Hope, the Human Condition and Shawshank Redemption

Hope, the human condition and The Shawshank Redemption: Jesus and Andy Dufresne against institutions

Good art – whether it be painting, music, literature or cinematography – can, in the words of the Wachowsky brothers (creators of The Matrix) provide answers to the “big questions” in life. In The Shawshank Redemption, Stephen King and Frank Darabont have shown the viewer much of the character of Christ through the main protagonist Andy Dufresne, exposing the character of their enemy: the institutions of the world and of the mind and spirit that seek to imprison us.

Fallen

A man wakes up in a cell. He has been convicted of a crime of which he is innocent: his wife and her lover have been found shot dead and he had the means and the motive. But he didn’t pull the trigger. Can you imagine the despair, the indignity and frustration this must hold for him? This is Andy Dufresne, the main protagonist in the film The Shawshank Redemption, bringer of hope to a dismal institution.

A baby is born in a dark, fallen world. This world was doomed due to the actions of its first occupants. This child becomes the man who knows that he is the Son of God, the supreme of all beings, imprisoned in human form, having to eat, drink, urinate and defecate with his fellow prisoners. This is the Man Jesus Christ, through whose suffering, death and resurrection, hope of something beyond the material reality around us came into this world.

Andy is unlike his fellow inmates. He is educated and well-spoken. Red, who became his close friend, puts it this way: “I could see why some of the boys took him for snobby. He had a quiet way about him, a walk and a talk that just wasn't normal around here. He strolled, like a man in a park without a care or a worry in the world, like he had on an invisible coat that would shield him from this place.”

Hope in a dark place

“This place” is Shawshank Prison, a sprawling bleak stone building housing those who have been judged and convicted by a society which has no interest in the edification of these inmates, but wants to see “more walls, more bars, more guards” to keep them inside. Andy wants to reverse this: he campaigns for funds for a new library for the prison and he strives to educate fellow inmates like Tommy Williams so that they don’t have to resort to a life of crime outside prison. In this struggle he is up against the prison of the mind, the state that the building, the bars and the guards strive to create: institutionalisation.

Red, the narrator, puts it this way: “These walls are funny. First you hate 'em, then you get used to 'em. Enough time passes, you get so you depend on them. That's institutionalized.” Inmates like Brooks Hatlen would commit a crime in order to get put back inside, or commit suicide, because they cannot fit into society when released. Red himself, after his release says, “There is a harsh truth to face. No way I'm gonna make it on the outside. All I do anymore is think of ways to break my parole.” But Andy Dufresne has given him that which he thought had no place in prison: hope.

Hope was also key to the ministry of Jesus Christ when he lived among the people of his day who were condemned by the religious powers. Like Andy Dufresne, he was imprisoned innocently. Not in a building of stone, but in an earthly body, in the human condition. Many parallels can be drawn between Andy Dufresne and Christ: Andy drove his wife into the arms of another man through his neglect; Christ came to atone for the sin of Adam who had lost his wife and freedom to the serpent’s seduction. Christ had to endure death on the cross and three days in the realm of death to redeem humanity’s sins; Andy Dufresne had to endure nineteen years in prison and a 500 yard crawl through human sewerage to redeem himself for being a bad husband. Christ mysteriously disappeared from the tomb, leaving just a shroud behind; Andy Dufresne “upped and vanished like a fart in the dark” leaving only a muddy set of prison clothes behind. The symbolism of the tomb here is significant: Christ was “swallowed up” by the earth and was rebirthed from it; Andy Dufresne escaped through a tunnel concealed by the poster of a woman - at one point the word “Mother” can be seen above the poster, again symbolising rebirth. The focus of the following discussion, however, is on the hope they both brought while among fellow prisoners (or prisoners of the flesh) and the enemy they faced.

Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption had a walk and a talk like no other prisoner. He displays the character of Christ by offering his fellow inmates freedom and hope.

Freedom for the prisoners

According to the Bible, Christ was the Son of God, or he was God himself, who had become incarnate (i.e. clothed in flesh and blood) and came to minister to the people of his time with a message that would resonate to this day. Christ’s commission, stated in Luke 4 when he stood in the temple at Nazareth, was this:
“He [God the Father] has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free” [own italics]

It is his intention “to proclaim freedom for the prisoners” which pertains to Andy Dufresne’s situation in The Shawshank Redemption. Christ did not literally come to throw open prison gates to let loose a horde of criminals in some sort of prison break. Instead, he brought a freedom that cannot be pinned down by any physical means. For Andy Dufresne, this was the freedom of the mind and the human spirit. We see this in every situation where he opposed the oppression of the institution.

Andy proves that, even though he is educated and different from his fellow inmates, he is a man like them and wins them over when he organises, almost miraculously, to get them beers while tarring a roof. Red says of the situation: “We sat and drank with the sun on our shoulders and felt like free men.” This is strongly reminiscent of Christ who, even though he was the Son of God and had “a walk and a talk that just wasn't normal around here”, proved that he knew what the small pleasures in life are to ordinary people by changing water into wine (of a good vintage!) at the wedding in Cana. This wasn’t just an act of divine benevolence: he loved to socialise with all manner of people – tax collectors, prostitutes, “sinners” in the eyes of the religious people of that time, and he loved to eat and drink wine with them. In Luke 7 Jesus says, “34 The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’” He was criticised by the Pharisees, the religious order that partially governed the Jews, for mingling with common folk and sharing their pleasure. In this way, Andy Dufresne and Jesus prove themselves sensitive to the pleasures of the ordinary people, not putting themselves above them. They are both well acquainted with the human condition, the metaphorical prison of the human spirit, and the little things that set us free from it.

Andy Dufresne presented the human spirit most defiantly when he put the Mozart record on and played it through the prison PA system, locking himself into the warden’s office so that he could continue playing it to the inmates until the door was broken down and he was dragged off to solitary confinement. But until that moment, the inmates were transported by the music – in Red’s words: “those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a grey place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.” [own italics]

When Andy comes back from solitary confinement, he stresses the importance of music in keeping hope alive:
Andy: I had Mr. Mozart to keep me company.
[points and taps his head]
Andy: It was in here.
[gestures over his heart]
Andy: And in here. That's the beauty of music. They can't get that from you. Haven't you ever felt that way about music?
Red: I played a mean harmonica as a younger man. Lost interest in it though. Didn't make much sense in here.
Andy: Here's where it makes the most sense. You need it so you don't forget.
Red: Forget?
Andy: Forget that there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. That there's something inside...that they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours.
Red: What are you talking about?
Andy: Hope.

The role of Red is interesting in this film: unlike the other prisoners, he is "the only guilty man in Shawshank". When asked what they did to land up here, all the other prisoners blame their "lawyer", but Red freely admits that he actually did commit a murder. In the same way, the people who have hope of salvation are those who admit their guilt, who know that they are feeble stumblers in a dark world, people who need hope. It is for this person that the innocent Christ came to earth, to give him the key to a life after being set free from the prison of the soul; it is for Red that the innocent Andy came to Shawshank, giving him the hope that he will meet him in his life after prison in a place that has no memory - the coast of Mexico and the vast expanse of the Pacific. Again, we cannot escape the parallels with Christian motifs here: Andy wants to take anglers (fishermen) out in his chartered boat - Jesus' disciples were fishermen.

Andy sees music as a means of remembering, in spite of the physical evidence of the prison around him, the concepts of hope and freedom. We shall examine the role of music in uplifting us from the human condition in the following discussion.