James Longkumer
“Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
It’s been a decade since the film The Shawshank Redemption was first released. Made in 1994 by first-time writer and director Frank Darabont, the film is based on Stephen King’s 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. Unlike King’s signature horror flicks, The Shawshank Redemption steers clear of the horror genre. The film went on to be nominated for seven Academy Awards in 1995, including one for Best Picture, but it failed to win any of the Oscars it was nominated for. However, over the years since its release, the film has received much critical appreciation and its popularity has grown so much so that it is now considered by many as one of the top five films of all time. For some, The Shawshank Redemption even relegates The Godfather to the second place in a list of the greatest films ever made.
The story of the film weaves around two friends—Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) and Ellis Boyd “Red” Redding (Morgan Freeman). Andy, a vice-president of a bank, is wrongly convicted of the murder of his wife (who was found in the arms of her lover), and is consequently ordered to serve two life sentences in Shawshank Prison. Red has been in prison for the past twenty years for a crime he committed in his youth. Red has little education but lots of street smarts. Andy has good education but lacks prison knack. When Andy first arrives in the prison, Red bets with his fellow inmates that Andy will be the first among the new prisoners to break down that night. But Andy does not, and thus wins Red’s respect. Slowly, Andy begins to make a few friends, most importantly with Red, who is also Shawshank’s resident black market dealer—he is the guy who can get anything smuggled into the prison. Andy and Red eventually become close friends. Inside Shawshank, Andy is promptly introduced to the brutal realities of prison life. He is subjected to vicious attacks from the guards and his fellow in-mates and is gang-raped several times in the boiler room. But escape from the ritual torment comes when he uses his banking skills to earn favor from the guards and the warden as he begins to launder money for them. Andy’s financial savvy not only makes him indispensable to the guards, but the warden also entrusts him with the financial management of his shady business dealings. In return, Andy is permitted special privileges which include working in the warden’s office and building a library for the rest of the prison.
As he continues to serve his wrongly convicted sentence, Andy dedicatedly expends all efforts to improve the prison library. Year after year he sends off letters to state legislators, requesting books and funds for the library. Andy also teaches reading and continues to give free tax advice. At the same time, Andy also bears up under terrible oppression, becoming a favorite target of inmates who subject him to years of painful abuse. But over those agonizing years in the prison, Andy beacons with hope. Red, however, has become an institutionalized man—a lifer who knows he’s guilty and who has come to accept the very walls that keep him from true freedom. “The walls begin as something you hate. As the years go by you get used to them, until finally you depend on them,” describes Red—the enslaving experience of being within those walls. Red’s disillusionment becomes real in the life of an old prisoner, Brooks (James Whitmore), when he is released after 50 years in Shawshank Prison. Unable to adjust and find meaning in his life outside of the prison walls, Brooks ultimately commits suicide. As Red grows older, he too becomes fearful that one day he will be cast out of the prison when he is too old to readjust to the outside world. But the response to such despair comes from Andy’s unrelenting hope. Instilling hope in his friend, Andy shares with Red his dream. He tells Red that when he gets out of prison, he will go to a little town in Mexico on the edge of the Pacific Ocean—Zihuatanejo. There he says he will buy a little hotel and an old boat to begin his life all over again. When he shares his dream of the future, he is accused by Red of having a pipe dream—a useless wish that only makes his enslavement more painful. Red also thinks that he is too old to follow such a dream. But when Andy persists that a place like that could use a man who knew how to get things, Red finally agrees to find him someday.
Throughout his time in Shawshank, Andy does not allow the cruelty of prison life including beatings, solitary confinement, humiliations, and homosexual rapes, to poison his mind and deter his hope. He manages to preserve the certainty of his innocence by envisaging freedom. The turning point in the film occurs when a new young prisoner proves to be a key witness to Andy’s innocence. But when Andy’s innocence is proven after serving almost twenty years of his sentence, the warden uncovers a series of events which not only leaves Shawshank sinking in scandal but also puts him in a precarious situation. Fearing the exposure of his shady financial management, the warden places Andy in solitary confinement and murders the witness. Upon Andy’s release from solitary confinement, he appears to be a broken man. But when Andy fails to appear for roll call one fine morning, Red worries that he may have committed suicide. The warden and the guards storm into Andy’s cell only to find the cell empty—Andy is nowhere to be found! Stunned, the warden rushes to his office and finds his safe cleaned out of its contents, but neatly replaced by Andy’s Bible and his tool of escape—a six-inch mini pick-axe. Later, the warden commits suicide by shooting himself.
