Two Films of Madness by Scorsese And Herzog
By Alvaro André Zeini Cruz
Through a dense fog, a ferry emerges. This is the opening scene of Shutter Island, by Martin Scorsese. Nothing to be seen beyond, the ferry is the only remnant of an external world, and rather than seeing it penetrate the fog, moving away from the camera lens, we are given a view inside this new world, with the boat approaching us. We thus find ourselves in a different universe and can affirm that from the beginning we are immersed in madness. The cut takes us to a close-up of the protagonist Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) with an already troubled countenance, apparently suffering from a phobia of water. When he emerges from the cabin of the ferry, he is met by Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), who introduces himself as his partner assigned to the case.
Charged with investigating the disappearance of a patient in a maximum-security psychiatric hospital, located on an isolated island, Daniels is soon faced with his own traumas and is plagued by visions of his dead wife, who urges him to abandon the case. The fact that he is on the island is no mere coincidence: Daniels seeks an internal arsonist responsible for the murder of his wife. His hallucinations, however, become more and more frequent, to the point where the notion of what is real or imaginary disappears, both for the character and for us, the audience.
Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant is set in New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The natural feel of the physical realm, however, seems to have become compromised, played out in Nicholas Cage’s character. Is Detective Terence McDonagh a mere consequence/extension of the doom? It matters little beyond the fact that pre-established concepts implode and dichotomies between good and evil, moral and amoral, real and imaginary, cease to exist. Everything goes haywire: the natural invades the urban (alligators lie by the road), hallucinations and reality coexist. And it matters little whether the events occur only in the mind of the protagonist, as it is from there that the movie is presented to us (the iguanas on the table). The city is filmed like a fenced-off area, with its alleys, bridges and power lines; there is no escape.
The Bad Lieutenant opens with a scene in an alley, quickly summarizing the trajectory of the character: during a stakeout, the detective questions a couple leaving a club, citing suspicions of drug possession. The scene begins as McDonagh seeks to establish his superiority over the other characters. But McDonagh’s eagerness to find the drugs, which he confiscates for his own use, turns into his own undoing. He plunges into a search for something to sustain his addiction: a hallucination. The girl realizes this and offers him drugs and sex. The former senior cop gives rise to the madman, an addict unable to measure consequences. Amid the encounter between the two, the girl’s companion, humiliated, tries to sneak out. McDonagh then pulls his gun and shoots into the air, telling the boy to stay and watch. The madness reaches a level of cruelty, finding a means to restore the Lieutenant’s initial role as predator. The scene plays out as an echo of the entire plot, beginning with McDonagh being honored, whereupon he proceeds down a crooked path. The film culminates with still one more encounter with a character that marks his return to the beginning.
Herzog and Scorsese have both created characters with a similar madness: it is cyclical. Nicholas Cage’s character follows a path of predictable downfall – submersion/resignation/madness – reestablishment. And DiCaprio’s character suffers random resets throughout the plot. However, there are differences as well: if McDonagh enters the insanity of inconsequentiality, even flirting with the comic, the madness of Teddy Daniels is tragic, and a total reestablishment of order is not even proposed. For example, Daniels enters the hospital-prison, he faces a sinister lady who silences him with a gesture. We have only one view of the initial frightening figures presented in that universe. It is, however, only the first of a series of small clues scattered throughout Laeta Kalogridis’s script, which justifies the turning point in the climax of the film.
The question that arises at the end of the movie is, if the viewer has not been misled (and so what if he had been?) and the ”mandatory” turning point comes, as is common in movies of this genre, why does the experience of suspense in Shutter Islands seem frustrating? It is simply because Scorsese does not hurry the moment of the first shock, but rather builds suspense in the most primordial interpretation of suspension of an event, the dilation of circumstance. So when we see the protagonist during his persecution in the most dangerous wing of the prison, meeting his opponent matters little to him, as it’s the construction of images, one for each moment, as well as the location of the scenes that counts. That is, what matters to Scorsese is the journey and not the destination. Scorsese’s suspense is frustrating precisely because we don’t have any outlets; it simply exists and is empowered from one scene to the next.
Parallel to this construction is the development of the insanity of the principal character. The insanity of Detective Daniels grows as much as the suspense, and increases with every empty hallway, with the noise of every match strike. In the manufacture of this state, inextricably linked to space and ethos, Scorsese uses the customary tools of the genre as sudden close-ups and detail shots, abstract sounds associated with reduced hearing (non-diegetic sound) and flashbacks, whose nature is not known to be part of a real or imagined past. However, the antagonism between sanity and madness features in very forceful encounters between husband and wife. There in the Boston apartment, we witness the scene through a window from the street. But in the window next door we see a lake. Suddenly, the wife begins to ooze blood and water, while her body bursts into flames. From the volatile body in the arms of Teddy Daniels, gush elements pertaining to the fiction created by his mind, while others are part of a reality that we will only find in pure form at the end of the movie.
If in Herzog’s film, sanity and madness coexist in a very clear, well-segregated, and often almost physical form, for Scorsese it is allied with a state of constant tension, suspension and the presence of trauma. It is responsible for creating the cyclic state of the character, and is also the only thing that can break it. Both directors believe in the insanity as a dive, a resignation, although in Bad Lieutenant, the protagonist surfaces a few times for a breath of reality. In Shutter Island this never happens: it is a jump into the midst of primal feelings such as guilt, fear and pain; so much so that in the final scene, even without the fog, we are unable to make out anything beyond the horizon or even the island itself. We remain, therefore, within the territory of madness.
