The Duck Speaks

Shawshank was one of the hardest prisons in the state of Maine. It could break the hardest of men, and when Andy Dufresne arrived, there was no reason to think it wouldn’t crush him as well. It didn’t work out quite like that, though…

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“Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption,” from Different Seasons by Stephen King

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The Shawshank Redemption

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There was a period in my life when it seemed like everything I read was written by Stephen King. Starting at some point in junior high, when my dad let me pick up The Stand, and continuing for a number of years, while King wasn’t the only author I looked at, he was the primary motivating factor of my reading life. I was, as is my usual habit, hooked in, and nothing would satisfy but to devour his entire oeuvre as quickly as possible.

This was a great time for me; it’s when I first realized I should be a writer, and it was back when it was still possible for me to get so enthusiastic about a creative force as to believe they could do no wrong. Eventually I became disillusioned; I realized that not everything King put to paper was as well-constructed and phrased as it could have been, and that he had the annoying habit of writing five words where two would do. But back then, the man was a god to me, the first true artistic mentor of my life, and to this day, I miss the feeling I would get when I started one of his novels for the first time- I still get that feeling today on occasion, but it’s never as strong as it was then.

Still, even then I wasn’t completely enthusiastic about some King books- I was interested in everything, yes, and a King novel was better than pretty much anything else, but some rated higher than others. Different Seasons was on the lower end of the pole, for a number reasons; it’s a collection of novellas and I’ve always preferred full-length novels, but more importantly, the collection wasn’t out and out horrror, a fact which I didn’t discover for myself till I got the book home- the publishers do their damnedest to hide that two out of the four stories aren’t scary, and three out of the four don’t deal with the supernatural at all.

Discovering this was a bit of a let down, like getting one of those lime Skittles, cause it’s still a Skittle, but its lime, and orange would’ve been better. I read the first three stories (today’s subject, “Apt Pupil,” and “The Body”), and they were pretty good, although “Apt Pupil” dragged on something fierce, but I stalled out at the last one, “The Breathing Method.” Took me a few years to get around to reading it, which is funny when you realize it’s the only story of supernatural horror in the whole collection.

I do remember enjoying “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” quite a lot. It’s told in the first person, which generally goes down easier; at the very least, it turns the actual writer’s various idiosyncrasies and occasional flubs into the revealing quirks of the fictional narrator. Even better, it’s a prison story, and everybody loves a good prison story. Something about reading of a world that most of us will never experience, I guess, a world which eschews most of the social niceties we’re all familiar with, replacing them with more brutal, essential realities. There’s a fascinating narrowing of focus that goes on in most prison tales as well- when someone has that much time on their hands, and only so many places they can go, the few comforts that have left are far more valuable than you ever thought possible. (Cigarettes as currency? Gosh, that’s nifty!)

Oh, and there’s the ever present promise of violence, can’t leave that out of our factoring. For me, there’s the added sadist factor; for reasons I don’t really understand, I enjoy reading stories of people suffering horribly before reaching some amazing success. I like characters who accomplish seemingly impossible things, and I especially like it when those impossible things require lots of endurance- it makes the character more appealing to me. (And yet, I refuse to see The Passion of the Christ. I’m an odd one, that there is.)

Well, “RHSR” certainly has its violent moments, although violence is not a huge presence in the book; and there’s definitely a narrowing of focus, although it’s the breaking of that focus that gives the story its theme, and its soul. Mostly, though, it’s about endurance- the endurance of one man against a cruel fate, and how that endurance led him to the eventual freedom he so richly deserved. It’s about hope, really, and how it can find salvation in the most unlikely of places.

All this and more in my latest book, Chicken Soup for the Convict Soul- first hundred copies have a shiv taped to the inside cover, so buy yours now!

The novella is told from the perspective of Red, an Irishman in for murdering his wife, his neighbor, and his neighbor’s baby. Red seems a decent sort, as the story opens a good ten years into his sentence; he continually fails his parole hearings, but it’s not like he’s killing people now. He even has his own, semi-comfortable niche in prison, as the guy who can get things for you. Through an established a network of bribed guards, outsiders, and fellow inmates, he provides other cons access to materials they would not normally have access to. With only the most reasonable mark-up in price, of course.

