The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
Get busy living, or get busy dying.
THE SUMMARY: A wrongfully incarcerated man schemes for decades to escape prison, expose a corrupt warden, and take his money for a permanent Mexican vacation. The first half is a butt rape documentary, but as is a theme of the movie, the back half is well worth the wait. A satisfying story of not just ‘redemption,’ but revenge, with important themes about choosing our own imprisonment, though I can’t agree with IMDb users that it’s the best movie of all time.
FROM MOVIE-PICKER JACOB: I love the character development of both Red and Andy. Andy is unassuming and quiet, but gets the best of everyone despite his situation. Red is an older man who believes he has great understanding and wisdom. Little does he know when he sees Andy for the first time that he will teach him so many things he thought he had figured out. This has to be one of the greatest movies ever made.
THE BEST:
The conditioning to crave a prison: Even beyond ‘redemption,’ I’d argue the movie’s main theme is conditioning not just to accept imprisonment, but to desire it. Of course in the movie, it’s literal. Brooks can’t adjust to a normal life outside prison and hangs himself. Red rejects any desire to leave, saying he’s ‘an institutional man now.’ These are men who lack structure, purpose, social belonging, or anything else that makes life worth living outside the prison walls.
The philosophical point applies to all of us, though. When we don’t develop these things for ourselves in the right places, we search for others to provide them for us and surrender to their control. We create the conditions for our own imprisonment.
There’s nothing wrong with seeking these things - structure, purpose, belonging - these are things we do in fact all need to flourish. The key is seeking them in the right places, through God and family first. When we search in lesser places, we allow wicked people to gain power over us and use us for their purposes.
Hiding the crime behind the scripture: It’s often said you can’t have morality without God, a concept to which I am more receptive as I age. But a related concept is also true - the mere citation of God does not make a man moral. His actions do. There’s a great illustration of that point in the warden Norton keeping his cooked books in a safe behind a scriptural reference. Or at least what is supposed to be a scriptural reference, given Norton’s repeated commitment to the Bible. Just because a man labels himself pious or virtuous does not make him so. If he has to tell you, and doesn’t show you, he isn’t.
The man conspiring is the first to accuse others of conspiracy: Likewise, those most insistently warning against ‘conspiracies’ or ‘conspiracy theories’ are often engaged in conspiracies themselves. See our government officials, media, Hollywood, and everybody else in the gang on non-interdimensional non-shape shifting non-pedophile non-lizard people.
That point is also illustrated by Warden Norton, who rages discovering Andy’s escape: ‘This is a conspiracy! That’s what this is! It’s one big damn conspiracy, and everyone’s in on it!’ In fact, it’s one guy, responding to his conspiracy to keep him wrongfully imprisoned. Sounds familiar.
The nature of hope: Allow me to indulge in cliché self-help platitudes for a moment, but they’re true. For as delusionally rosy as it supposedly is to say and believe there’s always hope, it’s actually pure denial to claim that there isn’t. The hope of a better tomorrow is the only reason to live today. It’s the only reason we all get up every morning and do what we do every day - the idea that somehow, some way, all that effort will make tomorrow better. Even if that tomorrow is beyond many days of suffering immediately ahead, and even if, in the case of this movie, the progress toward tomorrow is achieved just one tiny rock chipping and one long shit scramble at a time.
If you really believed there is no hope, you’d quit everything you do. But you don’t, which means you hope. It’s the lesson Andy teaches Red, converting him from ‘hope is a dangerous thing’ to ‘hope is the best thing.’ It’s not naive to hope. It’s naive to think you don’t.
I’m an institutional man now.
Maybe the best of things.
THE WORST:
We get it - prison sucks: The first half of the movie is just too slow. Until Tommy shows up and reveals Andy’s innocence, the scenes simply repeat how much prison sucks. It’s hard labor. There’s inadequate entertainment and learning opprotunity. The guards are violent. Plus guys rape you. Then they rape you again. Then someone beats the rapist’s ass because, yes, prison is a brutal place that sucks. It makes for a movie that takes its time to reveal what are ultimately satisfying twists and turns. It’s not the biggest drag I’ve ever seen, but it is a movie that’s slow to start, even if great to finish.
They stole that bit from The Great Escape: Fine - maybe it’s just ‘influence’ or ‘homage.’ But you could call it a straight-up ripoff too. When it was revealed that Andy had been slowly excavating an escape for years, my first question was ‘where is he moving the dirt?’ Then the movie explains it in the exact same way that The Great Escape does - by storing dirt in his pants and discreetly dropping it in the prison yard.
It’s a small point - it’s not like the entire story was lifted. But if the purpose was a nod to The Great Escape, more subtlety is appreciated. This was the exact same plot point.
The sewage pipe breakthrough: Yes, I’m going to nitpick about how ackshuuuuallly there’s no way he could have escaped like that. I get it - it’s dramatized fiction. But seriously, nobody is breaking a body-sized hole through a (presumably metal) pipe that thick with just a concrete chunk in five minutes. For a man this sharp with decades of otherwise perfectly executed scheming, he would have had a better, smarter, more plausible escape route than this one.
Though I guess it is on-brand with the movie. He escaped the abuse of his poop chute… through an actual poop chute. Poetic.
Use of pants in The Great Escape
Use of pants in Shawshank
You’re not doing this in five minutes by hand.
THE RATING: 4/5 Wickies. A little slow to start, but the deep themes tied up with glorious revenge to end make for a thoughtful and satisfying viewing. Even if not the greatest movie ever, well worth the watch.
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NEXT WEEK: The Count of Monte Cristo (2002)
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