Fire represents the fantasy Andrew/Teddy has created around himself. This is why his hallucinations are always accompanied by fire in one way or another. Water, on the other hand, represents the reality of what happened to his wife and children.
Fire is the symbol of Andrew's fantasy world. In contrast, water (the opposite of fire) is the symbol of the reality of what happened to him. His wife drowns his children in water and it is water that makes Andrew so upset/uneasy/sick throughout the film.
Teddy experiences migraine headaches, flashbacks of his experiences as a U.S. Army soldier during the liberation of Dachau, and also vivid dreams of his wife Dolores, who was killed in a fire set by arsonist Andrew Laeddis. Teddy explains to Chuck that he took the case to find Laeddis, believing he is on the island.
Shutter Island (Film) Symbols, Allegory and Motifs
Water (motif) Scorsese deploys water and water imagery throughout the film to denote tragic events from Teddy's past, namely the drowning of his three children in a lake. ...
To keep quiet for the sake of all those he could still save if the results of the roleplay are a success. "Shhh. Keep quiet. You can't run from what you've done, but that's okay."
The Big Clue Everyone Missed Early In Shutter Island
What do the cigarettes mean in Shutter Island?
When Teddy dreams about Laeddis, Laeddis sits beside the fire in an armchair. Teddy's version of Laeddis; a scarred and disfigured man, then lights a match and proceeds to light Teddy's cigarette. This act of Teddy accepting the light from Laeddis is symbolic of Teddy accepting this fantasy as reality.
He explains that Andrew Laeddis is an anagram of Edward Daniels and that he murdered his wife, Dolores Chanal (an anagram of Rachel Solando), two years before after she drowned their three children during a manic episode. This is the answer of the code "the law of 4" and Laeddis is the 67th patient at Ashecliffe.
It turns out that Andrew is actually an inmate at Ashecliffe, and that the film's events up until this point — Cawley's allowing Andrew to play the role of Teddy — were designed to cure his insanity that stemmed from murdering his depressed wife after she drowned their children at their lake house.
So, finding the cave, was in itself a manifestation of Teddy's own mind using "survival instincts" and the rats were most possibly, remnants of his past life during his days at the German Camp, where he may or may not have been a part of and witnessed mass shooting and the pile of the corpses laid alongside the path.
Andrew created the Teddy persona as a result of his guilt for not helping his wife sooner, and the events of the film were all part of a role-play designed by Cawley to help Andrew accept reality. Chuck was in fact a hospital staff member called Dr. Lester Sheehan, and a nurse played the role of Rachel Soldano.
Teddy (Edward) Daniels is killer Andrew Laeddis (the former name an anagram to disguise the latter), while the woman whose disappearance from the asylum he has been investigating, Rachel Solando (another anagram), is really his wife Dolores Chanal, whom he made disappear.
In 1952, while Andrew was working, Dolores suffered a mental breakdown and drowned all three of their children. After Andrew came back to work, she tried to convince him that their children are at school, but he found out the truth almost immediately.
Why does Leonardo DiCaprio have a bandaid in Shutter Island?
It is unclear why he wears the band-aid, but it stays with him until nearly the end of the film. He only gets rid of it while taking a shower after John Cawley informs him that he actually showed up on the island alone.
his wife is mentally ill happens to kill their children , drowning them in pond. The moral of "Shutter Island" revolves around the theme of perception versus reality, the complexity of the human mind, and the consequences of denial.
Several months before DiCaprio and Nolan unleashed the spinning top in “Inception,” DiCaprio and Scorsese dropped this line of dialogue in “Shutter Island”: “Which would be worse: To live as a monster, or to die as a good man?” The line is asked by Andrew/Teddy, and in doing so Scorsese and screenwriter Laeta ...
DiCaprio's character is part of a role-playing experiment to help him overcome repressed memories, which is why the glass appears to be invisible. From Teddy's perspective, he blocks out the water because it reminds him of a traumatic experience.
Some believe that the Rachel Solando in the cave was real; others believe that she was a figment of Teddy's imagination. It is possible that he fabricated the Rachel Solando in the cave, because what she says was everything he wanted to hear, which gives him a reason to find everyone suspicious on Shutter Island.
Shutter Island is a film that shows so many evidences of hallucination experienced by the main character, Teddy Daniels. Teddy Daniels had bad experiences in the past which lead him to change his identity in order to forget his past.
This condition make him always has hallucination and has delusional acute which is identified as the schizophrenia symptoms. created a new identity as Edward Teddy Daniel who as a detective that come to shutter island with the big mission to find the patient number 67.
But, the guilt of his past was so painful that he choose to act as Teddy and get lobotomized, over accepting the fact that he is Andrew (who killed his wife) and lead a normal life.
In this thriller, Lehane created a fictitious hospital island with nefarious happenings. Though the later film used Peddocks Island as the backdrop, Lehane's true inspiration likely comes from other islands that have long histories in institutions and social services, such as Rainsford Island and Long Island.
There is no Rachel Solando. There is no Chuck, at least as we see him. It's all a trick on the person we know as Teddy for the entirety of the story, right up until the end. Teddy, not the arsonist of his fantasy, was the one who killed his wife after she had drowned their three children.
Was Andrew faking it at the end of Shutter Island?
During the ending scene, Andrew and Dr. Sheehan sit down on some steps for a smoke. Andrew was just told that he had made up his entire identity as US Marshal Edward "Teddy" Daniels in order to escape from the reality that he had killed his wife. Andrew, in short, had realized who he really is.
However, by Shutter Island's ending, viewers have learned Chuck is actually Dr. Sheehan, Teddy's doctor, who Teddy believed had left the island after Rachel's disappearance. It turns out Teddy is the patient and created a delusion to escape the crime he committed.
Cawley tells Teddy that he himself is in fact Andrew Laeddis (an anagram of Edward Daniels) and that he has been a patient at Shutter Island for two years for murdering his wife, Dolores Chanal (an anagram of Rachel Solando), after she murdered their three children.