Which is not all that unusual, in and of itself; as Red says, there’s probably a guy like him in every prison in the country. Unusual comes in the form of one Andy Dufresne, a man brought to Shawshank, some time after Red, for the murder of his wife and her lover. The case was apparently quite the scandalous one in the outside world, as Andy was a young up and coming banker, and his wife strikingly beautiful. At trial, two things weighed heavily against the accused: there were the (rather circumstantial) facts, which placed him in the vicinity of the victims near the time of the murders with a weapon necessary to commit the crime, but also, and perhaps even more damningly, there was his cool, composed demeanor on the witness stand- he appeared to have no remorse over what he was accused of doing, nor was he obviously upset at his wife’s infidelity. The whole case looked open and shut, and Andy was sent to prison in rapid time, to serve two consecutive life sentences. The papers got the story that they wanted, the DA got the attention from papers he wanted, and a psychotic killer got his just desserts.

The problem being, Andy Dufresne didn’t kill anybody. A cold fish? Possibly. A bad husband? Could be. But a murderer? No.

Okay, fans of the movie may be annoyed with me at this point, as it seems I’ve just given away a fairly large twist in the film. Darabont takes great care to keep Andy’s guilt or innocence in doubt for the first two thirds of the movie; we see him outside his wife’s lover’s bungalow the night of the murder, we see him all stiff and quiet in court, and we see every other character convinced of his guilt. However, in the novella, we’re told Andy’s innocent within a page of meeting him for the first time. Since I read the novella long before the movie was made, the reveal didn’t mean too much to me; and to be honest, I don’t think it’s all that big a deal even if you go into the flick cold. It’s pretty damn hard to imagine Andy as anything but not-guilty, and, perhaps even more importantly, the movie isn’t about guilt or innocence anyway. Besides, it would make this review even harder than it already is, and it’s already late, so screw it.

Moving on…

So Andy goes to jail, a nasty piece of work jail full of thieves, murderers, and worst for him, rapists. I’ve never been to jail myself, but I do know that no prison story would be complete without some disturbing sexual assault. The novella manages to tell of Andy’s difficulties, largely with a group of psychos called “The Sisters,” without dwelling on them; the rapes are presented as a disturbing but inevitable fact of life, and while it may be unpleasant, they’re a necessary part of the story- Andy has go through his time in hell if his eventual triumph is to have any meaning at all.

Eventually, Andy finds his place in Shawshank, and even if he never does truly seem at home, he at least manages to reach some level of comfort. He even finds a way to stop the rapes, and this is where the story really gets interesting, because here’s when Andy’s true talents first assert themselves. The turning point is a tarring session on one of the prison roofs, when Andy steps in on a conversation between two of the guards. One of them has just inherited a chunk of money, but instead of bragging about his good fortune, he’s grousing that the government will just end up taking a huge chunk out of it and life’s just finding one more way to screw him.

While his fellow cons (including Red) look on in horror, Andy makes the cardinal mistake of admitting he’d been listening in on the guards’ conversation by stepping forward and trying to contribute. (His first sentence to the griping guard, “Do you trust your wife?”, isn’t exactly the smoothest, either.) The guard immediately flips out and drags Andy over to the side of the roof, threatening to throw him off- an “accident” which he could easily get away with. Andy, however, manages to explain, all with his feet a mere inch away from the edge, that if the guard trusts his wife, it’s possible to give her the inheritance as a “gift,” a one-time only arrangement that will let him keep the money tax free. All he would need to do is fill out certain paperwork; paperwork which Andy would be more than happy to do himself. The only charge? A few beers apiece for his “co-workers.”

It’s a wonderful, iconic moment, a moment which not only allows the hero to get what just might be his first brief bit of power since entering Shawshank (because, by the end of his talk with the guard, Andy is in control of the situation- even if the guard doesn’t realize it, and would probably beat up the side of the head of anyone foolhardy enough to point it out to him), but it also let’s us see what sort of man he really is. Before, our basic knowledge of Mr. Dufresne was that he’d been falsely imprisoned, and that despite his best efforts, he got raped every now and then. Oh, and he liked rocks. Now we have a new Andy to contend to: Andy the brave, Andy the lucky, and above all, Andy the man with something special inside him that will not die. The only sort of man who would be courageous and foolhardy enough to cross the line between con and guard is the sort of man who still allows himself to believe that he won’t always be screwed; that if he perseveres, he might even succeed. He’s the sort of man who still allows himself the dangerous freedom of hope.

