Seen through the prism of history, race, sexual habits and sexual identity, Treasure Island is as much expose of the lies America told itself about itself as it is World War II mystery. It is also as much a celebration of accomplishments of 1940s Hollywood as it is a condemnation of the pure propaganda films of that era.

   Treasure Island is filmed in black and white and uses a real incident from World War II as a jumping-off point. In the style of the time, director / screenwriter /cinematographer Scott King begins his feature with a newsreel and a cliffhanger episode of a typical (and very topical) serial.

   Frank (Lance Baker) and Samuel (Nick Offerman), two intelligence officers on the San Francisco Bay naval base of Treasure Island - where letters from service men and their families at home were read for code messages to the enemies - are charged with creating an entirely new identity for a dead man's body (Jonah Blechman). As Frank and Samuel compose letters to be planted on the corpse before it is dumped into the Pacific (in hopes that the Japanese will find it and act on the misinformation), the corpse's real identity reveals to them - and to us - the true nature of the American identity circa 1945.

   Like many Americans who fought and lived through World War II, Frank and Samuel are completely different individuals who have been thrown together by coincidence and the necessity of the effort. Frank is slight, seemingly introverted yet quietly smart, while Samuel is a beefy guy, on the macho side and not afraid to express his opinion. Despite their differences, Frank and Samuel compliment each other and work well together in the office.

   Frank and Samuel are superior code-crackers, able to combine the skills of the linguist and the mathematician in the top-secret first line of defense of our country. But their expertise in subterfuge is by no means limited to their professional lives. Frank, we learn, is married to two women and is actively pursuing a third. One wife, Yo-Ji, is Japanese; but because all Californians of Japanese descent have been rounded up in the camps, Yo-Ji lives a life in hiding. Frank's other wife, Anna, has medical problems, so she does not get out much, either. Frank is not a polygamist out of malice or financial gain. Frank uses serial marriage as a way to mask and legitimize a much darker and deeply-held compulsion.

   Samuel, on the other hand, knows exactly what he wants from sex with his wife, Penny, and Penny is happy with the arrangement. It may have even been Penny's suggestion to bring another guy into their bedroom (or their living room, to be precise) but they participate together in the search for these "thirds." When Samuel describes the arrangement, to outsiders, he makes it clear that he's not "queer," that he doesn't ever touch the other guy, doesn't even really look at them. But when one of these fellows ships off at the end of the war, he and Samuel share a moment at the dock that we feel like we have seen before.

   As Frank uses polygamy to disguise his obsessions, and Samuel uses his marriage to accommodate his attraction to men, The Body that sits in a refrigerated casket in their office begins to react to the lies that Frank and Samuel spin as they prepare his identity. The Body has the fertile ground of the agents' imaginations at there most active. As one of them reads aloud letters that they have composed, creating a new identity for the Body, the reader imagines the circumstances described as applied to his own life. The scenarios spun in the fictitious letters begin to crack the codes that Frank and Samuel have constructed to hide their true natures from themselves.

   As if sensing these weaknesses in the armor of his creators, the Body starts to enter Frank and Samuel's consciousness, often at the most inappropriate times.