstyle is very similar to what you would have seen back in the 50’s. The setting of the film was in an old fashioned concrete and brick building, with old fashioned cars driving through the streets. Smoking is a big part of the film as it was a common occurrence in the 1950’s, as it was a social habit. In this film it was used for medicine to be given to the patients, as it was considered okay to hide drugs, compared to today’s day and age. It shows that experimenting with different drugs was okay because they didn’t have the research that they do today. Imagine the outcry if doctors planted drugs in cigarettes today.
The second text which contains mental illness, shows similar treatments but different environments. The Notebook is a romantic drama set in 1940’s where the characters are seen in their youth years and in the present when they are elderly. The film starts off at a Nursing home showing an old man reading a romantic story to one of the patients. Already you can see the nursing home is much nicer than the Aschecliffe hospital, with nice flowers, a pretty lake and lovely nurses taking care of the patients. As the old man starts his story the screen then switches to a young couple and their life in the 40’s, with their old styles and carnival rides and amazing old mansions. As we watch the young couple’s romance develop we then come back to the old man and lady at the nursing home, we then learn that the young couple in the story is actually the old lady and man, Allie and Noah. Allie is suffering from dementia and Noah is reading to her in the hope of regaining her memory. Since she gets dementia in her older years, she is closer to the modern day meaning her treatments are basically what we have today, rather than in Shutter Island and lobotomies were still present. But both Allie and Andrew get basically 24 hour care because in Shutter Island Andrew has Dr Sheehan by his side throughout almost the whole film and Allie has Noah looking after her. Although the nursing home in The Notebook looks a lot nicer and friendly, it is in a lovely peaceful environment and the natural treatment of her husband coming in everyday to read to her in order to regain her memory, most people nowadays will do that to a loved one to help bring their thoughts back. One scene in The Notebook the treatments are quite similar as Allie has to be sedated after getting frantic because she forgot who everyone was, this is similar to Andrew but instead they are slowly taking him off drugs to bring him back to reality causing him to collapse. There are also two very close connections between these two films, the first one is when Andrew is able to remember his past by seeing the photos of his children and being told who he is and also when Allie realises that the story Noah is reading her is actually their life “I remember now. It was us”. The other one was at the end of both films and the two characters memories come back about who they both used to be and don’t want those memories going away, Andrew not wanting to be a monster and Allie not wanting to forget her husband. Both Allie and Noah, Allie asks “you think our love, can take us away together?” And Noah responding “I think our love can do anything we want it to.” They then exchange their ‘I love yous and good nights’ and Noah saying “I’ll be seeing you again.” When the nurse finds them in the morning you find out they both die in their sleep making it a very emotional scene for the audience and you realise by Noah saying :I’ll see you again” he meant that when they head up to heaven Allie will regain her memory and they can have their everlasting love again. The theme mental illness is seen in today’s world as a more serious matter, rather than in the olden times like the 50’s as a way of locking people up to get rid of them they are better treated nowadays. They are given the proper care needed in order to help with their condition, sort of like Allie in The Notebook where she lived in a nursing home and they helped her out by making her days as easy as possible as she slowly lost her memory. This kind of treatment can be seen in today’s society as all extreme methods like lobotomies have been wiped out as they now know that treatment like that never really worked. In The Notebook it also reflected the values of the time it was based on as you could tell be the clothes, cars, houses and mannerisms that it’s wasn’t set in the 21st century. As well as the physical things the values back then were very different as Ali’s parents didn’t want her to love Noah because she was brought up in a wealthy family and Noah didn’t not. Back then the man had to ask the woman’s father if he could marry his daughter, this isn’t seen but rather said as Allie says to Noah “well, you see you have to get their permission first. And I think you may have overestimated their affection for you.” Lon doesn’t think so as he “asked them already and they said yes.” You also see throughout the film black house maids, not exactly slaves but still servants but respected better.
