waterworks weeknights at 11 as we turn on the cinematic shower.
For a movie I claim to have not liked at all, I really have been going back to Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010) repeatedly while blogging, haven't I? It just keeps coming up somehow. A lot of it is just too stiffly serious when it would have been a better sit had it swerved towards the archly horrific on occassion to offset its portentous Sturm und Drang.
But about those Sturms...
Pull yourself together Teddy. Pull yourself together. It's just water. It's a lot of water.
Teddy Daniels in Shutter Island is barely functional considering all the lakes, oceans and storms haunting him. So it's kind of pitiable that he also has to shower in the movie, too. Both times it's just so completely futile.
Two sorry showers after the jump.
First Shower
Our first shower scene is super brief and almost not a shower scene at all; it's post-rinse. But what's oddly funny about the sequence is that it's preceded by Teddy and his partner looking like drowned rats in a storm. They're told to dry off. Cut to:
But of course. When someone tells you to dry off, pouring water all over yourself is the ideal next step. I hadn't noticed before that both showers involve Teddy's partner Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) once physically and once psychologically. What does it mean? (Please refrain from Mark & Leo slash fic' in the comments.
Second Shower
The next shower follows a disturbing conversation with Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley). Teddy ends the scene asking about his partner and reminds him that he doesn't have one. Teddy has just met the Real Rachel in a cave cliffside and now he's really worried about his sanity. So he opts to play along.
What partner?
He'll play their sick mindfuck games. Cut to: shower.
This is what we call a Cleansing Shower.
It's clearly the type of shower you take when you need to wash the bad thoughts away and attempt a clean start with your Plan B. It's the type of shower Marion Crane tried to take after putting her sandwich down at The Bates Motel, a return to Phoenix on her mind. Poor Marion.
Cleansing Showers are super useful in real life but they're almost never successful in the movies. (Unless all you need is a good cry. Movie showers are sometimes good for that.) This shower doesn't work for Teddy at all despite the awesome water pressure that gothic asylums come with..
He tries to rinse it all away but he emerges blinking, nervous and still very much on edge. And now he's wet again.
Oh Teddy... water is never the answer.
Not when you look like Leonardo DiCaprio. Leo has been threatened with drowning his entire career (Titanic's sinking, The Beach's island of no escape, What's Eating Gilbert Grape's eternal bath, Inception's dream waves and van dives). His movie characters now have hydrophobia built into their very DNA.