After the rooftop incident, things start to improve in Andy’s world. The guards beat down a Sister or two, getting them off Andy’s back, and he is eventually transferred from the laundry to the library. Soon enough, he’s helping guards out with their tax forms, and helping to launder the steady stream of money coming from the warden on down, work that, while not legal by any stretch of the imagination, at least provides him with leverage for improvements on the library, and, perhaps even more importantly, the luxury of living in a cell by himself. Andy likes to sleep alone, it seems.

It should be noted here that, while the same basic story is told in both versions, the novella and the movie have much different ways of telling. Red’s doing the narrating in each, but, because of the way movies work, his narration in the film is largely left to either connect scenes to each other, to pass long periods of time quickly, or, in some of the movie’s most heartfelt, moving moments, to supply an extra piece of dramatic force to the visual. Probably the best example of this last is the iconic opera scene, when Andy manages to play a piece of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro over the prison’s intercom system; we see the convicts listening, enraptured, we hear the music ourselves, and we also hear Red’s description of what that music meant to him at that moment. Often, such narration is overkill, providing as it does information of which we already have ample evidence- it’s pretty obvious that the cons are seriously grooving on the aria. However, since the writing is so good, taken directly from the book, and Freeman’s delivery so straightforward, the narration here augments the impact of the scene and makes it magical.

Still, Freeman doesn’t narrate the entire movie- Red narrates the whole book, though, and here’s where the obvious differences between media comes into play. Clearly, you don’t need to have someone narrate a film in its entirety, unless what’s being filmed is unable to tell a story on its own, like nature films. Books work a bit differently, because the words are all you have most of the time. Big duh on both, of course, but I mention it because it does create one less than obvious difference between the end results of the two versions. The main character of the movie is Andy Dufresne; there’s no real question of this, as the movie begins with him alone, and he’s the one who drives the plot along. Red is a close second, and even becomes the star of the show for a brief spot at the end when Andy leaves the scene, but as an audience member, it’s Andy who you’ve got your eye on. However, because Red is the guy telling you the novella- essentially talking to you for over a hundred pages- it’s Red who’s the main character; hell, he even admits it himself.

This difference is largely an intellectual exercise, always a dangerous game to play with pleasurable fiction, but look at it this way: movie Andy is the hero, a man who, through a combination of intelligence, perseverance and luck manages to achieve his goals and get fully justified revenge on those who wronged him. The novella Andy does all these things, but there’s a certain distance to him. The movie version, while impressive, still feels like an everyman; we can relate to him because, for one thing, we’ve most likely never committed a crime serious enough to land ourselves jail time, so the idea of wrongful imprisonment is a scary one. Plus, he’s being played by Tim Robbins, an actor who, while projecting an air of oddness due to his height and curious manner of line delivery (he’s very quiet), is a charismatic, likeable guy. The book version, not being played by Robbins, is a different story. He’s still likeable, and his accomplishments are very impressive, but he’s less iconic and more symbolic, if that scans. On film, we are watching him accomplish things as they happen, but on the page, we are hearing about them second hand; he’s almost a folk hero, and you usually don’t relate to folk heroes.

An easier difference to quantify is how the look of the characters- as well as many of the characters themselves- vary between versions. Morgan Freeman plays Red in the movie, but there’s no indication in the novella that Red is black; hell, one would think his explanation for his nickname would sort of make it impossible. What’s remarkable about the change is how little it effects the story, in the end. Sure, there’s a bit of added emotional weight in watching a friendship blossom between a white man and a black man (not sure why, maybe it’s that it gives us hope that not everybody’s a jerk), but nobody ever talks about it. Sufficeth to say, Freeman’s perfect for the part; all other considerations are meaningless.

Dufresne is described in the book as a meek, small man with glasses; picture your standard accountant cliché, and you’ll have him. This distances him even further from us, as it’s a very specific character type that most of us do not fall in to. While we may not look like Robbins, either, he’s not so much of a character actor as to lose the charismatic universality of the leading man.