For the other two texts the main theme is also mental illness but rather the consequences that come from mental illness like obsessions and persuasion, some interpret their thoughts into something else which leads them to commit criminal acts. The huge connection between Tell Tale Heart and The Following is Edgar Allan Poe’s Tell Tale Heart was written by him and The Following is about a man who is ‘obsessed’ with his work. Tell tale heart is a short story written in 1843, about a man who becomes obsessed with an old man’s evil eye causing him to kill him just so he can destroy his eye. The Following is a TV series that started in 2013, it is about a man named Joe who teaches at a school about literacy and is obsessed with Edgar Allen Poe’s work. He teaches students about Poe and ends up killing a bunch of people, causing him to go to jail. But due to his charisma he brings about a cult, that follows in joe’s footsteps. The audience can work out by themselves that Joe is a psychopath. In Tell Tale Heart the main character suffers from tinnitus this is a ear condition that makes people hear a ringing or thumping noise. The condition can cause auditory hallucinations, intense sensitivity to sound and possibly amplifying hearing. We know that the narrator suffers from this as he is always going on about the ringing in his ears, he also thinks he hears the old man’s heartbeat after he killed him which made him think he was still alive causing him to come clean. A thumping can also be seen in The Following as when detective Ryan Hardy is on screen audience can hear a thumping sound sort of like a heart beating, I’m not sure if the sound is just for the audience to hear to make a comparison between the two texts or if the character Ryan can hear the noise also. Another interesting connection between the two text is that the narrator in Tell tale heart is completely obsessed with the old man’s eye which is why he ended up killing the old man and cutting him up. We the audience can then presume he removed the old man’s eye which was the source of his obsession. In The Following a female whole is covered from head to toe in Edgar Allen Poe quotes she then stabs herself in the eye destroying it and killing herself. It is said in The Following that “Eyes are the window to the soul” and that Eyes are symbolic, essence of identity this could mean that since the narrator was starting to lose himself due to the tinnitus removing the eye could mean that he wouldn’t be able to see his reflection anymore and his identity would finally go. Edgar Allan Poe wants the reader to understand how someone’s obsession can become too hard for them to handle that the only way to stop it is to remove the problem, like in the narrator’s case he literally killed the old man and most likely removed his evil eye because his obsession got the best of him causing him to commit a horrible crime eventually coming clean. Kevin Williamson wanted to show the audience that ambition and persuasion are two key aspects a person needs in order to complete what they set out to do. For instance Joe’s ambition was to finish what Poe started which was killing people, but since he got locked away he needed to persuade others to do his dirty work for him showing the audience just how easy it is to be manipulated by someone. Tell Tale Heart reflects the values of the time it was written in by referring to furniture items back then and the English language used, for instance they mention “shutters” which isn’t something you would normally hear in your home, they are now called blinds. Also In that era mental illness could not be treated and was considered as a disease, but it was clear that the man had no conscience for the crime he had just committed. The following is set in the 21st century so it wasn’t too hard to make the setting and clothing set a certain era, because of this it makes it easier for the audience to relate to the television series. Also in today’s society is someone was suffering from a ringing in the ears they can be diagnosed with the condition tinnitus and get treatment for it to help them. Because they didn’t have anything like that back then, this could have made the narrator feel as if he was going mad and caused him to become obsessed over the evil eye. The Following is a little different as in today’s society there is no excuse for killing people just because you want to finish what your idol started, you are just seen as criminally insane so this kind of links to Shutter Island as Andrew Laeddis is also criminally insane as he refuses to come to terms with the crime he committed.
