The Great Movies: The Shawshank Redemption
“I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't wanna know. I would like to think they were singing about something was so beautiful it can't be expressed in words and make your heart ache because of it. I tell you this voice soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It is like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made these walls dissolve away. For the briefest moment every last man in Shawshank felt free” - Ellis ‘Red’ Redding.
Art has the ability that Ellis ‘Red’ Redding (Morgan Freeman) so eloquently describes while the entire prison population of Shawshank Prison comes to a halt listening to Mozart. It is ironic that only recently I have begun to really appreciate and love classical music. Red doesn’t know anything about classical music, and another inmate, Heywood, insists that Andy should have played something good like Hank Williams. Yet, even without any familiarity with classical music, the song transcended the moment, creating a feeling of soaring, a realization of an existence beyond our physical reality, recognizing that there is something more to life than our physical world. It is a spiritual moment. This same description could describe the film this quotation comes from: The Shawshank Redemption.
It is amazing that it has been 25 years since The Shawshank Redemption first appeared in theaters. Being in third grade, I was too young to see it at the time; however, I saw it on television since The Shawshank Redemption is probably the most repeatedly played movie in the history of TV. For a while, it seemed like it played at least once a week on one of the cable channels: TNT, TBS, etc. Although it was released to little fanfare and did only marginally well at the box office, Shawshank went on to receive seven Academy Award nominations. Since then, the film has slowly climbed in popularity and now tops the list of the most popular films on IMDB’s website besting even The Godfather.
For the 25th anniversary, TMC through Fathom Events has re-released the film in theaters. Seeing it on the big screen was a trans-formative experience; even though I have seen the movie at least ten times, seeing it on the screen was like watching something new. The power of the story and images indeed remind us that in our world where it is grey and depressing, where conflict and division seem to be the standard, for just the briefest moment in watching Shawshank I felt hopeful about the future. What a gift. This may be one of the most important movies for our times, a spiritual reminder that even though life is unfair, we must “get busy living.”
For those somehow not familiar with the story, Shawshank tells the tale of Andy Dufrense (Tim Robbins), a cold and unemotional man, who is convicted of murdering his cheating wife and her lover. He admits to being there at the scene of the crime, but claims he left, throwing his gun into the river. Convicted, he is sentenced to two life sentences in Shawshank Prison. Although Andy is the center of the story, in the same way that Jay Gatsby is the center of Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, the film is told through the perspective and narration of Andy’s admirer, Red (for the record, Nick Carraway, who is the admirer of Jay Gatsby that narrates the novel). Red’s world is Shawshank Prison. As Andy arrives in the prison bus, the camera cranes over the massive walls of Shawshank to reveal the courtyard where all of the prisoners dressed in grey live, contained. Like Andy, we have entered Red’s world by going over those walls. Even later in the film when Shawshank prison begins to participate in an inmate worker program, the camera never reveals that we are not truly in the area of Shawshank prison. Those walls never disappear.
Seeing the film for the first time on the big screen, I was amazed at how oppressive the walls of the prison are. They are always in the background and tower over the inmates, reminding them, and us, of how they are trapped. The only place worse is solitary confinement where the walls are closed in even more. The sense of oppression and weight grow throughout the film until the nearly climactic scene where Andy reveals to Red that he is going to find a way out… any way out. In the conversation, Red approaches Andy who is sitting at the base of one of the walls. The looming wall puts an emphasis on the scene. When Red admits that one day he is going to get released, but like Brooks before him, he’s been institutionalized and won’t make it on the outside. As Red says, “they say a life sentence… and that’s exactly what they take.”
Being a prison movie, Shawshank follows a certain formula. A new prisoner arrives. At first, he is an outsider who somehow makes friends before deciding it’s time to escape. Shawshank follows those broad outlines, but where most of these types of movies focus on the escape, Shawshank instead focuses on the routine and monotony of life. Prison is a schedule, which in many ways is another form of a prison. Unable to do the work they want or when they want, prisoners are shuffled by guards who get off on the power that they have over these men: none worse than the head of the prison security force, Byron Hadley (Clancy Brown). Everything in the movie is either a routine or grey or oppressive to remind us continually of the lack of freedom that such a life entail.
Routines include writing a letter a week to the State Senate for funding for a prison library. They include being sexually assaulted until Andy’s decision to upset the norm and help a guard with a tax issue causes him to begin to be protected by the guards. After that decision, it becomes routine doing taxes for prison guards as well as laundering money for the Warden. Routines include collecting posters that started with Rita Hayworth, polishing and creating cheese pieces out of stone, even “reading the bible”. Another routine to fill the time, Andy starts helping inmates get their high school degree. Another routine. Anything to help pass the time because no one is getting busy living.
One routine that happens every ten years is Red’s parole hearing. Ironically, the image that always accompanies those meetings is a barred gate being pulled back into a black room. The darkness is total. We exist in it, but then a light is revealed through an eye level hole in the door. But, if you stop and think, it looks like a tunnel with a light on the end. There are several other images in the film that play with this notion of a tunnel and burrowing through it. Traversing a tunnel takes a great deal of time. It’s slow work. Of course, there is the amazing reveal in Andy’s cell, when the Warden throws a rock at the poster on the wall, but instead of bouncing off, it echoes as it continues to bounce through the hidden tunnel. Then of course, there is the actual sewer tunnel that Andy crawls through to freedom, “one inch at a time”.