As for the rest of the gang… There are a number of folks who Andy and Red spend time with in the joint, and surprisingly enough, hardly any of them are on the printed page. This is because Red mostly describes events and conversations between him and Andy, or between Andy and the warden; there’s no group scenes to set up the environment, or to ease the tension. Brookes Hatlen, one of James Whitmore’s finest end-of-the-career roles, is mentioned briefly, but only as a cautionary tale; while the movie Brookes fate is tragic, the novella is simply realistic and sad, with none of the dramatic finality of a noose and a fallen chair.

The realism thing is another point worth mentioning. One of the easiest criticisms to make of the movie is that it presents us a number of supposedly seasoned cons for heroes, but then never bothers to mention what any of them are doing in jail, sanitizing them to make them more likeable. The novella doesn’t make this “mistake.” We know within the first few pages why Red’s in jail- he tampered with the brakes of his wife’s car, and the next time his wife went for a drive she picked up a friend and her baby, so when the brakes went out, all three were killed- and while we don’t always know the crimes of every character we meet (since most of them are walk-ons anyway, it would slow down the story unnecessarily to provide a full back story for each), they at least all feel like they’re capable of committing crimes. It gives the novella a harder feel than the movie, and a more realistic one.

However, to view the film in that sort of light, to expect it to be some sort of convincing depiction of prison life, is to miss the point of it entirely. The Shawshank Redemption is a myth, a fable with a clear moral and lots of poetry to make it more universal than a simple jail-break plot. The prisoners, while tough men, are likeable and, at heart, decent enough guys; Shawshank itself is less an institution to detain the dangerous elements of society for our protection, and more a representation of the prisons we all live in, the restraints of fear and entropy and conformity that hinder us from our dreams and lock us into comfortably monotonous lives. Focusing on the prisoners’ crimes would have grounded the movie in a way that would’ve diminished it, reduced it’s almost magical texture into something more ordinary.

Perhaps I’m being overly-defensive here; I admit, I do have a slight reservation about a supposed prison-flick that so whole-heartedly embraces its criminals as, well, innocents. It comes down to a matter of taste, really. For some folks, that softness is going to be very off-putting, mostly likely ruining the movie for them completely. After all, if you can’t really believe in the characters as anything more than the conceits of the author and actor, how can you expected to give a tinker’s dam about them? For other folks, though, this tendency towards the blinkered sentimentality is a large part of what gives the film its drawing power; the universality makes the drama more compelling, and the triumphant ending almost impossible to watch without tears.

It’s worth noting that there is a delicate balance being struck here, between harshness and, well, hugs. Darabont’s next project, The Green Mile, another Stephen King adaptation (which, gods willing, I’ll someday get to), runs even more a risk of alienating its audience through a sugar-coating of whole bottles of bitter pills, and while it still has its his adherents, it wasn’t nearly as embraced. His next project after that, The Majestic, is largely loathed by critics and filmgoers alike for its flaccid sense of conflict, overly sappy melodrama, and insanely myopic mythologizing of small town life. Shawshank was Darabont’s first major picture as a director, and while it may be a bit cruel (and premature) of me, I can’t help but wonder if it will always be considered his triumph; if that elusive mixture of crowd-pleasing cheer and darkness on the edge of town, once wielded so expertly, has deserted him, leaving him to repeat the same shlocky mistakes over and over again.

But back to the movie at hand. (I think I used about sixty adjectives in that paragraph. And the alliteration! Please forgive me.) Another criticism often slung at Shawshank is its slowness. Again, this is not entirely without merit, at least in theory; the source material is a mere novella, and there’s been a long history of draggy Stephen King adaptations dedicating too much time to not enough story. However, while the novella is shorter than your average novel, it’s still a chunk of writing, and actually a pretty good fit for a couple hours. More importantly- perhaps most importantly- is that the slow pace works to the movie’s advantage. This is not an action film, raising adrenaline through quick cuts, nor is it a comedy that gets its laughs through frenetic, overlapping dialogue. It’s a drama about people whose lives are defined by time in a way we can only relate to by inaccurate comparisons (“Forty years in jail? Well, I had this really crummy Econ class once…”), and the pacing should reflect that. The movie isn’t dull, and it’s not plodding, but there is a steadiness to it, a rhythm that is unflinching and melancholy. The pace of the novella isn’t quite the same, but that’s because it’s a different sort of thing; it’s a story being told, instead of shown, and feels like a series of anecdotal islands, connected by rivers of narrative.

