Surprisingly, The Departed (2006) is the winner of four Oscars for Best Picture (Graham King), Best Achievement in Directing (Martin Scorsese), Best Writing-Adapted Screenplay (William Monahan), and Best Achievement in Film Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker). It won a total of 97 awards from 2006 to 2007. The movie is a remake of the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs and is based on the real-life Boston Winter Hill Gang. Colin Sullivan's character is based on the corrupt FBI agent John Connolly, while Francis "Frank" Costello is based on gangster Whitey Bulger. Martin Scorsese directed the Departed, and surprisingly, it became his first and, to date, only win for Best Director. The movie is in 45th place in IMDb's Top 250 Films list with its many accolades.
The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as William Costigan Jr., with Matt Damon co-starring as Colin Sullivan. The movie featured the roles of Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg, Martin Sheen, Ray Winstone, Vera Farmiga, and Alec Baldwin in supporting roles. Principal photography took place in Boston, but the crew also ventured to Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx in New York City. The film follows a similar story structure of Cidade de Deus (2002) in that two paths begin at the same point and diverge but constantly influence one another. The movie is about an undercover cop and a mole in the police attempting to identify each other while infiltrating an Irish gang in South Boston. Snitches, informants, and rats are terms that the police and Costello use to scare others. What do the rats in the movie symbolize?
Rats are connected to dirt, and since they are typically found in the sewers, they represent the lowest tier of society. Rats are negatively associated with cruelty, poverty, sadism, and even eroticism (maybe that's why Scorsese and William Monahan decided on the dick shot in the porn theater). Unsurprisingly, Freud had a theory about rats: he believed that rats were phallic symbols and represented dirty children with their screaming, crying, and biting, and as vermin, rats symbolize unwanted children or unwanted siblings. In Western Christian societies, rats have negative connotations. The Bible deemed them too lowly to be eaten, and rats were the cause of the Black Plague in Europe from 1346–1353.
In the language of gangbangers and gangsters, rats are connected to spies, moles, dishonest people, and money. In a movie about police spies and informants, the word 'rat' gets thrown around a lot. Costello, however, takes this term to the next level when he develops a psychotic obsession with the idea of a rat in his gang. He starts drawing horrifying pictures of rats and says stuff like:
COSTELLO: Point I'm making here is, Bill, I got this rat. This gnawing, cheese-eating, fucking rat, and it brings up questions.
In this scene, Jack Nicholson even improvises the rat-like gnawing motion that helps convey just how crazy the thought of a rat is making him. The longer Costello goes without finding out who his rat is, the angrier he gets. It even comes to the point where he starts threatening the people who are closest to him, for example, when he tells Colin:
COSTELLO: I hope I won't have to remind you that if you don't find this cheese-eating rat bastard in your department, you can assume it won't be me who pays for it.
When Sullivan comes face to face with Dignam, who's avenging Costigan and Queenan, Sullivan doesn't hesitate and doesn't defend himself. He simply says, "okay." That "okay" expressed exhaustion and resignation. He was tired of living a double life, and he was ready to be done with it. Sullivan was also smart enough to know that there was no way for him to be done with the lies unless he decided to come forward, which would lead to an arrest and jail time. In his case, Sullivan believed that he was taking the easy way out by letting Dignam kill him. After the shot is fired, Martin Scorsese decides to close the movie with a rat running across Sullivan's banister, contrasted with the image of the golden dome, a symbol of Sullivan's dreams of becoming a powerful man.
Rats are creatures that can survive in very harsh circumstances, and that's been the case with Costigan and Sullivan, even though neither of them makes it out of the movie alive. None of the 'rats' in the film make it out alive. Rats symbolize distrust in the movie. No one was more obsessed with finding the rats than Costello was, and the presence of a rat in his mob is evidence of the fact that really, he can't ever trust anyone. Ironically, he was a rat too. His gang was set up in such a way that disloyalty was inevitable and impossible to trace. Now that we're on the 40th movie on the list, I'm really surprised with the number of movies on this list that I disagree with. Many things in this movie felt unnecessary… like that dick shot in the porno theater? What was the point of that? I know I mentioned that it could be connected to the symbolism of the rat, but I still think it's a bit much. It's a shot that reminded me of something that belonged in Taxi Driver, not The Departed.
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