Shutter Island and me

What did today bring?  One of my occasional idiot-turns, a foray into the post-Christmas sales, a hugely enjoyable Chinese lunch, a cold collation for dinner, and then Shutter Island on dvd.  Not sure if I enjoyed it but there was a neat irony in watching a film about mental health and madness following on from  my irrational behaviour earlier in the day.   Was it a panic attack?  Mental instability?  An episode in simply being human?   Wish I knew.  Things picked up from there and the day ended  quite well.  Think I ate too much again however.  A tv news item about the increase in the average weight of Britons and the prevalence of diabetes, although a regular seasonal offering, pulled at my gut strings and determined me to take a long walk tomorrow.   Hope there's no more snow.

So, was Martin Scorsese pulling our collective legs?  The ride was enjoyable, the music, sets and photography atmospheric if slightly heavy-handed.  I enjoyed least the gauche flashbacks.  I enjoyed most di Caprio's imitation of Humphrey Bogart from The Maltese Falcon.  There was more than a nod to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and enough electrical storms, howling wind and night-time thrills to outdo a hundred Rebecca's.  Was Daphne du Maurier credited?  I don't think so, but she seemed to have had a hand in the script, along with Hitchcock.  And does Virginia Wolf know they borrowed the symbolism of the lighthouse thingy?  We had dark corridors (or,  'dark thoughts'), rickety iron staircases (the shaky foundations on which we build our sense of reality), cages reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter's underground pad (metaphor for being trapped), and mazes within mazes of which the Ancient Minoans would have been proud (please see 'The Maze at Knossos: a metaphor for the human mind').  There was literal fog and fog as metaphor for memory.  And an onscreen debate about the use of drugs versus surgical butchery as a tool of social control.  To answer my own question, I think the old master was having a huge joke at our expense but a richly textured gag it was to be sure.  There's enough material in it to keep film and media students busy for decades to come and why not, says I.