Besides strong performances from Tim Robbins, Morgan Freeman and yes, even Bob Gunton as the evil warden, what makes this movie so compelling is its universal themes of hope and redemption.
Let’s look at hope first. Andy Dufresne, a successful banker, is condemned to Shawshank prison for the murder of his wife and her lover. Shawshank is a terrible place, but worse than the corrupt warden and sadistic guards, its real power is the power to dehumanize. Andy’s cynical friend, Red, describes it this way:
“Spend enough time in prison and it no longer matters why you’re there. Guilty or innocent, there comes a time when you no longer have an identity except as an inmate. You lose your autonomy, and by then, even release leaves nothing but the broken shell of a man. They send you here for life, and that’s exactly what they take.”Now there is a description of hopelessness.
There is only one thing that can keep an inmate in Shawshank alive -- hope. But what is hope? Is it just wishful thinking, a pipe dream, a refusal to accept reality? That’s what Red thinks; he’s stopped hoping. But Andy knows better. He knows that that whatever prison and its evil intent can do to beat down the body, they can never kill the soul. Referring specifically to music (one of the ways people throughout the centuries have nourished the soul and kept hope alive) he says, “there’s something inside that they can’t get to, they can’t touch.” Yet hope for Andy is not just an internal thing that one retreats into and ignores the situation one faces. Twice, he risks terrible punishment and his favored position as the Warden’s assistant to show his friends what hope means in real terms. For example, he accepts two weeks of solitary confinement for broadcasting Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro over the prison loudspeakers. When he came out, he told his fellow inmates, “easiest time I ever did.”
What Andy realizes and where the movie excels, is showing us that real hope is not about closing your eyes to the inhumanity around us or stopping up our ears (hear no evil) and dreaming. No, real hope is about embodying in one’s life a belief that life is worth living, no matter how bleak the external circumstances -- even at the risk of one’s own safety. “Get busy living or get busy dying,” Andy tells Red. From a Christian perspective, hope means a strong and confident expectation based on the promises of God. Through the prophet Jeremiah, God tells the people of Israel in the midst of their darkest moment, “I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope.” In the Bible, hope is dynamic, active, and life-sustaining. It does not leave us drifting or rocking on the porch. It puts us in gear. That’s the kind of hope that Andy Dufresne exemplifies in Shawshank Redemption and why I think the movie connects with so many people.
Next time I will write about who and what is being redeemed in this wonderful movie. Stay tuned...
Jeff
