billy fat

“Is it better to live as a monster or die as a good man?”

The question is posed at the end of “Shutter Island” by Martin Scorsese

SPOILER ALERT:
The main character has schizophrenia. He has created an alternate reality for himself due to his experiences in WWII. His mind broke years later after the war when he arrived at home and his wife murdered all three of their children. He killed her because of this.

He dissociated himself from this horror because he felt personally responsible and couldn’t agree his conscience with “reality” (the reality everyone else accepts). His brush with meaninglessness rendered him this way. His psychologists let him play out his fantasy as a man who had not done these things, a Grand Marshall in the army. After regaining all his memories of everything that happened to him (a place the psychologists had brought him to before) he asks, “is it better to live as a monster or die as a good man?”

It’s unclear which is which: is being a monster rejecting reality and living (or choosing death) as a crazy person in asylum or is being a monster accepting reality and living (or choosing death) with the horror of what you’ve done? Which is the choice of the good man?

Finally, it asserts that any of us could be crazy, or have a reality that is considered crazy. We’re just not all imprisoned for whatever reality we have, because we aren’t violent. We also don’t know if our realities are fabricated by our minds or actually represent what’s around us.

Are you a good person? Are you a monster?
Are you hiding reality from yourself?
Are you morphing it to what you want it to mean like a “monster” or like a “good man”?

>monster here means a creature that reacts to its reality with suspicion, violence, defense, thoughtlessness, doesn’t continue to challenge itself to deal with each new reality (or simply can’t)
>good man here means a creature that reacts to its reality with empathy, love, understanding, honor, conscientiousness, and continually challenges itself to deal with each new piece of reality it encounters

reply and tell me what you think!