Although Andy is quite a private person, he exemplifies unreserved strength—often misunderstood, but nevertheless admired. When he is told that, “Hope is a dangerous thing,” he unperturbedly responds, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.” This transcendental trust in the future and a working hope is the strength within Andy. And for twenty years, through ingenious planning and unusual opportunities, Andy works out his hope with concrete actions to escape.
The two friends do get out from the prison eventually—Andy first and Red sometime later. Andy lets Red to promise to go to a field in Baxton when he gets out of the prison, and when Red does get out finally, he goes to the field and finds what is buried there. Andy has left him some money and a note saying, “Remember, hope is a good thing.” The film ends with Red traveling all the way to Mexico, where he finds Andy on the beach in Zihuatanejo, repairing an old boat. The redemption, when it comes, is Red’s.
The Shawshank Redemption is a film in which the dialectic between resignation and hope is continuously set in tension. Red plays the antithetical role to Andy’s character. Red expresses resignation to the dehumanizing effects of prison life, while Andy constantly displays the voice of hope. Andy’s poise to keep true to oneself, not lose hope, bide one’s time, and to set a quiet example, becomes the epitome of hope. Fear and defeat in the realms of the boiler room, the solitary cage, the beatings by prison guards, and the gang rapes by fellow inmates are juxtaposed alongside the free spirit of gulping down cold beers on the rooftop by Red and his fellow inmates, as well as the episode in which Andy plays an aria from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro.” The prisoners in the prison yard become spellbound and are mesmerized by the music, and such a scene reveals the pattern of many of the film’s redeeming epiphanies. The film is such an emotional and cathartic appraisal of the best and the worst of the human spirit that in the face of fear and resignation, the film is ultimately won over by hope.
Some people have said life is a prison—we are Red and Andy is our redeemer. The prison can therefore be seen as a metaphor for the world we live in. And Red unambiguously illustrates the role of negativity in the human spirit within the bounds of the prison walls. Fear is not only a factor inside the four walls of the prison, but fear is also pictured outside those walls where hope is but only a mirage, as in the case of Brooks’ tragic death. Looking at the present dilapidated condition of our world, many Christians also show signs of resignation and fear and think that hope for a shalom society seems to be farfetched whether because of war, violence, oppression, moral decadence, drug abuse, diseases, poverty, or natural calamities. Besides, for a lot more Christians, faith does not engender hope but is rather a subject of fear for an inevitable oncoming apocalyptic wrath, often indoctrinated by a wrong notion of spirituality! Hope is replaced by fear, and such fear is often self-destructive.
But The Shawshank Redemption is a film which unwraps the reality of hope and eliminates fear. Andy as a redeemer not only demonstrates inward strength and outward action, but he also shows how to cultivate and work out hope in a totally hopeless situation. Such hope like that of Andy’s is a profound theme in Christian faith and understanding. Christian hope for goodness and freedom, like that of Andy’s, is neither colored by fear nor is it a fantasy which is unattainable or unlivable. Christian hope is not only an anticipation of the future, but is a living hope and must be worked out here and now through good deeds and by beckoning freedom. Such a hope is a reality for the believer because in Christ the certainty of the hope of the future has already broken through into time and space, grounded on the concrete antecedent of Christ’s resurrection (1 Peter 1:3-5; 1 Cor 15:19-20). And so The Shawshank Redemption is a film which not only echoes the messages of hope and redemption in a humanized way, but through the metaphor of a prison the film also captivates and exemplifies such truths of the Christian faith in a very powerful way. After all, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