Another aspect that was able to connect two of my texts together was symbolism. In the Tell Tale Heart and Shutter Island the symbol of light was present in both texts. Tell Tale Heart light is a lantern used by the narrator, it basically symbolises the lack of insight on behalf of the narrator and acts as a fuel to light up his beliefs (his being the only way to destroy the evil eye is to kill the old man). The light acts as a cruel guide allowing the narrator to see the world only from his view, which is obviously wrong as he isn’t mentally stable. Although the lantern is barely ever lit, he uses it as a safety measure by pushing it through the old man’s door first before himself. When the narrator turns on the light it enables him to see what he thought all along, he no longer sees the kind of man that he lives with anymore, instead the only thing he sees is the “evil eye”. So the lantern acts as the narrator’s eyes, allowing him to see things more clearly causing him to commit murder. The text manipulated the audience into thinking that the narrator wasn’t mad because he kept trying to reassure us that he wasn’t, when he clearly showed signs of unstableness. It helped readers to understand that you shouldn’t be too trusting. Everyone has elements of good and bad within us it just depends who’s bad will actually be triggered and finally shine through. From Tell Tale Heart we learn that human behaviour can change when one gets obsessed with something, it can basically take over their life. They can’t see anything but that one thing, in this case it’s the narrator’s obsession with the old man’s evil eye.
In Shutter Island fire is a way of helping the audience understand when Teddy Daniels is far from his reality, this means that all his troubles started with water because his wife murdered their children in the lake, so fire is the opposite of water so that means when you see fire he is far from his reality. For example when Teddy was in the cave talking to what he believes is Rachel Solando there is a campfire in between them, which allows the audience to then know that he is hallucinating. Also another example is when Teddy blows up a car there is a small explosion of fire, he then starts hallucinating about seeing his wife and daughter there with him. The text manipulated the audience into thinking that the main character is at a hospital investigating a disappearance but as the film progresses the audience learns that they were actually deceived and he is actually a patient himself and his real name is Andrew who was put in Ashecliffe for killing his wife. The audience only learns of this knowledge at the end of the film where we are told that the names he has made up are actually anagrams for his family members. So we the viewers feel quite stupid at the end as we should have been able to pick this information up from the film because of all the clues that were given. One more symbol in Shutter Island that I found quite interesting was water, at the beginning of the film we see Teddy Daniels on a boat vomiting because he apparently gets seasick “I can’t stomach the water” this may have been because water just reminds him of the death of his children as they were drowned so the thought of them makes him sick and that he can’t ‘stomach’ the idea of them dying. His human nature was to block out his terrible memories and replace them with new ones, what we learn is that is he told himself that he told himself so much that his fictitious life was so real that he ended up believing it. When the doctors finally got through to him by showing Andrew a picture of his daughter “the girl you keep seeing in your dreams Rachel, she’s your daughter Andrew.” Right at the end of the film you see the real Andrew believes that his original self can never live again. You learn that he would rather lie to the doctors and make them think that their treatment hadn’t worked so they will perform a lobotomy on him just so he can finally be free of his guilt and memories once and for all.
Throughout the four texts I studied, the short story Tell Tale Heart, the television series The Following, and the two films Shutter Island and The Notebook. All of these contain a mental illness of some kind, whether it be about the treatments they are enduring to try help them or the consequences that came from their illness like crime. All of these texts made the audience think about their lives and how different it could be if they suffered from some kind of illness. I personally found Tell Tale Heart to be quite realistic in the sense that obsession can cause a person to do unusual things like stalk a man or even go to the extreme of killing someone as they don’t have any control over their mental illness so I think that anyone who suffered from an illness like this could quite possibly commit and act that is out of their control. The Following to me was quite hard to understand not so much the story line but understanding the mentality of the criminal in the to show as I can’t grasp the concept that someone could murder someone and feel no guilt whatsoever and then want other people to follow you and do the same so your goal is met. I found that the film Shutter Island sort of gave me a thrill as there was just so many turns and then a major plot twist at the end that you never quite knew what was happening so you could relate to Teddy the main character as he to was unable to understand what was real and what was imaginary. I left the film The Notebook till last as I thought it would be more lighthearted than my other texts. This film made me understand how sad mental illness can be not only for the person suffering from it but also for the people around them. The film also should me that if someone loves you that much than even through the toughest of times they will always stick around and be there for you which I really liked about the film.
Bibliography
The following – TVs series
Tell Tale Heart – short story
The notebook – film
Shutter island – film
http://katiec1b.weebly.com/symbolstechniques.html
http://www.shortstoriesanalyzed.com/2013/10/symbolism-tell-tale-heart.html
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