The Study of Co-extensiveness of Biopolitics and Insanity Discourse in Shutter Island from Social Psychology Perspective

Shutter Island is a movie that depicts the atrocities of the Second World War by the representation of the traumas inflicted on the modern man’s mind. In the movie Teddy Daniels is trapped in the labyrinth of psychiatry to recover from the trauma of his presence in concentration camps. Therefore, in Shutter Island, concentration camp and psychiatric asylum are intertwined by different images. According to Foucault, the formation of madhouses in modern society and the psychiatric authority on the patients is a means for insertion of modern power on man. He, indeed, believed that these power mechanisms were inserted in two levels. While the first level was psychiatric, the other method, lobotomy or brain surgery, was based on physiological alteration. Furthermore, Agamben introduced camp as a paradigm by which the Western states insert their power on man. He considers camp as the consequence of putting men in state of exception and the best condition for touching their physiological entity. Agamben believes that in this biopolitical procedure the deformed human bodies are made. He names this biological condition “bare life”. Bare life is “a biological condition in which the human is not dead or alive, but living on the opaque inhuman boundary of life and death. In Shutter Island the intertwinement of the images related to camp and psychiatric asylum shows that these two areas play a major role on the formation of Teddy’s identity as the contemporary man. Therefore, in this article, Foucault’s and Agamben’s ideas about the modern man’s formation of lifeworld are utilized. In this article, the intertwinement of camp and asylum images is studied by Jakobson’s and Lodge’s ideas about the entanglement of the metaphoric and metonymic poles. Accordingly, the interrelation of Foucault’s ideas about the formation of docile bodies and Agamben’s ideas about the infliction of “bare life” are used as the theoretical framework. This article clarifies that the process of formation of Teddy Daniel’s life is tantamount to the formation of bare life.