But, how do we keep going through the metaphorical tunnel of life when it is so dark, and so hard? How do we keep digging? Supposedly, it is because of the light on the other side. One could call that hope. The hope that one day we will emerge into the light. But, as someone who has been in prison so long, Red has a couple things to say about hope: “Hope is a dangerous thing, my friend. It can kill a man.” Red speaks from experience. To survive in the routine of prison, as the years go by, Red loses the ability to hope.
How does Andy keep it? It is the interruptions in the routine that allow someone to continue to keep their spirit alive even during downtimes and there are certainly downtimes. Andy’s arrival represents the first interruption to the routine. Red loses his bet. It seems like Red is good at picking the “winner”, the first prisoner to cry. On the first night, Andy never made a sound. Red said Andy seemed like he glided over things, like the walls couldn’t contain him. He provided an interruption to Red’s dull routine. Then, came the work assignment. By sere luck, and sometimes interruptions are pure luck, a number of men were needed to tar the roof of one of the buildings in the prison. Red, being a man who can get things, made sure that the “volunteers” were all his friends. The interruption to their routine, working outdoors on the roof was a welcome break. Working out in the sun with purpose instead of wondering around the yard trying to fill the time. Andy, hearing Captain Hadley had inherited 35,000 dollars, but was upset by how much he was going to lose to Uncle Sam’s taxes, provided him with an out. Having worked in a bank, Andy knows financial laws and the loopholes that exist often for the rich to stay rich. The only payment Andy asks for his financial advice? Three ice cold beers a piece for each of the working prisoners. Sitting on that roof, drinking beer, Red says “we were kings of our domain.” Even when offered by his friends, Andy never drank any beer… he had given up drinking. He didn’t do it for the thrill of having a drink. He did it for them. He did it to feel human.
Other breaks in routine were the building of the library, the chance where Andy got to play Mozart for the entire prisoner population, asking Red for a Rita Hayworth poster, the guys doing detail to try and find rocks for Andy as a gift when he returned from the hospital. All these breaks in the routine provided moments of levity. Moments to feel like your life is not simply stuck in a tunnel crawling towards a light that you may never reach. Or that life is more than the walls around you that imprison you. Indeed, the break in routine is what allows for hope.
The final break in routine comes when Andy discovers through a new inmate that another criminal has confessed to killing Andy’s wife. Andy is actually innocent. He wants a new trial, but when he tries to convince the Warden to go along, the Warden realizes that Andy has the power to put him in prison. Andy has become so integral to their financial schemes that without him, they won’t work. Or worse, he could turn his information over to the feds. To destroy Andy’s “last hope” the Warden has the young inmate shot who took the information of the confession with him to his grave. Andy is then shoved back into routine… but he now has decided it's time to end this routine. Andy decides it’s time to escape.
After Andy escapes, Red goes into his parole hearing expecting the same old thing. Rather than treating it as just a routine this time, Red explains himself and what has happened to him in prison: “Not a day goes by I don't feel regret, and not because I'm in here or because you think I should. I look back on myself the way I was...stupid kid who did that terrible crime...wish I could talk sense to him. Tell him how things are. But I can't. That kid's long gone, this old man is all that's left, and I have to live with that. Rehabilitated? That's a bullshit word, so you just go on ahead and stamp that form there, sonny, and stop wasting my damn time. Truth is, I don't give a shit.” Red is released from prison, paroled for his honesty.
But, freedom does not feel good anymore. Red is too used to routine. He’s just like Brooks. Brooks, who was paroled and then took his own life because he didn’t fit into the world, is heavy on Red’s mind. He’s even staying in the same place that Brooks lived when he hung himself. Before he considers doing that, he breaks the routine one more time. Andy had told Red to take a journey out to where he proposed to his wife and to find a rock, black as night, and dig up what’s under it. He heads out to do just that. To break the routine of always being scared from how fast the world moves, of doing a dead-end job, of not really being free even though he’s on the outside.
Years before, when Red was last rejected for parole, Andy bought him a harmonica. Red said music symbolized hope to him, but he had given up playing the harmonica a long time ago. Andy’s gift was one of hope. Red refused to play it. In prison, he plays it once for just a single note, before putting it away. Yet, when Red walks through the field towards the spot where Andy asked him to go… the score begins to include a harmonica. Red doesn’t know what awaits him, but he goes. He goes because he has hope again. He hopes to see his old friend. He hopes: “Remember Red, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
In the darkness of the last few years… personally losing loved ones, dealing with realities, confronting our angry sexism, racism in America, seeing people driven apart instead of together… life feels like a grey and dull routine. It feels like the walls are there and that this is all there is… and yet… this movie reminds us that we must continue to hope. On its 25-anniversary, I understand The Shawshank Redemption so much more than when in my youth. It may be one of the most important works of our time.
