shutter island

Julia Kristeva's 1982 account of abjection usually has connections with cinema in relation to the horror film, a genre in which scenes of blood and death feature prominently, exemplifying some of the threats to subjectivity that constitute the abject. In contrast, this paper locates abjection in the filmic institution, where challenges to subjectivity arise through spatial restriction, extreme control or mental illness, and invariably lead to visual chaos and narrative disorder. These traits seem universal to the American institution film – the ‘institution film’ being, for the purposes of this paper, one in which the institution is central to narrative organisation. Indeed, such patterns of transgression appear regularly throughout the genre's well-established history, being conspicuous in high-security settings. It is therefore relevant to diverge from typical Foucauldian analyses of the institution to a theoretical model that centres on the implications of repression. Kristeva's 1982 theory of abjection provides such a model, which this paper utilises to explain how fictional institutions affect subjectivity. This paper argues that as sites of extreme control, such institutions become abject spaces, abjection manifesting within both the mise-en-scène and cinematography. In relation to the asylum, abjection further emerges in the nature of mental illness. Referring to Scorsese's Shutter Island (2010), I correlate abjection with the loss of identity that the film's protagonist experiences, considering how abjection visually manifests in the physical spaces of the asylum, and propels the narrative trajectory forward.

Julia Kristeva's 1982 account of abjection usually has connections with cinema in relation to the horror film, a genre in which scenes of blood and death feature prominently, exemplifying some of the threats to subjectivity that constitute the abject. In contrast, this paper locates abjection in the filmic institution, where challenges to