The Shawshank Redemption: Moral Vision

Sorry this is uber-late; GIN trip and what not.

It’s absolutely heartbreaking that I write this on the day that the Velvet Underground mastermind, Lou Reed, passed away. Consistently dealing with dark and morose subject matter—songs that talked about drug use and abuse, sadomasochism, among other things—it can be said that his art wasn’t exactly moral. That doesn’t mean that it was bad art; quite the opposite, his music is brilliant, and has stood the test of time. Except for that solo record, Metal Machine Music. An abomination of the musical kind, it was absolutely immoral of him to even think of making it… It’s so bad it should be illegal. Anyway, this blog post is about Shawshank Redemption, not Lou Reed.

Viewed from every single angle, The Shawshank Redemption is a brilliant dig at some of the most pressing (quasi-paradoxical) moral dilemmas we see today. In that sense, yes, the film has an entirely moral dimension to it. Obviously, it’s not as simple as that. There’s a quite intricate complexity to the moral vision in the film, both that displayed by the characters and the filmmaker, Mr. Frank Darabont.

            I will tackle the prompt for this blog with the word “moral” being defined as that which we—students at Graded—are most accustomed to: behavior that is considered “correct” or acceptable in a society. Thus morality for the characters and for the filmmaker is very different.

            On the face of it, The Shawshank Redemption appears to portray a very strong good vs. bad dynamic, which defines its basic moral compass. In the Shawshank penitentiary, convicts of all shapes and sizes are placed together to struggle in living hell, headed by Samuel Norton, Shawshank’s very own Beelzebub. In the world we’re accustomed to, we’d be inclined to loathe prisoners—after all, they did commit heinous crimes—but not in this film. Frank Darabont sets the movie in such a way that the antagonists become Samuel Norton, the corrupt warden of the prison and Byron Hadley, the vicious captain of the prison guards. The good guys, for the most part, are the convicts and the bad guys are the higher-ups. Funny. This in and of itself presents a strong moral vision of the filmmaker: he is trying to get the general audience to understand that our perception of morality is not necessarily a correct or good one. He uses this overly simplistic good versus bad moral view as a way to satirize our very own moral view, which is just a simplistic: we think convicts are bad and that those in charge of prisons and whatnot are the good ones.

            However, within this simplicity, there are many complexities to this basic moral vision, summed up by protagonist Andy Dufresne telling his convict friend, Red: “I had to come to prison to be a crook.” Andy was completely innocent of his crime and, yet, was given the life sentence for supposedly murdering his wife and her lover. Is this a flaw in the system? Or is Andy simply collateral damage in an otherwise perfect framework? Once in the penitentiary is when he begins doing dirty deeds: Red helps him infiltrate items he wants, he helps the guards’ finances and aids the warden in his acts of corruption in order to receive favors within the prison walls. From this we can gather a pretty strong idea of the filmmaker’s moral vision. It appears that, in his view, the prison fails as a correctional facility—one that instills morals in otherwise immoral people—and ends up doing just the opposite: it forces them to depend on a system that is just as immoral or more so (considering the warden and his principal guard mistreat the prisoners, partake in corruption and even murder a convict) than the crimes they have committed. In the words of the wise Red: “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.”

            Morality is such a pressing issue in the film that even within the convicts themselves, moral visions can be found. Within hours of arriving, Andy is seen as a target for the prison’s “bull queers,” also known as “The Sisters.” They sporadically rape Andy over the course of several years, acts which are never directly shown on screen—this is an artistic way in which the director is able to show that rape is a deed so immoral that it doesn’t even deserve screen time. Despite the entirety of the prison being made up of felons convicted for the most diverse reasons, nobody condones the actions of “The Sisters.” In that sense, they have a moral compass that is more correct, so to speak, than that of the correctional officers. However, they fail to do anything about it, despite it being a fairly common occurrence. This is a parallel with what happens in real-life; time and time again people fail do to anything when they are in a position in which they easily could. By pitting us with convicted felons, the filmmaker tries to show that, at least in the moral spectrum, we are more similar than we’d like to believe.

            During the movie, we see prisoners who have been discharged unable to enjoy life on the outside. In fact, Brooks ends up killing myself and Red deliberates doing the same. Both of these are symbolized by the moment Brooks releases a black crow out into the wild—those who leave are bound to find darkness and bad luck. Is “rehabilitation just a bullshit word” as Red claims, then? If a prison fails at doing its most basic job as a correctional facility, is it morally justifiable to maintain it as it is? Probably not. And this is what filmmaker Frank Darabont wants to believe. Finally, what does it mean to be moral? To do as the warden and guards tell you? Or to lock a guard in the toilet as he’s minding his business and play Mozart to all your fellow convicts? It appears to be the latter—the authorities, though they maintain this façade, are not the ones who determine morality.

            More than most movies we watch, The Shawshank Redemption is a work of art. Cinematography played a huge role in the storytelling. One scene stands out in particular, as brilliantly executed as any great painting: the one in which Andy plays Mozart’s “Canzonetta sull'aria” from The Marriage of Figaro to all the prison inmates. This scene contains a magnificent aerial shot of the countless inmates standing on a vast, enclosed patch of hopeless dirt; it appears that they’ve been stripped naked of any sort of life they once had. This all is contrasted by beautiful, soaring music—symbolic, in this case, as it is the scene in The Marriage of Figaro where Countess Almaviva is reading a letter intended the husband of the countess, in order to expose his infidelity—that instills hope, a hope that begins to show on the prisoners’ faces as the camera zooms in. This all is too in contrast with Andy Dufresne, who is extremely nonchalant on his chair, appreciating the music as well as the guard, who is interrupted in the middle of his defecating. As I said before, this single scene presents a twist on morality as we know it: Andy is the moral one, despite going against the warden and all his guards, because he’s doing what he can to bring back hope to a hopeless world. I also said that the music was symbolic, but I’ll make myself a bit clearer. First off, Andy’s wife cheated on him, the most obvious point of comparison, but infidelity can be seen throughout the film, especially in the warden, who betrays his honor and duty for money and power.

            All that said, there will be those who claim that art is a mere collection of visual (and sometimes sonic) artifacts that are in some way beautiful and thus, do not meddle into issues such as morality. This is very true and it could very well be that Frank Darabont went into this movie simply wanting to create an audiovisual experience that would entertain the masses for two hours and twenty minutes. After all, the film is adapted from Stephen King’s Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, so it can be said that any moral views presented are simply inherited from the novel it borrows from and are not really part of the art itself. The art, if movies are considered art, comes from collections of shots and not the messages that can be extrapolated from it.

            However, if art has to encompass everything situated within the piece of artwork, even that which it implies, then it is clear that in The Shawshank Redemption’s case, morality is prevalent. The big question, then, is: is it moral? Given the fact that it criticizes our view of morality, but remains within our moral schema (things that the director shows as bad, we understand as bad) I think that the answer is yes. That said, should all art be moral? I don’t think so. Beautiful art came about in Nazi Germany (the “Art of the Third Reich”), influenced by romantic realism, and it can be said that that art was not particularly moral. However, is it still art? Definitely.

This finally presents a bigger knowledge issue: should we consider and appreciate immoral art? Part of me wants to say “yes, but only the aesthetic part,” but that is utterly ignorant of me, for art to me, is not just the work itself, but the totality of it, complete with its literal and implied meaning. I think I’m in the swamp. Help.