Summary
That night, Teddy again considers the note found in Rachel’s cell. He tells Chuck that they have been lied to, and that he suspects Rachel had help escaping. Teddy dreams he is having a conversation with his dead wife, Dolores. After criticizing Teddy's excessive drinking, she tells him that Rachel is still “here” and that Teddy cannot leave. Dolores also tells him that although she herself is not around anymore, Rachel still is, and so is Andrew Laeddis — the arsonist responsible for Dolores's death.
Teddy wakes up during a storm and asks Cawley to interview the patients in Rachel’s group therapy session. Cawley consents, and explains that when it comes to caring for the violently insane, he prefers talk therapy and medication over invasive surgical procedures like lobotomies. Teddy, however, remains skeptical of his hands-off approach.
Teddy and Chuck interview a violent patient named Mr. Breene, but fail to learn anything about who Laeddis is. Next the men interview a female patient named Mrs. Kearns who tells them that Rachel’s delusions involved still pretending like she was living in her former home in the Berkshires. Teddy asks her about Rachel's doctor, Dr. Sheehan, whom she describes as handsome. When Teddy asks her if she knows Laeddis, she says no, but Teddy later tells Chuck that he believes her answers were prepared.
Exploring the island’s cliffs, Teddy explains to Chuck that Andrew Laeddis should be at Ashecliffe according to state records, but has vanished. The turbulent storm causes the men to seek shelter in a nearby shed. Teddy reassures Chuck that he does not want to kill Laeddis, and begins telling Chuck about his experience liberating the Nazis' concentration camp in Dachau, Germany. Teddy remembers passing corpse piles in the snow and executing the camp's remaining Nazi troops along a barbed-wire fence—an act that Teddy solemnly calls not warfare, but "murder."
Teddy tells Chuck that those who know about Ashecliffe are reluctant to talk about it. He also explains that the facility receives grant money from HUAC (the House Un-American Activities Committee), which Teddy guesses is funneled toward mysterious psychological experiments. Teddy tells the story of a former patient who was willing to talk, a socialist college student named George Noyce, who wound up in Ward C after participating in a "psych study" that led him to almost kill one of his professors. After being released, Teddy explains, Noyce killed three men in a bar fight and asked the judge for capital punishment during his sentencing, rather than having to return to Ashecliffe.
Teddy tells Chuck that, according to Noyce, Ashecliffe is conducting secretive experiments on its patients, just like Nazis did in concentration camps during World War II. Although Chuck is hesitant to believe the testimony of clinically insane people, Teddy says that that is what makes them the "perfect" test subjects. When Chuck once again presses Teddy about what the true goal of his investigation is, Teddy tells him that he is searching for evidence to bring back to the mainland.
The coincidental overlap between the U.S. Marshal's official investigation and Teddy's own interest in Ashecliffe makes Chuck suspicious that they are being set up by the government. Chuck questions whether Rachel's escape might have been staged to lure the men to the island, where they are now trapped. As the storm worsens, McPherson finds the men marooned inside the shelter, and drives them both back to the island's main facility.
Analysis
Scorsese uses the first act of Shutter Island to lure the viewer into an identification with Teddy's delusional belief that a cover-up at Ashecliffe is concealing the fact that the arsonist who killed his wife has taken Rachel Solando hostage. As a result of medical withdrawal from his anti-psychotic medication, Teddy dreams about his dead wife, Dolores Chanal, who is, over the course of the film, the primary figure tethering him to his delusional world, which he inhabits to avoid reckoning with past trauma.
Teddy's interview subjects, Mr. Breene and Mrs. Kearns, regard him with suspicion not because he is a detective, but because he is a fellow patient who has been given "the run of the place," in Cawley's words. Scorsese uses cutaway shots of Mrs. Kearns, in particular, at a number of moments to convey the anxious effect that Cawley's experiment is having on Ashecliffe's other patients. The film suggests that Cawley coaches Mrs. Kearns to tell Teddy that she does not know who Laeddis is, which makes Teddy's hunch that her response sounded prepared ironically correct.
The film's World War II flashbacks add weight to Naehring's philosophical question about whether Teddy is a "violent man," at the same time that they strategically withhold details. In the first flashback, Teddy watches a Nazi soldier bleed out without intervening, but it is unclear whether he caused the injury. Although Teddy describes the execution of the remaining Nazi Germans at Dachau as cold-blooded "murder," it is similarly unclear whether he participated directly in or merely witnessed the slaughter pictured in Scorsese's film. This missing information creates a moral ambiguity surrounding Teddy's character that reflects the way Scorsese is withholding key elements of the film's plot.
The invocation of the historical atrocities of World War II stage thematic questions around violence, trauma, and memory in explicitly political ways. Teddy's paranoid feelings toward Dr. Naehring stem from Naehring's German ancestry and Teddy's experience in Dachau, which give him the paranoid fear that Nazi mind-control experiments could be taking root in the postwar United States. Scorsese ironically bases one pillar of Teddy's delusional conspiracy theory on a well known historical fact: that known communist subversives in the United States were being hunted in the early 1950s by HUAC (The House Un-American Activities Committee).
Teddy's story about George Noyce is purely a fantasy, but contains stray details that refer to specific events from his repressed past. His belief that Noyce committed a triple homicide, for example, reflects the fact that his wife, Dolores Chanal, did the same to their children. Teddy's recollection that Noyce pleaded for capital punishment over re-internment at Ashecliffe also foreshadows the fact that Teddy will surrender himself willingly to a trans-orbital lobotomy at the end of the film.