I suppose the most obvious difference- and the least importance, at least on a surface level- between the source and its adaptations are the titles. The reason for the change is obvious: “Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption” isn’t exactly the catchiest phrase in the world, and a bit unwieldly besides- nobody wants to suffer from The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain disease. But it’s worth noting that the new title, aside from memorability and marquee fitting ease, casts a slightly divergent glow over its plot. “RHaSR” sounds like the punchline of a joke, and sets you up for a sort of low-key, would you believe it really happened? kind of tale. (Plus, there’s the lure of Rita Hayworth- I mean, just what the hell is she doing there?) The Shawshank Redemption, though, there’s no gag there. It focuses on the most important part of the original title, adds a “the” to make it distinct, and the resulting effect is far more striking, almost religious. It tells us pretty clearly that something of import is going to happen in the next hundred and twenty plus minutes- something unique.

Just what that something is, though, is up for grabs. (Spoilers, me fine bucko, are dead ahead. Probably this whole stinking paragraph is ripe with ‘em, and the next few after that. Are you man enough to accept that? Are you woman enough to dive right in?) Yeah, the first thing you think of is Andy’s jailbreak, right? I mean, that is the major event of either version, the thing the plots of both build-up to, and probably the inspiration for King writing it in the first place. (Maybe he thought “What if an innocent man got sent to jail? How would he escape?”, although I’d be more impressed if it’d just been the image of a gaping hole underneath a pin-up girl poster.) I’m not sure that plays, though, largely because, well, what is being redeemed here? Andy is an innocent man, and he commits no crime over the course of the story which he needs to make up for; the worst thing we hear about him- from his own mouth- is that he was a bit of a cold fish to his wife. Redemption is the salvation of the sinner from a state of corruption to a state of grace, and I don’t think Andy is ever a sinner. You could say he frees himself from a state of corruption (ie, prison and the warden’s white-collar machinations), but I think that’s a stretch.

The only other possible character, if the redemption is a one-man act, is Red, and this feels more right to me. Especially in the novella. Red is a man who has sinned, and has been lowered to a den of thieves and murderers, and it is only through his friendship with Andy and his own inner strength that he finds his way out, and back to a life that is truly worth living again. Hope is what he finds, and hope is a big thing in movie and book, including the beautiful refrain given at the end of each, one through print, one through narration. Since Red is really telling his own story in the book, it’s he who is ultimately redeemed, through the hope that a crime can be paid for, and the hope, as he puts it, that “the Pacific will be as blue as it has been in my dreams.”

Picking the redeemee (ugh) is not quite so easy in the movie, though. Because, while the ending is the same (and just as powerful), with the shift from Red as clear main character to a split between him and Andy (a split which favors Andy), and dramatic title, it’s sort of a cop out to foist it on a character whose journey, though important, is largely subdued. Besides, since we don’t know what Red’s crime is, never actually see him do anything even, y’know, mean and stuff (aside from betting that Andy would cry his first night in the stir), he doesn’t seem to be that much more of a sinner than Dufresne.

There’s nobody else, though. A few other memorable characters, but nobody else gets a clear happening ending besides those two. So what, then, is the Shawshank redemption? I think it has something to do with the fable-like feel to the story I mentioned previously. The Shawshank redemption is not about specific crimes or sins which need to be expunged; it’s about finding a way to break out of the traps which life and circumstance lay for us, the traps we sometimes willingly walk into, the traps that seem to cling to us always. Andy and Red are redeemed from the life of “quiet desperation” because they have won back their freedom, Andy through perseverance, and Red through maturity and kindness, and both, of course, through hope. While the novella is about one specific man finding a way to believe in a life he had long given up dreaming of, the movie is about the process by which two men- who are, in a way, every men- accept the possibilities of joy inherent in a lifetime.

Solid stuff all around, I think.

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For the record- “The Breathing Method” was damn good.